Librarians to Follow on Twitter

http://www.mattanderson.org/blog/2013/01/22/125-librarians-to-follow-on-twitter/

Various Tweets on Archiving and Radio

Shepperd: media preservation (esp of radio) allows historians to research groups underrepresented in paper trail of most archives #AVSymp

— Jesse Johnston (@jesseajohnston) March 27, 2015

I think of the many radio broadcasts in Hawaii alone that are probably lost forever.

Shepperd: Radio between 1917 + 1946 remains virtually untouched in the historical record. #AVSymp

— ArchivesAmericanArt (@ArchivesAmerArt) March 27, 2015

A better question: Why did you think that tie would go with that jacket?

Here we go. Robertson: ‘Was the co-pilot a Muslim? Why did he want to kill all those people?’ http://t.co/5wcwjlYzuy pic.twitter.com/gBGNf9bqKs

— Imraan Siddiqi (@imraansiddiqi) March 26, 2015

Spreading the Word 2

My newest: Germanwings crash speculation & airline union-busting from Reagan to Merkel @PandoDaily http://t.co/f4TIINAMrE

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 26, 2015

Spreading the Word

600 corporations writing secret #TPP doesn't sound like #democracy! #NoFastTrack for #TPP! http://t.co/iJ2OQuOm9Z #p2 pic.twitter.com/v4imx65jhe

— Expose The TPP (@ExposeTPP) March 24, 2015

Various Tweets from @archivesnext

"A digital file that represents a non-copyrightable object [like a screw] will be protected by copyright even if..." (head explodes)

— Michael Peter Edson (@mpedson) March 23, 2015

Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin 1st female dept head @Harvard http://t.co/FJt1pOOTYW #histSTM #WomensHistoryMonth pic.twitter.com/XRkwB2bwDH

— Alexi Baker (@AlexiBaker) March 21, 2015

Mass State Archives: new site for digital records incl @DevalPatrick correspondence http://t.co/POtnXxFrSE cc @BostonGlobe #maracnea15

— Paige Roberts (@paige_roberts) March 21, 2015

BRICS Bank

http://www.globalresearch.ca/%E2%80%8Brussia-ratifies-100bn-brics-new-development-bank/5433304

Armond White Acknowledging Madonna

#Madonna by popular demand. Her most mature video. Read now. http://t.co/UHGa9mTUvR pic.twitter.com/VdUdoGLJ33

— armond white (@3xchair) March 18, 2015

Queen and King of music videos. Read it now. http://t.co/WZu6sopdQm pic.twitter.com/rTLcMEQOvi

— armond white (@3xchair) March 14, 2015

Kunstler: Kicked to the Curb.

Kunstler: Kicked to the Curb.

Pierre Omidyar, Again

There's probably something to occasion this teeth-gnashing about Pierre Omidyar. I'd say Richard Smart had a lot more charm and personality.

Basically Omidyar is the Vinod Khosla asshole of Hawaii http://t.co/YubDlOgQg8

— exiledonline.com (@exiledonline) March 15, 2015

This October: The Second Annual Global Food Security Conference

The Second Annual Global Food Security Conference.

Dublin Review of Books

Sometime I'll have to clean up my list of links, but I added a link to its Book Review section.

Dublin Review of Books

Richard Heinberg: "Only Less Will Do"

Who knew violin manufacturing at a mass scale had such an impact as what he describes?

http://www.postcarbon.org/only-less-will-do/

This Blog's Ninth Anniversary

Nine years ago today I began Poppa Zao. So much has changed since then, and so much has stayed the same.

Health Care Costs

A subject I'll be considering more here.

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

Seedy Rahm and "The Red Light Rip-Off"

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/03/11/5_signs_rahm_may_be_doomed_125888.html

Max Blumenthal's New Book: Due This Summer

However, Goliath was delayed a few times as he put more material in. Don't be surprised if his new book might be published a little later for the same reason.

Seems like an appropriate time to announce my next book - The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza http://t.co/Swa13HCvao Due out in July

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 11, 2015

Ferguson mayor brags about privatizing red-light cameras to company accused of fixing stoplights to increase tickets http://t.co/hPjHMX4iMV

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 8, 2015

(Link below contained in the Pando story)

http://www.alternet.org/story/145752/cities_shortening_yellow_traffic_lights_for_deadly_profit

Kunstler: Truthinesslessness

(Any links therein added by me.--P.Z.)

Kunstler: Truthinesslessness

Nothing is stable, nothing is straightforward, everything is fixed, and nothing is fixed. O nation of busboys and WalMart greeters, awake and sing!

Can an empire founder on sheer credulousness? After last Friday’s jobs report, I think so. For a culture that luxuriates in statistical analysis (and the false idea that if you measure enough things, you can control them), it is rather amazing that we absolutely don’t care whether the measurements are truthful or not. Hence, an economist (sic) such as Paul Krugman of The New York Times might ask himself how it is that Zero Interest Rate Policy only trickles down to places where hamburgers are sold. PK was at it again in his Monday column, yammering about “rapid job growth,” “partying like it was 1995.” Wise men like him are pounding this country down a rat hole faster than you can say Romulus Augustulus.

Apparently the US Bureau of Labor Statistics missed the job bloodbath in the oil industry, especially over in Frackville where the latest western phenomenon is the ghost man-camp (along with ghost pole dancing parlors). It’s a veritable hemorrhagic fever of job layoff announcements: 9,000 here, 7,000, there, thousands of thousands everywhere — Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes — like an Ebola ward in the oil services sector. Not to mention the cliff-drop of capital expenditure, meaning even steeper job losses ahead, Casey Jones. But nobody notices, I guess because they’re out at Ruby Tuesdays eating things bigger than their heads. Are the portions getting smaller, or are their heads shrinking?

Finance is complicated, but not as complex as the wizards employed in it would have you believe. They would have you think it is an order of magnitude more abstruse and recondite than particle physics, when, in fact, it is often not much more than a Three Card Monte switcheroo. The whole ZIRP and QE game, for instance, can be boiled down to a basic wish to get something for nothing, that is, prosperity where nothing of value created. Now, that’s not so hard to understand, is it? Until the economics wardrobe team comes in and dresses it up in martingales and bumrolls of metaphysics and you end up in a contango of mystification.

More galling and worrisome, though, is the failure of anyone even remotely in authority to stand up and publically object to the tidal wave of lies washing over this dying polity, actually killing it softly with truthinesslessness. The code of anything goes and nothing matters is turning lethal and the more it is kept swaddled in lies, the more perverse, surprising, and destructive the damage will be. The more our leaders lie about misbehavior in banking — including especially the actions of the Federal Reserve — the worse will be the instability in currencies. The more central bankers intervene in price discovery mechanisms, the more unable to reflect reality all markets will become. The more that the US BLS lies about the employment picture in America, the worse will be the eventual wrath of citizens who can’t get paid enough to heat their houses and feed their children.

An economist (sic) named Richard Duncan last week proposed the interesting theory that Quantitative Easing can go on virtually forever in an endless chain of self-canceling debt. Government spends money it doesn’t have and cannot raise, issues bonds to “investors,” buys its own bonds and stashes them in a storage vault so deep that the sun will not shine on them until it becomes a blue dwarf — long after the cockroaches have taken charge of Earthly affairs. Duncan forgets one detail: consequences. The consequence of this behavior will not be eternal virtual prosperity, but rather a wrecked accounting system for the operations of civilized human life. We’ve stepped across the event horizon of that consequence, but we just don’t know it yet. My bet is that we start feeling the effects sooner rather than later and when it is finally felt, all the Kardashian videos in this universe and a trillion universes like it will not avail to distract us from the flow of our own blood.

Omidyar on Kauai

Interesting. But what do Joan Conrow ("Kauai Eclectic") and Andy Parx ("Got Windmills?") have to say?

Kauai locals try to stop Omidyar from destroying environment to feed his prepper pandemic paranoia http://t.co/TTjfizCDF2

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 5, 2015

http://m.thegardenisland.com/news/local/doubling-down-on-the-dairy/article_46edb0de-c234-11e4-bfd6-338a4f6e7d7e.html?mode=jqm

http://hpr2.org/post/proposed-kauai-dairy-fiddler-roof-ecotourism-cellular-transformation


http://kauaieclectic.blogspot.com/2014/02/details-on-new-dairy.html

http://www.civilbeat.com/2014/11/kauai-oks-building-permits-for-dairy-farm-backed-by-ebay-founder-omidyar/

Seedy Rahm

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/05/rahm-goes-nuts-at-a-mental-health-clinic-you-re-gonna-respect-me.html#

Ethel Stansfield Peck: Zero-Waste Pioneer; Kunstler: Heroes and Villains

Kunstler discusses heroes and villains. I maintain a list of scoundrels on this blog; they range from the ordinarily cloddish to the truly malicious. And though I don't have a list of them, I occasionally mention people who do commendable things. On that note, may I present the late Ethel Stansfield Peck. Although she died in 2000 at age 91, Mrs. Peck is and should be remembered for her zero-waste way of life, which she led just because she believed in it.


Kunstler: Heroes and Villains.

Television: The Deluge

Here.

Vulture.com. "Why You Feel Like There's Too Much TV TO Watch."

FiveThirtyEight.com, 23 January 2015.

Variety.com. "New Television Fall Season: Glut of Content."

ThinkProgress.org, 12 April 2013, "Has Television Oversaturated Its Own Marketplace?"

Beyond the Lights: Future Cult Classic?

Missed this: BEYOND THE LIGHTS (2014; Gina Prince-Bythewood). A savvy pop fantasy, quietly compelling and touching. pic.twitter.com/rluLQDJJ68

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) February 26, 2015

I missed this movie in the theater too. I'd probably have seen it at the Kress (missed). The box office was lackluster but it looks as if it will find a bigger audience on video.

Kunstler: How Goes the War?

Kunstler: How Goes the War?

On Edit-a-Thons: A Post in Progress

http://kreyolicious.com/afrocrowd/17531/

Fifty Shades Box Office Plummets

Fifty Shades of Grey Box Office Plummets. Presumably as word gets around that the movie was lousy.

All In With Chris Hayes may be cancelled. But MSNBC denies it.

Happy President's Day, from Baberaham Lincoln!!!!! #SAMandCAT pic.twitter.com/QSqZH59wCa

— Dan Schneider (@DanWarp) February 16, 2015

Billy Ocean

"There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)" (1986)



His first single, "On the Run" (1974: Lark Records), released under the name Scorched Earth.



"Suddenly" (1984)

@nytimes was asked about the strongest MoC. Ask @aaronschock & @TulsiPress who their trainer is.

— Markwayne Mullin (@RepMullin) January 9, 2015

MSNBC Ratings Low

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/danieldoherty/2015/02/07/grim-milestone-msnbc-suffers-worst-day-of-ratings-since-2005-n1953312#!

Al Jazeera America is having ratings problems too, but its foreign coverage beats Fox, MSNBC, and CNN.

http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/al-jazeera-america-schedule-in-flux-after-network-cancels-programs-1201400856/#

Considering the Grammys

I watched the Grammys but switched between it and Family Guy then Bob's Burgers, so I missed the moments when Beck won the Album of the Year award for Morning Phase (which also got Best Rock Album). Sam Smith won Song and Record of the Year for "Stay With Me." He was also named Best New Artist and won Best Pop Vocal Album for In the Lonely Hour. Well-deserved, I say. What was undeserved was Beyoncé's Best R&B Performance award for "Drunk in Love." Jennifer Hudson's "It's Your World" (which should have won) and Ledisi's "Like This" were much worthier.

These were the Best R&B Performance nominees:

Drunk In Love
Beyoncé Featuring Jay Z
Track from: Beyoncé
Label: Columbia Records



New Flame
Chris Brown Featuring Usher & Rick Ross
Track from: X
Label: RCA Records



It's Your World
Jennifer Hudson Featuring R. Kelly
Track from: JHUD
Label: RCA Records



Like This
Ledisi
Track from: The Truth
Label: Verve



Good Kisser
Usher
Label: RCA Records




More later.

A review of The World After Cheap Oil

Here. One of the authors responds in the article's comments thread.

"Quarterly Compilation of Periodical Literature Reflecting the Use of Records in the National Archives: Previous Years."

Russia Library Fire

Awful. Russian library fire destroys a million historic documents dating back to 16th century http://t.co/8xi5BOItAA pic.twitter.com/TZ6j36p791

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) February 1, 2015

German Culture in Britain: Headbangers and High Kultur

The Economist, German culture in Britain: headbangers and high Kultur.

Kunstler: Apocalypse Now and Forever

Kunstler on possible U.S. military aid to the Ukraine. I guess we're in the second Cold War.

Apocalypse Now and Forever


As a political psychoanalyst I find the Super-bowl halftime show the best concise index of how psychotic American culture is becoming from year to year, and the 2015 version signaled a complete break from reality, a nightmare of twerking robots in a hall of mirrors, as if America had utterly surrendered its tattered soul to some rogue motherboard pulsing deep within Dr. Evil’s subterranean palace of sin. Hence it is the perfect analog for understanding otherwise incomprehensible happenings such as the USA’s role in fomenting further chaos and mayhem in Ukraine.

How otherwise to explain things like this morning’s New York Times report that the USA “now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position….”

Earth calling New York Times readers: I regret to inform you that this decision was already reached a year ago when we paid for the coup d’état against the elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, after the poor sap decided to not sign up with EU but rather the Russian-backed Eurasian Customs Union. Whoops! You’re so out of here, Bub, State Department Under Secretary Victoria Nuland burbled in a clandestinely recorded phone call to the American ambassador. Will somebody please find Yats! Yes Yats! [UKR politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk] and plug the Bluetooth earpiece of power into his skull!

And so it went this past year with a cabal of the USA, the EU, and the IMF shoveling financial support (billions!), armaments, and surely boots-on-the ground into the Ukrainian morass. Last week, a reporter in eastern Ukraine approached a soldier in UKR army battle garb only to be told, in pitch perfect American English, to “get out of my face.” Say what??? The You-tube clip was seen all over the world and to this minute no agent of the US government has been called to account over it. Like I said, a hall of mirrors.

But anyway, we get a little ahead of ourselves because all this really begs the question: what business do we have in Ukraine in the first place and why should it matter to us that they align with Russia? And more to the point: why is it not transparently obvious that Ukraine is solidly within Russia’s sphere of influence, and has been, really, for more than 500 years, and for an excellent reason that has been demonstrated most recently in Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 and then Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of 1941.

In both cases, Russia owed it survival to the vast expanse of flat geography represented by Ukraine where “General Winter” was able to carry out his own defensive operations of relentless howling wind, snow, sub-zero temperatures, and frostbite that eventually vanquished the invaders. Through most of modern times Ukraine has been under the explicit “protection” of the Russian Czars or has been an outright province under the former USSR. Hundreds of years before that, Kievan Rus was the center of an emerging Russian culture and kingdom that only later picked up and moved to Moscow.

You get the picture: Ukraine has a long association with Russia, a principal association, not always happy, sometimes tragic, but a fact of life and history that the US and its foolish stooges in the EU bureaucracy now wish to challenge for absolutely no good reason. Does anybody who is not whacked out of his/her head on crack, or focused like a laser beam on the gender schism within the Kardashian Klan, remember when the US ever challenged the Soviets over Ukraine? No. And for the excellent reason that we accepted the relationship for reasons stated above. So, whose idea is it now that we should start World War Three over this remote region where so many other reckless adventurers came to grief? And what, by the way, do our people mean by “defensive weapons?” Are not most modern weapons designed to work both ways? Anyway, I see the list includes “anti-armor missiles” (i.e. tank-killers) and “drones,” the latter presumably guided by comfortable American military gamers effortlessly targeting pixelated “bad guys” between Slurpee gulps and taco bites, not exactly American Sniper style.

Keynesianism vs. Degrowth?

Krugman writes off @postcarbon for backing #degrowth ... @richardheinberg responds in a great convo with @Kayemmo >> http://t.co/CMRju5G43I

— slow ottawa (@slowottawa) November 1, 2014

Digital Projectors and Small Cinemas

Jill Stein Replies to the State of the Union Address

On the Green Party's Prospects in 2016

Not recent, but still worth watching.

Kelis, "Jerk Ribs"

Why Bookstores Are Vital

http://www.csudhnews.com/2015/01/archives-aquarian-collection/

2015 National Magazine Awards Nominations

2015 National Magazine Awards Nominations.

Magazine A-List

Ad Age's 2014 Magazine A-List.

Free the Little Free Library

I'll be following this:

MPC Orders Little Free Library to Cease Operation.

"What Will 2015 Do for Peak Oil?"

With low oil prices and record production, oil cornucopians are smugly proclaiming peak oil has been disproved forever. But Ron Patterson writes in
"What Will 2015 Do for Peak Oil?" that "[A]n oil glut is exactly what we would expect at the very peak. After all, that is what peak oil is, that is the point in time when the world produces more oil than ever in history… and the most it ever will produce."

Arabic Comic Books

Mr. Magazine, "From Lebanon With Love: Preserving a Cultural History, Capturing the Joys of Arabic Childhood Through Comic Books: The Mr. Magazine Interview With Henry Matthews, Collector."

Michael Fredo, "Free"

Water Rationing in Sao Paulo

On water rationing in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

"Raw Power"

Some day I'm going to write my thinkpiece, Good Etiquette Is Good But Politics Is Historically The Raw Exercise of Coercive Power

— Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) January 27, 2015

#blizzardof2015 prob won't be a top 10 snowfall in NYC, but Cuomo closes subways for 1st time ever. Welcome to grandstanding nanny state.

— Arun Gupta (@arunindy) January 27, 2015

Kunstler: The Broken Template

Kunstler: The Broken Template.

T he more detached from reality American culture becomes the more strictly ceremonial leadership gets, as illustrated by the raft of bromides Barack Obama floated past the assembled vassalage of government last week in another grand effort to avoid the necessities of the moment.

Those necessities include freeing a hostage public from the tyrannical clutches of corporate despotism — the evil empire of big boxes, big burgers, big pharma, Big Brother — and the atrocious rackets fostered by them that masquerade as an economy. The template of the life we have known is broken and the pieces within are flying apart, and no amount of wishing or promising can keep them going. If this society is even going to survive, the people have to smash their way out of this template prison, probably against the efforts of the people and organizations now running it merely for their own benefit.

The future is telling us very clearly: get smaller, get finer, get more local, get less complex, get less grandiose, do it now. Do you want to eat food in the years ahead? Better make sure you live in a part of the country where small-scale farming and backyard gardening is possible because the General Mills Agri-Biz GMO Cheerios model will be folding its big tent along with its financing agents in the debt Ponzi banking system.

Do you want to have a personal economic future? Think about what you can do to make yourself useful in a local economy made up of your neighbors. And if you live in one of the thousands of soulless, neighborless suburban wastelands that amount to nothing but big box and big burger plantations, you better get out and find a real town in some other part of the country.

Do you believe that computers and robot factories will define the years to come? Maybe you have failed to notice that the US electric grid is decrepit and in need of at least a $1 trillion upgrade-and-rebuild, which, by the way, is not going to happen. What is all that crap going to run on? America’s disappointment with the broken promises of technology will be so epic that we’ll be lucky not to slide back into a world ruled by superstition and ghosts.

Do you think that $50 oil is going to make the world safe for WalMart, Walt Disney World, and Happy Motoring? In fact, $50 oil is going to crush what is left of the US Oil industry, especially fracking for shale oil and deep water drilling. And guess what — everything else is depleting at about 5 percent a year. The frackers will never again get access to the sort of junk bond financing that allowed them to ramp up their Ponzi demonstration projects in the Bakken and Eagle Ford. And they will never again regain their current level of production — which is the net result of past Ponzi financing, now ending in tears. So, forget “Saudi America” and “energy independence,” unless you mean living in a walkable community near a navigable waterway.

Do you want to be an educated person, that is, someone capable of comprehending reality and functioning within its demands? In the USA, that means you must learn how to speak and write English correctly, especially if you are in a “low performing” ethnic minority group. If you can’t conjugate verbs, you will have a hard time distinguishing the past, the present, and the future in your daily activities. Among other things, you’ll be incapable of showing up on time. And that, of course, is only the beginning. It’s that simple. These abilities used to be the result of an eighth-grade education in the United States. We would be lucky to get back to that high standard, and our knucklehead fantasies about universal access to community college be damned. It’s only a new layer in the current racket that pretends to be education.

That is the current state of the union and a glimpse of the trajectory it’s on, which the inept leaders of our country do not comprehend and cannot communicate.

Growing Food From Scraps

I'm growing plants from scraps too.

@Gail_Boddy @michaelpollan @IFHE_HomeEc Teach families to regrow food from scraps, to reduce food waste! pic.twitter.com/xXcFvqkGRd

— KitchenTakeovers (@KTakeovers) January 13, 2015

That feels icky RT @crampell: In three states—Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi—MLK Day is also Robert E. Lee Day http://t.co/QhM9uF3PaU

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) January 19, 2015

Blumenthal & White At the Movies

If Max Blumenthal and Armond White ever have a debate about American Sniper, I'd watch it. Then I hope they'd make like Siskel and Ebert and get a show.

Go #AmericanSniper! Sergeant York for Millennials. http://t.co/JObWMiQ4Fe

— armond white (@3xchair) January 20, 2015

On @oreillyfactor, @iptuttle calls me "the worst offender" against American Sniper: http://t.co/nOY7gnWTkl I graciously accept this honor.

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 22, 2015

-----

The box office forecast for this weekend:

Forecast (Jan. 23-25)
1. American Sniper - $56 million (-37%)
2. The Boy Next Door - $18 million
3. Paddington - $13.1 million (-31%)
4. The Wedding Ringer - $10.7 million (-48%)
5. Mortdecai - $7.5 million
6. Strange Magic - $6 million

R.I.P. Faten Hamama

Obituary for Faten Hamama, Egyptian actress.

We Honor Martin Luther King, Jr.

The King Institute at Stanford University.

Kunstler: A Solemn Pause

January 19, 2015

A Solemn Pause

Events are moving faster than brains now. Isn’t it marvelous that gasoline at the pump is a buck cheaper than it was a year ago? A lot of short-sighted idiots are celebrating, unaware that the low oil price is destroying the capacity to deliver future oil at any price. The shale oil wells in North Dakota and Texas, the Tar Sand operations of Alberta, and the deep-water rigs here and abroad just don’t pencil-out economically at $45-a-barrel. So the shale oil wells that are up-and-running will produce for a year and there will be no new ones drilled when they peter out — which is at least 50 percent the first year and all gone after four years.

Anyway, the financial structure of the shale play was suicidal from the get-go. You finance the drilling and fracking with high-yield “junk bonds,” that is, money borrowed from “investors.” You drill like mad and you produce a lot of oil, but even at $105-a-barrel you can’t make profit, meaning you can’t really pay back the investors who loaned you all that money, a lot of it obtained via Too Big To Fail bank carry-trades, levered-up on ”margin,” which allowed said investors to pretend they were risking more money than they had. And then all those levered-up investments — i.e. bets — get hedged in a ghostly underworld of unregulated derivatives contracts that pretend to act as insurance against bad bets with funny money, but in reality can never pay out because the money is not there (and never was.) And then come the margin calls. Uh Oh….

In short, enjoy the $2.50-a-gallon fill-ups while you can, grasshoppers, because when the current crop of fast-depleting shale oil wells dries up, that will be all she wrote. When all those bonds held up on their skyhook derivative hedges go south, there will be no more financing available for the entire shale oil project. No more high-yield bonds will be issued because the previous issues defaulted. Very few new wells (if any) will be drilled. American oil production will not return to its secondary highs (after the 1970 all-time high) of 2014-15. The wish of American energy independence will be steaming over the horizon on the garbage barge of broken promises. And all, that, of course, is only one part of the story, because there is the social and political fallout to follow.

The table is set for the banquet of consequences. The next chapter in the oil story is more likely to be scarcity rather than just a boomerang back to higher prices. The tipping point for that will come with the inevitable destabilizing of Saudi Arabia, which I believe will happen this year when King Abdullah ibn Abdilaziz, 91, son of Ibn Saud, departs his intensive care throne for the glorious Jannah of virgins and feasts. Speaking of feasts, just imagine how the Islamic State (or ISIS) must be licking its chops at the prospect of sweeping over an Arabia no longer defined as Saudi! The Saudis are so spooked that they announced plans last week for a kind of super Berlin-type wall to be constructed along the northern border with Iraq. But that brings to mind a laughable Maginot Line scenario in which the masked invaders just make an end run around the darn thing. In any case, Saudi Arabia will already be disintegrating internally as competing clans and princes vie for control. And then, what will the US do? Rush in there shock-and-awe style? Bust up the joint? That’ll make things better, won’t it? (See American Sniper.) [Or don't. Paddington or The Wedding Ringer are better worth your time.--P.Z.]

Meanwhile, there will be plenty to contend with state-side. The next time there is a pratfall in the stock and bond markets and the TBTF banks — and there is sure to be — the rescue tricks are liable to be a whole lot more severe than the TARP, ZIRP, and QE hijinks of 2008-2015. Next time around, the federals are going to have to confiscate stuff, break promises, take away things, and rough some people up. The question is how much of this abuse will the public take? I take a certain comfort knowing how heavily armed America is. And not just the lunatic fringe. The thought of Hillary and Jeb out there beating the bushes for big money makes me laugh. They are so not going to happen. Just wait. For now, take this MLK holiday break to reflect on the fragility of our own country, and gird your loins for the week to come.

When fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. With an Israeli flag close by. pic.twitter.com/XxFuVpMDqt

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 18, 2015

He's never seen Lincoln Park.

Any social science professor who claims total neutrality is probably delusional. http://t.co/30GoogCaHL via @carolmswain

— Prof. Carol M. Swain (@carolmswain) January 15, 2015

"The idea of journalistic objectivity is completely false—@MaxBlumenthal on the Perils of Being an Anti-Zionist http://t.co/WcD93UbA5o @VICE

— Verso Books (@VersoBooks) January 15, 2015

The Better Than... List

Armond White's Tenth Annual Better Than...List

What's the Matter With Florida?

Police chief defends use of photos of real people for target practice. @NBC6 investigation #humantargets pic.twitter.com/ORdRa0wq1U

— NBC 6 South Florida (@nbc6) January 15, 2015

"Nous Sommes Hypocrites!"

https://twitter.com/Emran_Feroz/status/554678344437219328/photo/1

https://storify.com/tometty/staunch-defenders-of-free-press-attend-solidarity

--
For what it's worth, read British GQ's editorial, "We Should Not Blame the Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo For This Attack". Then read how it scrubbed mentions of Russell Brand from its website when Brand dared to point out that fashion label Hugo Boss (a major advertiser) once supplied uniforms to the SS.

Kunstler: The Clash of Civilizations

Kunstler: The Clash of Civilizations.

How to Make a Charpoy

I just found this blog, How to Make a Charpoy. It looks very informative.

Kunstler's Forecast for 2015

Kunstler's forecast for 2015.

He has a new column up too, which I might link to later.

Blog Maintenance in the New Year

  Hawaii Time

Hattie, of Hattie's Web, plans to clean up her sidebar, removing links to inactive blogs. I might go through my own List of Links and see which blogs are inactive. As I commented at Hattie's Web, 2014 was for me a very busy, even hectic year, particularly the latter half. I haven't posted as much as I wanted to. This year I plan to devote more time to my writing, both on-line and off-, and that means more posts here, including accounts of my trips to Sacramento and Honolulu. Many anniversaries are coming up this year, and I want to feature more local history (e.g., this summer is the twentieth anniversary of the collapse and demolition of the Mamo Theater).

The New Year

Four-ten p.m. as I write this. Very quiet. Not many firecrackers today here.

2 January update: IFC had a Portlandia marathon yesterday. I've heard of but never saw the show before. It has a Kids in the Hall quality to it.

Happy New Year

A headline and lead of an article I saw online, with the names redacted:

[Young female celebrity] Rocks Skimpy Bikini in Dubai with [another young female celebrity] and [another yfc or socialite I've never heard of]

Oh, to be on this A-list New Year's vacation! [YFC] is currently in Dubai, where's she set to ring in the New Year ...

No thanks. I'm at home watching the free preview of NGN (Nippon Golden Network), which our cable company offers every New Year's. I had some maki sushi and tempura from Kawamoto's. Later, I'll watch more NGN, and maybe the New Year's celebration from Times Square.

Kunstler: The Trigger

Last week's column was a sub-par rant about finance. Today's is a return to form.

Kunstler: The Trigger

The futility of politics in America these days has driven the public into exactly the dream-state of zombie blood-lust depicted in so many popular video fantasies, a nightmare of decay, powerlessness, and degeneracy matching the actual condition of a disintegrating polity that has lost collective consciousness and seeks only to infect the dwindling numbers of the still-sentient. Almost nobody in this country believes we can manage our affairs anymore.

Well, can we? One of the hallmarks of an imploding culture is that people lose a sense of consequence. Things just seem to happen and unhappen, and nobody really cares about chains of decision and event. Anything goes and nothing matters.

One reason this is happening to us is that we allowed reality to be divorced from truth. Karl Rove wasn’t kidding back in the Bush-2 days when he quipped that “we create our own reality.” The part old Karl left out is that there’s a price for doing that. In the short run, it allows you to pretend that you have superpowers and can act in defiance of the way things really are. In the longer run, your view of the world comports so poorly with the facts of the world that things stop working.

The tragedy of Barack Obama is that he continued the basic Karl Rove doctrine only without bragging about it. I don’t know whether Mr. Obama was a hostage, an empty suit, or a fool, but he broadened and deepened the acquiescence to lying about just about everything. Did criminal misconduct run rampant in banking for years? Oh, nevermind. Is the US economy actually contracting instead of recovering? We’ll just make up better numbers. Did US officials act like Nazi war criminals in torturing prisoners? Well, yeah, but so what? Did the State Department and the CIA scuttle the elected Ukrainian government in order to start an unnecessary new conflict with Russia? Maybe so, but who cares? Was the Affordable Care Act a swindle in the service of insurance and pharmaceutical racketeering? Oh, we’ll read the bill after we pass it. Shale oil will make us “energy independent.” (Not.)

Has anyone noticed the way these incongruities percolate into the public attention and then get dismissed, like daydreams, with no resolution. I’ve harped on this one before because it was, to my mind, Obama’s greatest failure: When the Supreme Court decided in the Citizens United case that corporations were entitled to express their political convictions by buying off politicians, why didn’t the President join with his then-Democratic majority congress to propose legislation, or a constitutional amendment, more clearly redefining the difference between corporate “personhood” and the condition of citizenship? How could this constitutional lawyer miss the reality that corporations legally and explicitly do not have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the public interest but only to their shareholders? How was this not obvious? And why was there not a rush to correct it?

Of course, this only begs the question: where are the opponents to the ethos that anything goes and nothing matters? Where are the political figures who can sustain a complaint long enough, and loudly enough, to keep it in the public consciousness clearly enough to make a difference? The more conspiracy-minded might say that the security apparatus (the NSA and its servelings) or Wall Street actually run the country and somehow suppress opposition. I don’t believe that. I do believe that cultures go through tragic periods when they lose their bearings and the will to be truthful to themselves.

The latest news is that Mr. Jeb Bush is way ahead among his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination, leading to a beautiful setup for the battle of the dynasties: Bush versus Clinton in 2016. I believe that insulting prospect would be the wake-up call that will hit the American people upside the head and wake them out of their zombie rapture. A third party will arise. It may be a good one or a bad one, but it will blow the existing order of things apart, as it should.

A Hectic Year

Not without good times but very, very busy.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas. Peace on earth.

"Santa Claus is a Black Man"

Hipster Cleaning Advice

""Ask A Clean Person"

Kunstler: Crash-O-Matic Finance

Kunstler: Crash-O-Matic Finance.

Football Game Over?

As I noted late last year, a small Dallas-based college, Paul Quinn College, ended its football program because it was a drain on its finances. The remarkable thing about this story was that Paul Quinn converted the football field into an organic farm. Paul Quinn would not be the last college to disestablish its football team. The University of Alabama at Birmingham Blazers football team has played its last season. Boosters may kick in enough money to keep the team kicking, but this may be a sign of the slow ebb of college football.
------
The Paul Quinn farm, called the WE over Me Farm, has a Twitter account.

Forget College Football—This School Turned Its Gridiron Into an Organic Farm http://t.co/DuUQAPSuzI via @TakePart

— WE over Me Farm (@PaulQuinnFarm) December 5, 2014

Defecting from The New Republic

Slate, "The Slatest: Your News Companion," "Mass Resignations at TNR Follow Departures of Foer, Wieseltier" by Ben Mathis-Lilley.

Gawker: "White Men Upset Wrong White Man Placed in Charge...", by Leah Finnegan.

National Catholic Reporter, "Distinctly Catholic" blog, "RIP: The New Republic", by Michael Sean Winters (5 Dec. 2014)

What will John MacArthur make of this?

----
12 December 2014 update: A USA Today article on the future of newsweeklies.

----
14 December update: I just found Ilind.net: "Hawaiian Electric Deal Begging for Deeper Reporting."

What will ILSR make of this?

More later.

This Has Been an Eventful Year

And the weather lately has been cold and rainy.

Elizabeth LOUTen

I found this while checking out Coozledad's blog this morning.

Twenty Years Ago Today

The paper published my first opinion letter, about the lack of "quality films" playing in Hilo theaters.

Sometime soon, I'll look at how things have changed, movie-wise, in Hilo.

On another note, Kunstler goes into full head-spinning mode about Ferguson. I'll post a link soon.

First Woman to Head OPEC

The Nigerian minister of petroleum became the first-ever woman to head OPEC.

The Ferguson Public Library Gets Support

http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/book-blog/ferguson-library-stays-open-attracts-over-in-grassroot-support/article_2ef8a4eb-fe0c-5390-87b7-bb471d6f06a3.html

Flickr

This is an example of photos I've taken and posted to my Flickr page, as Brandon of Hilo.



My Flickr Photostream.

America's New Oil Weapon

"The Oil Weapon in America's Hands."

"America's New Oil Weapon."

Kunstler: The Instability Express

Kunstler: The Instability Express

The mentally-challenged kibitzers “out there” — in the hills and hollows of the commentary universe, cable news, the blogosphere, and the pathetic vestige of newspaperdom — are all jumping up and down in a rapture over cheap gasoline prices. [There's a lot about gas prices.--P.Z.] Overlay on this picture the fairy tale of coming US energy independence, stir in the approach of winter in the North Dakota shale oil fields, put an early November polar vortex cherry on top, and you have quite a recipe for smashed expectations.

Plummeting oil prices are a symptom of terrible mounting instabilities in the world. After years of stagnation, complacency, and official pretense, the linked matrix of systems we depend on for running our techno-industrial society is shaking itself to pieces. American officials either don’t understand what they’re seeing, or don’t want you to know what they see. The tensions between energy, money, and economy have entered a new phase of destructive unwind.

The global economy has caught the equivalent of financial Ebola: deflation, which is the recognition that debts can’t be repaid, obligations can’t be met, and contracts won’t be honored. Credit evaporates and actual business declines steeply as a result of all those things. Who wants to send a cargo ship of aluminum ore to Guangzhou if nobody shows up at the dock with a certified check to pay for it? Financial Ebola means that the connective tissues of trade start to dissolve, and pretty soon blood starts dribbling out of national economies.

One way this expresses itself is the violent rise and fall of comparative currency values. The Japanese yen and the euro go down, the dollar goes up. It happens in a few months, which is quickly in the world of money. Foolish US cheerleaders suppose that the rising dollar is like the rising score of an NFL football team on any given Sunday. “We’re numbah one!” It’s just not like that. The global economy is not some stupid football contest.

When currencies change value quickly, as has happened since the past summer, big banks get into big trouble. Their revenue streams are pegged to so-called “carry trades” in which big blobs of money are borrowed in one currency and used to place bets in other currencies. When currency values change radically, carry trades blow up. So do so-called “derivatives” such as bets on interest rate differentials. When the sums of money involved are grotesquely large, the parties involved discover that they never had any ability to pay off their losing bet. It was all pretense. In fact, the chance that the bet might go bad never figured into their calculations. The net result of all that foolish irresponsibility is that banks find themselves in a position of being unable to trust each other on virtually any transaction.

When that happens, the flow of credit, a.k.a. “liquidity,” dries up and you have a bona fide financial crisis. Nobody can pay anybody else. Nobody trusts anybody. Fortunes are lost. Elephants stomp around in distress, then keel over and die, and a lot of “little people” get crushed in the dusty ground.

The happy dance about low gasoline pump prices featured on Fox News, combined with the awful instability in currency markets, will cut a swathe of destruction through the shale oil “miracle.” That industry has been relying on high yield “junk” financing to perform its relentless drilling-and-fracking operations — imperative due to the extremely rapid depletion rate of shale oil wells. Across the board, shale oil production has not been a profitable venture since it was ramped up around 2006. Below $80 a barrel, chasing profit only becomes more difficult for those who couldn’t make a profit at $100. A lot of those junk bond “investments” are about to become worthless, and the “investment community” will lose its appetite for any more of it. That will leave the US government as the investor of last resort. Expect that to be the object of the next round of Quantitative Easing. The ultimate destination of these shenanigans will be the sovereign debt crisis of 2015.

Nikkei Jin Kai elders honored.

Kunstler: The Fate of the Turtle

Kunstler: The Fate of the Turtle.

Anybody truly interested in government, and therefore politics, should be cognizant above all that ours have already entered systemic failure. The management of societal affairs is on an arc to become more inept and ineffectual, no matter how either of the current major parties pretends to control things. Instead of Big Brother, government in our time turns out to be Autistic Brother. It makes weird noises and flaps its appendages, but can barely tie its own shoelaces.

The one thing it does exceedingly well is drain the remaining capital from endeavors that might contribute to the greater good. This includes intellectual capital, by the way, which, under better circumstances, might gird the political will to reform the sub-systems that civilized life depends on. These include: food production (industrial agri-business), commerce (the WalMart model), transportation (Happy Motoring), school (a matrix of rackets), medicine (ditto with the patient as hostage), and banking (a matrix of fraud and swindling).

All of these systems have something in common: they’ve exceeded their fragility threshold and crossed into the frontier of criticality. They have nowhere to go except failure. It would be nice if we could construct leaner and more local systems to replace these monsters, but there is too much vested interest in them. For instance, the voters slapped down virtually every major ballot proposition to invest in light rail and public transit around the country.* The likely explanation is that they’ve bought the story that shale oil will allow them to drive to WalMart forever.

That story is false, by the way. The politicos put it over because they believe the Wall Street fraudsters who are pimping a junk finance racket in shale oil for short-term, high-yield returns. The politicos want desperately to believe the story because the background reality is too difficult to contemplate: an American living arrangement with no future.

The public, of course, is eager to believe the same story for the same reasons, but at some point they’ll flip and blame the story-tellers, and their wrath could truly wreck what remains of this polity. When it is really too late to fix any of these things, they’ll beg someone to tell them what to do, and the job-description for that position is dictator.

It’s certainly remarkable that the years since the troubles of 2008 have been so seemingly placid and uneventful, at least here in the USA — not so much if you live in the Middle East or Ukraine, or in the decaying economies of southern Euroland, or the septic failed states of Africa. The many formerly-middle-class Americans living in economic ruin apparently blame themselves when, for instance, they’re billed tens of thousands of dollars for some routine surgery performed “out of network” by a bureaucratic happenstance. They must be punch-drunk with cable news, or over-medicated. Don’t expect this national mood of paralysis and surrender to last indefinitely.

What troubles me at the moment is that when that mood snaps, it will be for a bad reason in the wrong way. Ferguson, Mo., is still sitting there like an unattended back-pack on the courthouse steps. Before Christmas, some kind of grand jury decision is going to come down. All the reality-based chatter points to the probable exoneration of Darren Wilson, the policeman who shot teenager Michael Brown. I expect the trouble arising out of that to be a lot worse than most people currently suppose, and then we’ll literally be off to the races. If that happens, it will be a huge and tragic diversion from the things that really matter to keep the project of civilized life going. In a way, it will be the true beginning of the end. The end of what? Of pretending that the people in authority know what they are doing.

If you think that President Obama is lonely and bereft now, just wait. Some excuse will be found to try an impeach him and then the nation will spend another two years conducting a three-ring circus while the shale oil “miracle” crashes and burns and the banking system melts away to nothing. It’s been fun watching Mitch McConnell get ready to preside over all of this. History could not have found a less sympathetic patsy.

-----------
* See "6 Transportation Ballot Initiatives to Watch Next Tuesday", Streetsblog USA. Also on Streetsblog, a roundup of articles on what happened to some of those initiatives. For example, "Voters Reject Greenlight Pinellas", Tampa Bay Times).--P.Z.

I came down with a cold on Tuesday. Though I'm still sick I feel much better than I did. I still want to write on my trips to Sacramento and Honolulu. Till then, here are some links to archivists on Twitter.

Soc Amer Archivists (@archivists_org) | Twitter
https://twitter.com/archivists_org‎CachedSimilar

@archivesnext/Archivists on Twitter on Twitter
https://twitter.com/archivesnext/lists/archivists-on-twitter‎Cached Subscribe to Archivists on Twitter .... Wish more companies when they get rid of
archives programs would donate records to an archives @BASarchivists.

Ask Archivists (@AskArchivists) | Twitter
https://twitter.com/AskArchivists‎CachedSimilar
The latest Tweets from Ask Archivists (@AskArchivists).

Archivists (@Archivists) | Twitter
https://twitter.com/Archivists‎CachedSimilar
The latest Tweets from Archivists (@Archivists). This is not SAA's account--follow them at @archivists_org.

Archivists' Toolkit (@ArchToolkit) | Twitter
https://twitter.com/ArchToolkit‎CachedSimilar
The Archivists' Toolkit™(AT) is an open-source archives data management system.

Aust Archivists (@ausarchivists) | Twitter
https://twitter.com/ausarchivists‎CachedSimilar
The latest Tweets from Aust Archivists (@ausarchivists). The Australian Society of Archivists.

Magazines for Libraries

Magazines for Libraries.

Another Kunstler Column

Another Kunstler column.

I was offline till Friday the 31st, so I'm belatedly posting Monday's column by Kunstler, which deals with financial shenanigans.

Our Honolulu Trip

We went to Honolulu from Thursday through Monday. In addition to our trip to Sacramento, I'll write soon about our vacation thereto.

Important to Read

The Nation: Is a Defense Contractor to Blame for Girls' Brain Cancer?"

The Nation is not a perfect magazine, but it does important work by publishing articles such as this.

Kunstler: Omenland

Kunstler: "Omenland"

Very Busy, But I Hope to Post Soon

Especially on my trip to Sacramento. In the meantime, here's a great link.


http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/serials.html

Ferguson Protests

https://news.vice.com/article/ferguson-protesters-march-on-as-the-movements-generational-divide-grows-deeper

Kunstler: Must Be the Season of the Witch

6 October 2014

Kunstler: Must Be the Season of the Witch

Must Be the Season of the Witch

As the Governor goblins at the Federal Reserve whistle past the graveyard of dead Quantitative Easing, and the US dollar magically expands like a prickly puffer fish, and Mario Drahgi does what it takes with Euro duct tape to patch all black holes of unpayable debt from Athens to Dublin, and Japan watches its once-wondrous economy congeal in a puddle of Abenomic sludge (with a radioactive cherry on top), and China chokes on its dollar-peg, and Russia waits patiently with its old friend, Winter, covering its back — and notwithstanding the violent chaos, beheadings, and psychopathic struggles across the old Levant, not to mention the doubling of Ebola cases every 20 days, which the World Health Organization did not have the nerve to project beyond 1.2 million in January (does the doubling just stop there?) — there is enough instability around the globe for the gentlemen of Wall Street to make one last fabulous fortune arbitraging the future before the boomerang of consequence circles this suffering planet and finally accomplishes what the Department of Justice under Eric Holder failed to do for six long years.

It’s the season of witch and you should be nervous. Especially if you live in part of the world where money is used. Pretty soon nobody will know what any currency is really worth — at least for a while — or what anything else is worth, for that matter. Perhaps the fishermen of India will start using their worthless gold for sinkers. Jay-Z and Diddy will gaze down on their bling in despair, thinking, perhaps, they should have invested in Betamax players instead. In the time of anything-goes-and-nothing-matters, it’s dangerous to expect anything.

Here’s what I expect: the surge of the dollar is the crest of an historic Great Wave. A Great Wave is an awesome event, and its crest is a majestic sight, but soon the foam spits and hisses and the wave breaks and crashes down on the beach — say, out at the Hamptons — where hedge funders stroll to catch the last dwindling rays of a beautiful season, and all of a sudden they are being swept out to sea in the rip-tide that retracts all that lovely green liquidity, and no one is even left on the beach to weep for them. Indeed their Robert A. M. Stern shingled manor houses up behind the dunes are swept away, too, and the tennis courts, and the potted hydrangeas, and the Teslas, and all the temporal bric-a-brac of their uber-specialness.

And, of course, it being the season of the witch, that’s where the zombies come out for real — the tattooed savages who all this time have been stewing in their own rancid juices awaiting their turn to get jiggy with the nation that left them restlessly undead. I don’t think you can overestimate the depth of ill-feeling that the American public harbors for the cravens who engineered their USA into the biggest booby-trap the world has ever seen. The trouble is, they lost their humanity in the process, so when they have their way with the feckless folks tweaking the dials, you might want to contemplate moving to Finland.

Who can feel confident about the tending of things just now? The diminishing returns of the Information Age are about to bite our collective ass like an army of Orcs. The sum of all that digital magic is a nation completely incapable of telling itself the truth or acting honorably. Unemployment is down without employment being up. Candy Crush is making the world safe for democracy. We have the finest health care system in the world. ISIS is trying to compete with our homegrown videogame industry for supremacy in porno-violence (actually, I thought we already won that) but now we will obliterate all the bad guys in the world by remote control from the drone bunkers of Las Vegas, and that will show them. Thank goodness the long holiday season is almost upon us to juice the so-called economy ever-higher.

There has never been a crazier moment in history. The weeks before the outbreak of the First World War seem like a garden party compared to the morbid antics of these darkening days. America, you’ve been wishing fervently for the Zombie Apocalypse. What happens when you discover you can’t just change the channel?

Kunstler: Real Life is Not Spin Art

Kunstler: Real Life is Not Spin Art.

An Account of My Trip to Sacramento is Forthcoming

It's been very busy so I haven't had a chance to write the detailed post about the trip I'd like to. But soon.