Saturday, September 30, 2017
could this society possibly allocate resources any worse https://t.co/mLOQ6oa1HB
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) September 30, 2017
Read Kunstler.
Friday, September 29, 2017
A Foreshadowing of the Long Emergency in Puerto Rico
Trump: Puerto Rico recovery is going great
— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) September 30, 2017
On-ground aid worker w/admin: this is "societal collapse"https://t.co/DzKxwxy48m pic.twitter.com/F9rprSdVn8
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
"Spent the Day in Bed."
Laid off from my job today, which means I can watch "The Deuce" right now, in broad daylight. IN MY UNDERWEAR. So I'm gonna.
— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) September 25, 2017
Why the NFL should have stayed in bed. https://t.co/MLADaqSfe8 pic.twitter.com/vMCLkACslp
— armond white (@3xchair) September 25, 2017
And maybe she'll listen to this during/after that.
Maddening.
— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) September 27, 2017
3,000 shipping containers packed with food water & medicene have been sitting at the port in Puerto Rico since Saturday pic.twitter.com/LJ0ETpmnOf
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Hack Has More Than One Meaning.
People who insist on using "hack" this way ("life hacks") should be hacked to death.
— TBogg (@tbogg) September 26, 2017
No mercy. pic.twitter.com/QPT46gSNvL
No. And Lifehacker is useful. See below.
A happy thing to come across: DESERT ORACLE RADIO in @Lifehacker's Favorite Podcasts. Thanks @caitschneider! https://t.co/kO3OGOJRNV pic.twitter.com/ZkL8jbb4yW
— DESERT ORACLE (@Desert_Oracle) September 26, 2017
The Way Ahead
Nancy Nall was just laid off from her job at the online Bridge magazine. Many talented journalists are out of work. What is a solution? Perhaps a cooperative or collective.
Saturday, September 23, 2017
This is the second time today I've encountered a thread of yours. You are a treasure! pic.twitter.com/XIXpvxwAJ2
— GhostlyShay 🌒🚂🖖🏻 (@RustyLocomotive) September 21, 2017
Friday, September 22, 2017
Ah, so THAT'S what low humidity feels like! #SanDiegoIsNotBatonRouge
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) September 21, 2017
Wouldn't it be something if he and Tom Boggioni ("tbogg") met face to face.
Kunstler: In the Murk.
Kunstler: In the Murk.
Puerto Rico, You lovely island,
Island of tropical breezes….
— West Side Story
Welcome to America’s first experiment in the World Made By Hand lifestyle. Where else is it going? Watch closely.
Ricardo Ramos, the director of the beleaguered, government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, told CNN Thursday that the island’s power infrastructure had been basically “destroyed” and will take months to come back
“Basically destroyed.” That’s about as basic as it gets civilization-wise.
Residents, Mr. Ramos said, would need to change the way they cook and cool off. For entertainment, old-school would be the best approach, he said. “It’s a good time for dads to buy a ball and a glove and change the way you entertain your children.”
Meaning, I guess, no more playing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard on-screen because you’ll be living it — though one wonders where will the money come from to buy the ball and glove? Few Puerto Ricans will be going to work with the power off. And the island’s public finances were in disarray sufficient to drive it into federal court last May to set in motion a legal receivership that amounted to bankruptcy in all but name. The commonwealth, a US territory, was in default for $74 billion in bonded debt, plus another $49 billion in unfunded pension obligations.
So, Puerto Rico already faced a crisis pre-Hurricane Maria, with its dodgy electric grid and crumbling infrastructure: roads, bridges, water and sewage systems. Bankruptcy put it in a poor position to issue new bonds for public works which are generally paid for with public borrowing. Who, exactly, would buy the new bonds? I hear readers whispering, “the Federal Reserve.” Which is a pretty good clue to understanding the circle-jerk that American finance has become.
Some sort of bailout is unavoidable, though President Trump tweeted “No Bailout for Puerto Rico” after the May bankruptcy proceeding. Things have changed and the shelf-life of Trumpian tweets is famously brief. But the crisis may actually strain the ability of the federal government to pretend it can cover the cost of every calamity that strikes the nation — at least not without casting doubt on the soundness of the dollar. And not a few bonafide states are also whirling around the bankruptcy drain: Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Kentucky.
Constitutionally states are not permitted to declare bankruptcy, though counties and municipalities can. Congress would have to change the law to allow it. But states can default on their bonds and other obligations. Surely there would be some kind of fiscal and political hell to pay if they go that route. Nobody really knows what might happen in a state as big and complex as Illinois, which has been paying its way for decades by borrowing from the future. Suddenly, the future is here and nobody has a plan for it.
The case for the federal government is not so different. It, too, only manages to pay its bondholders via bookkeeping hocuspocus, and its colossal unfunded obligations for social security and Medicare make Illinois’ predicament look like a skipped car payment.
In the meantime — and it looks like it’s going to be a long meantime — Puerto Rico is back in the 18th Century, minus the practical skills and simpler furnishings for living that way of life, and with a population many times beyond the carrying capacity of the island in that era. For instance, how many houses get their water from cisterns designed to catch rain runoff? How many communities across the island are walkable? (It looks like the gas stations will be down for quite a while.) I’ve been there and much of the island is as suburbanized as New Jersey — thanks to the desire to be up-to-date with the mainland, and the willingness of officials to make it look like that.
We’re only two days past the Hurricane Maria’s direct hit on Puerto Rico and there is no phone communication across the island, so we barely know what has happened. We’re weeks past Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and news of the consequences from those two events has strangely fallen out of the news media. Where have the people gone who lost everything? The news blackout is as complete and strange as the darkness that has descended on Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico, You lovely island,
Island of tropical breezes….
— West Side Story
Welcome to America’s first experiment in the World Made By Hand lifestyle. Where else is it going? Watch closely.
Ricardo Ramos, the director of the beleaguered, government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, told CNN Thursday that the island’s power infrastructure had been basically “destroyed” and will take months to come back
“Basically destroyed.” That’s about as basic as it gets civilization-wise.
Residents, Mr. Ramos said, would need to change the way they cook and cool off. For entertainment, old-school would be the best approach, he said. “It’s a good time for dads to buy a ball and a glove and change the way you entertain your children.”
Meaning, I guess, no more playing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard on-screen because you’ll be living it — though one wonders where will the money come from to buy the ball and glove? Few Puerto Ricans will be going to work with the power off. And the island’s public finances were in disarray sufficient to drive it into federal court last May to set in motion a legal receivership that amounted to bankruptcy in all but name. The commonwealth, a US territory, was in default for $74 billion in bonded debt, plus another $49 billion in unfunded pension obligations.
So, Puerto Rico already faced a crisis pre-Hurricane Maria, with its dodgy electric grid and crumbling infrastructure: roads, bridges, water and sewage systems. Bankruptcy put it in a poor position to issue new bonds for public works which are generally paid for with public borrowing. Who, exactly, would buy the new bonds? I hear readers whispering, “the Federal Reserve.” Which is a pretty good clue to understanding the circle-jerk that American finance has become.
Some sort of bailout is unavoidable, though President Trump tweeted “No Bailout for Puerto Rico” after the May bankruptcy proceeding. Things have changed and the shelf-life of Trumpian tweets is famously brief. But the crisis may actually strain the ability of the federal government to pretend it can cover the cost of every calamity that strikes the nation — at least not without casting doubt on the soundness of the dollar. And not a few bonafide states are also whirling around the bankruptcy drain: Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Kentucky.
Constitutionally states are not permitted to declare bankruptcy, though counties and municipalities can. Congress would have to change the law to allow it. But states can default on their bonds and other obligations. Surely there would be some kind of fiscal and political hell to pay if they go that route. Nobody really knows what might happen in a state as big and complex as Illinois, which has been paying its way for decades by borrowing from the future. Suddenly, the future is here and nobody has a plan for it.
The case for the federal government is not so different. It, too, only manages to pay its bondholders via bookkeeping hocuspocus, and its colossal unfunded obligations for social security and Medicare make Illinois’ predicament look like a skipped car payment.
In the meantime — and it looks like it’s going to be a long meantime — Puerto Rico is back in the 18th Century, minus the practical skills and simpler furnishings for living that way of life, and with a population many times beyond the carrying capacity of the island in that era. For instance, how many houses get their water from cisterns designed to catch rain runoff? How many communities across the island are walkable? (It looks like the gas stations will be down for quite a while.) I’ve been there and much of the island is as suburbanized as New Jersey — thanks to the desire to be up-to-date with the mainland, and the willingness of officials to make it look like that.
We’re only two days past the Hurricane Maria’s direct hit on Puerto Rico and there is no phone communication across the island, so we barely know what has happened. We’re weeks past Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and news of the consequences from those two events has strangely fallen out of the news media. Where have the people gone who lost everything? The news blackout is as complete and strange as the darkness that has descended on Puerto Rico.
Thursday, September 21, 2017
On The Village Voice Ending Its Print Version
To those bemoaning the death of the hard copy edition of the Village Voice -- welcome to the 21st century. https://t.co/XJd8xyDsGJ
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) August 22, 2017
I guess I'm just not there yet, Kurt - still proudly working for a daily newspaper 🤷🏾♀️
— Michele Canty (@DPMCanty) August 22, 2017
I use to read the Village Voice while waiting for my teenage daughter's Sat. GT classes to end at Montclair Univ. in NJ. Loved it & miss it.
— Jorga Stevens (@JorgaStevens) August 22, 2017
Or not. I work for a startup in montclair a new PRINT paper.
— gwenorel (@gwenorel1) August 22, 2017
shut up kurt
— nine binch nails (@hombrewrecker) August 22, 2017
Wrote for the Voice in the 80s.had great editors who helped me become a better writer
— Kate Walter (@KateWalter12) August 23, 2017
Brilliant insight dude. Stating the obvious in such an arrogant fashion is a dick move.
— Bruce McGuire (@dunord) August 23, 2017
👓👓Electronic communications are not easy to read nor are they anywhere near as pleasant to read. The joy of reading is being lost.
— Chetta Yoda (@chettayoda) August 22, 2017
That special day every month in my 80s Midwest City. Stop and downtown at the newsstand and grab a copy of the voice before School
— ArriannaEX (@ArriannaEX) August 22, 2017
There was a similar development at the Phoenix. A few months later it shut down completely
— दिनेश कुलकर्णी (@TurgidsonBuck) August 22, 2017
What about accesibilty + analog privacy, Kurt? This was kind of an obvious hot take. One day we are going to want print back. Both can exist
— ✦❋ David Hackett ✺✧ (@sangio_davese) August 22, 2017
So far, I kind of hate the 21st century....
— The 🍊💩🐒 Must Go (@Denaugurate45) August 22, 2017
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
🚨@BillCassidy is all over TV grossly misrepresenting impacts of #GrahamCassidy
— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) September 20, 2017
We made a myth/fact table debunking him
Pls share widely pic.twitter.com/Z8qtgMriv2
Monday, September 18, 2017
Friday, September 15, 2017
It's #frenchiefriday, so Frieda the #frenchie is treating herself to a spa day. How do you spoil yourself?#mydogiscutest #frenchbulldog pic.twitter.com/gzc1b8IzlY
— My Dog Is Cutest (@mydogiscutest) September 15, 2017
On trying to find better ways to talk about medieval religion, instead of repeating outdated stereotypes and myths https://t.co/gxB7MUF2Cu pic.twitter.com/01Kfdta2uA
— Clerk of Oxford (@ClerkofOxford) September 14, 2017
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Amnesty, "We Have Love", "Free Your Mind", and "Mister President."
I found this group's music just now.
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
The Reverend Khader El-Yateem
We're one of the hottest races in NYC according to @Gothamist. Get out there and vote so we can bring this home.https://t.co/A9KDrf9lfy
— Rev.Khader El-Yateem (@KhaderElyateem) September 12, 2017
Feeling so proud tonight. Honored and humbled. We came so close w/ limited institutional support. Thank you to all of our volunteers.
— Rev.Khader El-Yateem (@KhaderElyateem) September 13, 2017
More to follow.
Monday, September 11, 2017
Kunstler: In the Dark.
Kunstler: In the Dark.
The stock market is zooming this morning on the news that only 5.7 million people in Florida will have to do without air conditioning, hot showers, and Keurig mochachinos at dawn’s early light Monday, Sept 11, 2017. I’m mindful that the news cycle right after a hurricane goes kind of blank for a day or more as dazed and confused citizens venture out to assess the damage. For now, there is very little hard information on the Web waves. Does Key West still exist? Hard to tell. We’ll know more this evening.
The one-two punch of Harvey and Irma did afford the folks-in-charge of the nation’s affairs a sly opportunity to get rid of that annoying debt ceiling problem. This is the law that established a limit on how much debt the Federal Reserve could “buy” from the national government. Some of you may be thinking: buy debt? Why would anybody want to buy somebody’s debt? Well, you see, this is securitized debt, i.e. bonds issued by the US Treasury, which pay interest, and so there is the incentive to buy it. Anyway, there used to — back in the days when the real interest rate stayed positive after deducting the percent of running inflation. This is where the situation gets interesting.
The debt ceiling law supposedly set limits on how much bonded debt the government could issue (how much it could borrow) so it wouldn’t go hog wild spending money it didn’t have. Which is exactly what happened despite the debt limit because the “ceiling” got raised about a hundred times though the 20th century into the 21st so that the accumulated debt stands around $20 trillion.
Rational people recognize this $20 trillion for the supernatural scale of obligation it represents, and understand that it will never be paid back, so, what the hell? Why not just drop the pretense, but keep on working this racket of the government borrowing as much money as it wants, and the Federal Reserve creating that money (or “money”) on its computers to infinity. Seems to work so far.
Rational people would also suspect that at some point, something might have to give. For instance, the value of the dollars that the debt is issued in. If the value of dollars goes down, then the real value of the bonds issued in dollars goes down, and as that happens the many various holders of bonds already issued — individuals, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds of foreign countries — will have a strong incentive to dump the bonds as fast as possible. Especially if backstage magic by the Fed and its handmaidens, the “primary dealer” banks, keeps working to suppress the interest rates of these bonds at all costs.
Would the Federal Reserve then vacuum up every bond that others are dumping on the market? They would certainly try. The Bank of Japan has been doing just that with its own government’s bonds to no apparent ill effect, though you kind of wonder what happens when a snake eating its own tail finally reaches its head. What’s left, exactly, after it eats that, too? My own guess would be three words: you go medieval. I mean literally. No more engines, electric lights, central heating….
In this land, we face a situation in which both the value of money and the cost of borrowing money would be, at last, completely detached from reality — reality being the real cost and value of all goods and services exchanged for money. Voila: a king-hell currency crisis and the disruption of trade on the most macro level imaginable. Also, surely, a massive disruption in government services, including social security and medicare, but extending way beyond that. And then we go medieval, too. The mule replaces the Ford F-150. And The New York Times finds something to write about besides Russia and trannies. [A gratuitously nasty comment.--P.Z.]
The value of money and the cost of borrowing it is about as fundamental as it gets in a so-called advanced economy. You can screw around with a lot of things running a society, but when that goes, you’re flirting seriously with anarchy. In the meantime, we’ll see how the social glue holds things together in those parts of Florida that are entering a preview of medieval attractions in the electrical blackout days ahead.
The stock market is zooming this morning on the news that only 5.7 million people in Florida will have to do without air conditioning, hot showers, and Keurig mochachinos at dawn’s early light Monday, Sept 11, 2017. I’m mindful that the news cycle right after a hurricane goes kind of blank for a day or more as dazed and confused citizens venture out to assess the damage. For now, there is very little hard information on the Web waves. Does Key West still exist? Hard to tell. We’ll know more this evening.
The one-two punch of Harvey and Irma did afford the folks-in-charge of the nation’s affairs a sly opportunity to get rid of that annoying debt ceiling problem. This is the law that established a limit on how much debt the Federal Reserve could “buy” from the national government. Some of you may be thinking: buy debt? Why would anybody want to buy somebody’s debt? Well, you see, this is securitized debt, i.e. bonds issued by the US Treasury, which pay interest, and so there is the incentive to buy it. Anyway, there used to — back in the days when the real interest rate stayed positive after deducting the percent of running inflation. This is where the situation gets interesting.
The debt ceiling law supposedly set limits on how much bonded debt the government could issue (how much it could borrow) so it wouldn’t go hog wild spending money it didn’t have. Which is exactly what happened despite the debt limit because the “ceiling” got raised about a hundred times though the 20th century into the 21st so that the accumulated debt stands around $20 trillion.
Rational people recognize this $20 trillion for the supernatural scale of obligation it represents, and understand that it will never be paid back, so, what the hell? Why not just drop the pretense, but keep on working this racket of the government borrowing as much money as it wants, and the Federal Reserve creating that money (or “money”) on its computers to infinity. Seems to work so far.
Rational people would also suspect that at some point, something might have to give. For instance, the value of the dollars that the debt is issued in. If the value of dollars goes down, then the real value of the bonds issued in dollars goes down, and as that happens the many various holders of bonds already issued — individuals, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds of foreign countries — will have a strong incentive to dump the bonds as fast as possible. Especially if backstage magic by the Fed and its handmaidens, the “primary dealer” banks, keeps working to suppress the interest rates of these bonds at all costs.
Would the Federal Reserve then vacuum up every bond that others are dumping on the market? They would certainly try. The Bank of Japan has been doing just that with its own government’s bonds to no apparent ill effect, though you kind of wonder what happens when a snake eating its own tail finally reaches its head. What’s left, exactly, after it eats that, too? My own guess would be three words: you go medieval. I mean literally. No more engines, electric lights, central heating….
In this land, we face a situation in which both the value of money and the cost of borrowing money would be, at last, completely detached from reality — reality being the real cost and value of all goods and services exchanged for money. Voila: a king-hell currency crisis and the disruption of trade on the most macro level imaginable. Also, surely, a massive disruption in government services, including social security and medicare, but extending way beyond that. And then we go medieval, too. The mule replaces the Ford F-150. And The New York Times finds something to write about besides Russia and trannies. [A gratuitously nasty comment.--P.Z.]
The value of money and the cost of borrowing it is about as fundamental as it gets in a so-called advanced economy. You can screw around with a lot of things running a society, but when that goes, you’re flirting seriously with anarchy. In the meantime, we’ll see how the social glue holds things together in those parts of Florida that are entering a preview of medieval attractions in the electrical blackout days ahead.
Saturday, September 09, 2017
Friday, September 08, 2017
Kunstler: Swamp Fever.
Kunstler: Swamp Fever.
Map of section of Florida.
Further proof, as if more were needed, that God is rather cross with the world’s number one exceptional nation: Hurricane Irma is tracking for a direct hit on Disney World. In the immortal words of the Talking Heads: This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around.
Houston is still soggy and punch-drunk, with a fantastic explosion of breeding mosquitoes, and otherwise it’s not even in the news anymore. This week, the cable networks had their scant crews of reporters scuttling around Florida, asking the people here and there about their feelings. “What’s gonna happen is gonna happen….” I think I heard that one about sixty times, and there’s actually no disputing the truth of it.
For the moment, though (Friday morning), it’s a little hard to calculate the effect of a complete scrape-off, wash, and rinse of the state of Florida vis-à-vis the ongoing viability of the US economy. There’s going to be a big hole with dollars rushing into it and that will likely prompt the combined powers of the US Treasury, congress, and the Federal Reserve to materialize tens of billions of new dollars. Overnight the DXY plunged to a new low for the year. {Tweet about this embedded below by me.--P.Z.]
Am I the only observer wondering if Irma may be a fatal blow to the banking system? The mind reels at the insurance implications of what’s about to happen. Urgent obligations triggered by an event of this scale can’t possibly be serviced. Look for it to snap the chain of counterparty leverage that has been propping up the banks, insurers, and pension funds on mere promises for years on end. Finance, both private and public, has been feeding off unreality since well before the tremor of 2008. The destruction of Florida (and whatever else stands in the way up the line) will be as real as it gets.
You’ve heard the old argument, I’m sure, that a natural disaster turns out to be a boon for the economy because so many people are employed fixing the damage. It’s not true, of course. Replacing things of value that have been destroyed with new things is just another version of the old Polish Blanket Gag: guy wants to make his blanket longer, so he cuts a foot off the top and sews it onto the bottom. The capital expended has to come from something and somewhere, and in this case it probably represents the much talked-about necessary infrastructure spending that is badly needed for bridges, roads, water and sewer systems, et cetera, in all the other parts of the USA that haven’t been hit by storms. Instead, these places and the things in them will quietly inch closer to criticality without drawing much notice.
The second major weather disaster this year may not be enough to induce holdouts to reconsider the issue of climate change, but it ought to provoke some questioning about the development pattern known as suburban sprawl, which even in its pristine form can be described as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Surely there will be some debate as to whether Florida, or at least parts of it, gets rebuilt at all. The wilderness of strip malls, housing subdivisions, and condo clusters deployed along the seemingly endless six-lane highways that accumulated in the post-war orgy of development was an affront to human nature, if not to a deity, if one exists. There are much better ways to build towns and we know how to do it. Ask the shnooks who paid a hundred bucks to walk down Disney’s Main Street the week before last.
Apart from all that remains the personal tragedy that awaits, the losses of many lifetimes of work invested in things of value, of homes, of meaning, and of life itself. Many people who evacuated will return to… nothing, and perhaps many of them will not want to stay in such a fragile place. But the America they roam into in search of a place to re-settle is going to be a more fragile place, too. A week or so after Irma has gone away, the ill-feeling that heaps this country like a swamp fever will still be there, driving the new American madness into precincts yet unknown.
Map of section of Florida.
Further proof, as if more were needed, that God is rather cross with the world’s number one exceptional nation: Hurricane Irma is tracking for a direct hit on Disney World. In the immortal words of the Talking Heads: This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around.
Houston is still soggy and punch-drunk, with a fantastic explosion of breeding mosquitoes, and otherwise it’s not even in the news anymore. This week, the cable networks had their scant crews of reporters scuttling around Florida, asking the people here and there about their feelings. “What’s gonna happen is gonna happen….” I think I heard that one about sixty times, and there’s actually no disputing the truth of it.
For the moment, though (Friday morning), it’s a little hard to calculate the effect of a complete scrape-off, wash, and rinse of the state of Florida vis-à-vis the ongoing viability of the US economy. There’s going to be a big hole with dollars rushing into it and that will likely prompt the combined powers of the US Treasury, congress, and the Federal Reserve to materialize tens of billions of new dollars. Overnight the DXY plunged to a new low for the year. {Tweet about this embedded below by me.--P.Z.]
Am I the only observer wondering if Irma may be a fatal blow to the banking system? The mind reels at the insurance implications of what’s about to happen. Urgent obligations triggered by an event of this scale can’t possibly be serviced. Look for it to snap the chain of counterparty leverage that has been propping up the banks, insurers, and pension funds on mere promises for years on end. Finance, both private and public, has been feeding off unreality since well before the tremor of 2008. The destruction of Florida (and whatever else stands in the way up the line) will be as real as it gets.
You’ve heard the old argument, I’m sure, that a natural disaster turns out to be a boon for the economy because so many people are employed fixing the damage. It’s not true, of course. Replacing things of value that have been destroyed with new things is just another version of the old Polish Blanket Gag: guy wants to make his blanket longer, so he cuts a foot off the top and sews it onto the bottom. The capital expended has to come from something and somewhere, and in this case it probably represents the much talked-about necessary infrastructure spending that is badly needed for bridges, roads, water and sewer systems, et cetera, in all the other parts of the USA that haven’t been hit by storms. Instead, these places and the things in them will quietly inch closer to criticality without drawing much notice.
The second major weather disaster this year may not be enough to induce holdouts to reconsider the issue of climate change, but it ought to provoke some questioning about the development pattern known as suburban sprawl, which even in its pristine form can be described as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Surely there will be some debate as to whether Florida, or at least parts of it, gets rebuilt at all. The wilderness of strip malls, housing subdivisions, and condo clusters deployed along the seemingly endless six-lane highways that accumulated in the post-war orgy of development was an affront to human nature, if not to a deity, if one exists. There are much better ways to build towns and we know how to do it. Ask the shnooks who paid a hundred bucks to walk down Disney’s Main Street the week before last.
Apart from all that remains the personal tragedy that awaits, the losses of many lifetimes of work invested in things of value, of homes, of meaning, and of life itself. Many people who evacuated will return to… nothing, and perhaps many of them will not want to stay in such a fragile place. But the America they roam into in search of a place to re-settle is going to be a more fragile place, too. A week or so after Irma has gone away, the ill-feeling that heaps this country like a swamp fever will still be there, driving the new American madness into precincts yet unknown.
US Dollar Index closes at a 2-year low, down against every major currency in 2017. $UUP $DXY pic.twitter.com/liXbgSJgyz
— Charlie Bilello (@charliebilello) September 7, 2017
Wednesday, September 06, 2017
Kunstler: Perturbations Anon.
Kunstler: Perturbations Anon.
Happy Labor Day everybody. Forward from here, things get jiggy. The nation faces a pile-up of events as we turn the corner on summer and head into the spook-house of autumn.
This will be the week when the reeking after-effects of Harvey’s journey through Houston become super-vivid. It’s going to be hot-hot-hot there all week, perfect conditions for mold to creep through untold square-footage of soggy sheetrock and plenty of nutriment in the toxic gumbo of lingering standing water for mosquitoes and bacteria to breed like crazy. Bigger surprises will be waiting for some:
The news media are already calling Harvey the costliest storm in US history, with estimates running to $180 billion. But damage assessments are incomplete for highways, surface roads, bridges, railroad tracks, water and sewer systems, public buildings, dams (Addicks and Barker), natural gas terminals, and port facilities, not to mention homes and business structures. Texas is the nation’s number one cotton producer and the storm blew away many temporary cotton bale storage modules following a bumper harvest. Corn, soybeans, and cattle were also affected.
The Colonial Pipeline’s hookups to the refineries west of Lake Charles, Louisiana, won’t reopen fully until Tuesday at the earliest. The pipeline conveys 40 percent of the gasoline consumed from Atlanta to Washington, D.C. and extends up to the New York metro area. By next weekend Hurricane Irma looks like she’ll be slamming into the US Atlantic coast somewhere between Jacksonville and the Carolina Outer Banks as a category 3 or 4 event. There’s even talk today of possible cat 5. [Note: As of 6 Sept., Irma is a cat. 5--P.Z.] Will there be enough gasoline on hand for the folks at risk to evacuate? Stand by on that.
Much of western North America is burning up. British Columbia closed off its rivers to fisherman because 680 wildfires had broken out across the Canadian province this summer and 73 were still listed as “out-of-control” on Sunday. San Francisco set a record high temperature of 106 this past weekend. Down in Los Angeles, the county endured the largest wildfire in its history. The La Tuna Canyon blaze scorched 7,000 acres on the edge of Burbank. This morning it was at 30 percent containment after some Sunday rain showers.
Okay, that’s just the weather. You surely couldn’t fail to miss the weekend’s big news story out of North Korea: an underground hydrogen bomb test that set off a 6.3 magnitude earthquake felt across the border in China. Kim Jung-un was photographed with an alleged missile-ready weapon capable of inflicting an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the USA (though in the photo the device looked sort of like a 1938 washing machine barely capable of laundering a load of dishtowels). In theory, such an EMP could fry every electrical device over a large US region, from George Foreman grills to your car’s ignition system to the whole electric grid. After that, nothing works and would take years to fix and there’s a fair chance that nothing would ever work again. Disturbing, huh?
The Sunday Cable News chat-fests were full of politicians and assorted experts saying there was “no good option” available to deal with the North Korean threat. I’m not so sure about that because why would our military reveal a workable option if they had one? Mr. Trump, our (ahem) president made the point explicitly a dozen times during the election campaign that it would be foolish to reveal our military plans in advance of any action. Perhaps he meant it. You’d also have to suppose that computer jocks in the US military / intel sub-basements of northern Virginia are working around the clock to find some way to turn Kim into a platter of smoldering bulgogi by wireless command — and we won’t hear about it until after he’s eaten by his former flunkies and lackeys.
Finally, there are the accumulating hazards kludging up the sputtering engine of the US economy. Houston’s travails will take the GDP down a notch to Q1 2018 and Irma might take it negative. The oft-referenced debt-ceiling problem remains unresolved, and now it appears to have entailed the sticky problem of Hurricane damage relief — and who knows if Houston will ever recover no matter how much money is thrown at it. Dragging out the debt ceiling issue would lead to a chain of government defaults on its obligations, problems for US Treasury paper in the bond markets, and pressure on the dollar.
There are few shelters from the financial storm. In an emergency, the Federal Reserve might take a U-turn back to QE mode. That “liquidity” (money created out of thin air) would rush in to further inflate the over-stuffed stock markets. But without a QE pump, the markets may have already suckered in the last remaining liquidity pools on the buy-side, leaving the sell-side an empty echo-chamber if and when the market mood changes. Gold and silver have already launched into a zoom cycle, finally defeating the years-long efforts by interested parties, shall we say, to squash them in the paper markets. Bitcoin has been zooming all summer. I’m not a fan of the crypto-currencies. They are figments of the server farms, and they’re reproducing wildly like digital yeasts, and in the end they are at the mercy of those computer servers and an electrical grid that is less reliable than even economists might imagine.
There’s always excitement in the quickeningly chill air of fall, back to school, back to work, and back to what passes for reality these in these late days of empire. Finally, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Special Counsel Robert Mueller stepped up with a surprisingly sudden bill of particulars in the quest to pry Mr. Trump out of the just-redecorated oval office. The Deep State longs for that fatal lever, but it would come at a time when so many other perturbations are shaking things loose, the satisfaction might not last long.
Happy Labor Day everybody. Forward from here, things get jiggy. The nation faces a pile-up of events as we turn the corner on summer and head into the spook-house of autumn.
This will be the week when the reeking after-effects of Harvey’s journey through Houston become super-vivid. It’s going to be hot-hot-hot there all week, perfect conditions for mold to creep through untold square-footage of soggy sheetrock and plenty of nutriment in the toxic gumbo of lingering standing water for mosquitoes and bacteria to breed like crazy. Bigger surprises will be waiting for some:
HOUSTON (CNN) — A Texas homeowner returned to his flood-marred home Friday in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey to a shocking surprise: a 10-foot gator in his living room. Brian Foster made the discovery while assessing how badly the water had damaged his house near Lake Houston, north of Houston….
The news media are already calling Harvey the costliest storm in US history, with estimates running to $180 billion. But damage assessments are incomplete for highways, surface roads, bridges, railroad tracks, water and sewer systems, public buildings, dams (Addicks and Barker), natural gas terminals, and port facilities, not to mention homes and business structures. Texas is the nation’s number one cotton producer and the storm blew away many temporary cotton bale storage modules following a bumper harvest. Corn, soybeans, and cattle were also affected.
The Colonial Pipeline’s hookups to the refineries west of Lake Charles, Louisiana, won’t reopen fully until Tuesday at the earliest. The pipeline conveys 40 percent of the gasoline consumed from Atlanta to Washington, D.C. and extends up to the New York metro area. By next weekend Hurricane Irma looks like she’ll be slamming into the US Atlantic coast somewhere between Jacksonville and the Carolina Outer Banks as a category 3 or 4 event. There’s even talk today of possible cat 5. [Note: As of 6 Sept., Irma is a cat. 5--P.Z.] Will there be enough gasoline on hand for the folks at risk to evacuate? Stand by on that.
Much of western North America is burning up. British Columbia closed off its rivers to fisherman because 680 wildfires had broken out across the Canadian province this summer and 73 were still listed as “out-of-control” on Sunday. San Francisco set a record high temperature of 106 this past weekend. Down in Los Angeles, the county endured the largest wildfire in its history. The La Tuna Canyon blaze scorched 7,000 acres on the edge of Burbank. This morning it was at 30 percent containment after some Sunday rain showers.
Okay, that’s just the weather. You surely couldn’t fail to miss the weekend’s big news story out of North Korea: an underground hydrogen bomb test that set off a 6.3 magnitude earthquake felt across the border in China. Kim Jung-un was photographed with an alleged missile-ready weapon capable of inflicting an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the USA (though in the photo the device looked sort of like a 1938 washing machine barely capable of laundering a load of dishtowels). In theory, such an EMP could fry every electrical device over a large US region, from George Foreman grills to your car’s ignition system to the whole electric grid. After that, nothing works and would take years to fix and there’s a fair chance that nothing would ever work again. Disturbing, huh?
The Sunday Cable News chat-fests were full of politicians and assorted experts saying there was “no good option” available to deal with the North Korean threat. I’m not so sure about that because why would our military reveal a workable option if they had one? Mr. Trump, our (ahem) president made the point explicitly a dozen times during the election campaign that it would be foolish to reveal our military plans in advance of any action. Perhaps he meant it. You’d also have to suppose that computer jocks in the US military / intel sub-basements of northern Virginia are working around the clock to find some way to turn Kim into a platter of smoldering bulgogi by wireless command — and we won’t hear about it until after he’s eaten by his former flunkies and lackeys.
Finally, there are the accumulating hazards kludging up the sputtering engine of the US economy. Houston’s travails will take the GDP down a notch to Q1 2018 and Irma might take it negative. The oft-referenced debt-ceiling problem remains unresolved, and now it appears to have entailed the sticky problem of Hurricane damage relief — and who knows if Houston will ever recover no matter how much money is thrown at it. Dragging out the debt ceiling issue would lead to a chain of government defaults on its obligations, problems for US Treasury paper in the bond markets, and pressure on the dollar.
There are few shelters from the financial storm. In an emergency, the Federal Reserve might take a U-turn back to QE mode. That “liquidity” (money created out of thin air) would rush in to further inflate the over-stuffed stock markets. But without a QE pump, the markets may have already suckered in the last remaining liquidity pools on the buy-side, leaving the sell-side an empty echo-chamber if and when the market mood changes. Gold and silver have already launched into a zoom cycle, finally defeating the years-long efforts by interested parties, shall we say, to squash them in the paper markets. Bitcoin has been zooming all summer. I’m not a fan of the crypto-currencies. They are figments of the server farms, and they’re reproducing wildly like digital yeasts, and in the end they are at the mercy of those computer servers and an electrical grid that is less reliable than even economists might imagine.
There’s always excitement in the quickeningly chill air of fall, back to school, back to work, and back to what passes for reality these in these late days of empire. Finally, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Special Counsel Robert Mueller stepped up with a surprisingly sudden bill of particulars in the quest to pry Mr. Trump out of the just-redecorated oval office. The Deep State longs for that fatal lever, but it would come at a time when so many other perturbations are shaking things loose, the satisfaction might not last long.
Friday, September 01, 2017
Kunstler: A Hot Mess.
Kunstler: A Hot Mess.
It wasn’t until more than a week after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans in 2005 that the full extent of the damage was recognized and so it will go with the hot mess where Houston used to be. Mostly, it is inconceivable that the business activity which made Houston the nation’s fourth largest city and, according to Chris Martenson, equal to the 10th largest economy in the world, will ever return to what it was before August 26, 2017.
The major activity there has been the refining and distribution of oil products, and no activity is more central to the functioning of the US economy. So the public and our currently clueless leaders across the political spectrum, plus a legacy news media lost in the carnival of race and gender freak shows, is about to discover the dynamic relationship between energy and an industrial economy.
The pivot in this relationship is banking, which enables the conversion of oil’s raw power into everything else that goes on in a so-called advanced economy. The popular assumption is that federal disaster relief can compensate for all losses. That assumption may go out the window with the Houston flood of 2017. And no amount of federal aid can compensate for the hours, days, and weeks that will tick by as businesses struggle to return to something like their former level of normal operation.
Many businesses will never recover, especially the smaller ones that support the big one — the little tool and die shops, the construction outfits, the trucking and shipping concerns, the riggers and pipefitters, the cement companies, and so on. All of that activity existed in highly rationalized chains of on-time production and service and nothing will be on-time in Houston for a long time to come. The arguments over insurance coverage have not even begun, and then there is the question of how businesses in this perpetual flood zone will renew their insurance. Or how might they relocate to higher ground? And how do they pay for that? And where is higher ground in this vast, swampy lowland?
The public has been conditioned by frequent natural disasters to think that nobody has to eat the losses, so that in effect loss doesn’t exist, just as the nation’s central bank has engineered the belief that risk no longer exists in the management of capital. We sure had a nice demonstration of the latter, with the Dow inching over the 22,000 hashmark in overnight futures trading today. The exertions of the Federal Reserve in propping up the stock markets will have to go pedal-to-metal now to make up for the hole in economic activity that Houston represents.
Meanwhile congress is left to dither over two conjoined financial emergencies at once: authorizing emergency aid to Houston, and resolving the debt ceiling problem. The fault lines are already visible in the ill-feeling left over from Texas’s congressional delegation voting against aid for Hurricane Sandy’s rip through New York and New Jersey. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, for one, has reinvented his political philosophy overnight to accommodate federal aid for natural disasters, something he was not keen on before September 26.
I’d assume that these politicians have some normal human sympathies — yes, really — but that these emotions won’t stand in the way of their agenda for mutual self-destruction. Even if they manage to cobble together some kind of emergency aid package for Houston, the process will coincide with the Treasury running out of supposedly “actual” money — that is, money which can be accounted for by some method besides check-kiting. Another assumption du jour is probably the idea that accounting no longer matters, that bankruptcy no longer means anything. Pretty soon, those logical fallacies will manifest in an accelerated falling value of the US dollar.
Somewhere in this reverberating hot mess stands a character named President Trump. He acted out the customary disaster visitation ceremony last week, but I predict that the as-yet-revealed after-effects of Hurricane Harvey will put him in deeper and stinkier hot water than George W. Bush splashed through with Katrina.
Meanwhile, what’s that monster called Irma doing out there in the Atlantic?
It wasn’t until more than a week after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans in 2005 that the full extent of the damage was recognized and so it will go with the hot mess where Houston used to be. Mostly, it is inconceivable that the business activity which made Houston the nation’s fourth largest city and, according to Chris Martenson, equal to the 10th largest economy in the world, will ever return to what it was before August 26, 2017.
The major activity there has been the refining and distribution of oil products, and no activity is more central to the functioning of the US economy. So the public and our currently clueless leaders across the political spectrum, plus a legacy news media lost in the carnival of race and gender freak shows, is about to discover the dynamic relationship between energy and an industrial economy.
The pivot in this relationship is banking, which enables the conversion of oil’s raw power into everything else that goes on in a so-called advanced economy. The popular assumption is that federal disaster relief can compensate for all losses. That assumption may go out the window with the Houston flood of 2017. And no amount of federal aid can compensate for the hours, days, and weeks that will tick by as businesses struggle to return to something like their former level of normal operation.
Many businesses will never recover, especially the smaller ones that support the big one — the little tool and die shops, the construction outfits, the trucking and shipping concerns, the riggers and pipefitters, the cement companies, and so on. All of that activity existed in highly rationalized chains of on-time production and service and nothing will be on-time in Houston for a long time to come. The arguments over insurance coverage have not even begun, and then there is the question of how businesses in this perpetual flood zone will renew their insurance. Or how might they relocate to higher ground? And how do they pay for that? And where is higher ground in this vast, swampy lowland?
The public has been conditioned by frequent natural disasters to think that nobody has to eat the losses, so that in effect loss doesn’t exist, just as the nation’s central bank has engineered the belief that risk no longer exists in the management of capital. We sure had a nice demonstration of the latter, with the Dow inching over the 22,000 hashmark in overnight futures trading today. The exertions of the Federal Reserve in propping up the stock markets will have to go pedal-to-metal now to make up for the hole in economic activity that Houston represents.
Meanwhile congress is left to dither over two conjoined financial emergencies at once: authorizing emergency aid to Houston, and resolving the debt ceiling problem. The fault lines are already visible in the ill-feeling left over from Texas’s congressional delegation voting against aid for Hurricane Sandy’s rip through New York and New Jersey. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, for one, has reinvented his political philosophy overnight to accommodate federal aid for natural disasters, something he was not keen on before September 26.
I’d assume that these politicians have some normal human sympathies — yes, really — but that these emotions won’t stand in the way of their agenda for mutual self-destruction. Even if they manage to cobble together some kind of emergency aid package for Houston, the process will coincide with the Treasury running out of supposedly “actual” money — that is, money which can be accounted for by some method besides check-kiting. Another assumption du jour is probably the idea that accounting no longer matters, that bankruptcy no longer means anything. Pretty soon, those logical fallacies will manifest in an accelerated falling value of the US dollar.
Somewhere in this reverberating hot mess stands a character named President Trump. He acted out the customary disaster visitation ceremony last week, but I predict that the as-yet-revealed after-effects of Hurricane Harvey will put him in deeper and stinkier hot water than George W. Bush splashed through with Katrina.
Meanwhile, what’s that monster called Irma doing out there in the Atlantic?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
