Kunstler: Nausea Rising.
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Nausea Rising
Considering that the 2016 election looks like a Dark Age puppet show — Pantalone and La Signora smacking each other with dildos — we forget this spectacle is serious. Rather large matters are at stake, such as the continuity of governance, the legitimacy of the two major political parties, the credibility of our financial arrangements, perhaps even the durability of the nation as a united polity.
Most of the deliberate comedy comes from Donald Trump, whose super-long dangling necktie looks like it was designed for laughs by the Commedia dell'Arte prop department, not to mention the hair, which I have maintained for many years is actually a wolverine living on top of Trump’s head. Trump certainly represents a large and valid strain of sentiment in the zeitgeist — the frustration of many ordinary citizens at government-sponsored racketeering that is shoving them into pauperdom. But his utterances against all that are so childish and disordered that he de-legitimates his own mission every time he opens his mouth.
Hillary delivers her laughs mostly deadpan, for instance her Sunday morning ABC interview with the old 1992 Clinton “War Room” hand George Stephanopoulos, who grilled the Flying Reptile rather mercilessly over the recent report from the State Department Inspector General that said she was “not allowed” to use the private email server no, ifs, ands, or buts. As she struggled to deflect the question, the “uh”s started to stipple her vapid evasions like holes punched in a life raft. It was fun watching her sink, uh, uh, uh, gurgle gurgle — though surely that was not the effect she was going for.
Bernie, of course, is not so funny. He’s as serious as a heart attack, which suggests that a pretty sizeable portion of the public is sick of being diverted with slapstick comedy. The old bastard is determined to give the Democratic Party poobahs some schooling in ethical procedure. I admire the heck out of that — also, his record as a demonstrably non-griftable public servant, and his stance against the racketeering-as-usual status quo — though I’m not persuaded he would be an effective president (if such a thing is even theoretically conceivable) given his nanny government disposition. But the bigshots of the DNC still have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, and it looks like ole Bernie is going to beat it out of them at Philadelphia in July. What I wonder: is he strong enough to hold Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on his lap while he applies the rod.
The people of the United States have real grievances with the way this country is being run. Last Friday’s job’s report was a humdinger: only 38,000 new jobs created in a country of over 300 million, with a whole new crop of job-seeking college grads just churned out of the diploma mills. I guess the national shortage of waiters and bartenders has finally come to an end.
What’s required, of course, is a pretty stout restructuring of the US economy. And that should be understood to be a matter of national survival. We need to step way back on every kind of giantism currently afflicting us: giant agri-biz, giant commerce (Wal Mart etc.), giant banking, giant war-making, and giant government — this last item being so larded with incompetence on top of institutional entropy that it is literally a menace to American society.
The trend on future resources and capital availability is manifestly downward, and the obvious conclusion is the need to make this economy smaller and finer. The finer part of the deal means many more distributed tasks among the population, especially in farming and commerce operations that must be done at a local level. This means more Americans working on smaller farms and more Americans working in reconstructed Main Street business, both wholesale and retail. This would also necessarily lead to a shift out of the suburban clusterfuck and the rebuilding of ten thousand forsaken American towns and smaller cities.
For the moment, many demoralized Americans may feel more comfortable playing video games, eating on SNAP cards, and watching Trump fulminate on TV, but the horizon on that is limited too. Sooner or later they will have to become un-demoralized and do something else with their lives.
The main reason I am so against the Hillary and Trump, and so ambivalent on Bernie is their inability to comprehend the scope of action actually required to avoid sheer cultural collapse.
Monday, June 06, 2016
Peak Oil Review of 6 June
Resilience.org: Peak Oil Review: June 6, 2016.
Excerpts: The Scottish Parliament voted to ban fracking countrywide on Wednesday, making a moratorium on the controversial technique a permanent affair. The narrow vote (32-29) came after the legislative body temporarily outlawed fracking in January 2015 while it conducted a public health impact assessment and consulted environmental experts. (6/3)
...
Exelon Corp. said Thursday that it will retire two money-losing nuclear plants in Illinois during the next two years after state lawmakers declined to pass legislation that would have helped keep them running. The plants lost $800 million in the past seven years. (6/3)
Nuclear angle: as the Paris agreement on climate change has put pressure on the U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, some state and federal officials have deemed nuclear energy part of the solution. They are now scrambling to save existing plants that can no longer compete economically in a market flooded with cheap natural gas. (6/1)
Excerpts: The Scottish Parliament voted to ban fracking countrywide on Wednesday, making a moratorium on the controversial technique a permanent affair. The narrow vote (32-29) came after the legislative body temporarily outlawed fracking in January 2015 while it conducted a public health impact assessment and consulted environmental experts. (6/3)
...
Exelon Corp. said Thursday that it will retire two money-losing nuclear plants in Illinois during the next two years after state lawmakers declined to pass legislation that would have helped keep them running. The plants lost $800 million in the past seven years. (6/3)
Nuclear angle: as the Paris agreement on climate change has put pressure on the U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, some state and federal officials have deemed nuclear energy part of the solution. They are now scrambling to save existing plants that can no longer compete economically in a market flooded with cheap natural gas. (6/1)
Sunday, June 05, 2016
Benny Benassi feat. Kelis, apl.de.ap, & Jean-Baptiste: "Spaceship."
From Benny Benassi's album, Electroman, (Ultra Records, 2011).
Saturday, June 04, 2016
A Book to Check Out Sometime
@ 5:45p ET @NicholsUprising & Robert McChesney on impact of the tech revolution on the American worker @nationbook pic.twitter.com/5iSOPor8Vm
— C-SPAN2's BookTV (@BookTV) June 4, 2016
BREAKING: JPMorgan may cut "as many as 4,000 jobs" if #Brexit happens, CEO Jamie Dimon says https://t.co/g0F966Xt98 https://t.co/wzxHxw3Ksi
— Bloomberg (@business) June 3, 2016
"Salt in their veins and fire in their bellies: fishermen battling for Brexit" > https://t.co/jwCGitDX5N @guardian pic.twitter.com/Jh9Vi2qp4x
— Labour Leave (@labourleave) June 4, 2016
Somerset farmer Jacob Mattick: Brexit is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for much-needed change in the ag. industry. https://t.co/gCyT8nRtfA
— FarmersforBritain (@Farmers4Britain) June 4, 2016
Poll: Majority of Swedes want to leave EU in case of Brexit @EurActiv https://t.co/qrKaYhA0SK
— Prof Andy Demaine (@andy_demaine) June 4, 2016
Friday, June 03, 2016
Thursday, June 02, 2016
Wednesday, June 01, 2016
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Politics to be Considered Soon
I've been very, very busy these past few weeks. I hope to find some time soon to read up on politics. The Trump-Clinton-Sanders race has overshadowed many other campaigns and issues locally, nationally, and internationally. So I plan to post what I can find out about these.
Monday, May 30, 2016
Kunstler: The Fat Lady Always Sings Twice.
Kunstler: The Fat Lady Always Sings Twice.
That was the week Hillary began to look like the candidate who fell off a truck wearing a Nixon mask. Email-gate is taking on the odor of Watergate — the main ingredient of which was not the dopey crime itself but the stonewalling around it. The State Department Inspector General’s report saying definitively, no, she was not “allowed” to use a private, unsecured email server validated Donald Trump’s juvenile name-calling of “Crooked Hillary.”
We may never hear the end of that now (if Trump is actually nominated). And, of course, there lurks the Godzilla-sized skeleton in her closet of the still-unreleased Goldman Sachs speech transcripts, the clamor over which is sure to grow. Meanwhile the specter of the California primary looms, a not inconceivable loss to Bernie Sanders. And onto the convention in Philly which I contend will be even more fractious and violent than the 1968 fiasco in Chicago.
I’ll say it again: Hillary is a horse that ain’t gonna finish. The Democrats better be prepared to haul Uncle Joe out of the closet, fluff up his transplanted hair, wax his dentures, give him a few Vitamin B-12 shots, and stick a harpoon in his fist for the autumn run against the White Whale (if Trump is actually nominated).
The Republican convention in Cleveland is apt to be as bloody and violent a spectacle too (if Trump is actually nominated), with Black Lives Matters cadres having already promised to put on a show for global television and their Latino counterparts marching with Mexican Flags and cute signs saying: Trump: Chingate tu madre, perhaps garnished with the sobriquet pendejo. In such a situation, Trump has enormous potential to make things worse with his childish snap-backs. Hubert Humphrey in 1968 at least had the good sense to keep his mouth shut about the moiling multitudes out on Michigan Avenue inveighing against him.
The Vietnam War was a grave debacle, and it especially pissed off the young men subject to being drafted to fight in it, but the woof and warp of American life was otherwise intact. Blue collar workers still pulled in high wages in the Big Three auto plants, and women had not yet declared war on men, and the airwaves weren’t pornified, and there were still people in government with moral authority who loudly opposed official policy. The sobering martyrdoms of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy sanctified the opposition to the status quo. Even Hubert Humphrey himself, a thoughtful man underneath his Rotarian clown mask, began to turn away from Lyndon Johnson’s war hawks.
Nixon won. He surely benefited most not so much from the war issue and the riots in the streets as from the mass defection of Southern states from the long-entrenched domination of the Democratic Party — directly due to Johnson’s dismantling of the old Jim Crow laws. As a personality, Nixon was as much a pendejo as Donald Trump, but no one doubted his ability to run the machinery of government, if not the way they wanted to run it.
One difference today is that the two supposedly leading candidates, Hillary and Trump, are broadly loathed and mocked by people of all ages, not just disaffected youth. Trump appears to actually know so little about the major problems the country faces — energy, trade, the animus of foreigners — that he would be literally helpless in crisis. Hillary would enter the White House more mistrusted than Tricky Dick, and more starkly wired into the parasitical elites draining the body politic of its precious bodily fluids — in the immortal words of Doctor Strangelove.
Though it appears that Trump has consolidated the delegate vote needed for nomination, something tells me that a move is yet afoot to knock the gold ring out of his grubby fingers. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is playing it very cagey and you can imagine that current party stalwarts and office-holders all over the land are wringing their hands over being asked to follow Trump into some dark night of the American soul. Paul Ryan must know that a coup at the convention is still conceivable and that the action inside the hall will be as violent as the street-fighting outside.
That was the week Hillary began to look like the candidate who fell off a truck wearing a Nixon mask. Email-gate is taking on the odor of Watergate — the main ingredient of which was not the dopey crime itself but the stonewalling around it. The State Department Inspector General’s report saying definitively, no, she was not “allowed” to use a private, unsecured email server validated Donald Trump’s juvenile name-calling of “Crooked Hillary.”
We may never hear the end of that now (if Trump is actually nominated). And, of course, there lurks the Godzilla-sized skeleton in her closet of the still-unreleased Goldman Sachs speech transcripts, the clamor over which is sure to grow. Meanwhile the specter of the California primary looms, a not inconceivable loss to Bernie Sanders. And onto the convention in Philly which I contend will be even more fractious and violent than the 1968 fiasco in Chicago.
I’ll say it again: Hillary is a horse that ain’t gonna finish. The Democrats better be prepared to haul Uncle Joe out of the closet, fluff up his transplanted hair, wax his dentures, give him a few Vitamin B-12 shots, and stick a harpoon in his fist for the autumn run against the White Whale (if Trump is actually nominated).
The Republican convention in Cleveland is apt to be as bloody and violent a spectacle too (if Trump is actually nominated), with Black Lives Matters cadres having already promised to put on a show for global television and their Latino counterparts marching with Mexican Flags and cute signs saying: Trump: Chingate tu madre, perhaps garnished with the sobriquet pendejo. In such a situation, Trump has enormous potential to make things worse with his childish snap-backs. Hubert Humphrey in 1968 at least had the good sense to keep his mouth shut about the moiling multitudes out on Michigan Avenue inveighing against him.
The Vietnam War was a grave debacle, and it especially pissed off the young men subject to being drafted to fight in it, but the woof and warp of American life was otherwise intact. Blue collar workers still pulled in high wages in the Big Three auto plants, and women had not yet declared war on men, and the airwaves weren’t pornified, and there were still people in government with moral authority who loudly opposed official policy. The sobering martyrdoms of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy sanctified the opposition to the status quo. Even Hubert Humphrey himself, a thoughtful man underneath his Rotarian clown mask, began to turn away from Lyndon Johnson’s war hawks.
Nixon won. He surely benefited most not so much from the war issue and the riots in the streets as from the mass defection of Southern states from the long-entrenched domination of the Democratic Party — directly due to Johnson’s dismantling of the old Jim Crow laws. As a personality, Nixon was as much a pendejo as Donald Trump, but no one doubted his ability to run the machinery of government, if not the way they wanted to run it.
One difference today is that the two supposedly leading candidates, Hillary and Trump, are broadly loathed and mocked by people of all ages, not just disaffected youth. Trump appears to actually know so little about the major problems the country faces — energy, trade, the animus of foreigners — that he would be literally helpless in crisis. Hillary would enter the White House more mistrusted than Tricky Dick, and more starkly wired into the parasitical elites draining the body politic of its precious bodily fluids — in the immortal words of Doctor Strangelove.
Though it appears that Trump has consolidated the delegate vote needed for nomination, something tells me that a move is yet afoot to knock the gold ring out of his grubby fingers. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is playing it very cagey and you can imagine that current party stalwarts and office-holders all over the land are wringing their hands over being asked to follow Trump into some dark night of the American soul. Paul Ryan must know that a coup at the convention is still conceivable and that the action inside the hall will be as violent as the street-fighting outside.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Various Tweets
We know nothing about mega-billionaire Carlos Slim's ill-begotten riches and what Mexicans think of him. Related: Slim owns part of NY Times
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 28, 2016
If you can read Spanish, read this (24 Nov. 2015: La Jornada, "Carlos Slim y su biografÃa polÃtica."
Sacramento teen removed from graduation for African garb - SFGate https://t.co/GNxpsC3Wyn
— SacramentoCalifornia (@CalifSacramento) May 29, 2016
This is an amazing photo essay of Rodney, Mississippi .... a place I confess I've never heard of before. https://t.co/KCNCAFt603
— Rep. Greg Snowden (@snowlaw) May 5, 2016
FiringLine clips play @ NRI/@DefiningIdeas's 50th Anniversary celebration of WilliamF.BuckleyJr.'s FiringLine in NYC pic.twitter.com/r6F6m4IWeH
— NR Institute (@NR_Institute) May 26, 2016
Johnson-Weld 2016
As busy as ever but I watched part of the Libertarian convention yesterday and this morning on C-SPAN. Lots of colorful speeches, questions, and general debates. They finally settled on a presidential ticket. Your Libertarian candidates for 2016 are:
Gary Johnson and William Weld.
Gary Johnson and William Weld.
The story of Bill Weld's wild final fight for the Libertarian VP nomination https://t.co/Recn3Ur4qq
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) May 29, 2016
National media surrounding Weld as he accepts VP nomination #LegalizeFreedom #LibertarianConvention pic.twitter.com/wCh77rwZL2
— Joe Henchman (@jdhenchman) May 29, 2016
Saturday, May 28, 2016
More On Venezuela
Zimbabwe's monthly inflation rate hit 80 billion percent. Is Venezuela going the same way? https://t.co/4uPcJDJ034 pic.twitter.com/93GWgzE1jv
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) May 28, 2016
Media war against Venezuela kicks into high gear https://t.co/SuHfpqTRJ2 pic.twitter.com/BiwoN7S2lW
— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) May 28, 2016
Trying to save Venezuela by shutting it down https://t.co/G7LF6G4iPC pic.twitter.com/qEpuoDzCQK
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) May 28, 2016
The @nytimes blames Venezuela's tragic collapse on weather & oil prices.
— Dr. Milton Wolf (@MiltonWolfMD) May 28, 2016
Forgets to mention socialism.https://t.co/vSO2rWhQWG
How Venezuela's socialist dream collapsed into a nightmarehttps://t.co/d0UiWwIK1q
— SaloumehZ (@SaloumehZ) May 28, 2016
Swedish Public Service TV claims that the crisis & famine in Venezuela r due to lower oil prices. What about those poor starving Norwegians?
More infants die in Venezuela for lack of supplies -- @VanessaVenezia in Barquisimeto https://t.co/Rn4K8VeySm
— Nick Casey (@caseysjournal) May 28, 2016
— Old Whig (@aClassicLiberal) May 28, 2016
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Magazine Covers: Then and Now.
Amusing discussion of the first issue of #Billboard, published and apparently stuck onto walls back in #1894. https://t.co/CP48QQnAaP
— Chris Faille (@ccfaille) May 23, 2016
Monday, May 23, 2016
Kunstler: Lower Away!
Another Kunstler column on the presidential race. At least you know where he always stood with Hillary.
Kunstler: Lower Away!
Kunstler: Lower Away!
The Untanning
I wanted to see what he would look like without the fake tan and now I want my mom. pic.twitter.com/ZMLUTaHOxR
— Jen Lewis (@thisjenlewis) April 4, 2016
Monday, May 16, 2016
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Maybe when I have time later I can explore this more:
Clinton cultists are weirdly depressing https://t.co/Qcd5rnYV9D
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 13, 2016
Clintons, Greenwald, Coates--all shelter their riches in LLCs while scolding the rest of us https://t.co/waRVJ5ffg5
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 13, 2016
(Mark Ames has had a problem with Ron Paul for years. But his mention of Bernie means maybe he's not totally in the tank for him.)
The only person in Congress courageous enough to vote against AUMF & unlimited wars—not Ron Paul, not Bernie Sanders https://t.co/MGzFkls1bi
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 18, 2016
---------
Politico with a good case for nominating Sanders https://t.co/IrOLUW3JX0
— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) May 16, 2016
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Is the Long Emergency Already in Venezuela?
Hungry Venezuelans Hunt Dogs, Cats, Pigeons as Food Runs Out.
Headlines from today's Drudge Report:
VENEZUELA AT BREAKING POINT... ("U.S. Concern Grows Over Possible Venezuela Meltdown: Officials.")
SCENES FROM APOCALYPSE...
MADURO CLAIMS USA COUP PLOT...
PLANS ARMY EXERCISES...
18 May update: A Country Verging on Collapse: A Reading List on Venezuela.
25 May update: The Guardian: Venezuela unrest.
Headlines from today's Drudge Report:
VENEZUELA AT BREAKING POINT... ("U.S. Concern Grows Over Possible Venezuela Meltdown: Officials.")
SCENES FROM APOCALYPSE...
MADURO CLAIMS USA COUP PLOT...
PLANS ARMY EXERCISES...
18 May update: A Country Verging on Collapse: A Reading List on Venezuela.
25 May update: The Guardian: Venezuela unrest.
Shadow and Act
I found this website, ShadowandAct.com, by chance. I might add it to my list of links.
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Political News
Mother Jones: "Texas Republicans Inch Closer to Secession." Oh my, grab the smelling salts.
In 1998, Mother Jones had a brief, superficial overview of the major American secession movements, starting with--Texas. It mentioned Hawaiian sovereignty, and quoted Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell.
---
From half a year ago, Rod Dreher predicting "Our Trump-ish, Cruz-y Future":
In 1998, Mother Jones had a brief, superficial overview of the major American secession movements, starting with--Texas. It mentioned Hawaiian sovereignty, and quoted Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell.
---
From half a year ago, Rod Dreher predicting "Our Trump-ish, Cruz-y Future":
Neither Trump nor Cruz is electable. It’s looking like the only GOP candidate who might have the power to stop them is Marco Rubio, of all people. If he can’t do it, Republican Party bigs may have to hold their noses and back Cruz as the only way of stopping Trump.
It wasn’t long ago that Republicans were excited about the 2016 race, looking out over all the strong candidates in the field. That was before the Summer of Trump.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Last night, while trying to post, I got a 502 error notice. That's never happened before. Maybe the website's servers were overloaded. Anyway, Ted Cruz hints he might restart his campaign if he wins the Nebraska primary. Cruz went after Trump hard for several months, but I remember when he kissed up to him, when Trump was regarded as a novelty, in hopes of being named his running mate.
Monday, May 09, 2016
I recently developed a grey, cat-shaped goiter on my neck. #cats pic.twitter.com/ZHFWq666iM
— Caroline Carson (@Conductor222) April 30, 2016
Kunstler: Trumptopia.
Kunstler: Trumptopia.
For years, it was easy to see the political storm clouds gather over Europe with its fractious coalitions and its ancient babble of conflicts. Marine Le Pen’s Daddy, severe old Jean-Marie, was on the scene in France decades before Donald Trump ascended to glory on the noxious clouds of America’s crapified culture, attended by heavenly hosts of Kardashian angels and the cherub Honey BooBoo.
For all the strains in recent American life, the two-party system had seemed as solid as the granite towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. Not even the estimable Teddy Roosevelt could blow up the system when he tried in 1912 — though his Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party carried California, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and he far out-polled the incumbent Republican President Taft, who garnered a measly 8 electoral votes (Democrat Woodrow Wilson won). Ross Perot made an impact in 1992 — he certainly had a good point about NAFTA and “the giant sucking sound” of jobs draining out of the USA. But his popinjay manner didn’t go over so well, and at the critical moment in the general election he lost his nerve and withdrew, only to foolishly re-enter weeks later. Then there was the Ralph Nader in 2000, whose egoistic crusade arguably put George W. Bush in the White House.
Since then, the country see-sawed between the long tenures of two Deep State errand boys from each major party, putting both parties in such a bad odor that Trump now rises on their mephitic fumes. Which raises the question, of course: what exactly is this Deep State? Answer: A leviathan of symbiotic rackets producing maximum incompetence affecting adversely the majority of citizens. It’s a blood-sucking beast of a hundred-thousand heads draining the USA of its dwindling vitality, lying about its intentions while it advertises the pietistic certainties of the Left and superstitious shibboleths of the Right, leaving a smoking hole in the middle where the practical problems of everyday life used to be worked out by practical means.
The Deep State is also the sum of unintended consequences and diminishing returns of a late-stage, bureaucratic, techno-industrial economy cannibalizing itself to stay alive. One obvious conclusion is that this economy has got to change before there is nothing left to eat, and no political figure on the scene, including Trump and Bernie Sanders, has a plausible vision of where this takes us. Both really just assume that the engine keeps chugging down the track of ever more material wealth that can be distributed differently. The truth is, there will be a lot less material wealth of the kind we’re used to, and a lot less capital representation in the things we call “money.” [Emphasis mine.--P.Z.] In fact, the scene at hand today is just a spectacle of the shrewdest and biggest rodents scarfing up the table-scraps of a 200-year-long banquet.
Hillary Clinton, of course, is the Deep State incarnate, which is the real reason so few citizens trust her. Every poor schnook getting shaken down for a $90,000 appendectomy bill looks at Hillary and knows exactly what she represents. Every 25-year-old jobless, couch-surfing millennial carrying fifty-grand in college debt sees the face of the Deep State in her self-satisfied demi-smile. Mainly, she has gulled the diversity pimps — because they are wards of the Deep State — and women, because it’s Mommy’s “turn” to direct the Deep State. Writer, financier, and Deep State rogue operative Jim Rickards [Link added by me.--P.Z.] keeps insisting that Uncle Joe Biden will end up as the Democratic nominee. (He said so in a Tweet just the other day). You have to wonder what this guy knows. Don’t suppose that Uncle Joe is the knight on a white horse you’ve been waiting for. After all, he’s vice-president of the Deep State.
Voters seem attracted to Trump because he’s so eager to give the finger to the Deep State. It deserves the finger, but it also needs to be carefully disassembled without blowing up what remains of this country. Trump already has a good start on blowing up the Republican Party. Never before have so many party officials dissociated themselves from the (so far) presumptive nominee. I expect to see more extreme measures against Trump to be yet attempted by the party mandarins in the two months before the convention. I doubt you will hear about them before they happen.
In the face of that, Trump’s behavior only gets more childish. His speech after the Indiana primary was a masterpiece of incoherence. Everything that reflected on the magnificence of his victory was “incredible.” Interestingly, that was exactly the right word. He’s tuned in to the national nervous breakdown underway. From time to time, when he’s not speaking emptily about how much he is loved, Trump voices some legitimate concern of the Deep State’s victims. There are few decent jobs outside the Deep State’s own rackets. We’re not obliged to take in a limitless stream of immigrants. Nation-building by military means has been a dismal failure. The national debt is a problem. The country’s infrastructure is decrepit. Trump says he can negotiate a fix to all this: the art of the deal. Blowing smoke up the Deep State’s ass is not a plan.
The tragedy is that no other serious, grown-up figures stepped forward in this dangerous moment of history. The party that Trump purports to represent lost itself in wilderness of grift, jingoism, and supernatural pettifoggery. The rival Democratic Party is high on the fumes of “diversity and inclusion,” kindergarten politics that only corrode what’s left of our tattered common culture. Hillary’s Deep State couldn’t have found a better diversionary subterfuge. Both parties are close to blowing up altogether. I’m not convinced that they’ll survive their own conventionas this summer. Then what?
For years, it was easy to see the political storm clouds gather over Europe with its fractious coalitions and its ancient babble of conflicts. Marine Le Pen’s Daddy, severe old Jean-Marie, was on the scene in France decades before Donald Trump ascended to glory on the noxious clouds of America’s crapified culture, attended by heavenly hosts of Kardashian angels and the cherub Honey BooBoo.
For all the strains in recent American life, the two-party system had seemed as solid as the granite towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. Not even the estimable Teddy Roosevelt could blow up the system when he tried in 1912 — though his Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party carried California, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and he far out-polled the incumbent Republican President Taft, who garnered a measly 8 electoral votes (Democrat Woodrow Wilson won). Ross Perot made an impact in 1992 — he certainly had a good point about NAFTA and “the giant sucking sound” of jobs draining out of the USA. But his popinjay manner didn’t go over so well, and at the critical moment in the general election he lost his nerve and withdrew, only to foolishly re-enter weeks later. Then there was the Ralph Nader in 2000, whose egoistic crusade arguably put George W. Bush in the White House.
Since then, the country see-sawed between the long tenures of two Deep State errand boys from each major party, putting both parties in such a bad odor that Trump now rises on their mephitic fumes. Which raises the question, of course: what exactly is this Deep State? Answer: A leviathan of symbiotic rackets producing maximum incompetence affecting adversely the majority of citizens. It’s a blood-sucking beast of a hundred-thousand heads draining the USA of its dwindling vitality, lying about its intentions while it advertises the pietistic certainties of the Left and superstitious shibboleths of the Right, leaving a smoking hole in the middle where the practical problems of everyday life used to be worked out by practical means.
The Deep State is also the sum of unintended consequences and diminishing returns of a late-stage, bureaucratic, techno-industrial economy cannibalizing itself to stay alive. One obvious conclusion is that this economy has got to change before there is nothing left to eat, and no political figure on the scene, including Trump and Bernie Sanders, has a plausible vision of where this takes us. Both really just assume that the engine keeps chugging down the track of ever more material wealth that can be distributed differently. The truth is, there will be a lot less material wealth of the kind we’re used to, and a lot less capital representation in the things we call “money.” [Emphasis mine.--P.Z.] In fact, the scene at hand today is just a spectacle of the shrewdest and biggest rodents scarfing up the table-scraps of a 200-year-long banquet.
Hillary Clinton, of course, is the Deep State incarnate, which is the real reason so few citizens trust her. Every poor schnook getting shaken down for a $90,000 appendectomy bill looks at Hillary and knows exactly what she represents. Every 25-year-old jobless, couch-surfing millennial carrying fifty-grand in college debt sees the face of the Deep State in her self-satisfied demi-smile. Mainly, she has gulled the diversity pimps — because they are wards of the Deep State — and women, because it’s Mommy’s “turn” to direct the Deep State. Writer, financier, and Deep State rogue operative Jim Rickards [Link added by me.--P.Z.] keeps insisting that Uncle Joe Biden will end up as the Democratic nominee. (He said so in a Tweet just the other day). You have to wonder what this guy knows. Don’t suppose that Uncle Joe is the knight on a white horse you’ve been waiting for. After all, he’s vice-president of the Deep State.
Voters seem attracted to Trump because he’s so eager to give the finger to the Deep State. It deserves the finger, but it also needs to be carefully disassembled without blowing up what remains of this country. Trump already has a good start on blowing up the Republican Party. Never before have so many party officials dissociated themselves from the (so far) presumptive nominee. I expect to see more extreme measures against Trump to be yet attempted by the party mandarins in the two months before the convention. I doubt you will hear about them before they happen.
In the face of that, Trump’s behavior only gets more childish. His speech after the Indiana primary was a masterpiece of incoherence. Everything that reflected on the magnificence of his victory was “incredible.” Interestingly, that was exactly the right word. He’s tuned in to the national nervous breakdown underway. From time to time, when he’s not speaking emptily about how much he is loved, Trump voices some legitimate concern of the Deep State’s victims. There are few decent jobs outside the Deep State’s own rackets. We’re not obliged to take in a limitless stream of immigrants. Nation-building by military means has been a dismal failure. The national debt is a problem. The country’s infrastructure is decrepit. Trump says he can negotiate a fix to all this: the art of the deal. Blowing smoke up the Deep State’s ass is not a plan.
The tragedy is that no other serious, grown-up figures stepped forward in this dangerous moment of history. The party that Trump purports to represent lost itself in wilderness of grift, jingoism, and supernatural pettifoggery. The rival Democratic Party is high on the fumes of “diversity and inclusion,” kindergarten politics that only corrode what’s left of our tattered common culture. Hillary’s Deep State couldn’t have found a better diversionary subterfuge. Both parties are close to blowing up altogether. I’m not convinced that they’ll survive their own conventionas this summer. Then what?
Sunday, May 08, 2016
Why that Ben Rhodes profile in the New York Times Magazine is just gross: https://t.co/u0WGXcM6ju
— Carlos Lozada (@CarlosLozadaWP) May 6, 2016
Wednesday, May 04, 2016
Various Commentary on the Trump-Clinton Matchup (A Continuing Post)
Trump is not yet the official Republican nominee, but he should win enough delegates in the June primaries, especially in California, to avoid a contested convention. Likewise, Clinton is not yet the official Democratic nominee, but she's very close to attaining enough delegates. Basically, it's now a contest between the two, Sanders's stubborn presence in the Dem race notwithstanding. I'll add tweets, links to articles, etc. as I find them.
9 June update: Reason magazine: "Roseanne Barr, Socialist for Trump."
26 May update: Trump has just obtained 1,238 delegates, one more than needed to get the nomination.
The famous Elizabeth Warren Facebook post against Donald Trump.
(Throwing the Gary Johnson candidacy into the mix.)
"A Guide for the Perplexed", Hadley Arkes, TheCatholicThing.org, 4 May 2016
9 June update: Reason magazine: "Roseanne Barr, Socialist for Trump."
26 May update: Trump has just obtained 1,238 delegates, one more than needed to get the nomination.
@RaniaKhalek I cancelled my subscription to @thenation because of @joanwalsh. I'm not going to pay for corporate shilling.
— Pinko.Snob (@pinko_snob) May 23, 2016
Reaganism is dying of old age, says @roddreher: https://t.co/mEA97kIId7
— AmericanConservative (@amconmag) April 28, 2016
.@drmoore Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2016
Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats—both with delegates & otherwise. He should show them, & run as an Independent.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2016
The famous Elizabeth Warren Facebook post against Donald Trump.
(Throwing the Gary Johnson candidacy into the mix.)
Neocons embrace LP wannabe presidential nominee Gary Johnson https://t.co/qLEE0Xce5w Will this upend his candidacy? https://t.co/ujjm8M1lVw
— Justin Raimondo (@JustinRaimondo) May 6, 2016
"A Guide for the Perplexed", Hadley Arkes, TheCatholicThing.org, 4 May 2016
Seeing #DropOutHillary & #Republicans4Hillary show how divisive the corporate front running candidates are. Let's chose a different path.
— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) May 4, 2016
#WriteInCruz Where is the #ThirdParty https://t.co/V3rMsafUCo
— ConservativeAmerican (@Americanwoman63) May 4, 2016
My latest: Is Hillary Clinton more dangerous than Donald Trump? https://t.co/BfacLwSHV9
— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) April 14, 2016
Actually, I said it's unclear to me who is more dangerous, Clinton or Trump, which is why I won't vote for either https://t.co/uOzXSMCjAG
— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) May 4, 2016
#AlwaysTrump Remember U must still vote for Trump in
— Ally (@survivinglife3) May 5, 2016
Primaries ... pic.twitter.com/eT7PM4RjDZ
Coulter Gets the Last Laugh as Vid Predicting Trump Win a Year Ago Goes Viral; Author to Revisit Bill Maher Show.. pic.twitter.com/1HWXGxpl8O
— Anntensity (@anntensity) May 4, 2016
Tuesday, May 03, 2016
Verify Those Memes
Browsing just now at Mark Ames's Twitter I found this:
Something was off, namely the use of the word "selfesteem." It is said to have been coined by William James in his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology, many decades after the speech Lord Macaulay allegedly made.
The "speech" has gained currency among some Hindu nationalists as evidence of a conspiracy to destroy Indian education and demoralize its people. (Interestingly, Ames often rails against Narendra Modi and other Hindu nationalist politicians. E.g.,
This Wikipedia article on the English Education Act gives context to Macaulay's (actual) remarks.
Minute by the Hon'ble T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835.
The Columbia webpage gives as a source this site:
http://www.mssu.edu/projectsouthasia/history/primarydocs/education/Macaulay001.htm (dead link)
Further discussion here.
A brief history of Vulture Capitalism pic.twitter.com/0oKbn4oqII
— Rafael (@RafaelStepanian) May 3, 2016
Something was off, namely the use of the word "selfesteem." It is said to have been coined by William James in his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology, many decades after the speech Lord Macaulay allegedly made.
The "speech" has gained currency among some Hindu nationalists as evidence of a conspiracy to destroy Indian education and demoralize its people. (Interestingly, Ames often rails against Narendra Modi and other Hindu nationalist politicians. E.g.,
)Chilling @NewRepublic on India's Modi, a genuine fascist https://t.co/rMt0ze4HY6
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 4, 2016
This Wikipedia article on the English Education Act gives context to Macaulay's (actual) remarks.
Minute by the Hon'ble T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835.
The Columbia webpage gives as a source this site:
http://www.mssu.edu/projectsouthasia/history/primarydocs/education/Macaulay001.htm (dead link)
Further discussion here.
NACLA Returns to Print
"NACLA Returns to Print!"
NACLA Report on the Americas is returning to print through a partnership with Routledge.
NACLA Report on the Americas is returning to print through a partnership with Routledge.
Monday, May 02, 2016
(The) Room
Whenever anyone talks abt that movie Room I still think they're talking abt the Tommy Wiseau one
— Borsch Repellent (@srothbell) April 30, 2016
Me too. But remember, The Room is the Tommy Wiseau movie. Room (no article) is the other one.
Kunstler: Send Out the Clowns
Kunstler: Send Out the Clowns.
In this decade of maximum peril, a prankish God delivers two maximally detested candidates to lead the faltering nation as events run ahead of all the convenient narratives. For instance: the idea that Republican “insiders” can block Trump’s path to the nomination. The insiders may be phantoms after all. For instance, the loathsome Koch brothers have already made their move onto Hillary’s side of the game-board. Trump won’t miss their campaign contributions for a New York minute (while Hillary might find a way to stuff the cash into some Cayman Islands lock-box of the Clinton Foundation).
Events played right into Trump’s smallish hands last week when protesters outside a Donald rally in Costa Mesa, CA, waved Mexican flags and placards calling for the reestablishment of Aztlán del Norte. Kind of proves his point about illegal immigration, don’t it? Trump also supposedly blundered in saying that Hillary had only “the women’s card” left to play in her donkey trot to the election. I’m not so sure he’s wrong about that — though the indignometer needle danced through the red-line after he said it.
Has it come to this? The women’s party against the men’s party? What kind of idiot psychodrama is this country acting out? Mom and dad mud-wrestling in an election year hog-wallow? A Reality TV show writ large from sea to shining sea? Are there no better ways of understanding the difficulties we face?
Lately Hillary has been boasting of her ability to bring Wall Street to heel, theoretically after Wall Street installs her in the White House. Voters (especially women) might want to pay attention to Hillary’s lavish praise for President Obama’s handling of the banking turpitudes still unresolved seven years after the crack-up of 2008. What did the Dodd-Frank Act (signed by “O” in 2010) accomplish except to provide more lucrative work-arounds, by Too-Complex-To-Comprehend legalese, for Too-Big-To-Fail banks. It was written by bank lobbyists and lawyers and was about 2,270 pages longer than the old Glass Steagall Act that Bill Clinton vaporized in 1999. Do you suppose that Bill and Hill might have talked about the repeal of Glass Steagall back then? Do you wonder what she thought about it at the time… being a lawyer and all?
This week attention is fixed on the Indiana primary where Devil Bat Ted Cruz desperately makes his last stand against the Trump juggernaut. It seems that former House Speaker John Boehner actually succeeded in driving a wooden stake through Cruz’s hypothetical heart by casually remarking that he was “the most miserable sonofabitch I ever worked with.” Kind of hard to explain that one away, though Ted tried by sending out his new attack dog Carly Fiorina and claiming that he never worked with the Speaker of the House — a risible claim for a national legislator in the same party.
All of this would be amusing if the USA wasn’t sliding into the twilight of what many people call “modernity” — which is code for the techno-industrial hyper-complexity we’ve been enjoying lately as a species. We have yet to comprehend the diminishing returns of heaping more complexity on what is already too complex. Exhibit A for most of the common folk must be the Affordable Care Act (also signed by “O” in 2010). Whereas the shrewd stylings of Dodd-Frank surely mystify the public, most full-functioning adults understand what it means when their health insurance premiums go up by 20 percent and the new deductible makes it unthinkable to even consider going to the emergency room.
The sad truth may be that rackets of this kind are unreformable, and that we can’t begin to do things differently until they collapse. It should be obvious, for instance, that American health care needs to move in the opposite direction from where it has been going — from giantism, as epitomized by colossal merged mega-hospital corporations, back to some kind of local clinic care in which doctors and their subalterns are not burdened by an oppressive matrix of Charge-Master grift. There may be less razzle-dazzle technology in that future model, but much more hands-on care, plus an end to the kind of financial pillage that bankrupts households for relatively routine illnesses (the $90,000 appendectomy).
Likewise in virtually all other areas of American life, the real trend as yet un-discussed in this election campaign, will be unwinding and downscaling of the onerous, toxic hyper-complexity of the age now passing and finding our way to a workable re-set of what used to be known as political-economy.
In the meantime: a clown show.
In this decade of maximum peril, a prankish God delivers two maximally detested candidates to lead the faltering nation as events run ahead of all the convenient narratives. For instance: the idea that Republican “insiders” can block Trump’s path to the nomination. The insiders may be phantoms after all. For instance, the loathsome Koch brothers have already made their move onto Hillary’s side of the game-board. Trump won’t miss their campaign contributions for a New York minute (while Hillary might find a way to stuff the cash into some Cayman Islands lock-box of the Clinton Foundation).
Events played right into Trump’s smallish hands last week when protesters outside a Donald rally in Costa Mesa, CA, waved Mexican flags and placards calling for the reestablishment of Aztlán del Norte. Kind of proves his point about illegal immigration, don’t it? Trump also supposedly blundered in saying that Hillary had only “the women’s card” left to play in her donkey trot to the election. I’m not so sure he’s wrong about that — though the indignometer needle danced through the red-line after he said it.
Has it come to this? The women’s party against the men’s party? What kind of idiot psychodrama is this country acting out? Mom and dad mud-wrestling in an election year hog-wallow? A Reality TV show writ large from sea to shining sea? Are there no better ways of understanding the difficulties we face?
Lately Hillary has been boasting of her ability to bring Wall Street to heel, theoretically after Wall Street installs her in the White House. Voters (especially women) might want to pay attention to Hillary’s lavish praise for President Obama’s handling of the banking turpitudes still unresolved seven years after the crack-up of 2008. What did the Dodd-Frank Act (signed by “O” in 2010) accomplish except to provide more lucrative work-arounds, by Too-Complex-To-Comprehend legalese, for Too-Big-To-Fail banks. It was written by bank lobbyists and lawyers and was about 2,270 pages longer than the old Glass Steagall Act that Bill Clinton vaporized in 1999. Do you suppose that Bill and Hill might have talked about the repeal of Glass Steagall back then? Do you wonder what she thought about it at the time… being a lawyer and all?
This week attention is fixed on the Indiana primary where Devil Bat Ted Cruz desperately makes his last stand against the Trump juggernaut. It seems that former House Speaker John Boehner actually succeeded in driving a wooden stake through Cruz’s hypothetical heart by casually remarking that he was “the most miserable sonofabitch I ever worked with.” Kind of hard to explain that one away, though Ted tried by sending out his new attack dog Carly Fiorina and claiming that he never worked with the Speaker of the House — a risible claim for a national legislator in the same party.
All of this would be amusing if the USA wasn’t sliding into the twilight of what many people call “modernity” — which is code for the techno-industrial hyper-complexity we’ve been enjoying lately as a species. We have yet to comprehend the diminishing returns of heaping more complexity on what is already too complex. Exhibit A for most of the common folk must be the Affordable Care Act (also signed by “O” in 2010). Whereas the shrewd stylings of Dodd-Frank surely mystify the public, most full-functioning adults understand what it means when their health insurance premiums go up by 20 percent and the new deductible makes it unthinkable to even consider going to the emergency room.
The sad truth may be that rackets of this kind are unreformable, and that we can’t begin to do things differently until they collapse. It should be obvious, for instance, that American health care needs to move in the opposite direction from where it has been going — from giantism, as epitomized by colossal merged mega-hospital corporations, back to some kind of local clinic care in which doctors and their subalterns are not burdened by an oppressive matrix of Charge-Master grift. There may be less razzle-dazzle technology in that future model, but much more hands-on care, plus an end to the kind of financial pillage that bankrupts households for relatively routine illnesses (the $90,000 appendectomy).
Likewise in virtually all other areas of American life, the real trend as yet un-discussed in this election campaign, will be unwinding and downscaling of the onerous, toxic hyper-complexity of the age now passing and finding our way to a workable re-set of what used to be known as political-economy.
In the meantime: a clown show.
Sunday, May 01, 2016
Saturday, April 30, 2016
"Why India's Newspaper Industry is Thriving."
I found this article just now.
Ken Auletta, "Citizens Jain: Why India's Newspaper Industry is Thriving." The New Yorker, 8 October 2012.
Ken Auletta, "Citizens Jain: Why India's Newspaper Industry is Thriving." The New Yorker, 8 October 2012.
Peak Oil News
"We Could Be Witnessing the Death of the Fossil Fuel Industry: Will It Take the Rest of the Economy Down With It?"
April 28: Peak Oil Review: A Midweek Update.
It’s not looking good for the global fossil fuel industry. Although the world remains heavily dependent on oil, coal and natural gas—which today supply around 80 percent of our primary energy needs—the industry is rapidly crumbling.
This is not merely a temporary blip, but a symptom of a deeper, long-term process related to global capitalism’s escalating overconsumption of planetary resources and raw materials.
New scientific research shows that the growing crisis of profitability facing fossil fuel industries is part of an inevitable period of transition to a post-carbon era.
April 28: Peak Oil Review: A Midweek Update.
The woes of the US oil industry continue to grow with Exxon losing its AAA investment rating and numerous oil companies reporting sharply reduced profits or larger losses. The oil services industry which largely supports new drilling has been badly hit by capital spending by oil companies now some 50 percent of 2014 levels.
Over in Iraq, the political situation continues to deteriorate with Prime Minister al-Abadi unable to confirm a new cabinet amongst much turmoil. The situation in Iraqi Kurdistan is not much better with oil exports in 2016 lower than last year. The Kurds are negotiating to build an export pipeline through Iran thereby bypassing the never-ending conflict between the Kurds and the Turkish government. It is becoming apparent to the Kurds that dependence on the one oil export pipeline through Turkey will not be a solution to their troubles.
In Venezuela, the government announced that the public sector, which provides about 30 percent of the country’s jobs, will only work two days a week to save electricity. The situation in the country is becoming critical. The government will no longer announce the water level behind the dam, which could be only a week or so away from shutting down depriving the country of some 65-70 percent of its power production. Much of the future depends on when the rainy season begins, and how quickly it brings water levels up to operating levels. Some are saying that the thermal electric plants that used to provide about a third of the country’s power are breaking down for lack of maintenance leaving the Guri dam as the only source for much of the country’s electricity. It seems increasingly likely that the social fabric of the country could collapse soon endangering the country’s oil exports and eliminating much of the world’s oil surplus at one stroke.
Kawate Seed Shop
I went to Kawate Seed Shop early yesterday afternoon. There was a long line but not excessively so. As I stood in the line, a man approached me and asked if I wanted his bagged lunch. It had an apple, an orange, and a peanut butter sandwich. He said it was "professionally" packaged at Hale Nani, where he must have come from, I figured later. I decided to take it off his hands, and stood holding it for a while, before putting it in the car and getting back in the line.
Most of the people coming out had ice shaves, which I wasn't there for. A woman in line said school let out every other Friday at one-fifteen, so another said now she had to deal with the school crowds. There was a local kid with his hair dyed berry-red. As the line moved forward every time people left the shop, I looked up at the sky and at the bench with people's names carved in the wood.
Finally I got in, and looked at the jars of crack seed, most of which were empty. The first jars I saw held licorice olives. There was candied ginger too. No. I knew I'd get li hing mui or at least lemon. The shop was narrow and crowded, more so because of all the customers. I went to the end of the room and looked at the li hing mui, choosing a quarter-pound of baby seed. The lady scooped some out and weighed the bag, just over the amount I ordered. I paid and left, just after one-fifty. I don't know how long I was in line, maybe twenty or thirty minutes. But that was the last time I went to Kawate. The store closes permanently this afternoon.
Most of the people coming out had ice shaves, which I wasn't there for. A woman in line said school let out every other Friday at one-fifteen, so another said now she had to deal with the school crowds. There was a local kid with his hair dyed berry-red. As the line moved forward every time people left the shop, I looked up at the sky and at the bench with people's names carved in the wood.
Finally I got in, and looked at the jars of crack seed, most of which were empty. The first jars I saw held licorice olives. There was candied ginger too. No. I knew I'd get li hing mui or at least lemon. The shop was narrow and crowded, more so because of all the customers. I went to the end of the room and looked at the li hing mui, choosing a quarter-pound of baby seed. The lady scooped some out and weighed the bag, just over the amount I ordered. I paid and left, just after one-fifty. I don't know how long I was in line, maybe twenty or thirty minutes. But that was the last time I went to Kawate. The store closes permanently this afternoon.
Friday, April 29, 2016
Various Tweets
me irl pic.twitter.com/JTiHolUgPf
— me irl (@ItMeIRL) April 29, 2016
@_TronVin_ You should be reading this: https://t.co/dHWFa7MzOK pic.twitter.com/ivtJtETzCw
— armond white (@3xchair) April 28, 2016
Armond White on film criticism today pic.twitter.com/dhsvouyW5r
— Super TronVin '94 (@_TronVin_) April 28, 2016
This looks like a photo in the local paper announcing two used car dealership owners merging their lots. pic.twitter.com/o4VLrdYLGi
— Eli Olsberg (@EliOlsberg) April 28, 2016
Nothing is original, esp. in #design. (btw, these are NOT the logos of Medium AirBNB, Flipboard, and Beats)pic.twitter.com/JNDsM0rhod
— Spencer Chen (@spencerchen) April 27, 2016
he forgot why pic.twitter.com/0S7DbSZbgt
— Matt Bors (@MattBors) April 16, 2016
Eduardo Porter: Manufacturing is down, worldwide. The Mirage of a Return to Manufacturing Greatness https://t.co/NxDqM82cAS
— Nell Painter (@PainterNell) April 27, 2016
Work
I finished a big job last night (my column) and though I still have other things to do, I plan to take it easy. Kawate Seed Shop closes tomorrow so I hope to go there later today, depending on the lines.
The big news that broke last night: Peter Boy's parents charged in his death.
A glance at the headlines: I see a weasel has caused a shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider.
"Crazy hack" (Nancy Nall's term) Armond White on Prince here and here.
The big news that broke last night: Peter Boy's parents charged in his death.
A glance at the headlines: I see a weasel has caused a shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider.
"Crazy hack" (Nancy Nall's term) Armond White on Prince here and here.
Prince and the other great pop musicians of the 1980s — Michael Jackson, The Smiths, Public Enemy, Pet Shop Boys, Scritti Politti, Kate Bush, the Au Pairs, sometimes Madonna — were part of the texture of Reagan and Thatcher realities. They responded to the policies of that era in ways that Prince mourners now ignore by trading the thought-provoking complexities of yesterday’s cultural arguments for the non-thinking conformity of today’s politically naïve pop culture. It’s as if personal politics (the only politics a pop artist can honestly proclaim) didn’t matter.
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Sweet Briar's Comeback
In the Long Emergency, Kunstler writes, "many colleges and universities may close down, and the scale of those that remain may have to contract severely. College will simply cease to be the mass 'consumer' activity it has become." (Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2005/2007, p. 274.)
It is interesting that small colleges like Sweet Briar, which almost closed down because of a lack of money, then rallied back, will be the most likely to succeed.
It is interesting that small colleges like Sweet Briar, which almost closed down because of a lack of money, then rallied back, will be the most likely to succeed.
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
On Weeding Books
I don't know how many books I've accumulated over the years, probably hundreds. Eventually I have to go through them and pare down my library. This will be a continuous process. Below is linked the Awful Library Books blog and a PDF of a weeding manual. Taste is subjective so one's "awful" books are another's "wonderful" ones, and vice versa. Librarians try to make the weeding process as objective as possible, e.g., books that haven't been checked out in several years.
CREW Method (weeding manual).
AwfulLibraryBooks.net
CREW Method (weeding manual).
AwfulLibraryBooks.net
An Opening and a Closing
When Island Chevrolet closed in mid-2009 I took some photos of the empty car lot. It didn't stay like that for long, becoming a base for several food trucks, including the famous Gina's. Now WikiFresh is open in the building.
Meanwhile, Kawate Seed Shop will close its doors permanently on 30 April.
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Some Political Items
I haven't followed politics deeply for a while now. But I found this analysis by Newt Gingrich on the presidential candidates.
Sorry for tweeting #BaltimoreElection results pic.twitter.com/YJljGOholN
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 27, 2016
@Politics1com is the Twitter to follow:
Carly Fiorina acknowledges she is being vetted as potential Ted Cruz VP runningmate: https://t.co/D8n1xryrEM
— Politics1.com (@Politics1com) April 25, 2016
Ex-US Sen Harris Wofford (D-PA), 90, a widower, comes out as gay and is engaged to marry 40-year-old man - https://t.co/K85eHHkphv
— Politics1.com (@Politics1com) April 23, 2016
Chernobyl: Thirty Years Later
Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
How Chernobyl shook the USSR.
Chernobyl's Literary Legacy, 30 Years Later.
How Chernobyl shook the USSR.
Chernobyl's Literary Legacy, 30 Years Later.
No literary response to Chernobyl deserves a wider readership than Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. [Svetlana] Alexievich, the Belarusian journalist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, represents the broadest range of a society whose alienation makes them “a separate people. A new nation.” In these pages, harrowing stories of lost loved ones sit alongside litanies against technological hubris; the history of ideas—“the era of physics ended at Chernobyl”—contrasts with spots of black humor; science collides with superstition. The cumulative effect is not the absorption of Chernobyl, but rather an unlimited expansion. More than any other work, Alexievich’s provides a direct, vertiginous glimpse of Chernobyl's abyss.
Monday, April 25, 2016
Kunstler: The Awful Lull
In which Kunstler lays on the Hillary hate rather thickly.
Kunstler: The Awful Lull.
Spring unfolds at last in all its loveliness and Hillary sits back in repose like the matriarch of toads with a clear path to her toadstool throne, having swallowed the mouse-king Sanders. (She forgets that there are millions more mice under the thatched grass, including new mouse-kings awaiting.) And Trump with his bullfrog smile now casts his baleful eye on the two remaining gnats circling his lily pad. Yes, this magical week when the world bursts into leaf and flower, the life of our nation seems like a fairy tale.
Weeks from now when we’re used to the mild air and the greened world, going coatless and care-free, is when the storms of summer strike and the life of the nation turns from fairy tale to horror comic. Both Clinton and Trump are perfect representatives of the nascent forces moving towards some kind of civil war in comic book America.
Clinton perfectly embodies the fortress of the status quo, including especially her praetorian guard of black ghetto grandmothers, giving Hillary the false appearance of some sort of righteousness when, really, she has nothing to offer the greater crisis of black manhood, boxed into prison by the ancient crippling rules of federal welfare policy with its extreme penalties on active fathering. Otherwise, the stone wall of her status quo fortress conceals her privy council of Wall Street necromancers, and the fortune they have helped her lay up in the vaults of the Clinton Foundation.
All of which is to say that Hillary represents the forces that want to keep things just as a they are: rackets rampant. What can crush her triumph of fakery is the sudden manifestation of rackets collapsing under their own weight — a set of awful probabilities waiting to happen, ranging from riots at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia to an accident in financial markets jerry-rigged to mis-price everything for the purpose of funneling carry-trade gains into East Hampton. Look how she croaks about the triumph of the Affordable Care Act, as though it’s a great thing that Americans can shell out $10,000 a year for medical coverage that only kicks in after you rack up the first $6,000 in charges. (Forgetting for a moment that the costs are an hallucination of the “ChargeMaster” system designed to lavish six-figure salaries plus bonuses on the maestros in the hospital executive suites.) What a demonic fraud this woman is.
In terms of sheer persona on persona, Trump is not much better, a walking hood ornament on the faltering beater car that America has become. But at least he recognizes that the beater beneath him needs a complete overhaul, even if he can barely cobble up a coherent list of particulars, or name the mechanics who might be able to fix the damn thing. And, of course, a broad swathe of Americans whose lives have also come to resemble beater cars are very sympathetic to the impulses Trump radiates.
For example, I happen to agree that the nation needs to act on immigration, both on the problem of illegal immigrants and on limiting the quotas of legally admitted newcomers. The Left, sunk in its sentimental sob stories of “dreamers,” and its nostalgia for the Ellis Island romance of 1904, can’t conceive of any reason why the nation might benefit from, at least, a time-out on invitations. The idea undermines their world-saving fantasies. In my little corner of America, the computer chip factory run by Global Foundries (owned by the Emirate of Dubai) has just laid off the majority of its homegrown American technical labor force and replaced them with foreign technicians on H1B visas, thus creating x-number of new Trump voters among the laid-off, and rightfully so, I think.
Really, who says we have to invite every striver from other parts of the world where striving is more difficult? Let them improve the strive-osity of their own nations. Do the citizens already here not have any right to halt the influx and take stock of the nation’s circumstances for a period of time? If only Trump could speak clearly about these issues instead of simply issuing crude and rather dumb threats.
Enjoy this end-of-April lull in the action. Use the moment to gird your loins and perhaps get the hell out of the financial markets while the getting is good. I think you will see things liven up a lot as the heat rises and the seventeen-year locusts emerge from their long sleep underground in frightening storms.
Kunstler: The Awful Lull.
Spring unfolds at last in all its loveliness and Hillary sits back in repose like the matriarch of toads with a clear path to her toadstool throne, having swallowed the mouse-king Sanders. (She forgets that there are millions more mice under the thatched grass, including new mouse-kings awaiting.) And Trump with his bullfrog smile now casts his baleful eye on the two remaining gnats circling his lily pad. Yes, this magical week when the world bursts into leaf and flower, the life of our nation seems like a fairy tale.
Weeks from now when we’re used to the mild air and the greened world, going coatless and care-free, is when the storms of summer strike and the life of the nation turns from fairy tale to horror comic. Both Clinton and Trump are perfect representatives of the nascent forces moving towards some kind of civil war in comic book America.
Clinton perfectly embodies the fortress of the status quo, including especially her praetorian guard of black ghetto grandmothers, giving Hillary the false appearance of some sort of righteousness when, really, she has nothing to offer the greater crisis of black manhood, boxed into prison by the ancient crippling rules of federal welfare policy with its extreme penalties on active fathering. Otherwise, the stone wall of her status quo fortress conceals her privy council of Wall Street necromancers, and the fortune they have helped her lay up in the vaults of the Clinton Foundation.
All of which is to say that Hillary represents the forces that want to keep things just as a they are: rackets rampant. What can crush her triumph of fakery is the sudden manifestation of rackets collapsing under their own weight — a set of awful probabilities waiting to happen, ranging from riots at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia to an accident in financial markets jerry-rigged to mis-price everything for the purpose of funneling carry-trade gains into East Hampton. Look how she croaks about the triumph of the Affordable Care Act, as though it’s a great thing that Americans can shell out $10,000 a year for medical coverage that only kicks in after you rack up the first $6,000 in charges. (Forgetting for a moment that the costs are an hallucination of the “ChargeMaster” system designed to lavish six-figure salaries plus bonuses on the maestros in the hospital executive suites.) What a demonic fraud this woman is.
In terms of sheer persona on persona, Trump is not much better, a walking hood ornament on the faltering beater car that America has become. But at least he recognizes that the beater beneath him needs a complete overhaul, even if he can barely cobble up a coherent list of particulars, or name the mechanics who might be able to fix the damn thing. And, of course, a broad swathe of Americans whose lives have also come to resemble beater cars are very sympathetic to the impulses Trump radiates.
For example, I happen to agree that the nation needs to act on immigration, both on the problem of illegal immigrants and on limiting the quotas of legally admitted newcomers. The Left, sunk in its sentimental sob stories of “dreamers,” and its nostalgia for the Ellis Island romance of 1904, can’t conceive of any reason why the nation might benefit from, at least, a time-out on invitations. The idea undermines their world-saving fantasies. In my little corner of America, the computer chip factory run by Global Foundries (owned by the Emirate of Dubai) has just laid off the majority of its homegrown American technical labor force and replaced them with foreign technicians on H1B visas, thus creating x-number of new Trump voters among the laid-off, and rightfully so, I think.
Really, who says we have to invite every striver from other parts of the world where striving is more difficult? Let them improve the strive-osity of their own nations. Do the citizens already here not have any right to halt the influx and take stock of the nation’s circumstances for a period of time? If only Trump could speak clearly about these issues instead of simply issuing crude and rather dumb threats.
Enjoy this end-of-April lull in the action. Use the moment to gird your loins and perhaps get the hell out of the financial markets while the getting is good. I think you will see things liven up a lot as the heat rises and the seventeen-year locusts emerge from their long sleep underground in frightening storms.
Sunday, April 24, 2016
@JayRosen_NYU
Seder conversation. Adult: "What bands do you listen to?" Fourteen year-old. "I don't listen to 'bands.' I listen to producers."
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 23, 2016
Niche journalist @dannysullivan has been covering search engines for 20 years. The biggest changes he has seen: https://t.co/P5VQu4RJul
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 21, 2016
Categories aside, 4 of the first 5 Pulitzer Prize winners, announced today, are really investigative reporting. https://t.co/2eugKhSoPN
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 18, 2016
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Divedapper.com
This afternoon I just found out about Divedapper.com, an online magazine devoted to interviews with poets. It's somewhat like The Paris Review with its writer interviews, but more specialized.
Friday, April 22, 2016
Prince
Never forget that after Dave Chappelle did his famous Prince sketch, PRINCE PUT HIM ON HIS ACTUAL SINGLE COVER. pic.twitter.com/yxbevRpLrm
— Kyle Goon (@kylegoon) April 21, 2016
Named after the Prince Roger Trio, a jazz band his father performed with, Prince was signed to WB Records as a teenager. #RIPurple
— The Crisis Magazine (@thecrisismag) April 22, 2016
What could have been.
Madonna's manager Guy Oseary recalls:
I called him a few years back with the idea of @Madonna and Prince going on tour together. I pitched it to Madonna and within a second she said "I like it, we can call it the Royalty Tour... The Queen and The Prince".... I love the way she thinks... When I told Prince the idea he said: "the world isn't ready for this, it's too big".. I always felt like one day I would pull it off..
Michael Jackson didn't like Prince.
Mark Ames swipes at his former colleague Matt Taibbi:
Seriously, if the gonzo gig dries up there's a big future in Hallmark cards. Fucking hell pic.twitter.com/A9xSw39l40
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) April 23, 2016
And Nancy Nall gnashes her teeth (again) at Mitch Albom for his column on Prince.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Various Tweets
As a registered democrat in NY with a land line, this week has been hell. Caller ID is saving me. I'm not answering till after Tuesday.
— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) April 15, 2016
There are hundreds of tapes of conversations that are restricted till 2060 but really need to be digitized. #dilemma #popup1 #maracpgh
— Elena Colón-Marrero (@elenArchivist) April 16, 2016
Floppy disks containing Toni Morrison's drafts of Beloved bring home importance of well-planned born digital preservation. #s14 #MARACPgh
— Hilary Barlow (@hilbarchivist) April 15, 2016
Pinterest: Nuggwifee☽ ☼☾ - #architecture https://t.co/aYrHvb5qpg pic.twitter.com/Q4LTlR3heI
— Architecture Zone (@ArchitectureZon) April 20, 2016
The Greatest Typographic Tale:
— Eugene Conlon (@blendedcreative) April 14, 2016
How The World’s Most Beautiful Typeface Was Nearly Lost Forever https://t.co/7lGsnz6clf #Font #Typography
Hydrox, the original Oreo resurrected by Newport Beach man, goes national with Kroger https://t.co/bhErCSaFcs #hydroxareback #madeintheusa
— Hydrox Cookie (@HydroxCookie) April 7, 2016
.@squirrelburrito @gingermarauder Our family considered @HydroxCookie wafers crispier, and its flavor tangier, than treacly impostor, @Oreo.
— Boston Gardenia (@BostonGardenia) March 17, 2016
#peakoil Introducing Turn 21: As part of Launch Turn21, we were recently interviewed for the University of Haw... https://t.co/sx1ddPDT91
— peak oil news (@peaktweat) April 20, 2016
Monday, April 18, 2016
Kunstler: The Elephant Cometh.
More gnashing of teeth by Kunstler. He's right about the financial schemes and rackets, including the ones in higher education. I added links to the course descriptions so you can read them for yourselves. But the problem with academia is less with niche courses than with administration. For example: This article recounts Burlington College's descent into debt under the leadership of Jane Sanders, Bernie's wife.
Kunstler: The Elephant Cometh.
The elephant’s not even in the room, which is why the 2016 election campaign is such a soap opera. The elephant outside the room is named Discontinuity. That’s perhaps an intimidating word, but it is exactly what the USA is in for. It means that a lot of familiar things come to an end, stop, don’t work the way they are supposed to — beginning, manifestly, with the election process now underway in all its unprecedented bizarreness.
One reason it’s difficult to comprehend discontinuity is because so many operations and institutions of daily life in America have insidiously become rackets, meaning that they are kept going only by dishonest means. If we didn’t lie to ourselves about them, they couldn’t continue.
For instance the automobile racket. Without a solid, solvent middle-class, you can’t sell cars. Americans are used to paying for cars on installment loans. If the middle class is so crippled by prior debt and the disappearance of good-paying jobs that they can’t qualify for car loans, well, the answer is to give them loans anyway, on terms that don’t really pencil out — such as 7-year loans at 0 percent interest for used cars (that will be worth next to nothing long before the loan expires).
This will go on until it can’t, which is what discontinuity is all about. The car companies and the banks (with help from government regulators and political cheerleaders) have created this work-around by treating “sub-prime” car loans the same way they treated sub-prime mortgages: they bundle them into larger packages of bonds called collateralized loan obligations. These, in turn, are sold mainly to big pension fund and insurance companies desperate for “yield” (higher interest) on “safe” investments that ostensibly preserve their principal. The “collateral” amounts to the revenue streams of payments that are sure to stop because the payers are by definition not credit-worthy, meaning it was baked in the cake that they would quit making payments — especially when they go “under water” owing ever more money for junkers that have lost all value.
It’s easy to see how that ends in tears for all concerned parties, but we “buy into it” because there seems to be no other way to a) boost the so-called “consumer” economy and b) keep the matrix of car-dependant suburban sprawl in operation. We took what used to be a fairly sound idea during a now-bygone phase of history, and perverted it to avoid making any difficult but necessary changes in a new phase of history.
Health care is now such a blatant, odious, and ruinous racket that it is a little hard to believe that it hasn’t ignited an outright revolution or, at least, a workplace massacre in some insurance company C-suite. It is a well-known fact that most Americans don’t even have $500 to pay for a car repair. How are they supposed to cope with a $5,000 deductible health insurance incident? Answer: they can’t. Their mental health is destroyed in the process of attempting to fix their physical health. Not uncommonly, they have to declare bankruptcy after a routine appendectomy or a visit to the emergency room to set a broken arm. Sometimes, they don’t even bother to go to the doctor, seeing clearly how this plays out. The pharmaceutical industry has, of course, been allowed to convert itself into a simple extortion racket. Got an unusual kind of cancer? We have something that might help. Oh, it costs $43,000 a month….
What kind of a polity allows this cruel and indecent grift to go on? Why, the Obama administration, which allowed the health insurance company lobbyists and their colleagues in Big Pharma to “craft” the Affordable Care Act — the name of which must be the biggest public lie ever floated.
It’s interesting to see how a parallel fraud is playing out in higher ed. I submit the reason that college presidents are not pushing back against the Maoist coercions of the undergraduate social justice warriors is because the marvelous theater of the gender, race, and “privilege” melodrama is a potent distraction from the sad fact that college has turned into a grotesquely top-heavy and high-paying administrative racket offering boutique courses in fake fields (Dartmouth College: WGSS 65.06 Radical Sexuality: Of Color, Wildness, and Fabulosity… Harvard University: WOMGEN 1424: American Fetish) in order to pander to their young customers (students) conditioned to tragic “oppression” sob stories. All in the service of paying huge salaries + perqs to the dynamic executives running these places.
Then there is banking, a.k.a. the financial system, certainly the greatest racket of rackets, since the fumes it’s running on — combinations of ZIRP, QE, and “forward guidance” (happy talk) — is all that there is to maintain the illusion that “money” remains a reliable gauge of value. Finance is the racket that will go down first and hardest, and when it does, all the other rackets currently running will go up in a vapor. That elephant will storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.
-----------
Kunstler: The Elephant Cometh.
The elephant’s not even in the room, which is why the 2016 election campaign is such a soap opera. The elephant outside the room is named Discontinuity. That’s perhaps an intimidating word, but it is exactly what the USA is in for. It means that a lot of familiar things come to an end, stop, don’t work the way they are supposed to — beginning, manifestly, with the election process now underway in all its unprecedented bizarreness.
One reason it’s difficult to comprehend discontinuity is because so many operations and institutions of daily life in America have insidiously become rackets, meaning that they are kept going only by dishonest means. If we didn’t lie to ourselves about them, they couldn’t continue.
For instance the automobile racket. Without a solid, solvent middle-class, you can’t sell cars. Americans are used to paying for cars on installment loans. If the middle class is so crippled by prior debt and the disappearance of good-paying jobs that they can’t qualify for car loans, well, the answer is to give them loans anyway, on terms that don’t really pencil out — such as 7-year loans at 0 percent interest for used cars (that will be worth next to nothing long before the loan expires).
This will go on until it can’t, which is what discontinuity is all about. The car companies and the banks (with help from government regulators and political cheerleaders) have created this work-around by treating “sub-prime” car loans the same way they treated sub-prime mortgages: they bundle them into larger packages of bonds called collateralized loan obligations. These, in turn, are sold mainly to big pension fund and insurance companies desperate for “yield” (higher interest) on “safe” investments that ostensibly preserve their principal. The “collateral” amounts to the revenue streams of payments that are sure to stop because the payers are by definition not credit-worthy, meaning it was baked in the cake that they would quit making payments — especially when they go “under water” owing ever more money for junkers that have lost all value.
It’s easy to see how that ends in tears for all concerned parties, but we “buy into it” because there seems to be no other way to a) boost the so-called “consumer” economy and b) keep the matrix of car-dependant suburban sprawl in operation. We took what used to be a fairly sound idea during a now-bygone phase of history, and perverted it to avoid making any difficult but necessary changes in a new phase of history.
Health care is now such a blatant, odious, and ruinous racket that it is a little hard to believe that it hasn’t ignited an outright revolution or, at least, a workplace massacre in some insurance company C-suite. It is a well-known fact that most Americans don’t even have $500 to pay for a car repair. How are they supposed to cope with a $5,000 deductible health insurance incident? Answer: they can’t. Their mental health is destroyed in the process of attempting to fix their physical health. Not uncommonly, they have to declare bankruptcy after a routine appendectomy or a visit to the emergency room to set a broken arm. Sometimes, they don’t even bother to go to the doctor, seeing clearly how this plays out. The pharmaceutical industry has, of course, been allowed to convert itself into a simple extortion racket. Got an unusual kind of cancer? We have something that might help. Oh, it costs $43,000 a month….
What kind of a polity allows this cruel and indecent grift to go on? Why, the Obama administration, which allowed the health insurance company lobbyists and their colleagues in Big Pharma to “craft” the Affordable Care Act — the name of which must be the biggest public lie ever floated.
It’s interesting to see how a parallel fraud is playing out in higher ed. I submit the reason that college presidents are not pushing back against the Maoist coercions of the undergraduate social justice warriors is because the marvelous theater of the gender, race, and “privilege” melodrama is a potent distraction from the sad fact that college has turned into a grotesquely top-heavy and high-paying administrative racket offering boutique courses in fake fields (Dartmouth College: WGSS 65.06 Radical Sexuality: Of Color, Wildness, and Fabulosity… Harvard University: WOMGEN 1424: American Fetish) in order to pander to their young customers (students) conditioned to tragic “oppression” sob stories. All in the service of paying huge salaries + perqs to the dynamic executives running these places.
Then there is banking, a.k.a. the financial system, certainly the greatest racket of rackets, since the fumes it’s running on — combinations of ZIRP, QE, and “forward guidance” (happy talk) — is all that there is to maintain the illusion that “money” remains a reliable gauge of value. Finance is the racket that will go down first and hardest, and when it does, all the other rackets currently running will go up in a vapor. That elephant will storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.
-----------
Saturday, April 16, 2016
The Hullabaloo
I've been busy, and so I haven't paid much attention to the political news. I watched Rachel Maddow the other day, where she led the show with a lengthy account of Edward Cox, who married Richard Nixon's daughter Tricia, and is now head of the New York State Republican Party. (And he's not related to Archibald Cox, as I searched online.)
This poll was mentioned in today's paper as well:
"When it comes to rudeness in 2016 politics, the Republican presidential contest wins in a landslide."
Check out ElectionGuide.org, where you can read about elections all over the world. As I've noted earlier, Maureen Kyalya was running for President of Uganda. Museveni, Ugandan President since 1986, won in a landslide. He dismissed claims the election was rigged.
More later.
This poll was mentioned in today's paper as well:
"When it comes to rudeness in 2016 politics, the Republican presidential contest wins in a landslide."
Check out ElectionGuide.org, where you can read about elections all over the world. As I've noted earlier, Maureen Kyalya was running for President of Uganda. Museveni, Ugandan President since 1986, won in a landslide. He dismissed claims the election was rigged.
More later.
Thursday, April 14, 2016
The Conservative Fracturing
Commentary Magazine: "The Coming Conservative Dark Age."
The Guardian: "The conservative crack-up: managing a disintegrating political message."
George Hawley's book, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism.
Trump-inspired infighting among Hollywood Republicans.
The Guardian: "The conservative crack-up: managing a disintegrating political message."
#NeverTrump is built on the assumption that huge numbers of Republican voters care about conservatism. They don't. They never did.
— George Hawley (@georgehawleyUA) March 24, 2016
George Hawley's book, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism.
Trump-inspired infighting among Hollywood Republicans.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Evelyn Waugh? Who's She?
Normally I don't mock people for this because not everyone went to an elite private high school and Harvard. He did pic.twitter.com/zRShKVicEA
— Noah McCormack (@noahmccormack) March 13, 2016
.@noahmccormack Our elites are becoming ever more philistine. E.g., Sandberg in NYT By the Book naming only kiddie & biz books as her faves
— Kathleen Geier (@Kathy__Gee) March 13, 2016
This article is what Geier is referring to. Actually, Sheryl Sandberg didn't name "only kiddie" and "biz books" as her favorites. She mentions Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, and some American poetry books as well. And the "kiddie" and "biz" books are by some fine writers: Madeleine L'Engle, Michael Lewis, et al.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Doug Henwood vs. Joshua Holland
Fan mail! https://t.co/GzeSiguSPY
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) April 12, 2016
He’s coy. Says nice things about HRC but then says he’s not a supporter. https://t.co/xqgpL4BtWx
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) April 12, 2016
We'll see, smart guy. https://t.co/aEJPGvmEQ1
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) April 12, 2016
.@DougHenwood's claim that HRC would rip up the #IranDeal shows that he doesn't grasp the consequences. I doubt even Cruz would do so.
— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) April 11, 2016
Yes. I said I'd never argue with someone who votes for the Horror. Can't do it myself though. https://t.co/Hg8KCMLgHP
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) April 11, 2016
Should Sanders supporters vote for Hillary in November? @JoshuaHol & I say yes; @RaniaKhalek & @DougHenwood say no https://t.co/d2VDhywHar
— Kathleen Geier (@Kathy__Gee) April 11, 2016
.@DougHenwood That would be just bonkers. A total disaster. You're not describing a policy diff. You're calling her insane. @noahkayray
— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) April 12, 2016
Monday, April 11, 2016
Kunstler: The Mystery Revealed.
Kunstler: The Mystery Revealed.
The mystery is at last revealed: why does the field of candidates for president score so uniformly low in trust, credibility, likability? Why are there no candidates of real substance, principle, and especially of real charm in this scrim of political basilisks? (Surely there are many people of substance and principle elsewhere in America — they just don’t dare seek the job at the symbolic tippy-top of this clusterfuck of faltering rackets.) [There is at least one candidate of substance and principle--Jill Stein--but she's outside the Demopublican-Republicrat duopoly.--P.Z.] The reason is that the problems are unfixable, at least not within the acceptable terms of the zeitgeist, namely: the secret wish to keep all the rackets going at all costs.
This is true, by the way, of all parties concerned from the 0.001 percent billionaire grifter class to the deluded sophomores crying for “safe spaces” in their womb-like “student life centers” to the sports-and-porn addled suburban multitudes stuck with impossible mortgage, car, and college loan debts (and, suddenly, no paying job) to the deluded Black Lives Matter mobs who have failed to notice that black lives matter least to the black people slaughtering each other over sneakers and personal slights. None of these groups really want to change anything. They actually wish to preserve their prerogatives.
The interests of the 0.001 percent are obvious: maintain those streams of unearned, rentier, notional wealth as long as possible and convert them as fast as possible into hard assets (Caribbean islands, Cézanne landscapes, gold bars) that will theoretically insulate them from the wrath of history when the center no longer holds. The poor (and ever-poorer) formerly middle class suburban debt serfs, for all their travails, can’t imagine living any other way or putting less of their dwindling capital into the Happy Motoring matrix. The Maoist Social Justice Warrior students are enjoying the surprising power and thrills of coercion, especially as directed against their simpering professors and cringing college presidents anxious to sustain the illusion that something like learning takes place in the money laundering operations of higher ed. The Black Lives Matter crowd just wants to be excused from their failure to follow standards of decent behavior and to keep mau-mauing the other ethnic groups of America for material and political tribute.
It must be obvious that the next occupant of the White House will preside over the implosion of all these arrangements since, in the immortal words of economist Herb Stein, if something can’t go on forever, it will stop. So the only individuals left seeking the position are 1) An inarticulate reality TV buffoon; 2) a war-happy evangelical maniac; 3) a narcissistic monster of entitlement whose “turn” it is to hold the country’s highest office; and 4) a valiant but quixotic self-proclaimed socialist altacocker who might have walked off the set of Welcome Back Kotter, 40th Reunion Special. These are the ones left standing halfway to the conventions. Nobody else in his, her, it, xe, or they right mind wants to be handed this schwag-bag of doom.
On Saturday, the unstoppable Democratic shoo-in Hillary lost her 7th straight contest to the only theoretically electable Vermont Don Quixote, Bernie Sanders. This was a week after it was reported in The Huff-Po that her campaign crew literally bought-and-paid for the entire 50-state smorgasbord of super-delegates who will supposedly compensate for Hillary’s inability to otherwise win votes the old-fashioned way, by ballots cast. Wonder why that didn’t make nary a ripple in the media afterward? Because this is the land where anything goes and nothing matters, and that’s really all you need to know about how things work in the USA these days.
The Republican mandarins are apparently delirious over loose cannon Donald Trump’s flagging poll numbers in the remaining primary states. Should Trump fall on his face, do you think they’ll just hand Ted Cruz the Ronald Reagan Crown-and-Scepter set. (They’d rather lock Ted in the back of a Chevy cargo van with five Mexican narcos and a chain saw.) The GOP establishment insiders are already lighting cigars in preparation for the biggest smoke-filled room in US political history, Cleveland, July 20. But what poor shmo will they have to drag to the podium to get this odious thing done? Who wants to be the guy in the Oval Office when Janet Yellen comes in some muggy DC morning and says, “Uh, sir (ma’am)… that sucker you heard was gonna go down…? Well, uh, it just did.”
As for the Dems: they are about to anoint the most unpopular candidate of our lifetimes. The BLM mobs have promised to deliver mayhem to the streets of the party conventions and don’t think they will spare Hillary in Philary, no matter how many chitlins she scarfed down last month in Carolina. The action in Philly will unleash and reveal all the deadly power of President Obama’s NSA goon squads when the militarized police put down the riots, and Hillary will be tagged guilty by association.
And that is how Kim Kardashian gets elected president.
The mystery is at last revealed: why does the field of candidates for president score so uniformly low in trust, credibility, likability? Why are there no candidates of real substance, principle, and especially of real charm in this scrim of political basilisks? (Surely there are many people of substance and principle elsewhere in America — they just don’t dare seek the job at the symbolic tippy-top of this clusterfuck of faltering rackets.) [There is at least one candidate of substance and principle--Jill Stein--but she's outside the Demopublican-Republicrat duopoly.--P.Z.] The reason is that the problems are unfixable, at least not within the acceptable terms of the zeitgeist, namely: the secret wish to keep all the rackets going at all costs.
This is true, by the way, of all parties concerned from the 0.001 percent billionaire grifter class to the deluded sophomores crying for “safe spaces” in their womb-like “student life centers” to the sports-and-porn addled suburban multitudes stuck with impossible mortgage, car, and college loan debts (and, suddenly, no paying job) to the deluded Black Lives Matter mobs who have failed to notice that black lives matter least to the black people slaughtering each other over sneakers and personal slights. None of these groups really want to change anything. They actually wish to preserve their prerogatives.
The interests of the 0.001 percent are obvious: maintain those streams of unearned, rentier, notional wealth as long as possible and convert them as fast as possible into hard assets (Caribbean islands, Cézanne landscapes, gold bars) that will theoretically insulate them from the wrath of history when the center no longer holds. The poor (and ever-poorer) formerly middle class suburban debt serfs, for all their travails, can’t imagine living any other way or putting less of their dwindling capital into the Happy Motoring matrix. The Maoist Social Justice Warrior students are enjoying the surprising power and thrills of coercion, especially as directed against their simpering professors and cringing college presidents anxious to sustain the illusion that something like learning takes place in the money laundering operations of higher ed. The Black Lives Matter crowd just wants to be excused from their failure to follow standards of decent behavior and to keep mau-mauing the other ethnic groups of America for material and political tribute.
It must be obvious that the next occupant of the White House will preside over the implosion of all these arrangements since, in the immortal words of economist Herb Stein, if something can’t go on forever, it will stop. So the only individuals left seeking the position are 1) An inarticulate reality TV buffoon; 2) a war-happy evangelical maniac; 3) a narcissistic monster of entitlement whose “turn” it is to hold the country’s highest office; and 4) a valiant but quixotic self-proclaimed socialist altacocker who might have walked off the set of Welcome Back Kotter, 40th Reunion Special. These are the ones left standing halfway to the conventions. Nobody else in his, her, it, xe, or they right mind wants to be handed this schwag-bag of doom.
On Saturday, the unstoppable Democratic shoo-in Hillary lost her 7th straight contest to the only theoretically electable Vermont Don Quixote, Bernie Sanders. This was a week after it was reported in The Huff-Po that her campaign crew literally bought-and-paid for the entire 50-state smorgasbord of super-delegates who will supposedly compensate for Hillary’s inability to otherwise win votes the old-fashioned way, by ballots cast. Wonder why that didn’t make nary a ripple in the media afterward? Because this is the land where anything goes and nothing matters, and that’s really all you need to know about how things work in the USA these days.
The Republican mandarins are apparently delirious over loose cannon Donald Trump’s flagging poll numbers in the remaining primary states. Should Trump fall on his face, do you think they’ll just hand Ted Cruz the Ronald Reagan Crown-and-Scepter set. (They’d rather lock Ted in the back of a Chevy cargo van with five Mexican narcos and a chain saw.) The GOP establishment insiders are already lighting cigars in preparation for the biggest smoke-filled room in US political history, Cleveland, July 20. But what poor shmo will they have to drag to the podium to get this odious thing done? Who wants to be the guy in the Oval Office when Janet Yellen comes in some muggy DC morning and says, “Uh, sir (ma’am)… that sucker you heard was gonna go down…? Well, uh, it just did.”
As for the Dems: they are about to anoint the most unpopular candidate of our lifetimes. The BLM mobs have promised to deliver mayhem to the streets of the party conventions and don’t think they will spare Hillary in Philary, no matter how many chitlins she scarfed down last month in Carolina. The action in Philly will unleash and reveal all the deadly power of President Obama’s NSA goon squads when the militarized police put down the riots, and Hillary will be tagged guilty by association.
And that is how Kim Kardashian gets elected president.
Saturday, April 09, 2016
Some News About Energy
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