Wednesday, June 10, 2015
America
There has never been a country like America in the history of the world and there never will be one again.
Monday, June 08, 2015
Kunstler: Cover Girl
You knew Kunstler would opine on Caitlyn Jenner and her transition.
Kunstler: Cover Girl
This shoot was about my life and who I am as a person. It’s not about the fanfare….”
— Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner
It was, perhaps, only coincidental that the shy, elderly, Olympic decathlon champion and Wheaties box icon ended up on the cover of America’s glossiest glossy magazine attended by a squadron of make-up artists, costumers, publicists, drapers, lighting designers, endocrinologists, agents, and managers under the direction of supreme photographic commander Annie Liebowitz. And, perhaps, another coincidence that the E! Network is producing an eight-part reality show (“docu-series”) on the journey of America’s new transgender sweetheart from sweaty, hairy, testosterone-jacked athlete to air-brushed pin-up “girl.” I guess fanfare is sometimes just the unexpected cherry-on-top of life’s big creamy cake.
But doesn’t it all raise the question: why is it so important for the nation’s cultural stage managers to make the case that a life of sexual confusion is the highest-and-best way of being in this world? It’s everywhere. A day does not pass lately when The New York Times fails to run a front-page story about the triumph of transgender life. One easy theory might be that old chestnut about folks out on the “cutting edge” always needing a new way to épater le bourgeois, shock and horrify the middle class (into the recognition of their pathetic, mind-numbing dullness.) Maybe the middle class doesn’t have enough to think about with keeping a step ahead of the re-po man, or being billed $30,000 to give birth in a hospital, or working 70 hours a week.
The best explanation (not mine originally), may be that in a “liminal” moment of history, when great scary trends and events trigger society’s existential dread, all kinds of boundaries dissolve. And sex, being among the humanity’s most compelling drives, fraught with heavy cultural regulation, ends up being the means of expression for our collective anxiety over the dissolution of things. It also happens that America today is at once an exceptionally pornified society and an exceptionally puritanical one. Rome under Caligula did not have the internet, enabling 12-year-olds to spectate on every imaginable sex act. But neither did the witch-obsessed settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have the equivalent of the young woman (Emma Sulkowicz by name) who idiotically lugged a mattress around the Columbia University campus as a combination political protest / senior art project to draw attention to her dubious rape case (which was dismissed by Columbia’s own administrative kangaroo court).
The tension between these forces of extreme prurience and extreme Puritanism must be immense, probably intolerable, especially for the young who, even in the most settled times, are beset by insecurity over their sexual development — of how to grow into a man or a woman in the world. It’s also interesting that we want to talk about “sexuality” all the time — if media chatter can be taken for public “conversation” — but only in highly circumscribed ways. Overstep the conventional thinking du jour, and you invite a tsunami of censorious opprobrium… which I will now proceed to do.
For instance, I would propose the theory that homosexuality is lately promoted as a desirable way of being in the world because it allows those who behave that way to avoid and escape a primary source of tension in human life: the difficult relations between men and women. These tensions inevitably fluoresce in adolescence, and so now the choice is offered to opt out. I’d expect gay opinion to argue that opting into that way of being in the world actually generates greater tensions and torments, and that may indeed be so — but it is often the case with avoidance behavior that it invites unhappy complications.
I would also propose that the Caitlyn (Bruce) Jenner spectacle represents “peak transgender.” Now that the culture stage managers have made the point that the paragon of maleness — a five-sport Olympic champion — can opt late in life to become a simulacrum of femaleness (with strange overtones of sexual availability, but to whom, or to what?), there’s nowhere further to go… we finally come to the actual long-sought edge of the cutting edge and drop off into an abyss.
Or maybe this is all just the result of life’s supreme test: keeping up with the Kardashians. After all those years of slip-sliding in Clinique Anti-blemish solution and L’Oreal True Match, poor Bruce just caved, surrendered, resorted to the tactic that could tempt even the most driven competitor: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
All right, now I will step aside and endure all the punishment I have invited for venturing to have some opinions on these matters.
Kunstler: Cover Girl
This shoot was about my life and who I am as a person. It’s not about the fanfare….”
— Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner
It was, perhaps, only coincidental that the shy, elderly, Olympic decathlon champion and Wheaties box icon ended up on the cover of America’s glossiest glossy magazine attended by a squadron of make-up artists, costumers, publicists, drapers, lighting designers, endocrinologists, agents, and managers under the direction of supreme photographic commander Annie Liebowitz. And, perhaps, another coincidence that the E! Network is producing an eight-part reality show (“docu-series”) on the journey of America’s new transgender sweetheart from sweaty, hairy, testosterone-jacked athlete to air-brushed pin-up “girl.” I guess fanfare is sometimes just the unexpected cherry-on-top of life’s big creamy cake.
But doesn’t it all raise the question: why is it so important for the nation’s cultural stage managers to make the case that a life of sexual confusion is the highest-and-best way of being in this world? It’s everywhere. A day does not pass lately when The New York Times fails to run a front-page story about the triumph of transgender life. One easy theory might be that old chestnut about folks out on the “cutting edge” always needing a new way to épater le bourgeois, shock and horrify the middle class (into the recognition of their pathetic, mind-numbing dullness.) Maybe the middle class doesn’t have enough to think about with keeping a step ahead of the re-po man, or being billed $30,000 to give birth in a hospital, or working 70 hours a week.
The best explanation (not mine originally), may be that in a “liminal” moment of history, when great scary trends and events trigger society’s existential dread, all kinds of boundaries dissolve. And sex, being among the humanity’s most compelling drives, fraught with heavy cultural regulation, ends up being the means of expression for our collective anxiety over the dissolution of things. It also happens that America today is at once an exceptionally pornified society and an exceptionally puritanical one. Rome under Caligula did not have the internet, enabling 12-year-olds to spectate on every imaginable sex act. But neither did the witch-obsessed settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have the equivalent of the young woman (Emma Sulkowicz by name) who idiotically lugged a mattress around the Columbia University campus as a combination political protest / senior art project to draw attention to her dubious rape case (which was dismissed by Columbia’s own administrative kangaroo court).
The tension between these forces of extreme prurience and extreme Puritanism must be immense, probably intolerable, especially for the young who, even in the most settled times, are beset by insecurity over their sexual development — of how to grow into a man or a woman in the world. It’s also interesting that we want to talk about “sexuality” all the time — if media chatter can be taken for public “conversation” — but only in highly circumscribed ways. Overstep the conventional thinking du jour, and you invite a tsunami of censorious opprobrium… which I will now proceed to do.
For instance, I would propose the theory that homosexuality is lately promoted as a desirable way of being in the world because it allows those who behave that way to avoid and escape a primary source of tension in human life: the difficult relations between men and women. These tensions inevitably fluoresce in adolescence, and so now the choice is offered to opt out. I’d expect gay opinion to argue that opting into that way of being in the world actually generates greater tensions and torments, and that may indeed be so — but it is often the case with avoidance behavior that it invites unhappy complications.
I would also propose that the Caitlyn (Bruce) Jenner spectacle represents “peak transgender.” Now that the culture stage managers have made the point that the paragon of maleness — a five-sport Olympic champion — can opt late in life to become a simulacrum of femaleness (with strange overtones of sexual availability, but to whom, or to what?), there’s nowhere further to go… we finally come to the actual long-sought edge of the cutting edge and drop off into an abyss.
Or maybe this is all just the result of life’s supreme test: keeping up with the Kardashians. After all those years of slip-sliding in Clinique Anti-blemish solution and L’Oreal True Match, poor Bruce just caved, surrendered, resorted to the tactic that could tempt even the most driven competitor: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
All right, now I will step aside and endure all the punishment I have invited for venturing to have some opinions on these matters.
Thursday, June 04, 2015
The Plot Against Islamberg, New York
I just found out about it, and the town itself, todaythrough this FAIR article.
More here.
And here.
More here.
And here.
Various Tweets
Rick Perry under indictments runs for President http://t.co/Xx1DSFNawI pic.twitter.com/DAv4fUwjLx
— Americans America (@americans4amer) June 4, 2015That crashing disappointment when an actor, director, or musician you admire starts talking about politics.
— Thaddeus Russell (@ThaddeusRussell) June 2,
2015New book by Samuel Alexander, Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits.
— Richard Heinberg (@richardheinberg) May 23, 2015Wonder why John Amos was kicked off #GoodTimes? He didn’t agree with the shucking & jiving. http://t.co/W0gzPX5Ocj pic.twitter.com/G0IDUjLIRf
— The Root (@TheRoot) June 4, 2015Good Times is still a relevant show, but it became all about J.J. Esther Rolle took a break from the show late in its run but returned for the final season. (I'll watch the John Amos interview later.)
In tomorrow's vote, Gawker's 119 writers may become the first workers at a major new media site to unionize. My Story http://t.co/GqEZkzmtUQ
— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) June 3, 2015https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/01/fish
Wednesday, June 03, 2015
The Things I Find Through Twitter
Yesterday, as I browsed through Twitter, I found this tweet about the University of Wisconsin and its financial situation.
Today, revisiting his Twitter, I saw this tweet which includes the hashtag #Wississippi.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/Wississippi?src=hash
Apparently, #Wississippi is a portmanteau of Mississippi and Wisconsin, meant to imply that Wisconsin is becoming more like Mississippi in governance.
Will #UWSystem see an exodus of faculty? #ScottWalkerFailed and is destroying everything he can of #Wisconsin
— Harvey J Kaye (@harveyjkaye) June 2, 2015Today, revisiting his Twitter, I saw this tweet which includes the hashtag #Wississippi.
Latest from #Wississippi > #Wisconsin Abortion Ban Would Allow Father To Sue For Emotional Distress http://t.co/aY0OIEHMNa
— Harvey J Kaye (@harveyjkaye) June 3, 2015https://twitter.com/hashtag/Wississippi?src=hash
Apparently, #Wississippi is a portmanteau of Mississippi and Wisconsin, meant to imply that Wisconsin is becoming more like Mississippi in governance.
Tuesday, June 02, 2015
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/522928.html
Found via:
Found via:
Bakunin disciple prosecuted for introducing potato-backed local currency http://t.co/LM5e45aVET
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) June 2, 2015The Nonsense That Preoccupies People
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11643052/Manspreading-arrests-the-long-arm-of-the-law-just-invaded-our-personal-space.html
Monday, June 01, 2015
Kunstler: Twenty-Three Geniuses
Kunstler takes on a New York Times feature that dismisses the fears of overpopulation put forth most famously by Paul Ehrlich.
==============
If there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in awarding it to The New York Times’ Monday feature, The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. The former “newspaper of record” wants us to assume now that the sky’s the limit for human activity on the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and accompanying video was actually prepared by a staff of 23 journalists. Give the Times another award for rounding up so many credentialed idiots for one job.
Apart from just dumping on Stanford U. biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), this foolish “crisis report” strenuously overlooks virtually every blossoming fiasco around the world. This must be what comes of viewing the world through your cell phone.
One main contention in the story is that the problem of feeding an exponentially growing population was already solved by the plant scientist Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution,” which gave the world hybridized high-yielding grain crops. Wrong. The “Green Revolution” was much more about converting fossil fuels into food. What happens to the hypothetically even larger world population when that’s not possible anymore? And did any of the 23 journalists notice that the world now has enormous additional problems with water depletion and soil degradation? Or that reckless genetic modification is now required to keep the grain production stats up?
No, they didn’t notice because the Times is firmly in the camp of techno-narcissism, the belief that the diminishing returns, unanticipated consequences, and over-investments in technology can be “solved” by layering on more technology — an idea whose first cousin is the wish to solve global over-indebtedness by generating more debt. Anyone seeking to understand why the public conversation about our pressing problems is so dumb, seek no further than this article, which explains it all.
Climate change, for instance, is only mentioned once in passing, as though it was just another trashy celebrity sighted at a “hot” new restaurant in the Meatpacking District. Also left out of the picture are the particulars of peak oil (laughed at regularly by the Times, which proclaimed the US “Saudi America” some time back), [and publishes articles like this one--P.Z.] degradation of the ocean and the stock of creatures that live there, loss of forests, the political instability of whole regions that can’t support exploded populations, and the desperate migrations of people fleeing these desolate zones.
As averred to above, the Times also has no idea about the relation of finance to resources. The banking problems we see all over the world are a direct expression of the limits to growth, specifically the limits to debt creation. We can’t continue to borrow from the future to pay for our comforts and conveniences today because we have no real conviction that these debts can ever be repaid. We certainly wish we could, and the central bankers running the money system would like to pretend that we could by making negligible the cost of borrowing money and engaging in pervasive accounting fraud. But that has only served to cripple the operation of markets and pervert the meaning of interest rates — and, really, as a final result, to destroy any sense of consequence among the people running things everywhere.
The crackup of that financial system will be the signal failure of the collapse of the current economic regime. The financial system is the most fragile of all the systems we depend on (though the others do not lack fragility). This is the reason, by the way, that oil prices are so low, despite the fact that the cost of producing oil has never been higher. The oil customers are going broke even faster than the oil producers. Does anybody doubt that the standard of living in the USA is falling, despite all our cell phone apps?
The basic fact of the matter is that the energy bonanza of the past 200-odd years produced a matrix of complex systems, as well as a hypertrophy in human population. These complex systems — banking, agri-biz, hop-scotching industrialization, global commerce, Eds & Meds, Happy Motoring, commercial aviation, suburbia — have all reached their limits to growth, and those limits are expressing themselves in growing global disorder and universal bankruptcy. Do the authors of The New York Times report think that the oil distribution situation is stable?
There were two terror bombings in Saudi Arabia the past two weeks. Did anyone notice the significance of that? Or that the May 29th incident was against a Shiite mosque, or that the Shia population of Saudi Arabia is concentrated in the eastern province of the kingdom where nearly all of the oil production is concentrated? (Or that the newly failed state of neighboring Yemen is about 40 percent Shiite?) Have any of the 23 genius-level reporters at The New York Times tried to calculate what it would mean to the humming global economy if Arabian oil came off the market for only a few weeks?
Paul Ehrlich was right, just a little off in his timing and in explicating with precision the unanticipated consequences of limitless growth. But isn’t it in the nature of things unanticipated that they generally are not?
==============
If there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in awarding it to The New York Times’ Monday feature, The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. The former “newspaper of record” wants us to assume now that the sky’s the limit for human activity on the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and accompanying video was actually prepared by a staff of 23 journalists. Give the Times another award for rounding up so many credentialed idiots for one job.
Apart from just dumping on Stanford U. biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), this foolish “crisis report” strenuously overlooks virtually every blossoming fiasco around the world. This must be what comes of viewing the world through your cell phone.
One main contention in the story is that the problem of feeding an exponentially growing population was already solved by the plant scientist Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution,” which gave the world hybridized high-yielding grain crops. Wrong. The “Green Revolution” was much more about converting fossil fuels into food. What happens to the hypothetically even larger world population when that’s not possible anymore? And did any of the 23 journalists notice that the world now has enormous additional problems with water depletion and soil degradation? Or that reckless genetic modification is now required to keep the grain production stats up?
No, they didn’t notice because the Times is firmly in the camp of techno-narcissism, the belief that the diminishing returns, unanticipated consequences, and over-investments in technology can be “solved” by layering on more technology — an idea whose first cousin is the wish to solve global over-indebtedness by generating more debt. Anyone seeking to understand why the public conversation about our pressing problems is so dumb, seek no further than this article, which explains it all.
Climate change, for instance, is only mentioned once in passing, as though it was just another trashy celebrity sighted at a “hot” new restaurant in the Meatpacking District. Also left out of the picture are the particulars of peak oil (laughed at regularly by the Times, which proclaimed the US “Saudi America” some time back), [and publishes articles like this one--P.Z.] degradation of the ocean and the stock of creatures that live there, loss of forests, the political instability of whole regions that can’t support exploded populations, and the desperate migrations of people fleeing these desolate zones.
As averred to above, the Times also has no idea about the relation of finance to resources. The banking problems we see all over the world are a direct expression of the limits to growth, specifically the limits to debt creation. We can’t continue to borrow from the future to pay for our comforts and conveniences today because we have no real conviction that these debts can ever be repaid. We certainly wish we could, and the central bankers running the money system would like to pretend that we could by making negligible the cost of borrowing money and engaging in pervasive accounting fraud. But that has only served to cripple the operation of markets and pervert the meaning of interest rates — and, really, as a final result, to destroy any sense of consequence among the people running things everywhere.
The crackup of that financial system will be the signal failure of the collapse of the current economic regime. The financial system is the most fragile of all the systems we depend on (though the others do not lack fragility). This is the reason, by the way, that oil prices are so low, despite the fact that the cost of producing oil has never been higher. The oil customers are going broke even faster than the oil producers. Does anybody doubt that the standard of living in the USA is falling, despite all our cell phone apps?
The basic fact of the matter is that the energy bonanza of the past 200-odd years produced a matrix of complex systems, as well as a hypertrophy in human population. These complex systems — banking, agri-biz, hop-scotching industrialization, global commerce, Eds & Meds, Happy Motoring, commercial aviation, suburbia — have all reached their limits to growth, and those limits are expressing themselves in growing global disorder and universal bankruptcy. Do the authors of The New York Times report think that the oil distribution situation is stable?
There were two terror bombings in Saudi Arabia the past two weeks. Did anyone notice the significance of that? Or that the May 29th incident was against a Shiite mosque, or that the Shia population of Saudi Arabia is concentrated in the eastern province of the kingdom where nearly all of the oil production is concentrated? (Or that the newly failed state of neighboring Yemen is about 40 percent Shiite?) Have any of the 23 genius-level reporters at The New York Times tried to calculate what it would mean to the humming global economy if Arabian oil came off the market for only a few weeks?
Paul Ehrlich was right, just a little off in his timing and in explicating with precision the unanticipated consequences of limitless growth. But isn’t it in the nature of things unanticipated that they generally are not?
Saturday, May 30, 2015
"Representations of the Western Middle Ages in Modern Japanese Culture"
I found the Twitter of Medievalists.net through @ArchivesNext.
Representations of the Western Middle Ages in Modern Japanese Culture http://t.co/nCfk2fgXOn pic.twitter.com/iNz1N3JvQ0
— Medievalists.net (@Medievalists) May 27, 2015Thursday, May 28, 2015
Antidote to all MADnesses (Max & Draper) Apu Trilogy now more than ever! http://t.co/iltkPv3gSj pic.twitter.com/jFJQSFGTc1
— armond white (@3xchair) May 20, 2015Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Another Reason I'm Glad I Never Watched Mad Men
Betty Draper: the great refusenik of the entire show, the one truth-teller who can accept the finitude of life, that there are endings.
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) May 20, 2015Monday, May 25, 2015
Kunstler: Yesterday's Tomorrowland
Kunstler looks at two movies. Stylistically, they couldn't be more different from each other, but both offer visions of the future that are way off the mark. It should be noted that both movies are likely flops: Mad Max has a $150M budget but earned only $135M worldwide (26 May update: now it's $227.7M). Tomorrowland was made for $190M, but this opening weekend it took in $9.7M $42.7M.
(26 May update): Louis Proyect's great review of Mad Max: Fury Road.
Kunstler: Yesterday's Tomorrowland
Yesterday’s Tomorrowland
America takes pause on a big holiday weekend requiring little in the way of real devotions beyond the barbeque deck with two profoundly stupid movie entertainments that epitomize our estrangement from the troubles of the present day.
First there’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which depicts the collapse of civilization as a monster car rally. They managed to get it exactly wrong. The present is the monster car show. Houston. Los Angeles. New Jersey, Beijing, Mumbai, etc. In the future, there will be no cars, gasoline-powered, electric, driverless, or otherwise. Mad Max: Fury Road is actually a perverse exercise in nostalgia, as if we’re going to miss being a nation of savages in the driver’s seat, acting out an endless and pointless competition for our little place on the highway.
The other holiday blockbuster is Disney’s Tomorrowland, another exercise in nostalgia for the present, where the idealized human life is a matrix of phone apps, robots, and holograms. Of course, anybody who had been to Disneyland back in the day remembers the old Tomorrowland installation, which eventually had to be dismantled because its vision of the future had become such a joke — starting with the idea that the human project’s most pressing task was space travel. Now, at this late date, the monster Disney corporation — a truly evil empire — sees that more money can be winkled out of the sore-beset public by persuading them that techno-utopia is at hand, if only we click our heels hard enough.
Another theme running through both films is the idea that girls can be what boys used to be, that it’s “their turn” to be masters-of-the-universe, that men are past their sell-by date and only exist to defile and humiliate females. That this message is really only a mendacious effort to rake in more money by enlarging the teen “audience share” for the reigning wishful fantasy du jour is surely lost on the culture commentators, who are so busy these days celebrating the triumph and wonder of transgender life.
The reviewers are weighing these two movies on the popular pessimism / optimism scale. These are the only choices for the masses: whether to be a “doomer” or a “wisher.” Both positions are cartoon world-views that don’t provide much guidance for continuing the project of civilization, in case anyone is actually interested in that. It’s either rampaging id or the illusion of supernatural control, take your pick. I find both stances revolting.
Anyway, it’s interesting that the real Fury Road of the rightnow runs from Syria into Iraq starring ISIS. There is a growing sentiment in the news media (including the web, of course) of a sickening déjà vu with these developments. The old familiar talk of air strikes and ground troops infects the wifi transmissions. Maybe we should think about sending Charlize Theron over there with a few vestigial male sidekicks to load her assault rifle. How else to git’er done? Nobody knows.
Memorial Day is a dreary moment to have to face this onrushing calamity of rocket-propelled medievalism rampant — all those poor American soldiers blown up and mangled the past twelve years. It’s also interesting that the news media is totally out-of-touch with the biggest prize on the great gameboard: Saudi Arabia. You think ISIS overrunning Iraq is bad news? Wait until the ordnance starts flying around Riyadh. Notice, too, that there’s no news coming out of Yemen on the base of the Arabian peninsula, a failed state with a population nearly equal to its neighbor. If we have any idea what’s going on there — and surely the Pentagon and NSA do — then it’s not for popular consumption.
This is ironic because if the trouble happens to spread into Saudi Arabia — and I don’t see how it will not — then we’ll find out in a New York minute how America’s future is not about monster trucks, cars, dirt bikes, holograms, phone apps, and all the other ridiculous preoccupations of the moment.
(26 May update): Louis Proyect's great review of Mad Max: Fury Road.
Kunstler: Yesterday's Tomorrowland
Yesterday’s Tomorrowland
America takes pause on a big holiday weekend requiring little in the way of real devotions beyond the barbeque deck with two profoundly stupid movie entertainments that epitomize our estrangement from the troubles of the present day.
First there’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which depicts the collapse of civilization as a monster car rally. They managed to get it exactly wrong. The present is the monster car show. Houston. Los Angeles. New Jersey, Beijing, Mumbai, etc. In the future, there will be no cars, gasoline-powered, electric, driverless, or otherwise. Mad Max: Fury Road is actually a perverse exercise in nostalgia, as if we’re going to miss being a nation of savages in the driver’s seat, acting out an endless and pointless competition for our little place on the highway.
The other holiday blockbuster is Disney’s Tomorrowland, another exercise in nostalgia for the present, where the idealized human life is a matrix of phone apps, robots, and holograms. Of course, anybody who had been to Disneyland back in the day remembers the old Tomorrowland installation, which eventually had to be dismantled because its vision of the future had become such a joke — starting with the idea that the human project’s most pressing task was space travel. Now, at this late date, the monster Disney corporation — a truly evil empire — sees that more money can be winkled out of the sore-beset public by persuading them that techno-utopia is at hand, if only we click our heels hard enough.
Another theme running through both films is the idea that girls can be what boys used to be, that it’s “their turn” to be masters-of-the-universe, that men are past their sell-by date and only exist to defile and humiliate females. That this message is really only a mendacious effort to rake in more money by enlarging the teen “audience share” for the reigning wishful fantasy du jour is surely lost on the culture commentators, who are so busy these days celebrating the triumph and wonder of transgender life.
The reviewers are weighing these two movies on the popular pessimism / optimism scale. These are the only choices for the masses: whether to be a “doomer” or a “wisher.” Both positions are cartoon world-views that don’t provide much guidance for continuing the project of civilization, in case anyone is actually interested in that. It’s either rampaging id or the illusion of supernatural control, take your pick. I find both stances revolting.
Anyway, it’s interesting that the real Fury Road of the rightnow runs from Syria into Iraq starring ISIS. There is a growing sentiment in the news media (including the web, of course) of a sickening déjà vu with these developments. The old familiar talk of air strikes and ground troops infects the wifi transmissions. Maybe we should think about sending Charlize Theron over there with a few vestigial male sidekicks to load her assault rifle. How else to git’er done? Nobody knows.
Memorial Day is a dreary moment to have to face this onrushing calamity of rocket-propelled medievalism rampant — all those poor American soldiers blown up and mangled the past twelve years. It’s also interesting that the news media is totally out-of-touch with the biggest prize on the great gameboard: Saudi Arabia. You think ISIS overrunning Iraq is bad news? Wait until the ordnance starts flying around Riyadh. Notice, too, that there’s no news coming out of Yemen on the base of the Arabian peninsula, a failed state with a population nearly equal to its neighbor. If we have any idea what’s going on there — and surely the Pentagon and NSA do — then it’s not for popular consumption.
This is ironic because if the trouble happens to spread into Saudi Arabia — and I don’t see how it will not — then we’ll find out in a New York minute how America’s future is not about monster trucks, cars, dirt bikes, holograms, phone apps, and all the other ridiculous preoccupations of the moment.
Saudi Arabia is building a $3.5 billion hotel in Mecca and 5 floors will be exclusively for the Saudi royal family.
http://t.co/GeSLUdztkn
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 24, 2015Saturday, May 23, 2015
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
"Shameless Hypocrisy"
Agreed. And he looks like Humpty Dumpty.
Shameless Hypocrisy watch: Scott Desjarlais (TN-R), who supported wife's abortions & pressured gf to have one, votes for abortion ban.
— Katha Pollitt (@KathaPollitt) May 16, 2015Tuesday, May 19, 2015
R. I .P. , Gilles d'Aymery
Gilles d'Aymery, founder of Swans.com, has died, I have just found out. I hope Swans can continue to be published. It was one of the most original webzines I've read. And I've donated money to them from time to time, not necessarily because I agreed with everything written there, but because of the quality of its content and because Gilles was totally upfront about how donations were used. The yearly budget was roughly $4,000, less than some magazines spend on snacks. A breakdown of expenses is below.
"You send us money. Here, in total transparency, is how it is spent:
•Internet access and costs: Web, satellite, land-line access, TV: $1,900 a year
•Hardware/software maintenance and upgrades: $1,000 a year
•Press and book purchases: $1,000 a year
•Miscellaneous: $450 a year
•This is a very conservative accounting of our overall costs."
Monday, May 18, 2015
Kunstler: Dead Nation Walking
Kunstler: Dead Nation Walking
Many people seem to think that America has lost its sense of purpose. They overlook the obvious: that we are striving to become the Bulgaria of the western hemisphere. At least we already have enough vampires to qualify.
You don’t have to seek further than the USA’s sub-soviet-quality passenger railroad system, which produced the spectacular Philadelphia derailment last week that killed eight people and injured dozens more. Six days later, we’re still waiting for some explanation as to why the train was going 100 miles-per-hour on a historically dangerous curve within the city limits.
The otherwise excellent David Stockman posted a misguided blog last week that contained all the boilerplate arguments denouncing passenger rail: that it’s addicted to government subsidies and that a “free market” would put it out of its misery because Americans prefer to drive and fly from one place to another.
One reason Americans prefer to drive — say, from Albany, NY, to Boston — is that there is only one train a day, it never leaves on time or arrives on time, and it takes twice as long as a car trip for no reason that makes any sense. Of course, this is exactly the kind of journey ( slightly less than 200 miles) that doesn’t make sense to fly, either, given all the dreary business of getting to-and-from the airports, not to mention the expense of a short-hop plane ticket.
I take the popular (and gorgeous!) Hudson River Amtrak train between Albany and New York several times a year because bringing a car into Manhattan is an enormous pain in the ass. This train may have the highest ridership in the country, but it’s still a Third World experience. The heat or the AC is often out of whack, you can’t buy so much as a bottle of water on the train, the windows are gunked-over, and the seats are often broken. They put wifi on trains a couple of years ago but it cuts out every ten minutes.
Anyway, even if Americans seem to prefer for the present moment to drive or fly, it may not always be the case that they will be able to. Several surprising forces are gathering to take down the Happy Motoring matrix. Peak oil is actually not playing out in the form of too-high gasoline prices, but rather a race between a bankrupt middle class unable to pay the total costs of motoring and an oil industry that can’t make a profit drilling for hard-to-get oil. That scenario is plain to see in the rapid rise and now fall of shale oil.
Nowhere on earth is there passenger rail that pays for itself. But, of course, you don’t hear anyone complain about the public subsidies for driving or air travel. Who do you think pays for the interstate highway system? What major airport is privately owned and operated?
Some of the decisions made over our rail system are so dumb you wonder how the executives on board ever got their jobs. For instance the train between New York City and Chicago never runs on time for the simple reason that Amtrak sold the right-of-way to the CSX freight line. CSX then tore up the second track because there was an antiquated state real estate tax on railroad tracks. As a result, freight trains have priority on the single track and the passenger trains have to pull over on sidings every time a freight needs to go by. Earth calling the New York state legislature. Rescind the stupid tax.
America is going to need trains more than it thinks right now, despite what the “free market” says. The condition of our trains is symptomatic of the shape of the nation. The really sad part is we missed the window of opportunity to build a high-speed system. [George Will won't have to grumble about high-speed rail now.--P.Z.] Capital will soon be too scarce for that. But we still have a conventional network that not so many decades ago was the envy of the world, and we know exactly how to fix it. We just don’t want to. No will left. Apparently we’d rather just turn into the walking dead.
Many people seem to think that America has lost its sense of purpose. They overlook the obvious: that we are striving to become the Bulgaria of the western hemisphere. At least we already have enough vampires to qualify.
You don’t have to seek further than the USA’s sub-soviet-quality passenger railroad system, which produced the spectacular Philadelphia derailment last week that killed eight people and injured dozens more. Six days later, we’re still waiting for some explanation as to why the train was going 100 miles-per-hour on a historically dangerous curve within the city limits.
The otherwise excellent David Stockman posted a misguided blog last week that contained all the boilerplate arguments denouncing passenger rail: that it’s addicted to government subsidies and that a “free market” would put it out of its misery because Americans prefer to drive and fly from one place to another.
One reason Americans prefer to drive — say, from Albany, NY, to Boston — is that there is only one train a day, it never leaves on time or arrives on time, and it takes twice as long as a car trip for no reason that makes any sense. Of course, this is exactly the kind of journey ( slightly less than 200 miles) that doesn’t make sense to fly, either, given all the dreary business of getting to-and-from the airports, not to mention the expense of a short-hop plane ticket.
I take the popular (and gorgeous!) Hudson River Amtrak train between Albany and New York several times a year because bringing a car into Manhattan is an enormous pain in the ass. This train may have the highest ridership in the country, but it’s still a Third World experience. The heat or the AC is often out of whack, you can’t buy so much as a bottle of water on the train, the windows are gunked-over, and the seats are often broken. They put wifi on trains a couple of years ago but it cuts out every ten minutes.
Anyway, even if Americans seem to prefer for the present moment to drive or fly, it may not always be the case that they will be able to. Several surprising forces are gathering to take down the Happy Motoring matrix. Peak oil is actually not playing out in the form of too-high gasoline prices, but rather a race between a bankrupt middle class unable to pay the total costs of motoring and an oil industry that can’t make a profit drilling for hard-to-get oil. That scenario is plain to see in the rapid rise and now fall of shale oil.
Nowhere on earth is there passenger rail that pays for itself. But, of course, you don’t hear anyone complain about the public subsidies for driving or air travel. Who do you think pays for the interstate highway system? What major airport is privately owned and operated?
Some of the decisions made over our rail system are so dumb you wonder how the executives on board ever got their jobs. For instance the train between New York City and Chicago never runs on time for the simple reason that Amtrak sold the right-of-way to the CSX freight line. CSX then tore up the second track because there was an antiquated state real estate tax on railroad tracks. As a result, freight trains have priority on the single track and the passenger trains have to pull over on sidings every time a freight needs to go by. Earth calling the New York state legislature. Rescind the stupid tax.
America is going to need trains more than it thinks right now, despite what the “free market” says. The condition of our trains is symptomatic of the shape of the nation. The really sad part is we missed the window of opportunity to build a high-speed system. [George Will won't have to grumble about high-speed rail now.--P.Z.] Capital will soon be too scarce for that. But we still have a conventional network that not so many decades ago was the envy of the world, and we know exactly how to fix it. We just don’t want to. No will left. Apparently we’d rather just turn into the walking dead.
Ananda Project: "Where the Music Takes You" and Terrestre: "Norteno Dejaneiro"
Another Sunday-night discovery through Music Choice.
The Jones Girls: "Nights Over Egypt"
I just found this song on Music Choice Sunday night. Wonderful.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Maximum Madness
From the preview I've seen of Mad Max: Fury Road, I don't plan to see it. The near-unanimous critical acclaim (98 or 99 per cent at RottenTomatoes.com) for this movie is strange.
Then there's Armond White, who never believes the hype.
"Director-writer Miller capitulates to the low instincts he originally pandered to more than 30 years ago. He’s gotten better at it — demonstrating lotsa panache — but the problem is that popular taste has degraded into an appetite for outlandish destruction and fantastic cruelty. The pop audience (and not just youth) has become like the crazed yahoos Miller depicts on screen without exactly satirizing them."
17 May update: Box Office Mojo reports that Pitch Perfect 2 beat Mad Max for the top earning spot this weekend.
Then there's Armond White, who never believes the hype.
"Director-writer Miller capitulates to the low instincts he originally pandered to more than 30 years ago. He’s gotten better at it — demonstrating lotsa panache — but the problem is that popular taste has degraded into an appetite for outlandish destruction and fantastic cruelty. The pop audience (and not just youth) has become like the crazed yahoos Miller depicts on screen without exactly satirizing them."
17 May update: Box Office Mojo reports that Pitch Perfect 2 beat Mad Max for the top earning spot this weekend.
Friday, May 15, 2015
The Max Blumenthal New-Book Watch
Very much looking forward to reading @MaxBlumenthal's new book, to be published by @VersoBooks in July. pic.twitter.com/iojB1DdyS3
— Asa Winstanley (@AsaWinstanley) May 15, 2015Thursday, May 14, 2015
Eurobeat F.C.F. 1988 / Mirukomeda 138
01 Somebody's Loving /Jenny Kee
02 Duri Duri / Click
03 Chica Cubana / Tatjana
04 Love & Devotion / Co Co M
05 Go Go Boy / Ross
06 Hot Love / Jenny Kee
07 Come Come Come / Lilac
08 Jump To The Music / Lilac
09 Come Back & Do It / Malcolm J. Hill
10 I'll Be There / Dandy
11 Voice Of The Night / Molto Carina
12 Lies / King Kong & D'Jungle Girls
13 It's So Funny / King Kong & D'Jungle Girls
14 Never Can Change My Mind / Gary Cooper
15 Hey Robin / Alpha Town
16 Stop Me Baby / Mike Hazzard
17 You Can Set Me Free / Coo Coo
18 Crank It Up / Thomas & Schubert
19 Up Side Down / Coo Coo
20 Help Me / Mela
Monday, May 11, 2015
Kunstler: Muskular Magic
Kunstler: Muskular Magic.
Elon Musk, Silicon Valley’s poster-boy genius replacement for the late Steve Jobs, rolled out his PowerWall battery last week with Star Wars style fanfare, doing his bit to promote and support the delusional thinking that grips a nation unable to escape the toils of techno-grandiosity. The main delusion: that we can “solve” the problems of techno-industrial society with more and better technology.
The South African born-and-raised Musk is surely better known for founding Tesla Motors, maker of the snazzy all-electric car. The denizens of Silicon Valley are crazy about the Tesla. There is no greater status trinket in Northern California, where the fog of delusion cloaks the road to the future. They believe, as Musk himself often avers, that Tesla cars “don’t burn hydrocarbons.” That statement is absurd, of course, and Musk, who holds a degree in physics from Penn, must blush when he says that. After all, you have to plug it in and charge somewhere from the US electric grid.
Only 6 percent of US electric power comes from “clean” hydro generation. Another 20 percent is nuclear. The rest is coal (48 percent) and natural gas (21 percent) with the remaining sliver coming from “renewables” and oil. (The quote marks on “renewables” are there to remind you that they probably can’t be manufactured without the support of a fossil fuel economy). Anyway, my point is that the bulk of US electricity comes from burning hydrocarbons, and then there is the nuclear part which is glossed over because the techno-geniuses and politicians of America have no idea how they are going to de-commission our aging plants, and no idea how to safely dispose of the spent fuel rod inventory simply lying around in collection pools. This stuff is capable of poisoning the entire planet and we know it.
The PowerWall roll out highlighted the “affordability” of the sleek lithium battery at $3,500 per unit. The average cluck watching Musk’s TED-like performance on the web was supposed to think he could power his home with it. Musk left out a few things. Such as: you need the rooftop solar array to feed the battery. Figure another $25,000 to $40,000 for that, depending on whether they are made in China (poor quality) or Germany, or in the USA (and installation is both laborious and expensive). Also consider that you need a charge controller and inverter to manage the electric flow and convert direct current (DC) from the sun into usable alternating current (AC) for your house — another $3,500. So, the cost of hanging a solar electric system on your house with all its parts is more like fifty grand.
What happens when the solar panels, battery, etc., reach the end of their useful lives, say 25 years or so, when there is no more fossil fuel (or an industry capable of providing it economically). How will you fabricate the replacement parts? By then the techno-wizards will have supposedly “come up with” a magic energy rescue remedy. Stand by on that, and consider the possibility that you will be disappointed with how it works out.
What gets me about Tesla’s various products and activities is that, when all is said and done, they are meant to extend the fatal rackets of contemporary life, especially car dependency and the suburban development pattern. Car dependency can and probably will fail on the financial basis, not on the question of how you run the car. The main economic problem we face is the end of growth of the kind we’re used to, the kind that generates real capital and enables bank lending. It is already happening and has led to fewer loans for fewer qualified borrowers. It will also lead to the end of government’s ability to pay for fixing the elaborate hierarchy of paved highways, roads, and streets that the cars have to run on. Imagine the psychic pain of the Silicon Valley billionaire driving his $87,000 Tesla P85D down a freeway that the State of California hasn’t been able to repair in five years.
Elon Musk, Silicon Valley’s poster-boy genius replacement for the late Steve Jobs, rolled out his PowerWall battery last week with Star Wars style fanfare, doing his bit to promote and support the delusional thinking that grips a nation unable to escape the toils of techno-grandiosity. The main delusion: that we can “solve” the problems of techno-industrial society with more and better technology.
The South African born-and-raised Musk is surely better known for founding Tesla Motors, maker of the snazzy all-electric car. The denizens of Silicon Valley are crazy about the Tesla. There is no greater status trinket in Northern California, where the fog of delusion cloaks the road to the future. They believe, as Musk himself often avers, that Tesla cars “don’t burn hydrocarbons.” That statement is absurd, of course, and Musk, who holds a degree in physics from Penn, must blush when he says that. After all, you have to plug it in and charge somewhere from the US electric grid.
Only 6 percent of US electric power comes from “clean” hydro generation. Another 20 percent is nuclear. The rest is coal (48 percent) and natural gas (21 percent) with the remaining sliver coming from “renewables” and oil. (The quote marks on “renewables” are there to remind you that they probably can’t be manufactured without the support of a fossil fuel economy). Anyway, my point is that the bulk of US electricity comes from burning hydrocarbons, and then there is the nuclear part which is glossed over because the techno-geniuses and politicians of America have no idea how they are going to de-commission our aging plants, and no idea how to safely dispose of the spent fuel rod inventory simply lying around in collection pools. This stuff is capable of poisoning the entire planet and we know it.
The PowerWall roll out highlighted the “affordability” of the sleek lithium battery at $3,500 per unit. The average cluck watching Musk’s TED-like performance on the web was supposed to think he could power his home with it. Musk left out a few things. Such as: you need the rooftop solar array to feed the battery. Figure another $25,000 to $40,000 for that, depending on whether they are made in China (poor quality) or Germany, or in the USA (and installation is both laborious and expensive). Also consider that you need a charge controller and inverter to manage the electric flow and convert direct current (DC) from the sun into usable alternating current (AC) for your house — another $3,500. So, the cost of hanging a solar electric system on your house with all its parts is more like fifty grand.
What happens when the solar panels, battery, etc., reach the end of their useful lives, say 25 years or so, when there is no more fossil fuel (or an industry capable of providing it economically). How will you fabricate the replacement parts? By then the techno-wizards will have supposedly “come up with” a magic energy rescue remedy. Stand by on that, and consider the possibility that you will be disappointed with how it works out.
What gets me about Tesla’s various products and activities is that, when all is said and done, they are meant to extend the fatal rackets of contemporary life, especially car dependency and the suburban development pattern. Car dependency can and probably will fail on the financial basis, not on the question of how you run the car. The main economic problem we face is the end of growth of the kind we’re used to, the kind that generates real capital and enables bank lending. It is already happening and has led to fewer loans for fewer qualified borrowers. It will also lead to the end of government’s ability to pay for fixing the elaborate hierarchy of paved highways, roads, and streets that the cars have to run on. Imagine the psychic pain of the Silicon Valley billionaire driving his $87,000 Tesla P85D down a freeway that the State of California hasn’t been able to repair in five years.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Happy Mother's Day
An interview with Samuel Fussell, author of Muscle, and son of Paul.
I'm trying to find two poems on mothers, one by Audre Lorde and the other by Juliet Kono.
I'm trying to find two poems on mothers, one by Audre Lorde and the other by Juliet Kono.
Saturday, May 09, 2015
Thursday, May 07, 2015
Monday, May 04, 2015
Sunday, May 03, 2015
Saturday, May 02, 2015
The Foreign Quarterly Review
http://books.google.com/books?id=T9gRAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast Returns Next Week
The BRET EASTON ELLIS PODCAST returns next week on PodCastOne: Sentimental narratives & the fallacy of "relatability" pic.twitter.com/PrdxvMioIL
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) May 1, 2015Thursday, April 30, 2015
@tanehisicoates Tried to get B Sun and other historic papers @uofcincy a couple years ago. $25k purchase price and $1k/year or more in fees
— Rob Gioielli (@robgioielli) April 29, 2015Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Monday, April 27, 2015
Kunstler: Money Worries
April 27, 2015
Kunstler: Money Worries
The cynicism among the informed classes has never been so deep. Even the pompom boys in the cheerleading clubs like CNBC and The Wall Street Journal express wonderment at the levitation of stock indexes and bond values. They chatter about a “correction” of 20 percent being a healthful tonic that would clear away some dross and quickly usher in a new episode of “growth” — or growthiness, which, like truthiness, became an acceptable approximation of the real thing. The truth, as opposed to truthiness, is they no longer believe their own bullshit about growthiness.
The suppression of interest rates and pervasive accounting fraud has thundered through the financial system, and the deformities caused by it have emerged in currency war, currency instability, trade collapse, and political crisis. Years of central bank intervention have stolen the capital of the future to construct a Potemkin economy meant to conceal the sickening gyre of diminishing returns strangling business as usual.
Until it collapses by a great deal more than the wished-for mere 20 percent, more perversities will be piled onto the already existing burden. Is it not a wonder that professionalized interest groups like AARP have not screamed bloody murder over the suppression of interest rates which deprives its members of bank account and bond interest on savings? Instead AARP, like virtually every enterprise in America, has turned to racketeering. Don’t worry, they’ll be gone from the scene soon enough.
The next shoe to drop will be various forms of bail-ins and attempts to prevent bank account and money market holders from getting access to their cash. A withdrawal above $2,000 already can trigger a report to the IRS. The next step will be to put a simple ceiling on withdrawals. Will that trigger public ire? Who knows? Nothing yet has in the USA. The meme currently circulating is the fear that government would like to abolish cash altogether and put in a regime of all-electronic money. Being allergic to conspiracy ideas, I’m skeptical about this idea, but I really can’t dismiss it.
A cashless society would conceptually allow government much more leak-proof control of all citizen money transactions. Mainly it could funnel tax revenue into the treasury much more efficiently. It raises some obvious practical concerns, such as: would such a program lead to an enhanced colossal skim of credit card company off-creaming? And what about the percentage of poorer Americans who don’t have credit cards or bank accounts now, either because they don’t understand how it all works, or they’re forced to function in the “gray” economy for one reason or another (e.g. a drug felony rap). And what kind of as-yet-unknown perverse work-arounds would this new system provoke?
I put the question to a table of college-educated people last night and their response was surprising: utter complacency. They’re already used to paying for most things with plastic, they said, and their employer already withholds a big part of their regular paycheck for taxes, so what does it matter? They couldn’t grok the possibility that a cashless money system might easily deprive them of access to whatever reserves they have. Or perhaps, more specifically, they couldn’t imagine an economic or political emergency that might provoke such a situation.
They might find out sooner than they realize. As I suggest in the lede, apprehension is growing that some kind of “corrective” event is at hand on the financial scene. Even the supposedly salubrious 20 percent S & P drop could set off a chorus of margin calls that would make the trumpets of Jericho sound like a kazoo concert. What will Americans do if they can’t get their money out of the banks? The last time this happened, 1933, we were a hard-up but polite and highly-regimented society, and the automatic rifle was a novelty restricted to a relatively tiny army and Al Capone’s crew. Behind the financial jitters of the informed minority is the greater fear of social unrest.
Kunstler: Money Worries
The cynicism among the informed classes has never been so deep. Even the pompom boys in the cheerleading clubs like CNBC and The Wall Street Journal express wonderment at the levitation of stock indexes and bond values. They chatter about a “correction” of 20 percent being a healthful tonic that would clear away some dross and quickly usher in a new episode of “growth” — or growthiness, which, like truthiness, became an acceptable approximation of the real thing. The truth, as opposed to truthiness, is they no longer believe their own bullshit about growthiness.
The suppression of interest rates and pervasive accounting fraud has thundered through the financial system, and the deformities caused by it have emerged in currency war, currency instability, trade collapse, and political crisis. Years of central bank intervention have stolen the capital of the future to construct a Potemkin economy meant to conceal the sickening gyre of diminishing returns strangling business as usual.
Until it collapses by a great deal more than the wished-for mere 20 percent, more perversities will be piled onto the already existing burden. Is it not a wonder that professionalized interest groups like AARP have not screamed bloody murder over the suppression of interest rates which deprives its members of bank account and bond interest on savings? Instead AARP, like virtually every enterprise in America, has turned to racketeering. Don’t worry, they’ll be gone from the scene soon enough.
The next shoe to drop will be various forms of bail-ins and attempts to prevent bank account and money market holders from getting access to their cash. A withdrawal above $2,000 already can trigger a report to the IRS. The next step will be to put a simple ceiling on withdrawals. Will that trigger public ire? Who knows? Nothing yet has in the USA. The meme currently circulating is the fear that government would like to abolish cash altogether and put in a regime of all-electronic money. Being allergic to conspiracy ideas, I’m skeptical about this idea, but I really can’t dismiss it.
A cashless society would conceptually allow government much more leak-proof control of all citizen money transactions. Mainly it could funnel tax revenue into the treasury much more efficiently. It raises some obvious practical concerns, such as: would such a program lead to an enhanced colossal skim of credit card company off-creaming? And what about the percentage of poorer Americans who don’t have credit cards or bank accounts now, either because they don’t understand how it all works, or they’re forced to function in the “gray” economy for one reason or another (e.g. a drug felony rap). And what kind of as-yet-unknown perverse work-arounds would this new system provoke?
I put the question to a table of college-educated people last night and their response was surprising: utter complacency. They’re already used to paying for most things with plastic, they said, and their employer already withholds a big part of their regular paycheck for taxes, so what does it matter? They couldn’t grok the possibility that a cashless money system might easily deprive them of access to whatever reserves they have. Or perhaps, more specifically, they couldn’t imagine an economic or political emergency that might provoke such a situation.
They might find out sooner than they realize. As I suggest in the lede, apprehension is growing that some kind of “corrective” event is at hand on the financial scene. Even the supposedly salubrious 20 percent S & P drop could set off a chorus of margin calls that would make the trumpets of Jericho sound like a kazoo concert. What will Americans do if they can’t get their money out of the banks? The last time this happened, 1933, we were a hard-up but polite and highly-regimented society, and the automatic rifle was a novelty restricted to a relatively tiny army and Al Capone’s crew. Behind the financial jitters of the informed minority is the greater fear of social unrest.
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Neoconservative Robert Kagan on Hillary Clinton: "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy." https://t.co/sKQ3rItVDG
— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) April 15, 2015Tuesday, April 21, 2015
"How English Ruined Indian Literature"
Worth thinking about.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/how-english-ruined-indian-literature.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/how-english-ruined-indian-literature.html?_r=0
Monday, April 20, 2015
Kunstler: Change They Don't Believe In
With a Bush-Clinton matchup, people will either abstain from casting their presidential votes for the Big Two or will choose from among the third parties.--P.Z.
Kunstler: Change They Don't Believe In.
The unfortunate consequence of not allowing the process of “creative destruction” to occur in banking and Big Business is that the historic forces behind it will seek expression elsewhere in the realm of politics and governance. The desperate antics of central banks to cover up financial failure can’t help but provoke political upheaval, including war.
It’s a worldwide phenomenon and one result will be the crackup of economic relations — thought by many to be permanent — that we call “globalism.” The USA has suffered mightily from globalism, by which a bonanza of cheap “consumer” products made by Asian factory slaves has masked the degeneration of local economic vitality, family life, behavioral norms, and social cohesion. That crackup is already underway in the currency wars aptly named by Jim Rickards, [Link added by me.--P.Z.] and you can bet that soon enough it will lead to the death of the 12,000-mile supply lines from China to WalMart — eventually to the death of WalMart itself (and everything like it). Another result will be the interruption of oil export supply lines.
The USA as currently engineered (no local economies, universal suburban sprawl, big box commerce, despotic agribiz) won’t survive these disruptions and one might also wonder whether our political institutions will survive. The crop of 2016 White House aspirants shows no comprehension for the play of these forces and the field is ripe for epic disruption. The prospect of another Clinton – Bush election contest is a perfect setup for the collapse of the two parties sponsoring them, ushering in a period of wild political turmoil. Just because you don’t see it this very moment, doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking on the margins.
This same moment (in history) the American thinking classes are lost in raptures of techno-wishfulness. They can imagine the glory of watching Fast and Furious 7 on a phone in a self-driving electric car, but they can’t imagine rebuilt local economies where citizens get to play both an economic and social role in their communities. They can trumpet the bionic engineering of artificial hamburger meat, but not careful, small-scale farming in which many hands can find work and meaning.
The true genius of Hillary is that she manages to epitomize every failure of our current political life: the obsessive micro-manipulation of image, the obscene moneygrubbing, the tired cronyism, the entitlement masquerading as sexual equality. Mostly, though, she has no idea where history is taking us, in case you’re wondering at the stupefying platitudes offered up as representative of her thinking. I’m not advocating for this gentleman, but it will at least be interesting to see Martin O’Malley jump into the race and call bullshit on her, which he will do, literally, because he has nothing to lose by doing it. The eunuchs on The New York Times Op Ed page certainly won’t do it.
What happens on the world financial scene will determine the flow of events up into the 2016 election. The built-up tensions and fragilities are begging for release. The defining instant might be Greece’s unwillingness to fork over another debt payment, or the death of the shale oil “miracle,” or some act by Saudi Arabia’s enemies, or some chain of exploding booby-traps in the shadow banking netherworld. The great surprise for America especially will be the recognition that our current living arrangements have no future. That’s the only thing that will prompt a new consensus to form around some alternate, more plausible future, and the emergence of a generation willing to fight for it, even if it requires some real creative destruction of the things that are killing us anyway.
Kunstler: Change They Don't Believe In.
The unfortunate consequence of not allowing the process of “creative destruction” to occur in banking and Big Business is that the historic forces behind it will seek expression elsewhere in the realm of politics and governance. The desperate antics of central banks to cover up financial failure can’t help but provoke political upheaval, including war.
It’s a worldwide phenomenon and one result will be the crackup of economic relations — thought by many to be permanent — that we call “globalism.” The USA has suffered mightily from globalism, by which a bonanza of cheap “consumer” products made by Asian factory slaves has masked the degeneration of local economic vitality, family life, behavioral norms, and social cohesion. That crackup is already underway in the currency wars aptly named by Jim Rickards, [Link added by me.--P.Z.] and you can bet that soon enough it will lead to the death of the 12,000-mile supply lines from China to WalMart — eventually to the death of WalMart itself (and everything like it). Another result will be the interruption of oil export supply lines.
The USA as currently engineered (no local economies, universal suburban sprawl, big box commerce, despotic agribiz) won’t survive these disruptions and one might also wonder whether our political institutions will survive. The crop of 2016 White House aspirants shows no comprehension for the play of these forces and the field is ripe for epic disruption. The prospect of another Clinton – Bush election contest is a perfect setup for the collapse of the two parties sponsoring them, ushering in a period of wild political turmoil. Just because you don’t see it this very moment, doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking on the margins.
This same moment (in history) the American thinking classes are lost in raptures of techno-wishfulness. They can imagine the glory of watching Fast and Furious 7 on a phone in a self-driving electric car, but they can’t imagine rebuilt local economies where citizens get to play both an economic and social role in their communities. They can trumpet the bionic engineering of artificial hamburger meat, but not careful, small-scale farming in which many hands can find work and meaning.
The true genius of Hillary is that she manages to epitomize every failure of our current political life: the obsessive micro-manipulation of image, the obscene moneygrubbing, the tired cronyism, the entitlement masquerading as sexual equality. Mostly, though, she has no idea where history is taking us, in case you’re wondering at the stupefying platitudes offered up as representative of her thinking. I’m not advocating for this gentleman, but it will at least be interesting to see Martin O’Malley jump into the race and call bullshit on her, which he will do, literally, because he has nothing to lose by doing it. The eunuchs on The New York Times Op Ed page certainly won’t do it.
What happens on the world financial scene will determine the flow of events up into the 2016 election. The built-up tensions and fragilities are begging for release. The defining instant might be Greece’s unwillingness to fork over another debt payment, or the death of the shale oil “miracle,” or some act by Saudi Arabia’s enemies, or some chain of exploding booby-traps in the shadow banking netherworld. The great surprise for America especially will be the recognition that our current living arrangements have no future. That’s the only thing that will prompt a new consensus to form around some alternate, more plausible future, and the emergence of a generation willing to fight for it, even if it requires some real creative destruction of the things that are killing us anyway.
Library Book Sale
I picked up two boxes of books at the library book sale on Saturday. More later.
20 April update. Among my finds:
--Outline of Philippine Mythology by F. Landa Jocano (Manila, 1969).
20 April update. Among my finds:
--Outline of Philippine Mythology by F. Landa Jocano (Manila, 1969).
Auwe.
MT @JohnFea1: No desks in OAH hotel rooms. Owners say Millennials don't like them. http://t.co/LITGb1kRRA #OAH2015 pic.twitter.com/jqhOBNGQXR
— Seth Denbo (@seth_denbo) April 18, 2015Thursday, April 16, 2015
HB 464 Would Require Minor Party Nominees to Pay Filing Fees
A press release from the Libertarian Party on HB 464.
----
For immediate release
April 13, 2015
Texas Republican attacks Libertarian voting rights
Republican state representative Drew Springer of Muenster, Texas has filed HB 464, a bill to require minor party nominees to pay filing fees.
Libertarian National Committee executive director Wes Benedict commented, "Republican Drew Springer's bill is a poll tax on minor parties, including the Libertarian Party. It's an injustice, and it's unconstitutional."
The bill would require all minor party nominees to pay fees to be allowed to appear on the November election ballot. The fees range as high as $5,000, depending on the office.
Kurt Hildebrand, chair of the Libertarian Party of Texas, said, "This law would effectively shut down third parties in Texas, and I believe that is the intent behind it."
According to ballot access expert Richard Winger, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled twice that this sort of filing fee is unconstitutional.
On April 6, the Texas House Elections Committee voted 5-1 in favor of the bill. (Five Republicans voted yes, one Democrat voted no.)
Similar bills have been filed by Texas Republicans in past legislative sessions.
Benedict explained, "Republicans have claimed in the past that their bills make things 'fair' because Republicans and Democrats have to pay filing fees for their primaries. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"Republicans and Democrats have to pay primary fees because their primary elections are financed by taxpayers. Political parties are private organizations, even though they are regulated by the state. Nevertheless, taxpayers are forced to hand over a lot of money to help the Republicans and Democrats pick their nominees. The filing fees pay for a tiny fraction of these costs.
"Libertarians and Greens, on the other hand, don't use primaries. We don't force the taxpayers to pay for our nomination process. So there's no reason our candidates should be forced to pay any fees.
"If Republicans and Democrats are upset about their primary filing fees, they should just get rid of them. They control 100% of the seats in the legislature, so it should be pretty easy for them.
"The purpose of Drew Springer's bill is simple: it has nothing to do with fairness, it's just an attempt to shut all minor parties out of the election process. If this bill gets passed, there will be many more unopposed Republicans and unopposed Democrats in the 2016 elections.
"Representative Drew Springer has also filed a bill to prohibit school districts from offering same-sex couples the same benefits as opposite-sex couples. That gives us an idea of what 'fair' means to him.
"I urge legislators who support democracy to oppose this poll tax, which is designed to silence minority opinions.
"This is America. The people should decide who gets to run for office, not the incumbents. Libertarians stand for freedom on every issue, and we oppose bullies who would try to stop us from participating in the election process."
Benedict added, "Texas isn't the only place that Republicans are trying to step on voting rights. In New Hampshire, the Republican National Committee is trying to get involved in a lawsuit over the state's petitioning law. The law was changed in 2013 to make it harder for small parties to get petition signatures to appear on the ballot. The Libertarian Party filed a lawsuit against the change, but the Republican National Committee is trying to intervene in support of the change."
Wes Benedict is the executive director of the Libertarian National Committee, and he served as executive director of the Libertarian Party of Texas from 2004 to 2008.
----
For immediate release
April 13, 2015
Texas Republican attacks Libertarian voting rights
Republican state representative Drew Springer of Muenster, Texas has filed HB 464, a bill to require minor party nominees to pay filing fees.
Libertarian National Committee executive director Wes Benedict commented, "Republican Drew Springer's bill is a poll tax on minor parties, including the Libertarian Party. It's an injustice, and it's unconstitutional."
The bill would require all minor party nominees to pay fees to be allowed to appear on the November election ballot. The fees range as high as $5,000, depending on the office.
Kurt Hildebrand, chair of the Libertarian Party of Texas, said, "This law would effectively shut down third parties in Texas, and I believe that is the intent behind it."
According to ballot access expert Richard Winger, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled twice that this sort of filing fee is unconstitutional.
On April 6, the Texas House Elections Committee voted 5-1 in favor of the bill. (Five Republicans voted yes, one Democrat voted no.)
Similar bills have been filed by Texas Republicans in past legislative sessions.
Benedict explained, "Republicans have claimed in the past that their bills make things 'fair' because Republicans and Democrats have to pay filing fees for their primaries. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"Republicans and Democrats have to pay primary fees because their primary elections are financed by taxpayers. Political parties are private organizations, even though they are regulated by the state. Nevertheless, taxpayers are forced to hand over a lot of money to help the Republicans and Democrats pick their nominees. The filing fees pay for a tiny fraction of these costs.
"Libertarians and Greens, on the other hand, don't use primaries. We don't force the taxpayers to pay for our nomination process. So there's no reason our candidates should be forced to pay any fees.
"If Republicans and Democrats are upset about their primary filing fees, they should just get rid of them. They control 100% of the seats in the legislature, so it should be pretty easy for them.
"The purpose of Drew Springer's bill is simple: it has nothing to do with fairness, it's just an attempt to shut all minor parties out of the election process. If this bill gets passed, there will be many more unopposed Republicans and unopposed Democrats in the 2016 elections.
"Representative Drew Springer has also filed a bill to prohibit school districts from offering same-sex couples the same benefits as opposite-sex couples. That gives us an idea of what 'fair' means to him.
"I urge legislators who support democracy to oppose this poll tax, which is designed to silence minority opinions.
"This is America. The people should decide who gets to run for office, not the incumbents. Libertarians stand for freedom on every issue, and we oppose bullies who would try to stop us from participating in the election process."
Benedict added, "Texas isn't the only place that Republicans are trying to step on voting rights. In New Hampshire, the Republican National Committee is trying to get involved in a lawsuit over the state's petitioning law. The law was changed in 2013 to make it harder for small parties to get petition signatures to appear on the ballot. The Libertarian Party filed a lawsuit against the change, but the Republican National Committee is trying to intervene in support of the change."
Wes Benedict is the executive director of the Libertarian National Committee, and he served as executive director of the Libertarian Party of Texas from 2004 to 2008.
Monday, April 13, 2015
Kunstler: "She's Back."
Kunstler comments on Hillary Clinton's formal announcement of her presidential campaign.
Kunstler: "She's Back."
Kunstler: "She's Back."
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Friday, April 10, 2015
#untoldhistories
I've been checking out the Twitter of @ArchivesNext for a few weeks now. Through it I've found many fascinating things about archives, archival science, and its practitioners. There was a retweet from @jmddrake, the Twitter of digital archivist Jarrett M. Drake, which led me to his Twitter, where I saw this.
Robinson "Break the rules, save the records: human rights archives and the search for justice in East Timor" #untoldhistories
— Jarrett M. Drake (@jmddrake) April 10, 2015Wednesday, April 08, 2015
Various Things
Some movie reviews by Armond White. (Furious 7, Effie Gray).
Seedy Rahm won a second term as mayor of Chicago.
Seedy Rahm won a second term as mayor of Chicago.
Students at @uwoshkosh are now using Pop Up to search & discover oral histories from @WIS_History: http://t.co/lEp1OQ6qXU h/t @pehedges!
— Pop Up Archive (@PopUpArchive) April 7, 2015Via @lynnemthomas ALA Fact Sheet w/list of libraries in need of book donations. http://t.co/UmdIaFUMgc
— Kate Theimer (@archivesnext) April 8, 2015It's finally starting to feel like spring! pic.twitter.com/YiA9XL4xub
— Otter Emergency (@Otter_Emergency) April 7, 2015Monday, April 06, 2015
Friday, April 03, 2015
The Drought in California
When I went to Sacramento last August, California was in its drought. I remember brilliantly sunny skies, but it was never blazingly hot, as we were told to expect. And now there is even less water. (I still plan to write about my trip. It's too significant not to.)
Residents Conserving Water During Drought.
Residents Conserving Water During Drought.
Monday, March 30, 2015
Kunstler: The Way Out
Kunstler: The Way Out.
It’s not what most people think: a return to some hypothetical “normality,” with the ghost of Ronnie Reagan beaming down like a sun-god under his lopsided pompadour, and all the happy self-driving GM cars toodling back and forth from WalMart-to-home loaded to the scuppers with new electric pop-tart warmers and 3-D underwear printers. (Or drone deliveries of same from Amazon.com.)
I mean, surely the thinking folk out there must be asking themselves: what is the way out of this Federal Reserve three-card-monte, one-percenter-stuffing, so-called “economy,” and what is the destination of this society when that mendacious model for living fails?
I digress for a moment: there was a chap named Richard Duncan on the pod-waves this weekend (FSN Network) putting out the charming idea that quantitative easing (QE — governments “printing” money to buy their own bonds) had the effect of “cancelling debt” and that it could continue for decades to come. I don’t doubt that there are Federal Reserve officers who believe this. The part they leave out — and Mr. Duncan also left it out until pressed — is that there are consequences. Consult the operating manual of the universe, and you will find that there really is no free lunch or get-out-of-jail card.
The truth is, when you rig a money system with price interventions, distortions, and perversions, they will eventually express themselves in ways destructive to the system. In the present case of world-wide QE and central bank monkey business, these rackets are expressing themselves, finally, in wobbling currencies. In many nations, people are deeply unsure of what their money is worth, and how much it might be worth a month from now. This includes the USA, except for the moment our money is said to be magically appreciating in value compared to everyone else’s. Aren’t we special?
Get this: nothing is more hazardous than undermining people’s trust in their money.
All of this financial perfidy conceals the basic fact that the human race has reached the limits of techno-industrialism. There are too many people and not enough basic resources to grow more of them — oil, fishes, soil, ores, fertilizers — and there is no steady-state “solution” to keep that economy going. In other words, it must either grow or contract, and it can’t really grow anymore (despite the exertions of government statisticians), so the authorities are trying to provide a monetary illusion of growth, when instead we’re in contraction.
Yes, contraction. The way out is to get with the program, shed the dead-weight and go where reality wants to take you. In the USA that means do everything possible to quit supporting giant failing systems — Big Box shopping, mass motoring, GMO agribiz, TBTF banks — and get behind local Main Street integrated economies, walkable towns, regular railroads, smaller and more numerous farms, local medical clinic health care, artistry in public works, and community caretaking of the unfit. All this surely implies a reduced role for the national government, and maybe the states, too. You could call it a lower standard of living, or just a different way to live.
I don’t think we’ll go there via rational political discourse. The current instabilities around the world are so sinister that they are liable to lead to even more strenuous efforts at the top to pretend that everything’s working, and even war is one way to pretend you’re okay (and the “other guy” isn’t). Of course, war has already broken out, in the MidEast and Ukraine, and it has everything to do with the sequential failure of nations, in one way or another, to overcome the limits of techno-industrialism. America will be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization of what it needs to do. The 2016 election will be the convulsion point.
It’s not what most people think: a return to some hypothetical “normality,” with the ghost of Ronnie Reagan beaming down like a sun-god under his lopsided pompadour, and all the happy self-driving GM cars toodling back and forth from WalMart-to-home loaded to the scuppers with new electric pop-tart warmers and 3-D underwear printers. (Or drone deliveries of same from Amazon.com.)
I mean, surely the thinking folk out there must be asking themselves: what is the way out of this Federal Reserve three-card-monte, one-percenter-stuffing, so-called “economy,” and what is the destination of this society when that mendacious model for living fails?
I digress for a moment: there was a chap named Richard Duncan on the pod-waves this weekend (FSN Network) putting out the charming idea that quantitative easing (QE — governments “printing” money to buy their own bonds) had the effect of “cancelling debt” and that it could continue for decades to come. I don’t doubt that there are Federal Reserve officers who believe this. The part they leave out — and Mr. Duncan also left it out until pressed — is that there are consequences. Consult the operating manual of the universe, and you will find that there really is no free lunch or get-out-of-jail card.
The truth is, when you rig a money system with price interventions, distortions, and perversions, they will eventually express themselves in ways destructive to the system. In the present case of world-wide QE and central bank monkey business, these rackets are expressing themselves, finally, in wobbling currencies. In many nations, people are deeply unsure of what their money is worth, and how much it might be worth a month from now. This includes the USA, except for the moment our money is said to be magically appreciating in value compared to everyone else’s. Aren’t we special?
Get this: nothing is more hazardous than undermining people’s trust in their money.
All of this financial perfidy conceals the basic fact that the human race has reached the limits of techno-industrialism. There are too many people and not enough basic resources to grow more of them — oil, fishes, soil, ores, fertilizers — and there is no steady-state “solution” to keep that economy going. In other words, it must either grow or contract, and it can’t really grow anymore (despite the exertions of government statisticians), so the authorities are trying to provide a monetary illusion of growth, when instead we’re in contraction.
Yes, contraction. The way out is to get with the program, shed the dead-weight and go where reality wants to take you. In the USA that means do everything possible to quit supporting giant failing systems — Big Box shopping, mass motoring, GMO agribiz, TBTF banks — and get behind local Main Street integrated economies, walkable towns, regular railroads, smaller and more numerous farms, local medical clinic health care, artistry in public works, and community caretaking of the unfit. All this surely implies a reduced role for the national government, and maybe the states, too. You could call it a lower standard of living, or just a different way to live.
I don’t think we’ll go there via rational political discourse. The current instabilities around the world are so sinister that they are liable to lead to even more strenuous efforts at the top to pretend that everything’s working, and even war is one way to pretend you’re okay (and the “other guy” isn’t). Of course, war has already broken out, in the MidEast and Ukraine, and it has everything to do with the sequential failure of nations, in one way or another, to overcome the limits of techno-industrialism. America will be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization of what it needs to do. The 2016 election will be the convulsion point.
Sorry, ultranationalist suckers—Modi going back on campaign promise to provide universal health care http://t.co/iYzx5mRkaU
— exiledonline.com (@exiledonline) March 27, 2015Sunday, March 29, 2015
#Hist1161 the @JournAmHist Podcast series is a great, open resource on US History: http://t.co/FthH16NkNA
— Brandon Morgan (@CNMBrandon) March 27, 2015#Foodwaste represents missed opp to improve food security. Reducing food wastage footprint: http://t.co/tLMghxMb2n #UNFAO #savefood
— FAOKnowledge (@FAOKnowledge) March 26, 2015Discussing Racism in the SBC
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2015/03/27/395815996/southern-baptists-dont-shy-away-from-talking-about-their-racist-past
Saturday, March 28, 2015
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, 2015I 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, 2015Friday, 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, 2015Spreading 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, 2015Spreading 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, 2015Monday, March 23, 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, 2015Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin 1st female dept head @Harvard http://t.co/FJt1pOOTYW #histSTM #WomensHistoryMonth pic.twitter.com/XRkwB2bwDH
— Alexi Baker (@AlexiBaker) March 21, 2015Mass State Archives: new site for digital records incl @DevalPatrick correspondence http://t.co/POtnXxFrSE cc @BostonGlobe #maracnea15
— Paige Roberts (@paige_roberts) March 21, 2015BRICS 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, 2015Queen and King of music videos. Read it now. http://t.co/WZu6sopdQm pic.twitter.com/rTLcMEQOvi
— armond white (@3xchair) March 14, 2015Sunday, March 15, 2015
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, 2015Saturday, March 14, 2015
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
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/
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.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Health Care Costs
A subject I'll be considering more here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_costs
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, 2015Monday, March 09, 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.
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.
Sunday, March 08, 2015
Omidyar on Kauai
Interesting. But what do Joan Conrow ("Kauai Eclectic") and Andy Parx ("Got Windmills?") have to say?
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/
Kauai locals try to stop Omidyar from destroying environment to feed his prepper pandemic paranoia http://t.co/TTjfizCDF2
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 5, 2015http://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/
Friday, March 06, 2015
Seedy Rahm
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/05/rahm-goes-nuts-at-a-mental-health-clinic-you-re-gonna-respect-me.html#
Monday, March 02, 2015
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.
Kunstler: Heroes and Villains.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Thursday, February 26, 2015
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, 2015I 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.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
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.
All In With Chris Hayes may be cancelled. But MSNBC denies it.
Monday, February 16, 2015
Happy President's Day, from Baberaham Lincoln!!!!! #SAMandCAT pic.twitter.com/QSqZH59wCa
— Dan Schneider (@DanWarp) February 16, 2015Billy 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)
His first single, "On the Run" (1974: Lark Records), released under the name Scorched Earth.
"Suddenly" (1984)
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
@nytimes was asked about the strongest MoC. Ask @aaronschock & @TulsiPress who their trainer is.
— Markwayne Mullin (@RepMullin) January 9, 2015Monday, February 09, 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/#
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.
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.
Sunday, February 08, 2015
A review of The World After Cheap Oil
Here. One of the authors responds in the article's comments thread.
Friday, February 06, 2015
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, 2015Wednesday, February 04, 2015
Monday, February 02, 2015
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.
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.
Sunday, February 01, 2015
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
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