New York's Highest Court to Hear Appeals in Fracking Case

To be decided: Whether towns can ban fracking.

All Aboard the MLK Bandwagon

Richard Land was inspired by Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Do tell!

He's the same man who cast aspersions on fellow clergymen Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as "race hustlers" for their protests of the handling of Trayvon Martin's killing. (25 September update: More on Richard Land's controversial, plagiariazed rant, for which he has never apologized.

The MLK Memorial, a slab of stone built w/$1 million donation from weapons manufacturer @BAESystems: http://t.co/sRpUoW6QpX #IHaveADrone

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 28, 2013

I saw part of tonight's Piers Morgan, where Tavis Smiley told the host that Martin Luther King opposed racism, poverty, and militarism. On a day when pundits and politicians both liberal and conservative mouthed platitudes about "the content of their character", etc., he reminded us that in the last five years of his life, MLK lost many friends and gained even more enemies as he stood against the Vietnam War and tried to organize poor people, even planning a Poor People's March.

2 September update: MLK is not around to dispute how people use him and his image to give their causes legitimacy. So we get things such as, MLK: Proud Republican or MLK: Proud Zionist. (Found through Max Blumenthal's Twitter.)

Kunstler: "The Self-Rehypothecation of Ben Bernanke"

Kunstler: "The Self-Rehypothecation of Ben Bernanke"

Also, I saw a trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street.

One Day at a Time

I didn't get a whole lot done today but I got some things done.

Part of an Interview with Max Blumenthal

Max Blumenthal on his background and political divergence from mainstream liberalism.

Glover Park

@thomaslawlor yeah it's a young Republican dumping ground

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 20, 2013

Update: The young, bright things of Washington, D.C. keep to their own parties.

What occasioned this exchange was a photo by Max of a decal on a truck. It read: IF YOU CAN'T STAND BEHIND OUR TROOPS FEEL FREE TO STAND IN FRONT OF THEM.

Kunstler: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide

Kunstler: "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide"

@MaxBlumenthal @davidsirota @GroverNorquist The progressive deal with the devil: fund big brother & big govt. And of course the wars.

— Justin Raimondo (@JustinRaimondo) August 18, 2013

Lawsuit on Church Rental of Public School Facilities

Ilind.net is following the lawsuit on church rentals of public school facilities.

Ilind.net: "Lawsuit on Church Rental of Public School Facilities is Definitely One to Watch."

20 August update: Ilind follows up with "Documents Back Up Charge of Massive Underpayment for Church Use of Schools."

22 August update: Ilind continues: "Over at Civil Beat: 'Jihad Against God'"

24 August update: Ilind.net:"Partial List of Churches Using Public School Facilities"

The Suburbs: A Post in Progress

Linh Dinh essay on the suburbs.

Looking at Amazon for Leigh Gallagher's new book The End of the Suburbs, I found a book I've never heard of, by Stanley Kurtz: Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. If I saw this book at the library book sale, then I might pick it up. But I can guess that it blames suburbs' woes not on any inherent vice but on an Alinskyite conspiracy. Well....

20 August update: Reporter Yasha Levine found a book by David Bach that summed up the get-rich-quick mentality, inflating the housing bubble in the process.

On another note, my family and I went on a day trip to Kona last Friday. I can't begin to describe what it looks like. Kona developed very differently than Hilo did, and so it's much more sprawly. (After the 1960 tidal wave, Hilo moved inland. Since this development happened after cars became more common, those areas were more convenient for drivers, not pedestrians, with wide streets and vast parking lots.) Even when I was a small kid vacationing in Kona, that was the case. But now there are more big-box stores, and on the hills, more houses. It's late summer so there were a lot more tourists. We checked out the Royal Kona Resort (f.k.a. the Kona Hilton): no bougainvillea spilling from the balconies, no roof at the porte-cochere, but they have little gates at the parking lots. I guess people have to pay for parking now (even guests?).

Nall vs. The American Spectator

Nancy Nall looks at a recent issue of The American Spectator, which was at the height of its popularity during the Clinton administration.

Bader's Dutch Shortbread Cookies

The company was based in Seattle.

Discussed here.

The Story of Trayvon Martin is Not Over

"Beyond Trayvon: The Great Divide"

http://mashable.com/2013/07/15/trayvon-martin-tumblr/

BlackAgendaReport.com article on why post-Trayvon Martin talk turns black kids into a problem to be solved.

28 August update: And George Zimmerman visited a gun factory recently! Me, I'd like to check out the Mauna Loa mac-nut factory sometime.

29 August update: George Zimmerman's wife Shellie admits committing perjury.

The wife of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer acquitted in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, revealed Thursday that the couple's marriage may be in trouble.

The day after Shellie Zimmerman was sentenced to one year probation and 100 hours of community service for lying at her husband's bond hearing, she appeared on Good Morning America expressing uncertainty about the future of their relationship.
...

4 September update: Zimmerman pulled over for driving 60 mph in a 45-mph-zone.

Kunstler's Essay on

"Class, Race, Hierarchy, and Social Relations in The Long Emergency" Part two is behind a paywall.

I don't agree with Kunstler's stand on gender relations. He basically says that without cheap, abundant oil to power things, housework will once again become toilsome, and that women will do most of it. Unsurprisingly, many women wrote to him and took issue with that prediction.

Despite that, it's still worth reading. And I might have more later.

George Zimmerman's Friend

http://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/08/the-medias-go-to-george-zimmerman-defender-is-a/195298

#confessyourunpopularopinion getting things handed doesnt make you spoiled, it makes you fortunate. Being unappreciative makes you spoiled.

— Yours Truly, A (@thearielrogers) August 8, 2013

The Public Shaming Tumblr

http://publicshaming.tumblr.com/

Going through the channels, I saw a mention of a new book by Leigh Gallagher on the end of traditional suburbs. This article says it may be premature to write off suburbia just yet.

Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons

On the sixty-eighth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (and three days from now, Nagasaki), here are Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, listed by Ward Wilson, in his book of the same title.

http://shameproject.com/report/recovered-history-selfhelp-propaganda-helped-banks-grease-real-estate-bubble/

"Mood and a World"

Apologies if I telegraphed any spoilers. But I think THE CANYONS is about mood and a world and not plot points. The best movies are.

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) August 3, 2013

"A Very Short History of Driving While Black"

A Very Short History of Driving While Black, an essay from an upcoming book, Killing Trayvon.

I was just thinking earlier today that the Trayvon Martin killing will be discussed and written about for years to come.

Kunstler: The Dreadful Summer Wind

by James Howard Kunstler

The world is swiftly moving to the dangerous place where nations won’t be able to do business with each other because they don’t trust the institutions that control wealth, which includes central banks, commercial banks, and governments. It will happen when the purveyors of international commodities, oil especially, refuse to accept the letters of credit issued by untrustworthy intermediaries. And when that dark moment arrives, nations will throw tantrums. The USA may be the loudest baby in the playpen.

The USA is veering into a psychological space not unlike the wilderness-of-mind that Germany found itself in back in the early 20th century: the deep woods of paranoia where our own failures will be projected onto the motives of others who mean to do us harm. Of course, even paranoiacs have enemies. There are quite a few others who would like to harm the USA, at least to bamboozle and paralyze us, to push back against our influence on their culture and economies. But the tendency here will be to magnify the supposed insults while ignoring our own suicidal behavior.

Historians will remark that it was a beautiful August with bright days and cool nights for sleeping, and the Hamptons were ablaze with self-satisfied egos, and that nobody was paying attention to all the mischief that was set in motion the previous spring, not to mention the many seasons of bad behavior that preceded it. And when they returned from vacation, lo, the world was in crisis. What a surprise.

The USA cannot come to terms with the salient facts staring us in the face: that we can’t run things as we’ve set them up to run. We refuse to take the obvious actions to set things up differently. Instead, we’ve tried to offset the accelerating losses of running our unrunable stuff with accounting fraud, aimed at pretending that everything still works. But the accounting fraud has only accelerated the gathering disorder in the banking system. That disorder has infected our currency and the infection is spreading to all currencies. What a surprise that the first pandemic to strike an overstressed global immune system was not bird flu after all, but a sickness of money.

Near the center of that money sickness was the blitzkrieg against gold and silver in the spring, when arrant serial selling dumps were executed against the money metals to un-money them. The net result was only that a lot of that ancient money flowed from the places pretending it was valueless to the places that never adopted that pretense. At stake in that rather massive movement was the supposed value of the other stuff that pretended to hold value, namely sovereign bonds, and especially the treasury paper issued by the USA. After all, US Treasury bonds and notes were, in the eyes of bankers, the functional equivalent of cash-in-hand. Alas, the world was starting to choke on it — not least the US central bank itself, which had been gorging at the monthly auction buffet for years and was now stuffed to the gills. In fact, it had grown too fat to even leave the room where the buffet had been set up.

Anyway you look at it, there is no escape from the looming crisis of confidence. The “primary dealer” banks and commodity exchanges behind the spring gold smash are out of tricks and out of gold to play tricks with. Their partner, the US Government has two tricks left: confiscation of gold in private hands a la Franklin Roosevelt’s ploy of 1933, or punitive taxes on private sales of gold. What worked in 1933 might not go over so well now, in a land full of preppers armed to the teeth and long-simmered in gall. It brings to mind the bumper-sticker about prying things from people’s cold dead hands. As for the tax gambit, I venture to say that many holders of gold hold it in expectation that there may shortly be no effective government left to depend on to do the wrong thing. Meanwhile, over in the land of paper wealth, the interest rate on the 10-year US Treasury bond clicks up a basis-point here, a basis-point there, like a remorselessly rising sea level. It won’t take many more clicks to put, for instance, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under water.

I felt sorry for President Obama, going about the country trying to appear historically heroic without doing a damn thing, really, to face down to the monsters in our own midst. But then one hears the rumor of Larry Summers’ imminent appointment to chair the Fed, and it is no longer possible to feel sorry for Obama, but rather to feel sorry for the nation laboring under such a conclave of would-be wizards.

I just don’t see how the world financial system doesn’t blow up this fall, when the digested remains of the last miso-glazed oyster tidbit passes through the cloacal fundament of the prettiest girl in Sag Harbor. When it does blow, at least the NSA will have its prepared “to-do” list, and then perhaps all the unemployed can be enlisted at $8 an hour to harass the rest of the people trying to go about their daily lives. The roar you hear in the distance this September will be the sound of banks crashing, followed by the silence of business-as-usual grinding to a halt. After that, the crackle of gunfire.

Hunter Bishop Joins BigIslandNow.com

http://bigislandnow.com/2013/08/02/veteran-journalist-hunter-bishop-joins-big-island-now/

A Daria Movie Must Happen

This would be better than 99% of the Hollywood product out there.

Correcting Forbes on the Demise of TheOilDrum.com

Correcting Forbes on the demise of TheOilDrum.com

1 August 2013

Today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of Bloody Monday (I'm typing this on 1 August at 8:50 p.m. Hawaii time). I have seen nothing commemorating the Hilo Massacre in the local paper or the local press in general.

According to Max Blumenthal on Mondoweiss, the online broadcast of Al Jazeera English will end with the launch of Al Jazeera America, formerly known as Current.

3 August update:

MT @andrewchappelle: Sad ...apparently AJAM's launch means an end to AJE radio programs in US as well. http://t.co/NhoaMFG664 via @kcet

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 4, 2013