Incorporated into D.J. Sir Charles's "Throwback House" mix, which I heard just now on MusicChoice Throwback Jams channel.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
"Once Was Paradise"
This local short film purports to show a post-oil Hawaii. I first heard about it Tuesday night when it was featured on an episode of Hawaii Reel Stories.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Don't go Garbo on us!
The event.
http://twitter.com/#!/BretEastonEllis/status/70020711078563840
@BretEastonEllis
Bret Easton Ellis
The last ever U.S. bookstore appearance of "Bret Easton Ellis" will be held at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on Thursday, May 19th, 2011...
The event.
http://twitter.com/#!/BretEastonEllis/status/70020711078563840
@BretEastonEllis
Bret Easton Ellis
The last ever U.S. bookstore appearance of "Bret Easton Ellis" will be held at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on Thursday, May 19th, 2011...
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Monday, May 09, 2011
"The Song of Spring"
The Song of Spring
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 9, 2011 9:28 AM
This is a nervous country. I'm not sure that hanging Osama Bin Laden on the White House wall like a coonskin really helps that much. Already, a familiar darkness sets back in, a loss of purpose of the kind that Lindsay Lohan must feel when she gets out of rehab. This is exactly the situation that empty rhetoric was designed for, so we got a week of talk about "bringing our nation together" when the truth is that Fox News would like to send Team Six into the oval office with guns blazing and helmet cams on "record."
We have no idea what we're going to do as a people and absolutely no credible thought on this emanates from the upper echelons. Leadership is more than telling people what they want to hear. In the middle ranks of society, a sullen docility rules, no matter how many affronts to reality we witness. You ride this wreck until the wheels come off and think of what to do next when you're sitting in the drainage ditch by the side of the road. There's no period in US history that matches this for lassitude.
I had a strange experience, driving north about fifty miles along Route 22 in eastern upstate New York, from Canaan to Cambridge, a very rural stretch that roughly parallels the Massachusetts and Vermont lines. Aside from a few convenience stores serving up gasoline, slim-jims, and pepsi, there was no visible economic activity in any of the towns along the way. The little town of Berlin, NY, was especially striking. A "for sale" sign stood forlornly in the parking lot of the lumber yard, the inventory sheds plainly empty of stock. The Seagroatt wholesale flower company - where, years ago, I picked up roses as the delivery guy for a Saratoga retailer - was shut down, with rows of empty greenhouses standing vacantly in the late day spring sunshine. The little downtown on a street one hundred feet off the highway was not only empty of businesses, but the old wooden buildings themselves had gone lopsided from a lack of regular caretaking, while the paint was all but gone. A number of old houses were still occupied - cars in the driveways - but they looked battered and worn, one bad winter from roof failure, and often with front yards strewn with plastic detritus.
One thing you didn't see a lot of along Route 22 was farming. Columbia, Rensselaer, and Washington Counties used to be all about farming. For much of the 20th century, it was dairy farming after electric milking machines and bulk refrigeration came in, and you could run larger herds. That's done now, since the giant factory farms in the Midwest and California started up, where the business model is you jam hundreds of cows into a giant steel shed where they stand hock deep in their own wastes all day long, with their necks locked into a stanchion, and it's "economic" to truck their milk back east. Who needs pastures with grass growing in them? Who needs a happy cow? That will change, by the way, yet it is one of the many things we're not having a conversation about in this demoralized land.
I saw teenagers here and there along the way, wherever a convenience store exerted its magnetic pull of sweet and salty snacks, the boys all wearing black outfits, those dumb-looking calf-length baby pants, and death-metal T-shirts. This must be the longest period of history for a particular teen fashion - going on two decades now? When even teenagers lack the enterprise to think up a new look (that is, to make a fresh statement about who they are), you know you're in a moribund society. I saw some young adults, too. You could tell more or less because they had young women and babies with them, and they were stopping for gas or groceries (if you call a sack full of Froot Loops, jerky, Mountain Dew, and Pringles "groceries"). Their costume innovation du jour is the cholo hat, a super-deluxe edition of a baseball cap with special embroidered emblems and a completely flat brim -presenting a look of equal parts idiocy and homicidal danger. The day was warm enough for "wife-beater" shirts, all the better for displaying tattoos, which are now universal among a working class that has no work and no expectation of work, ever. I tried to think of them as the descendants of men who had marched off to Cold Harbor, Virginia, and those who built the great engine that the American economy once was - but it was no go.
Up the highway, I passed through the classic Main Street town of Hoosick Falls, just outside of which were the haunts of "Grandma" Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses), the painter of rural scenes. Try as you will to find them, there are no characters in her paintings wearing cholo hats and no indication of tattoos under the stiff frock coats and bodices. The little burg's downtown has a quirky main street that doglegs twice in an interesting way that you rarely see in this country. It contained some wonderful old buildings that radiated confidence and noble aspiration from a time that is bygone. We couldn't reproduce one correctly now to save our lives. I don't think there was any business besides a pizza joint and a consignment shop along the whole length of the main street. All was vacancy and desolation in Hometown USA. The victory of the national chain stores is now complete. I hope our citizens are happy with the result.
The time will come when that disposition of things will change of course. If that time is at hand, few are aware of it. Perhaps they get an inkling in the moment when they realize that they have no money to spend in the chain store, even if they could buy enough gas to get there. The chain store executives must sense something themselves in those dark moments after closing when they have to send the day's report to Bentonville, Arkansas.
These are the spring sights one encounters in the background of a time in history when a society slides toward change nobody wants to believe in. Not believing is easy, especially when you don't pay attention. Meanwhile, somewhere off in a European bank, an executive reads a computer screen and gags on his lunch. In Shanghai, a Chinese government banking official wonders what it means when he lends money to an army general to buy an enterprise owned by the government. Down in the heart of Dixieland, Memphis drowns and New Orleans once more looks anxiously to the levees. Who was Osama Bin Laden, anyway?
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 9, 2011 9:28 AM
This is a nervous country. I'm not sure that hanging Osama Bin Laden on the White House wall like a coonskin really helps that much. Already, a familiar darkness sets back in, a loss of purpose of the kind that Lindsay Lohan must feel when she gets out of rehab. This is exactly the situation that empty rhetoric was designed for, so we got a week of talk about "bringing our nation together" when the truth is that Fox News would like to send Team Six into the oval office with guns blazing and helmet cams on "record."
We have no idea what we're going to do as a people and absolutely no credible thought on this emanates from the upper echelons. Leadership is more than telling people what they want to hear. In the middle ranks of society, a sullen docility rules, no matter how many affronts to reality we witness. You ride this wreck until the wheels come off and think of what to do next when you're sitting in the drainage ditch by the side of the road. There's no period in US history that matches this for lassitude.
I had a strange experience, driving north about fifty miles along Route 22 in eastern upstate New York, from Canaan to Cambridge, a very rural stretch that roughly parallels the Massachusetts and Vermont lines. Aside from a few convenience stores serving up gasoline, slim-jims, and pepsi, there was no visible economic activity in any of the towns along the way. The little town of Berlin, NY, was especially striking. A "for sale" sign stood forlornly in the parking lot of the lumber yard, the inventory sheds plainly empty of stock. The Seagroatt wholesale flower company - where, years ago, I picked up roses as the delivery guy for a Saratoga retailer - was shut down, with rows of empty greenhouses standing vacantly in the late day spring sunshine. The little downtown on a street one hundred feet off the highway was not only empty of businesses, but the old wooden buildings themselves had gone lopsided from a lack of regular caretaking, while the paint was all but gone. A number of old houses were still occupied - cars in the driveways - but they looked battered and worn, one bad winter from roof failure, and often with front yards strewn with plastic detritus.
One thing you didn't see a lot of along Route 22 was farming. Columbia, Rensselaer, and Washington Counties used to be all about farming. For much of the 20th century, it was dairy farming after electric milking machines and bulk refrigeration came in, and you could run larger herds. That's done now, since the giant factory farms in the Midwest and California started up, where the business model is you jam hundreds of cows into a giant steel shed where they stand hock deep in their own wastes all day long, with their necks locked into a stanchion, and it's "economic" to truck their milk back east. Who needs pastures with grass growing in them? Who needs a happy cow? That will change, by the way, yet it is one of the many things we're not having a conversation about in this demoralized land.
I saw teenagers here and there along the way, wherever a convenience store exerted its magnetic pull of sweet and salty snacks, the boys all wearing black outfits, those dumb-looking calf-length baby pants, and death-metal T-shirts. This must be the longest period of history for a particular teen fashion - going on two decades now? When even teenagers lack the enterprise to think up a new look (that is, to make a fresh statement about who they are), you know you're in a moribund society. I saw some young adults, too. You could tell more or less because they had young women and babies with them, and they were stopping for gas or groceries (if you call a sack full of Froot Loops, jerky, Mountain Dew, and Pringles "groceries"). Their costume innovation du jour is the cholo hat, a super-deluxe edition of a baseball cap with special embroidered emblems and a completely flat brim -presenting a look of equal parts idiocy and homicidal danger. The day was warm enough for "wife-beater" shirts, all the better for displaying tattoos, which are now universal among a working class that has no work and no expectation of work, ever. I tried to think of them as the descendants of men who had marched off to Cold Harbor, Virginia, and those who built the great engine that the American economy once was - but it was no go.
Up the highway, I passed through the classic Main Street town of Hoosick Falls, just outside of which were the haunts of "Grandma" Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses), the painter of rural scenes. Try as you will to find them, there are no characters in her paintings wearing cholo hats and no indication of tattoos under the stiff frock coats and bodices. The little burg's downtown has a quirky main street that doglegs twice in an interesting way that you rarely see in this country. It contained some wonderful old buildings that radiated confidence and noble aspiration from a time that is bygone. We couldn't reproduce one correctly now to save our lives. I don't think there was any business besides a pizza joint and a consignment shop along the whole length of the main street. All was vacancy and desolation in Hometown USA. The victory of the national chain stores is now complete. I hope our citizens are happy with the result.
The time will come when that disposition of things will change of course. If that time is at hand, few are aware of it. Perhaps they get an inkling in the moment when they realize that they have no money to spend in the chain store, even if they could buy enough gas to get there. The chain store executives must sense something themselves in those dark moments after closing when they have to send the day's report to Bentonville, Arkansas.
These are the spring sights one encounters in the background of a time in history when a society slides toward change nobody wants to believe in. Not believing is easy, especially when you don't pay attention. Meanwhile, somewhere off in a European bank, an executive reads a computer screen and gags on his lunch. In Shanghai, a Chinese government banking official wonders what it means when he lends money to an army general to buy an enterprise owned by the government. Down in the heart of Dixieland, Memphis drowns and New Orleans once more looks anxiously to the levees. Who was Osama Bin Laden, anyway?
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
The Banana Peel of Destiny
The Banana Peel of Destiny
By James Howard Kunstler
on April 25, 2011 9:21 AM
That was a cute move by President Obama last week, calling out the "oil speculators" with a memo to his Attorney General, Eric Holder. The President proved a few weeks ago, in his energy speech to the nation, that he doesn't understand how these resources are produced and traded. Consequently, the people he addressed remain clueless, but ticked off nonetheless. And the logic of politics now compels Mr. Obama to call out the dogs on... people who make money trading paper claims on oil?
Funny, he didn't show any interest the past two-plus years in people who make money swindling taxpayers via booby-trapped Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps. Maybe those things sound too abstruse to get excited about - but believe me, it was a heckuva lot more money. In fact, a case could be mounted by God's attorney general - if he has one - that Mr. Obama abetted a gigantic conspiracy in fraudulent financial paper which makes the oil speculators look like shoplifters in a Kentucky WalMart.
For those of you interested in the reality side of things, here's the scoop: The price of oil is going to go way up, and way down, and way up again, and way down again until everyone is too broke to ask for any, and companies are too ruined to go get it for them, and governments are too broken to interfere in the process.
The oil speculators are normal characters in a stressed market doing what needs to be done on the margins of "price discovery." The trouble arises when price discovery occurs in turbulent times and places, for instance, when people in a part of the world called the Middle East & North Africa (MENA, for short), start rioting against their governments, which has been the case persistently for a couple of months now - a region that contains about half the world's oil reserves. So interested observers conclude there's a fair chance that oil production there might face impediments to normal operations.
And indeed that is already the case in Libya, where some of the world's lightest, creamiest, sweetest crude oil has stopped flowing into pipelines and tanker ships. With protesters being slaughtered by the score in Syria, and Yemen's president about to get a one-way ticket to Palookaville, and the Saud family cowering in their solid-gold senior housing facility, and affairs looking sketchy at best in other nations around that neighborhood, speculators at the margins have called for higher oil prices.
You will recall, perhaps, that hoary old concept, the "bumpy plateau" of the peak oil story. This was the idea that the actual tippy-top "peak" of peak oil, studied at close scale, would actually take the form of a raggedy line representing the interplay between supply, demand, and most importantly the frantic psychological response of humans operating in markets. It was clear that economies would stagger under the burden of high oil prices, and economic activity would contract, and people would use less oil and the price would go down. When prices were real low again, people would resume buying more oil (and other stuff) and economic activity would mount and oil prices would go up again. We knew this would happen for a couple-few cycles, and that then things would get... more interesting.
We also knew that this would occur with some "ratcheting side effects" - that with each cycle of up-and-down oil prices, against the background of permanent a decline in easy-to-get oil, there would be less money available to find, drill for, and produce future harder-to-get oil. What we did not know - at least in the morbid clerisies where academic economists spawn - was that the permanent decline in easy-to-get oil would introduce gross disorder into our money systems, nor that we would incessantly lie to ourselves about the health of our money systems, until their operations were so fatally compromised and impaired that their failure was likely to put us out-of-business even before worse imbalances came to pass in real oil supply and demand.
Of course, we also didn't know that MENA would explode in political unrest in early 2011, or that the earth below the Japan Trench would shudder badly, and no doubt there are other things we can't predict that will affect the global economic dynamic. But you do what you can with what you've got to work with, and here in the USA collective intelligence space, we're not doing such a great job.
Tensions keep rising around the distortions and perversions now loose in the money system. You can get a headache thinking about inflation and deflation - but either way you stand to end up broke. Either you'll be rolling in worthless money or you won't have any money. The banana peel of destiny can send you flying in either direction, or first one and then the other.
We've done a poor job of managing contraction, which is the fate of societies that have piled up too much complexity. All of our schemes for grappling with this seem to boil down to one foolish obsession: how can we keep all the cars running? We're not going to, of course, but we refuse to even think about anything else. President Obama is merely reflecting the foolish obsession of the public.
Whenever I give a talk at a meeting or a college, somebody gets up and censoriously asks we why I can't present "solutions" to the problems of contraction we face. I do of course. The audience just doesn't hear them because I don't believe it is possible to keep all the cars running and I don't pretend that any of the schemes currently circulating will avail. To go a step further, I'm convinced that we are committing cultural suicide by using all the cars the way we do, so I am not the one to look to for rescue remedies in this department. In fact, I am serenely persuaded that we would vastly improve our chances of remaining civilized if we gave up on mass motoring and deployed ourselves on the landscape differently.
By the way, that will be the eventual outcome anyway, whether we like it or not.
In the meantime, prepare for thrills and chills in the alternate universe of money. The phase of that story we're approaching looks more and more like the final scenes of the old Todd Browning horror movie about the uprising in a freak show. America can have the role of the pinhead, grinning vacantly while the other freaks burn the joint down.
By James Howard Kunstler
on April 25, 2011 9:21 AM
That was a cute move by President Obama last week, calling out the "oil speculators" with a memo to his Attorney General, Eric Holder. The President proved a few weeks ago, in his energy speech to the nation, that he doesn't understand how these resources are produced and traded. Consequently, the people he addressed remain clueless, but ticked off nonetheless. And the logic of politics now compels Mr. Obama to call out the dogs on... people who make money trading paper claims on oil?
Funny, he didn't show any interest the past two-plus years in people who make money swindling taxpayers via booby-trapped Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps. Maybe those things sound too abstruse to get excited about - but believe me, it was a heckuva lot more money. In fact, a case could be mounted by God's attorney general - if he has one - that Mr. Obama abetted a gigantic conspiracy in fraudulent financial paper which makes the oil speculators look like shoplifters in a Kentucky WalMart.
For those of you interested in the reality side of things, here's the scoop: The price of oil is going to go way up, and way down, and way up again, and way down again until everyone is too broke to ask for any, and companies are too ruined to go get it for them, and governments are too broken to interfere in the process.
The oil speculators are normal characters in a stressed market doing what needs to be done on the margins of "price discovery." The trouble arises when price discovery occurs in turbulent times and places, for instance, when people in a part of the world called the Middle East & North Africa (MENA, for short), start rioting against their governments, which has been the case persistently for a couple of months now - a region that contains about half the world's oil reserves. So interested observers conclude there's a fair chance that oil production there might face impediments to normal operations.
And indeed that is already the case in Libya, where some of the world's lightest, creamiest, sweetest crude oil has stopped flowing into pipelines and tanker ships. With protesters being slaughtered by the score in Syria, and Yemen's president about to get a one-way ticket to Palookaville, and the Saud family cowering in their solid-gold senior housing facility, and affairs looking sketchy at best in other nations around that neighborhood, speculators at the margins have called for higher oil prices.
You will recall, perhaps, that hoary old concept, the "bumpy plateau" of the peak oil story. This was the idea that the actual tippy-top "peak" of peak oil, studied at close scale, would actually take the form of a raggedy line representing the interplay between supply, demand, and most importantly the frantic psychological response of humans operating in markets. It was clear that economies would stagger under the burden of high oil prices, and economic activity would contract, and people would use less oil and the price would go down. When prices were real low again, people would resume buying more oil (and other stuff) and economic activity would mount and oil prices would go up again. We knew this would happen for a couple-few cycles, and that then things would get... more interesting.
We also knew that this would occur with some "ratcheting side effects" - that with each cycle of up-and-down oil prices, against the background of permanent a decline in easy-to-get oil, there would be less money available to find, drill for, and produce future harder-to-get oil. What we did not know - at least in the morbid clerisies where academic economists spawn - was that the permanent decline in easy-to-get oil would introduce gross disorder into our money systems, nor that we would incessantly lie to ourselves about the health of our money systems, until their operations were so fatally compromised and impaired that their failure was likely to put us out-of-business even before worse imbalances came to pass in real oil supply and demand.
Of course, we also didn't know that MENA would explode in political unrest in early 2011, or that the earth below the Japan Trench would shudder badly, and no doubt there are other things we can't predict that will affect the global economic dynamic. But you do what you can with what you've got to work with, and here in the USA collective intelligence space, we're not doing such a great job.
Tensions keep rising around the distortions and perversions now loose in the money system. You can get a headache thinking about inflation and deflation - but either way you stand to end up broke. Either you'll be rolling in worthless money or you won't have any money. The banana peel of destiny can send you flying in either direction, or first one and then the other.
We've done a poor job of managing contraction, which is the fate of societies that have piled up too much complexity. All of our schemes for grappling with this seem to boil down to one foolish obsession: how can we keep all the cars running? We're not going to, of course, but we refuse to even think about anything else. President Obama is merely reflecting the foolish obsession of the public.
Whenever I give a talk at a meeting or a college, somebody gets up and censoriously asks we why I can't present "solutions" to the problems of contraction we face. I do of course. The audience just doesn't hear them because I don't believe it is possible to keep all the cars running and I don't pretend that any of the schemes currently circulating will avail. To go a step further, I'm convinced that we are committing cultural suicide by using all the cars the way we do, so I am not the one to look to for rescue remedies in this department. In fact, I am serenely persuaded that we would vastly improve our chances of remaining civilized if we gave up on mass motoring and deployed ourselves on the landscape differently.
By the way, that will be the eventual outcome anyway, whether we like it or not.
In the meantime, prepare for thrills and chills in the alternate universe of money. The phase of that story we're approaching looks more and more like the final scenes of the old Todd Browning horror movie about the uprising in a freak show. America can have the role of the pinhead, grinning vacantly while the other freaks burn the joint down.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
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