Our Re-Design
Yes, as you know, we launched our new look last Tuesday and have been in teething pains ever since as our server struggles to adjust to the new data base. (Hint: emptying your cache on a regular basis may help.) Cheers and curses fill our editorial inbox.
When it comes to re-designs people mostly hate change. I do. So does Jeffrey St Clair. On my shelves I keep ancient copies of publications, just to remind me of the way they used to be: the old London Times, on beautiful old stock, with classifieds on the front page; the Italian Espresso of the 60s, with its vast rotogravure photos. Jeffrey and I liked the way the CounterPunch site looked. But technologically it was getting progressively harder to deal with, with many of you shouting for features it couldn’t accommodate, like a print-friendly feature, RSS feeds, ease of linking, a data base archive and so forth.
You’ve got them now, and boy, are some of you mad! When emotions cool we hope outraged CounterPunchers will see that under our mandate designer Tiffany Wardle stayed pretty close to the old design. We’ve kept changes to a minimum – no video, no ads, the same three-column lay-out.
Here’s a bouquet of reactions, starting with Sam Chandler’s rock through the editorial transom, about an hour after the resdesign went up.
“I do not appreciate the new look. It is horrible. It is not respective of the academic look CounterPunch has cultivated over the last few years. It is jarringly eye-wrenching shit. It is corporate capitalism without style. Sam Chandler.”
Jeffrey, who evolved our old layout piecemeal across the years, winces at the cruel phrase “academic look.” I’d say the typographical heritage here with the new site goes back to German lay-outs of the 1920s, not to mention the Constructivist heritage, but maybe that’s me being sentimental.
“It’s about time! Love the new layout. Pete Stanislaw”
“I thought I had the wrong web page for a second. Nice new streamlined look! Great work from my favorite source for news of what is happening. Congratulations, Glenn Ierley.”
“Just my 2 cents.. I much preferred your previous page layout to the new look changes you made in the last day or 2. FWIW, I’m a subscriber and will be renewing. Regards, Ron Bianco”
“As a person who has found your site to be an invaluable trove of alternative voices and views, I’m greatly distressed to see the new graphics of the site. The colors are harsh and distracting, the fonts are unattractive, and in general there seems to be a very aggressive look to it, one I would associate more with the sites of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (I have seen them) — the only thing that seems to be missing is an American flag. Teresa Schiano”
“I like the new layout of the website. Very fresh.
Be well, Vijay Prashad”
“I’m a faithful reader who believes in you and depends on you for my daily dose of hopelessness. I just don’t like that it was redesigned at all. All New! has gotten so passe. Our news sources should be staid and steady. Walter Cronkite never got a facelift or even shaved off his moustache, and we trusted him, whether or not we should have. I still hate the redesigned Wall St Journal, for instance: it’s so generic now. Likewise my hometown daily paper, the Keene (NH) Sentinel.
“We want news sources to be about content, not style. In a world where even the light switches are designed, the un-botoxed gets more and more beautiful. Wabi-sabi, the Japanese called it, beautiful decreptitude. Boo to urban renewal of websites. Let the words speak. Stacia Tolman”
“I love the easy-to-read new look, particularly the print option (I’ve probably sent a half dozen emails requesting such a change over the past decade). Thank you. Bob Siver”
“Sir,
I like the revised format; the change is greatly appreciated. Respectfully, Dave Fargher.
Impressive website redesign – addition of RSS feed is very welcome.Cheers!
Will Astle.”
“Drudge has stayed the same and is still one of the most popular sites. There’s something gratifying and attractive about remaining low-tech – don’t let well-meaning bumblers tell you otherwise. In two words, it is repulsive and UGLY!! (Add a third word: Unreadable).
–Elizabeth”
Let’s see how you all feel in a month or two. Meanwhile, it’s a work in progress. We appreciate the plaudits, ponder the advice and dodge the brickbats.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Allen West: Real-Life Mr. Butts
With his ash-gray fade Congressman Allen West resembles no one so much as Doonesbury's Mr. Butts, an anthropomorphic walking cigarette.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Hold Your Applause
History is Not Your Therapist
By James Howard Kunstler
on August 22, 2011 8:36 AM
I suppose we'll know in a few hours whether Colonel Muammar Gaddafi gets hung out to dry, Mussolini-style, from a lamp-post, or is mercifully handed a one way ticket to Palookaville, a.k.a. The Hague, where old despots go to eat French fries with mayonnaise and be judged. The rebels celebrating in Tripoli's main square looked a tad ticked off about all the trouble it took to pry the old rascal off his throne. Over in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, the ophthalmologist who rules the place, must be following developments with a keen interest. (Perhaps he will hastily decide to re-open his medical practice in, say, Iraq.) Despite the bubbling of CNN news-readers, I suggest that we Westerners hold our applause until the world gets a clue as to who or what will govern Libya (or Syria, in the event).
Besides, we have a sort of Man-Who-Would-Be-Gaddafi fresh out of the woodwork right here in the USA. I speak of Texas Governor Rick Perry, the Bush-Without-a-Brain clone who pulled off a kind of "hat-trick" of cretinism last week by 1.) announcing his disbelief in climate change science; 2.) announcing his disbelief in evolution science; and 3.) more or less threatening to lynch Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The nation has not seen such a puffed up rogue take the stage since the days of Huey Long, but the rural idiocy that saturated Louisiana in the 1930s has finally seeped all over the country so that even people in once-literate Minnesota are represented by reality-averse evangelical maniacs. Candidates like Perry and Bachmann make a plain vanilla narcissist like Sarah Palin look at least capable of running a student council. What a low moment in America's history. Don't lose sight of the fact that there's room for the bar to go further down.
Otherwise, the weekend was notable for the complete and utter retreat from public view of European leaders charged with figuring out some way around the EU's banking woes. The dirty secret is that there isn't any way around these Alp-size heaps of broken promises, worthless certificates, overdrawn accounts, shiftless governments, and booby-trapped counter-party contracts. The people in charge are trying like hell to make it through the vacation season before the entire continent tips over, but then what? I'll tell you: the chain-lightning of ruin will crackle across the Sargasso Sea and strike deep in the heart of JP Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citi, and all the other citadels of grift until blood runs out the bronze nostrils of George Washington's statue on the portico of Federal Hall. I don't begrudge poor Barack Obama's attempt to eat a few ice cream cones at the seashore with his wife and two girls. Some presidents are just one-termers. History is cruel that way. But it also rhymes. Rick Perry may be as dumb as Ronald Reagan.
Nobody can believe what's happening. Nobody knows what to do. Well, here's some straight dope: do you want to have an economy? Then prepare to cut your losses and move on. There's so much to do "out there" in America, but the catch is it's not the same as what we've been doing. Do you want to eat a few years from now? Get serious about reorganizing agriculture on a smaller, finer, more local scale. Believe me, there will be plenty of jobs. Only they won't be like sitting in a cubicle writing a marketing plan for a video-game about the slaughter of gym rats from another planet. Do you want to be able to travel around this big country in a few years? Start working on the nearest reconstructable railroad line - and get over your techno-grandiose fantasies about running all the cars on algae, corn, or the plug in the wall. Do you want have some household goods in the future without sending an order halfway around the world? Figure out a way to make stuff in some North American place where there is running water for electric power.
There isn't a politician out there, including the Paul duo, who can really articulate the direction in which history is propelling us. This "recession-depression" narrative doesn't even adequately capture it. This is the end of a certain way of doing things - the industrial growth-spurt fiesta. We're in permanent contraction now. There are no technological rescue remedies that will restore the old economic regime. The banks are not working anymore because we can't create more real wealth, and the wealth we pretended to create for thirty-odd years in the form of IOUs can't be paid back into existence. We can't fund any more senior golfing careers and a lot of people will have to just stop eating fried pork rinds, guzzling Pepsi Cola, and then waddling into the emergency room for consolation.
Does this sound a little harsh? Surprise: history is not your therapist. This is the New Age you never expected. Crybabies need not apply.
By James Howard Kunstler
on August 22, 2011 8:36 AM
I suppose we'll know in a few hours whether Colonel Muammar Gaddafi gets hung out to dry, Mussolini-style, from a lamp-post, or is mercifully handed a one way ticket to Palookaville, a.k.a. The Hague, where old despots go to eat French fries with mayonnaise and be judged. The rebels celebrating in Tripoli's main square looked a tad ticked off about all the trouble it took to pry the old rascal off his throne. Over in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, the ophthalmologist who rules the place, must be following developments with a keen interest. (Perhaps he will hastily decide to re-open his medical practice in, say, Iraq.) Despite the bubbling of CNN news-readers, I suggest that we Westerners hold our applause until the world gets a clue as to who or what will govern Libya (or Syria, in the event).
Besides, we have a sort of Man-Who-Would-Be-Gaddafi fresh out of the woodwork right here in the USA. I speak of Texas Governor Rick Perry, the Bush-Without-a-Brain clone who pulled off a kind of "hat-trick" of cretinism last week by 1.) announcing his disbelief in climate change science; 2.) announcing his disbelief in evolution science; and 3.) more or less threatening to lynch Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The nation has not seen such a puffed up rogue take the stage since the days of Huey Long, but the rural idiocy that saturated Louisiana in the 1930s has finally seeped all over the country so that even people in once-literate Minnesota are represented by reality-averse evangelical maniacs. Candidates like Perry and Bachmann make a plain vanilla narcissist like Sarah Palin look at least capable of running a student council. What a low moment in America's history. Don't lose sight of the fact that there's room for the bar to go further down.
Otherwise, the weekend was notable for the complete and utter retreat from public view of European leaders charged with figuring out some way around the EU's banking woes. The dirty secret is that there isn't any way around these Alp-size heaps of broken promises, worthless certificates, overdrawn accounts, shiftless governments, and booby-trapped counter-party contracts. The people in charge are trying like hell to make it through the vacation season before the entire continent tips over, but then what? I'll tell you: the chain-lightning of ruin will crackle across the Sargasso Sea and strike deep in the heart of JP Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citi, and all the other citadels of grift until blood runs out the bronze nostrils of George Washington's statue on the portico of Federal Hall. I don't begrudge poor Barack Obama's attempt to eat a few ice cream cones at the seashore with his wife and two girls. Some presidents are just one-termers. History is cruel that way. But it also rhymes. Rick Perry may be as dumb as Ronald Reagan.
Nobody can believe what's happening. Nobody knows what to do. Well, here's some straight dope: do you want to have an economy? Then prepare to cut your losses and move on. There's so much to do "out there" in America, but the catch is it's not the same as what we've been doing. Do you want to eat a few years from now? Get serious about reorganizing agriculture on a smaller, finer, more local scale. Believe me, there will be plenty of jobs. Only they won't be like sitting in a cubicle writing a marketing plan for a video-game about the slaughter of gym rats from another planet. Do you want to be able to travel around this big country in a few years? Start working on the nearest reconstructable railroad line - and get over your techno-grandiose fantasies about running all the cars on algae, corn, or the plug in the wall. Do you want have some household goods in the future without sending an order halfway around the world? Figure out a way to make stuff in some North American place where there is running water for electric power.
There isn't a politician out there, including the Paul duo, who can really articulate the direction in which history is propelling us. This "recession-depression" narrative doesn't even adequately capture it. This is the end of a certain way of doing things - the industrial growth-spurt fiesta. We're in permanent contraction now. There are no technological rescue remedies that will restore the old economic regime. The banks are not working anymore because we can't create more real wealth, and the wealth we pretended to create for thirty-odd years in the form of IOUs can't be paid back into existence. We can't fund any more senior golfing careers and a lot of people will have to just stop eating fried pork rinds, guzzling Pepsi Cola, and then waddling into the emergency room for consolation.
Does this sound a little harsh? Surprise: history is not your therapist. This is the New Age you never expected. Crybabies need not apply.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
Kunstler: "High Corn"
High Corn
By James Howard Kunstler
on August 15, 2011 9:47 AM
Looking every inch the Assistant Manager of a J.C. Penny, Rick Perry of Texas stepped on-board the touring evangelical freak show that the Republican pre-primary parade has turned into. I like to think of him as George W. Bush without all the encumbering intellect. I give it three months before media snoops catch him in bed with Michele Bachmann. The two of them will claim it was all right because Jesus was there as chaperone and anyway, "...alls we did was watch the Vikings-Cowboy game...."
Oh these sons and daughters of the high corn! Make no mistake (to borrow a favorite war cry from the presidential cheat sheet), both of these heartland bozos are dumb enough to lead America straight into the graveyard of failed states. Imagine a summit between Rick Perry and whoever succeeds Hu Jintao - the incredulous side-glances of the Chinese leader and his interpreter when Mr. Perry presents the official gift from our nation: a miniature Bible made by the inmates at Stringfellow State Prison and "prayed over by qualified preachers twenty-four hours a day!" Or how about Michele Bachmann and Vlad Putin. I'd sooner watch a gerbil in a terrarium with a King Cobra.
Meanwhile, the other day poor Mitt Romney tried to explain to a crowd of Iowa hot-heads that "corporations are people!" Wasn't that just the right thing to say to folks whose employment opportunities have dwindled down to eviscerating chickens on an assembly line or humping boxes on the WalMart loading dock for $8 an hour. He was heckled mercilessly. I don't see how a candidate recovers from that kind of caught-on-camera mockery - but then again, in a culture that has no shame, just about anything goes.
One thing I'd really like to know about the Republican party, though: if they're so all-fired up about fiscal rectitude and the honest disposition of money, and stuff like that, then how come not a single one of these dissembling ninnies has suggested the investigation and prosecution of the entire Wall Street matrix of swindling grifters - including the officials who rotate between the too-big-to-fail banks and the regulatory agencies like the SEC and the CFTC and all the other utterly failed official watchdogs who stood by whistling Dixie while the future of this country was blatantly sold down the river?
Of course, nobody on the Democratic side asks anything similar of President Obama as he hops from fundraiser to fundraiser. I'd like to know why the fuck the president is even out campaigning more than a year before the election. And hasn't the mainstream news media noticed that there's something a little peculiar about a cycle of perpetual election with no governing in between? I suppose everything is show business now, though I don't expect this aberrant and very dangerous behavior to persist, because virtually all the major operations of the supposedly civilized, "developed" world are veering into a state of obvious failure.
The global financial system is wobbling on its pyramid-tip of debt. Europe is trapped. The members of the currency union can't make good on what they owe and neither can they surrender their independence to some jerry-rigged extra-national authority. At stake is the European banking system and the post-World War Two amity that allowed the region to become the lovely tourist theme park we lately know it as. They are running out of tricks for pretending that debts can revolve forever, and as this occurs the fear rises that the whole lovely thing will bust apart in mob violence, revolution, and maybe even armed conflict between people who don't hold their forks the same way. England is not even in the Euro currency club but five decades of rather feckless immigration policy have resolved into something that looks an awful lot like race war. God knows what the French are thinking, with their own massive immigrant slum population ringing Paris.
Anyway, whatever happens around Europe in the months to come, trouble with its banks is sure to blow back into the American ones, which are hopelessly entangled in Europe's obligations, not to mention skeins of supposed "insurance" swaps contracts primed for ignition at the slightest flap of a black swan's wing that could propel the likes of Lloyd Blankfein's cappuccino machine from an upper floor at 200 West Street, NYC, through the roof, clear to planet Uranus. At least we'd have a space program again.
Surely a lot of European and American officials just want to escape to the seashore for the last two weeks of this punishing month and soak their heads in the surf - perhaps a few will decide to not come back up for air. President Obama will enjoy the briny vapors out on Martha's Vineyard, and maybe even splash around in the wimpy waves there. I'll enjoy the thought of him tying into a clam roll. And now to check how the markets are doing this opening day of the week....
By James Howard Kunstler
on August 15, 2011 9:47 AM
Looking every inch the Assistant Manager of a J.C. Penny, Rick Perry of Texas stepped on-board the touring evangelical freak show that the Republican pre-primary parade has turned into. I like to think of him as George W. Bush without all the encumbering intellect. I give it three months before media snoops catch him in bed with Michele Bachmann. The two of them will claim it was all right because Jesus was there as chaperone and anyway, "...alls we did was watch the Vikings-Cowboy game...."
Oh these sons and daughters of the high corn! Make no mistake (to borrow a favorite war cry from the presidential cheat sheet), both of these heartland bozos are dumb enough to lead America straight into the graveyard of failed states. Imagine a summit between Rick Perry and whoever succeeds Hu Jintao - the incredulous side-glances of the Chinese leader and his interpreter when Mr. Perry presents the official gift from our nation: a miniature Bible made by the inmates at Stringfellow State Prison and "prayed over by qualified preachers twenty-four hours a day!" Or how about Michele Bachmann and Vlad Putin. I'd sooner watch a gerbil in a terrarium with a King Cobra.
Meanwhile, the other day poor Mitt Romney tried to explain to a crowd of Iowa hot-heads that "corporations are people!" Wasn't that just the right thing to say to folks whose employment opportunities have dwindled down to eviscerating chickens on an assembly line or humping boxes on the WalMart loading dock for $8 an hour. He was heckled mercilessly. I don't see how a candidate recovers from that kind of caught-on-camera mockery - but then again, in a culture that has no shame, just about anything goes.
One thing I'd really like to know about the Republican party, though: if they're so all-fired up about fiscal rectitude and the honest disposition of money, and stuff like that, then how come not a single one of these dissembling ninnies has suggested the investigation and prosecution of the entire Wall Street matrix of swindling grifters - including the officials who rotate between the too-big-to-fail banks and the regulatory agencies like the SEC and the CFTC and all the other utterly failed official watchdogs who stood by whistling Dixie while the future of this country was blatantly sold down the river?
Of course, nobody on the Democratic side asks anything similar of President Obama as he hops from fundraiser to fundraiser. I'd like to know why the fuck the president is even out campaigning more than a year before the election. And hasn't the mainstream news media noticed that there's something a little peculiar about a cycle of perpetual election with no governing in between? I suppose everything is show business now, though I don't expect this aberrant and very dangerous behavior to persist, because virtually all the major operations of the supposedly civilized, "developed" world are veering into a state of obvious failure.
The global financial system is wobbling on its pyramid-tip of debt. Europe is trapped. The members of the currency union can't make good on what they owe and neither can they surrender their independence to some jerry-rigged extra-national authority. At stake is the European banking system and the post-World War Two amity that allowed the region to become the lovely tourist theme park we lately know it as. They are running out of tricks for pretending that debts can revolve forever, and as this occurs the fear rises that the whole lovely thing will bust apart in mob violence, revolution, and maybe even armed conflict between people who don't hold their forks the same way. England is not even in the Euro currency club but five decades of rather feckless immigration policy have resolved into something that looks an awful lot like race war. God knows what the French are thinking, with their own massive immigrant slum population ringing Paris.
Anyway, whatever happens around Europe in the months to come, trouble with its banks is sure to blow back into the American ones, which are hopelessly entangled in Europe's obligations, not to mention skeins of supposed "insurance" swaps contracts primed for ignition at the slightest flap of a black swan's wing that could propel the likes of Lloyd Blankfein's cappuccino machine from an upper floor at 200 West Street, NYC, through the roof, clear to planet Uranus. At least we'd have a space program again.
Surely a lot of European and American officials just want to escape to the seashore for the last two weeks of this punishing month and soak their heads in the surf - perhaps a few will decide to not come back up for air. President Obama will enjoy the briny vapors out on Martha's Vineyard, and maybe even splash around in the wimpy waves there. I'll enjoy the thought of him tying into a clam roll. And now to check how the markets are doing this opening day of the week....
Friday, August 12, 2011
Paul vs. Santorum
Ron Paul vs. Rick Santorum on Iran
Cole refers to the possible sixth war, or the sixth country in which the U.S. military is involved.
The other five:
Iraq
Afghanistan
Pakistan
Yemen
Libya
Cole refers to the possible sixth war, or the sixth country in which the U.S. military is involved.
The other five:
Iraq
Afghanistan
Pakistan
Yemen
Libya
Thursday, August 11, 2011
The Lady of Rage
I doubt if Michele Bachmann is "The Queen of Rage." (Hers is a different kind of madness.) Anyway, I'd rather listen to The Lady of Rage.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Monday, August 08, 2011
Kunstler's Latest: On S&P, Etc.
Change You Don't Have to Believe In
By James Howard Kunstler
on August 8, 2011 8:00 AM
A waterfall of woe broke over all the realms of money last week - including especially the realm where we determine just what money is supposed to mean - and a lot of folks barely made it to a rooftop, or a floating log, or some scrap of high ground, where they sit wet and shivering, expecting to get slammed again. The torrent of events is still flowing and there are countless dangerous objects bobbing in it. Remember what that in-rushing ocean was like in the Fukushima tsunami? A wall of miso soup strewn with Toyotas and houses instead of squid rings and fish balls. Try swimming in that. (Try swimming in your Cuisinart on the guacamole setting.)
Europe is telling itself one cockamamie story after another. We've got a rescue fund! Only it has no money! But we will bail out Italy nonetheless! But Italy is too big to bail out - and we tried stuffing it under the carpet, but there's no more room with Greece, Ireland, and Portugal already suffocating in there. The whole G-20 is yakking on the phone as I write, hatching fresh cockamamie stories. Oh, now it looks like the European Central Bank will ride to the rescue with a dispatch satchel full of good intentions. They said the same thing last time, a month or so ago, when a caryatid fell on Greece's head. They are not so sure what money is either. Is a bond like money? Maybe not so much anymore. A stock portfolio? Feh! A Euro? The damned thing is starting to look like a ball-and-chain custom-crafted to weigh down Germans. (And, let's face it: they never did pay any of us for World War Two, really, except what they had to fork over to get the communist side of their own country out of hock. Their guilt-o-meter is still buzzing, I'm sure.) All I know is I hope the whole gang printed up some fresh lira, francs, marks, drachma, pesetas, punts, and whatnot. It would be nice to go back to one of these cute places some day at a discount.
Did you admire Standard and Poor's sly, Friday night downgrade of the United States Treasury bond rating? I was probably the only one in the whole country besides Anderson Cooper not out eating something bigger than my own head at Applebees, or watching the "Footwear Clearance" show over on the Shopping Network. However, I'm not the only one in America asking where do these S and P punks get off downgrading US bonds when three years ago they wore out their Triple-A rubber stamps on the cartloads of stinking offal that Angelo Mozillo and other mortgage rustlers were pawning off as bond-fodder on every Frankenstein "investment opportunity" pumped out of the Wall Street CDO mills. Government officials were righteously seething over S and P's chutzpah, but I suppose when they tried to ring-up Eric Holder over at the DOJ they got connected to some call center in Uttar Pradesh where a friendly fellow named "Dale" picked up. China's government-run newspaper virtually spanked the US: "Learn (thwack) to live (thwack) within (thwack) your (thwack) means!"
I'm not convinced that the US bond rating will even matter that much because nobody knows what anything is worth anymore - especially when governments teeter and the folks in the public square (or the parking lot in America's case), start yelling for blood. Merkel, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Zapatero, will soon be swept away by that selfsame rolling torrent of dreck-strewn woe - in their case a bouillabaisse - while poor Obama looks like one of those hapless, floating creatures in the second-to-last scene of O Brother, Where Art Thou. Even the gold bugs are scared the price will collapse in a debt deflation, or that the federal government will slap a giant extra-special punitive capital gains tax on precious metal sales, or will try to confiscate it from the public altogether like Franklin Roosevelt did - though, given the vast arsenals of private firearms across this land, and the martial spirit lingering in many pissed-off factions of the Tea Party ilk, nothing would invite a revolution, or civil war, or civic upheaval as surely as trying to snatch folks' gold. As a capital preservation refuge, I'm sympathetic to gold, of course, though not so much to buggery.
Everybody is broke now: national treasuries, giant banks, pension funds, insurance companies. The wonder so far is that credit default swaps have not yet been triggered by interest rate changes or some other silly shit, but when that comes to pass there is no way the counterparties can settle their contracts. Ruin will thunder through the financial system like winged death. Everybody is broke and there's a lot less real "money" (whatever it is) out there. Everybody's quailing at the prospect of QE 3, in all its cosmic futility. The United States has already half killed itself at the Golden Corral steam-table of deep-fried debt. I guess we could go all the way and shoot what remains of the dollar in its pitiful, lolling head.
There is a welling recognition that the dice have been cast and the world has rolled snake eyes. The casino is on fire and a flash flood is boiling down the strip. It's no fun running to the exits only to find the revolving doors already eyeball deep in dirty water. America gibbers to itself but nobody has a clue. I'll try to help: this is a compressive financial and economic contraction (one is money, the other is activity). Late-summer storm that it is, it looks to be intensifying. Everything that's super-big is going down sooner or later. The exact sequence of failures is unpredictable. But you can be sure Nature is telling you to get local, get smaller, get finer, downscale, solidify your friendships, and drop your stupid grandiose fantasies about running WalMart on algae. This is change you don't have to believe in, because it is about to jump up and bite you on the lips.
By James Howard Kunstler
on August 8, 2011 8:00 AM
A waterfall of woe broke over all the realms of money last week - including especially the realm where we determine just what money is supposed to mean - and a lot of folks barely made it to a rooftop, or a floating log, or some scrap of high ground, where they sit wet and shivering, expecting to get slammed again. The torrent of events is still flowing and there are countless dangerous objects bobbing in it. Remember what that in-rushing ocean was like in the Fukushima tsunami? A wall of miso soup strewn with Toyotas and houses instead of squid rings and fish balls. Try swimming in that. (Try swimming in your Cuisinart on the guacamole setting.)
Europe is telling itself one cockamamie story after another. We've got a rescue fund! Only it has no money! But we will bail out Italy nonetheless! But Italy is too big to bail out - and we tried stuffing it under the carpet, but there's no more room with Greece, Ireland, and Portugal already suffocating in there. The whole G-20 is yakking on the phone as I write, hatching fresh cockamamie stories. Oh, now it looks like the European Central Bank will ride to the rescue with a dispatch satchel full of good intentions. They said the same thing last time, a month or so ago, when a caryatid fell on Greece's head. They are not so sure what money is either. Is a bond like money? Maybe not so much anymore. A stock portfolio? Feh! A Euro? The damned thing is starting to look like a ball-and-chain custom-crafted to weigh down Germans. (And, let's face it: they never did pay any of us for World War Two, really, except what they had to fork over to get the communist side of their own country out of hock. Their guilt-o-meter is still buzzing, I'm sure.) All I know is I hope the whole gang printed up some fresh lira, francs, marks, drachma, pesetas, punts, and whatnot. It would be nice to go back to one of these cute places some day at a discount.
Did you admire Standard and Poor's sly, Friday night downgrade of the United States Treasury bond rating? I was probably the only one in the whole country besides Anderson Cooper not out eating something bigger than my own head at Applebees, or watching the "Footwear Clearance" show over on the Shopping Network. However, I'm not the only one in America asking where do these S and P punks get off downgrading US bonds when three years ago they wore out their Triple-A rubber stamps on the cartloads of stinking offal that Angelo Mozillo and other mortgage rustlers were pawning off as bond-fodder on every Frankenstein "investment opportunity" pumped out of the Wall Street CDO mills. Government officials were righteously seething over S and P's chutzpah, but I suppose when they tried to ring-up Eric Holder over at the DOJ they got connected to some call center in Uttar Pradesh where a friendly fellow named "Dale" picked up. China's government-run newspaper virtually spanked the US: "Learn (thwack) to live (thwack) within (thwack) your (thwack) means!"
I'm not convinced that the US bond rating will even matter that much because nobody knows what anything is worth anymore - especially when governments teeter and the folks in the public square (or the parking lot in America's case), start yelling for blood. Merkel, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Zapatero, will soon be swept away by that selfsame rolling torrent of dreck-strewn woe - in their case a bouillabaisse - while poor Obama looks like one of those hapless, floating creatures in the second-to-last scene of O Brother, Where Art Thou. Even the gold bugs are scared the price will collapse in a debt deflation, or that the federal government will slap a giant extra-special punitive capital gains tax on precious metal sales, or will try to confiscate it from the public altogether like Franklin Roosevelt did - though, given the vast arsenals of private firearms across this land, and the martial spirit lingering in many pissed-off factions of the Tea Party ilk, nothing would invite a revolution, or civil war, or civic upheaval as surely as trying to snatch folks' gold. As a capital preservation refuge, I'm sympathetic to gold, of course, though not so much to buggery.
Everybody is broke now: national treasuries, giant banks, pension funds, insurance companies. The wonder so far is that credit default swaps have not yet been triggered by interest rate changes or some other silly shit, but when that comes to pass there is no way the counterparties can settle their contracts. Ruin will thunder through the financial system like winged death. Everybody is broke and there's a lot less real "money" (whatever it is) out there. Everybody's quailing at the prospect of QE 3, in all its cosmic futility. The United States has already half killed itself at the Golden Corral steam-table of deep-fried debt. I guess we could go all the way and shoot what remains of the dollar in its pitiful, lolling head.
There is a welling recognition that the dice have been cast and the world has rolled snake eyes. The casino is on fire and a flash flood is boiling down the strip. It's no fun running to the exits only to find the revolving doors already eyeball deep in dirty water. America gibbers to itself but nobody has a clue. I'll try to help: this is a compressive financial and economic contraction (one is money, the other is activity). Late-summer storm that it is, it looks to be intensifying. Everything that's super-big is going down sooner or later. The exact sequence of failures is unpredictable. But you can be sure Nature is telling you to get local, get smaller, get finer, downscale, solidify your friendships, and drop your stupid grandiose fantasies about running WalMart on algae. This is change you don't have to believe in, because it is about to jump up and bite you on the lips.
Sunday, August 07, 2011
Cockburn Asks:
"Get Ready to Vote for Mitt Romney?"
Start with Obama. Of course he blew it. Whether by artful design or by sheer timidity is immaterial. He blew it. Two days before the United States was officially set to default on its debts on August 2, Barack Obama had the Republicans where he wanted them: All he had to do was announce that he’d trudged the last half mile towards a deal but that there’s no pleasing fanatics who reject all possibilities of compromise, who are ready and eager to shut down the government, to see seniors starve and vets denied their benefits. So, Obama could proclaim, he was invoking the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution which states that the "validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned."
Monday, August 01, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
I.F. Stone
Thanks to a comment at Ilind.net, I found out about the website of I.F. Stone, which contains all his writings, including pdfs of the entire run of I.F. Stone Weekly. I'll likely add it to the list of links.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
NBC Nightly News Video on Texas Drought
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Friday, July 22, 2011
Far From the Best
If this guy isn't a dildo, I don't know who is. Considering he lives in a state shaped like America's phallus, perhaps it's not all that surprising.
25 July update: More
29 July update: AW faces a primary challenge--from the Tea Party.
AW: Tea Party Statist
AW threatens to leave Congressional Black Caucus. The article reminds us that during his 2010 campaign, AW claimed to have a higher security clearance than the President!
Has Militarist Right Found Its Warlord?
(12 September update: It's just sad when one unwittingly desecrates the flag.)
The Flag Code
Monday, July 18, 2011
Kunstler: "The Amazing Dissolving Nation"
in which he lays out the different paths European countries will take.
Europe has run the money string to its bitter end and now it just remains to be seen how each country blows up and where the dust settles. Greece and Portugal may just shrug and retire on an economy based on goat-cheese and olives. Ireland will get drunk and pass out for at least a century. Spain sinks back into an age-old catatonic daze, having gone broke spectacularly once before. Italy strings up Mr. Berlusconi on a lamp-post and breaks up into 112 warring city-states. France elects DSK, whose first act is to declare war on the City of New York. Religious wars leave England in embers. And Germany becomes the world's first "green" police state.
It's conceivable to me that Barack Obama may be the last president - for a while. He was a decent fellow but, in the end, ineffectual, and of course he got no help from the legislative branch, including especially colleagues in his own party, a most remarkable class of maundering chickenshits and grifters. Our money problems will not go away and after a while this land will not be governable by familiar means. In case you haven't noticed, the rule of law is already AWOL in many sectors of our national life, most particularly money matters, but before long on every street-corner, every highway strip, plus every GMO cornfield, and brownfield. The two parties are unreformable and the Tea Party is the stooge of one of the two parties, and there is no other party of earnest, decisive, and sane individuals anywhere near the horizon. So some kind of convulsion is in the cards and it will be the unfortunate duty of some dutiful officer to step in and set an agenda based on something other than bluster, fakery, and pocket pool.
While there's a good chance the US debt ceiling will be extended, it seems to me that meanwhile we have crossed an invisible line into a place where untoward things happen.
Europe has run the money string to its bitter end and now it just remains to be seen how each country blows up and where the dust settles. Greece and Portugal may just shrug and retire on an economy based on goat-cheese and olives. Ireland will get drunk and pass out for at least a century. Spain sinks back into an age-old catatonic daze, having gone broke spectacularly once before. Italy strings up Mr. Berlusconi on a lamp-post and breaks up into 112 warring city-states. France elects DSK, whose first act is to declare war on the City of New York. Religious wars leave England in embers. And Germany becomes the world's first "green" police state.
It's conceivable to me that Barack Obama may be the last president - for a while. He was a decent fellow but, in the end, ineffectual, and of course he got no help from the legislative branch, including especially colleagues in his own party, a most remarkable class of maundering chickenshits and grifters. Our money problems will not go away and after a while this land will not be governable by familiar means. In case you haven't noticed, the rule of law is already AWOL in many sectors of our national life, most particularly money matters, but before long on every street-corner, every highway strip, plus every GMO cornfield, and brownfield. The two parties are unreformable and the Tea Party is the stooge of one of the two parties, and there is no other party of earnest, decisive, and sane individuals anywhere near the horizon. So some kind of convulsion is in the cards and it will be the unfortunate duty of some dutiful officer to step in and set an agenda based on something other than bluster, fakery, and pocket pool.
While there's a good chance the US debt ceiling will be extended, it seems to me that meanwhile we have crossed an invisible line into a place where untoward things happen.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
Monday, July 04, 2011
On the Fourth of July
"There is one day of the year when America should receive nothing but praise. That's July Fourth. On all other occasions, those who wish the United States well will vigorously distinguish the good from the bad, and especially from the BAD."
--Paul Fussell, BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America (New York: Summit Books, 1991).
--Paul Fussell, BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America (New York: Summit Books, 1991).
Saturday, July 02, 2011
Friday, July 01, 2011
The Richest Man in the World
Carlos Slim Helu
The World's Billionaires 2011--Forbes
Carlos Slim is a philanthropy skeptic.
Interesting findings:
The Koch brothers, David and Charles, both ranked 18th, are worth $22 billion each. David is slightly less rich than Charles but is still the richest man in New York City, if only because Charles lives in Wichita. Another Koch brother, William, is further down the list at 310, with a $3.5 billion fortune.
There are four Waltons listed (ranked at 10, 20, 21, and 22).
But Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart (currently ranked 100, with a $9 billion fortune) could soon have a fortune of $100 billion.
Wikipedia's list of non-Forbes billionaires, which includes Hosni Mubarak.
The Forbes 400 Richest People in America.
The World's Billionaires 2011--Forbes
Carlos Slim is a philanthropy skeptic.
Interesting findings:
The Koch brothers, David and Charles, both ranked 18th, are worth $22 billion each. David is slightly less rich than Charles but is still the richest man in New York City, if only because Charles lives in Wichita. Another Koch brother, William, is further down the list at 310, with a $3.5 billion fortune.
There are four Waltons listed (ranked at 10, 20, 21, and 22).
But Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart (currently ranked 100, with a $9 billion fortune) could soon have a fortune of $100 billion.
Wikipedia's list of non-Forbes billionaires, which includes Hosni Mubarak.
The Forbes 400 Richest People in America.
Monday, June 27, 2011
New Orleans Libraries Renovated
One of my first posts concerned the libraries of New Orleans, which were damaged in Hurricane Katrina. This article details the renovation and modernization of library branches across the city.
Cable News Ratings
Cable news ratings.
Headline News has strong showings because of its coverage of the Casey Anthony trial.
Cable Coverage Estimates as of October 2010.
CNN/HLN (100,877 households)
Current TV (59,122 households)
Fox Business Network (57,136 households)
Fox News Channel (99,057 households)
MSNBC (95,414 households)
Headline News has strong showings because of its coverage of the Casey Anthony trial.
Cable Coverage Estimates as of October 2010.
CNN/HLN (100,877 households)
Current TV (59,122 households)
Fox Business Network (57,136 households)
Fox News Channel (99,057 households)
MSNBC (95,414 households)
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Countdown on Current, Part 2
We shall see how Keith's show does. Though his audience seems to be a fraction of what he drew at MSNBC, I attribute that to Current's relative obscurity. It still has ample room for growth. Meanwhile, the Countdown audience, small but dedicated, will keep holding it down for Keith
MSNBC's main anchors are coming into their own. Off-the-top impressions: Rachel is wonky and informative, Ed is a populist-with-heart, and Lawrence models himself after Keith.
Glenn Beck has about a week left on Fox News, after which he'll host an online show. I remember when he was a self-effacing, self-described rodeo clown on Headline News.
MSNBC's main anchors are coming into their own. Off-the-top impressions: Rachel is wonky and informative, Ed is a populist-with-heart, and Lawrence models himself after Keith.
Glenn Beck has about a week left on Fox News, after which he'll host an online show. I remember when he was a self-effacing, self-described rodeo clown on Headline News.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
The Scandal Beneath the Scandal
While seemingly everyone focuses on the Weiner sex scandal, Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss hopes that it might bring attention to what he regardsas the real scandal, specifically Weiner's prevaricating about Israel and Palestine.
Maybe it's in their nostrils, but I think Weiner and "Diaper" David Vitter look alike.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Energy and Hawaii
This will be a short essay on oil and renewable power in Hawaii.
Ian Lind: "Energy Costs, Air Fares, and Our Tourism-Dependent Economy."
I'm still working on this, but wanted to add that direct flights between Hilo and Los Angeles have just begun for the first time since 1983. Are we approaching the peak of oil production or have we passed it? I don't know, but air travel will severely contract in the Post-Oil Age.
Update: I found this.
http://www.disappearednews.com/2011/06/energy-and-power-in-hawaii-1850-93.html
Ian Lind: "Energy Costs, Air Fares, and Our Tourism-Dependent Economy."
I'm still working on this, but wanted to add that direct flights between Hilo and Los Angeles have just begun for the first time since 1983. Are we approaching the peak of oil production or have we passed it? I don't know, but air travel will severely contract in the Post-Oil Age.
Update: I found this.
http://www.disappearednews.com/2011/06/energy-and-power-in-hawaii-1850-93.html
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Shawn Christopher, "Another Sleepless Night"
Incorporated into D.J. Sir Charles's "Throwback House" mix, which I heard just now on MusicChoice Throwback Jams channel.
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
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
Will Japan Turn Inward?
An Odd Rumination
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 21, 2011 9:42 AM
Can't we just drop Pee Wee Herman on Tripoli? Surely this shocking manifestation of everything toxic in America's existential zeitgeist arsenal would send the Gadhafi corps shrieking for the blank Saharan interior - somewhere between Murzuk and Timbuktu - where timeless dunes shift in the eternal wind, and the cares of modern life, armies, geopolitics, banks, bombs, and crusaders in red bowties are but grains of sand under the uncountable stars. To recline there, outside the tent, in the bracing chill of the desert night, against the warm backrest of a sleeping camel, with a glass of strong tea, would bring one into communion with the peace of Allah - don't you think?
But it appears we're going for the heavy ordnance instead, aided by the latest and greatest in video-gaming technology, and, by Gawd (yes, that one, ours, the one Michelangelo painted in Rome) we are going to give this cheeky Gadhafi fellow something like a Semtex colonoscopy and few around the wide world will shed a tear as he is translated into just another late-night snack for the rats and scorpions.
Good gracious what an exhausting month this has been!
Most remarkable in the tsunami of events last week was the peculiar dearth of actual reported news - as in hard, reliable information. CNN played the same loop all weekend of brave Japanese firemen marshalling outside the Fukushima reactors, trotting this way and that way in disciplined ranks, while alarms went out about radioactivity showing up here and there, in milk, spinach (did it grow overnight?), and on airline customers de-planing in the otherwise spotless reaches of Dallas, Texas. My correspondents tell me that the radioactive scare meme is way overblown, with the number of actual dead so far at exactly zero from the whole reactor event- and they may be right, or not, though it is hard to imagine no severe consequences at all over time from this disgusting mess. More to the point perhaps is the loss of about 30 percent of Japan's electric power. What will they do in the long agony of sorting things out there?
I have a peculiar fantasy about Japan. It burbled up in my mind even before the earthquake-tsunami-reactor disaster, and I conceived it in rumination upon Japan's weird twenty-year-long economic malaise, as the nation's population shrank, and its debt climbed to astronomical heights, and its young people lost heart, and it seemed just to go through the motions of whatever modernity required of them - ship the cars, package the robot parts, show up at the salaryman drinking contest, get stuffed into another late-night commuter train. I don't claim to be a Japan expert, but I think all this was getting to them in a deep, major way. I think they perhaps secretly longed to get back to something like an older traditional Japanese society - the one before car assembly plants, big steel ships, chain reactions, and fluorescently-lighted pachinko parlors, back to the society that blossomed and fruited in cycles of centuries on those beautiful rocky, sea-washed islands into a culture saturated in artistry - unencumbered by idiot religions or the bothersome neediness of other nations.
I can't shake the odd feeling that Japan was looking for a way to get back to the 19th century, and perhaps even deeper beyond that - to the dream-time before they made the fateful decision to industrialize. The earthquake-tsunami-reactor moment is their chance now to begin that journey. Frankly, I don't know what else they can do. Japan imports over 95 percent of the fossil fuels it uses (that would be oil, coal, and natural gas). Does anyone think they'll be able to continue that indefinitely? Sorry, I just don't see it under any circumstances. And, anyway, the geographic region where the bulk of the world's oil comes from is in the process of blowing up. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are like some kind of mansion where fire has broken out simultaneously in the kitchen, the conservatory, the media room, the master bathroom, the chauffeur's apartment over the garage, and the pool house, and whenever the flames are doused in one spot, they break out in another. Yesterday it was Syria and Yemen. Bahrain is under lockdown. The Egyptians are having second thoughts about the loss of a grinding stability, trouble is stirring up in Kuwait, Iraq is like a crazy person in the rubber room of history, and who knows what kind of spells the vizeer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is laying out in his Kevlar sanctum. There is just too much tension in the world and it is demanding release in the most vexing ways.
So, I can see the Japanese people - a deeply homogenous society - veering toward an as yet un-articulated consensus: let's just get out of the modern world. Let's go back home. Let's don the kimono and the hakama, get us some horses, sharpen the katana, and kick back in the chaniwa garden with a bowl of green tea - and forget about all that dirty, disgusting, dangerous, heavy manufacturing-for-export (to an insane world) nonsense. History may record their industrial adventure as a weird blip of activity in a much longer timeline. As it will for us and everybody else, I believe. In fact, this fantasy about the Japanese shrugging off the toils of modernity is exactly what all the other so-called advanced nations of the world will find themselves doing sooner rather than later as we all take the road back to a world made by hand. The Japanese may just be the pioneering exemplars of the universal process.
What we're seeing these days is an epochal unspooling of hypercomplexity. The world just can't take anymore of it. The world is telling us to cut it out or it is going to kick our upright bipedal asses. Of course, America may be absolutely the last society to get this message. We'll receive it in the car-wash, no doubt. On our iPhones.
"Make the World Go Away" indeed.
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 21, 2011 9:42 AM
Can't we just drop Pee Wee Herman on Tripoli? Surely this shocking manifestation of everything toxic in America's existential zeitgeist arsenal would send the Gadhafi corps shrieking for the blank Saharan interior - somewhere between Murzuk and Timbuktu - where timeless dunes shift in the eternal wind, and the cares of modern life, armies, geopolitics, banks, bombs, and crusaders in red bowties are but grains of sand under the uncountable stars. To recline there, outside the tent, in the bracing chill of the desert night, against the warm backrest of a sleeping camel, with a glass of strong tea, would bring one into communion with the peace of Allah - don't you think?
But it appears we're going for the heavy ordnance instead, aided by the latest and greatest in video-gaming technology, and, by Gawd (yes, that one, ours, the one Michelangelo painted in Rome) we are going to give this cheeky Gadhafi fellow something like a Semtex colonoscopy and few around the wide world will shed a tear as he is translated into just another late-night snack for the rats and scorpions.
Good gracious what an exhausting month this has been!
Most remarkable in the tsunami of events last week was the peculiar dearth of actual reported news - as in hard, reliable information. CNN played the same loop all weekend of brave Japanese firemen marshalling outside the Fukushima reactors, trotting this way and that way in disciplined ranks, while alarms went out about radioactivity showing up here and there, in milk, spinach (did it grow overnight?), and on airline customers de-planing in the otherwise spotless reaches of Dallas, Texas. My correspondents tell me that the radioactive scare meme is way overblown, with the number of actual dead so far at exactly zero from the whole reactor event- and they may be right, or not, though it is hard to imagine no severe consequences at all over time from this disgusting mess. More to the point perhaps is the loss of about 30 percent of Japan's electric power. What will they do in the long agony of sorting things out there?
I have a peculiar fantasy about Japan. It burbled up in my mind even before the earthquake-tsunami-reactor disaster, and I conceived it in rumination upon Japan's weird twenty-year-long economic malaise, as the nation's population shrank, and its debt climbed to astronomical heights, and its young people lost heart, and it seemed just to go through the motions of whatever modernity required of them - ship the cars, package the robot parts, show up at the salaryman drinking contest, get stuffed into another late-night commuter train. I don't claim to be a Japan expert, but I think all this was getting to them in a deep, major way. I think they perhaps secretly longed to get back to something like an older traditional Japanese society - the one before car assembly plants, big steel ships, chain reactions, and fluorescently-lighted pachinko parlors, back to the society that blossomed and fruited in cycles of centuries on those beautiful rocky, sea-washed islands into a culture saturated in artistry - unencumbered by idiot religions or the bothersome neediness of other nations.
I can't shake the odd feeling that Japan was looking for a way to get back to the 19th century, and perhaps even deeper beyond that - to the dream-time before they made the fateful decision to industrialize. The earthquake-tsunami-reactor moment is their chance now to begin that journey. Frankly, I don't know what else they can do. Japan imports over 95 percent of the fossil fuels it uses (that would be oil, coal, and natural gas). Does anyone think they'll be able to continue that indefinitely? Sorry, I just don't see it under any circumstances. And, anyway, the geographic region where the bulk of the world's oil comes from is in the process of blowing up. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are like some kind of mansion where fire has broken out simultaneously in the kitchen, the conservatory, the media room, the master bathroom, the chauffeur's apartment over the garage, and the pool house, and whenever the flames are doused in one spot, they break out in another. Yesterday it was Syria and Yemen. Bahrain is under lockdown. The Egyptians are having second thoughts about the loss of a grinding stability, trouble is stirring up in Kuwait, Iraq is like a crazy person in the rubber room of history, and who knows what kind of spells the vizeer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is laying out in his Kevlar sanctum. There is just too much tension in the world and it is demanding release in the most vexing ways.
So, I can see the Japanese people - a deeply homogenous society - veering toward an as yet un-articulated consensus: let's just get out of the modern world. Let's go back home. Let's don the kimono and the hakama, get us some horses, sharpen the katana, and kick back in the chaniwa garden with a bowl of green tea - and forget about all that dirty, disgusting, dangerous, heavy manufacturing-for-export (to an insane world) nonsense. History may record their industrial adventure as a weird blip of activity in a much longer timeline. As it will for us and everybody else, I believe. In fact, this fantasy about the Japanese shrugging off the toils of modernity is exactly what all the other so-called advanced nations of the world will find themselves doing sooner rather than later as we all take the road back to a world made by hand. The Japanese may just be the pioneering exemplars of the universal process.
What we're seeing these days is an epochal unspooling of hypercomplexity. The world just can't take anymore of it. The world is telling us to cut it out or it is going to kick our upright bipedal asses. Of course, America may be absolutely the last society to get this message. We'll receive it in the car-wash, no doubt. On our iPhones.
"Make the World Go Away" indeed.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Fifth Anniversary
Five years ago today, I began this blog with the following message:
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Welcome to Poppa Zao, my eponymous blog on culture, art, and other matters. I welcome comments at poppa-zao@hotmail.com.
Posted by Poppa Zao at 4:49 PM 0 comments
The e-mail address is defunct, but I'll have a new one soon. What I find is that the blog race belongs not to the swift nor to the prolific but to the consistent. Posting something, not necessarily every day, but at least once a week (if only a link) is important.
A few months prior, Hattie began her own blog, and it inspired me to start mine.
With that, here's Kunstler's latest (i'll add K's links later):
Rock Me on the Water
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 14, 2011 8:09 AM
Note of apology. My iMac turned up dead this morning and I got a late start by other means.
_____________________________________________
There was Japan, standing quietly offstage all these years, minding its own business, more or less - though unwinding financially and socially at some very deep level for two decades, debt rising around everybody's ankles like a silent, insidious tsunami, population dying back, young people demoralized by the "salary-man" culture with its meager consolation of nightly drinking sprees ending in micro-hotels with rooms like funerary vaults - Japan, who had been horrifically chastened after its mad military-industrial outburst of the last century, who shook all that off to become the world's most dependably, civilized nation.
And now, the sorrows of Job.
The world was very busy watching the ME/NA countries go batshit in history's center ring, but the spectacle of wreckage in Japan, unfolds now like the slow-motion blossoming of some gigantic evil chrysanthemum and you get the ominous idea that this is only the start of a story that will grind on and on as more bodies are discovered and the nuclear fiasco burns deeper and Japan's finances enter a death spiral. How could you watch those videos of the sickening wall of black water that slammed through Sendai without wondering how many doomed people it carried unseen beneath the rafts of cars, and the sideways ships, and the eerily floating houses?
I tried to follow the story on American cable TV Sunday night but with the exception of stolid, dogged CNN, all the other news channels were playing one sordid and titanically stupid program after another: meth freaks, show-biz narcissists, and sex chatter without sex. What a nation of morons we are. Over six hundred cable TV stations and only one that even tries to tell you what is going on in the world. How many citizens of this republic were watching a dessert chef undergo staged humiliation for the failure of a cupcake batch while two nuclear reactors melted down across the Pacific? We deserve what just happened to Japan three times over. And we might just get the equivalent at least in social and political trouble as our money follies unwind and normal living here becomes untenable on the old terms.
So many things are shaking loose now in this world-wrapped-too-tight that it is hard to track where they all overlap, but I will try today.
ME/NA has gone critical overnight. Saudi Arabia wants to occupy tiny-but-strategic Bahrain, and Bahrain says that would be an act of war - though it's hard to conceive how they would wage one against KSA, which is up to its eyeballs in US supplied state-of-the art aircraft and all sorts of other dangerous swag. The Shia population wants to blow the little Kingdom wide open; they'll be lucky if the Saudis don't inadvertently turn it into an ashtray, just to see if their equipment works-as-advertised. That might be exactly what Iran wants - poised, as it is across the Persian Gulf and wishing deeply to evict the US Navy from its deep-water port in Bahrain. It would be unlikely if Iran was not helping to provoke the Shia uprising that is ongoing in many of the states on the west side of the Gulf. I only wonder why Iran has not given a green light to Nasrullah of Hezbollah in Lebanon to start a rumble there with Israel. It can't be anything akin to a sense of political responsibility. More likely just fear of how the Israeli air force might answer this time, with events moving so quickly and the world's head spinning so fast, it can barely focus on one particular place. Anyway, stay tuned in the Persian Gulf.
Meanwhile, the dithering Euro-American alliance finally takes its green light from the Saudi-dominated Arab League for a NATO no-fly zone in Libya - or the eastern provinces of Libya for now - in hope of putting the schnitz on Mr. Gadhafi's shenanigans. I don't know what the political idea is behind this - perhaps little more than the notion that there must be some other colonel in the Libyan military who is less mad and more tractable than proven maniac Gadhafi. It would be nice for Euro-America (and China, too, actually) if the Libyan oil industry could survive all this intact but as Michael Klare pointed out on the Web last week, it is generally the case that oil production goes way down permanently in all nations that endure political uproars. Anyway, a no-fly zone involves a lot more than just shooting down Gadhafi's aircraft when it dares to take off. It starts with destroying the planes and helicopters on the ground, and moves forward quickly to the question of boots-on-the-ground.
At the moment, the oil markets don't know what to do. Some loose talk says that Japan will not need oil for a while, due to a wrecked economy. I dunno about that, with the reactors melting and twelve million people without electric power there. Let's remember, they are not the only people in the world who buy oil. In fact, everybody but a few savages in some tiny backwaters of the rain forest use oil - and even the savages do indirectly since they trade for things that come up the Amazon (and the rivers of Borneo) in boats with motors. (Not to put too fine a point on it.)
Most interesting to me this morning are the financial implications of all these things and let's start with Japan. Monumental doesn't seem to describe the unholy mess there, just the sheer awfulness of all that mud, twisted steel, radioactive trash, and decomposing human bodies scattered amongst and within it. The cost of it seems beyond calculation, but the first questions might be how does a deeply-in-debt Japan raise some cash to begin digging out and (possibly) rebuilding (and I add that qualification because I don't know that a lot of this lost stuff will be rebuilt at all). But it will be cleaned up and sorted out. The obvious answer to the funding question is that Japan sells foreign bonds, namely US and European.
That will not be a good thing for Euro-America. Japan was the quiet benefactor last time the European sick countries had to roll over their debt payments, and nobody wanted to buy their paper. Japan went in and hosed up their debt, allowing them to enjoy one last Christmas of seeming political normality. Now it's rollover time again in the Euro-Zone and not only will kindly Uncle Japan not be present for the bond sales, they will be selling off the stuff they already hold, and it is hard to see how the European banks digest that ugly bolus of reality.
Similarly, in the US. Japan has accumulated about 800-billion in US debt paper. They have more-than-generously propped up our operations here for years by buying the stuff. Now they would seem to have little choice but to liquidate a bunch of it and cancel their seats at the upcoming auctions of new paper issues. That leaves Ben Bernanke alone in his office with a shit sandwich for lunch. What to do now, Ben? Who on this planet is going to buy more debt of a people who spend their lives in zombie-like thrall to the Kardashian sisters? No, Ben's going to have to eat the sandwich himself, a least until the end of QE-2. Or watch interest go way way up to the point where the risks are acceptable to outside parties - but that would only destroy the US Economy and American government at all levels, since we can't meet our obligations even at ZIRP levels - and, anyway, who would step forward now to buy this crap under any circumstances? (Echo answers....)
The most beguiling financial idea of the week comes from Jim Rickards of Omnis on Eric King's interview website who says that the sheer load of stuff in the Fed's vaults is now so enormous that further QE is quite unnecessary to continue monetizing America's debt. All they have to do over at the Fed is roll over the maturing securities they hold and take the money and buy more securities! In other words we now have at our disposal a perpetual motion money-generating engine. And, by the way, if I do sound a tad facetious its not because I disbelieve what Mr. Rickards is telling us. I do, however demur when it comes to the question of consequences. Despite the elegance of that operation, it still remains a fixed law of the universe that you can' get something for nothing. What Mr. Rickards describes is a trick for buying just a little more time using the residues of wealth that already exists. But then the time comes when you have even burned through the residues of your wealth, and then what?
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Welcome to Poppa Zao, my eponymous blog on culture, art, and other matters. I welcome comments at poppa-zao@hotmail.com.
Posted by Poppa Zao at 4:49 PM 0 comments
The e-mail address is defunct, but I'll have a new one soon. What I find is that the blog race belongs not to the swift nor to the prolific but to the consistent. Posting something, not necessarily every day, but at least once a week (if only a link) is important.
A few months prior, Hattie began her own blog, and it inspired me to start mine.
With that, here's Kunstler's latest (i'll add K's links later):
Rock Me on the Water
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 14, 2011 8:09 AM
Note of apology. My iMac turned up dead this morning and I got a late start by other means.
_____________________________________________
There was Japan, standing quietly offstage all these years, minding its own business, more or less - though unwinding financially and socially at some very deep level for two decades, debt rising around everybody's ankles like a silent, insidious tsunami, population dying back, young people demoralized by the "salary-man" culture with its meager consolation of nightly drinking sprees ending in micro-hotels with rooms like funerary vaults - Japan, who had been horrifically chastened after its mad military-industrial outburst of the last century, who shook all that off to become the world's most dependably, civilized nation.
And now, the sorrows of Job.
The world was very busy watching the ME/NA countries go batshit in history's center ring, but the spectacle of wreckage in Japan, unfolds now like the slow-motion blossoming of some gigantic evil chrysanthemum and you get the ominous idea that this is only the start of a story that will grind on and on as more bodies are discovered and the nuclear fiasco burns deeper and Japan's finances enter a death spiral. How could you watch those videos of the sickening wall of black water that slammed through Sendai without wondering how many doomed people it carried unseen beneath the rafts of cars, and the sideways ships, and the eerily floating houses?
I tried to follow the story on American cable TV Sunday night but with the exception of stolid, dogged CNN, all the other news channels were playing one sordid and titanically stupid program after another: meth freaks, show-biz narcissists, and sex chatter without sex. What a nation of morons we are. Over six hundred cable TV stations and only one that even tries to tell you what is going on in the world. How many citizens of this republic were watching a dessert chef undergo staged humiliation for the failure of a cupcake batch while two nuclear reactors melted down across the Pacific? We deserve what just happened to Japan three times over. And we might just get the equivalent at least in social and political trouble as our money follies unwind and normal living here becomes untenable on the old terms.
So many things are shaking loose now in this world-wrapped-too-tight that it is hard to track where they all overlap, but I will try today.
ME/NA has gone critical overnight. Saudi Arabia wants to occupy tiny-but-strategic Bahrain, and Bahrain says that would be an act of war - though it's hard to conceive how they would wage one against KSA, which is up to its eyeballs in US supplied state-of-the art aircraft and all sorts of other dangerous swag. The Shia population wants to blow the little Kingdom wide open; they'll be lucky if the Saudis don't inadvertently turn it into an ashtray, just to see if their equipment works-as-advertised. That might be exactly what Iran wants - poised, as it is across the Persian Gulf and wishing deeply to evict the US Navy from its deep-water port in Bahrain. It would be unlikely if Iran was not helping to provoke the Shia uprising that is ongoing in many of the states on the west side of the Gulf. I only wonder why Iran has not given a green light to Nasrullah of Hezbollah in Lebanon to start a rumble there with Israel. It can't be anything akin to a sense of political responsibility. More likely just fear of how the Israeli air force might answer this time, with events moving so quickly and the world's head spinning so fast, it can barely focus on one particular place. Anyway, stay tuned in the Persian Gulf.
Meanwhile, the dithering Euro-American alliance finally takes its green light from the Saudi-dominated Arab League for a NATO no-fly zone in Libya - or the eastern provinces of Libya for now - in hope of putting the schnitz on Mr. Gadhafi's shenanigans. I don't know what the political idea is behind this - perhaps little more than the notion that there must be some other colonel in the Libyan military who is less mad and more tractable than proven maniac Gadhafi. It would be nice for Euro-America (and China, too, actually) if the Libyan oil industry could survive all this intact but as Michael Klare pointed out on the Web last week, it is generally the case that oil production goes way down permanently in all nations that endure political uproars. Anyway, a no-fly zone involves a lot more than just shooting down Gadhafi's aircraft when it dares to take off. It starts with destroying the planes and helicopters on the ground, and moves forward quickly to the question of boots-on-the-ground.
At the moment, the oil markets don't know what to do. Some loose talk says that Japan will not need oil for a while, due to a wrecked economy. I dunno about that, with the reactors melting and twelve million people without electric power there. Let's remember, they are not the only people in the world who buy oil. In fact, everybody but a few savages in some tiny backwaters of the rain forest use oil - and even the savages do indirectly since they trade for things that come up the Amazon (and the rivers of Borneo) in boats with motors. (Not to put too fine a point on it.)
Most interesting to me this morning are the financial implications of all these things and let's start with Japan. Monumental doesn't seem to describe the unholy mess there, just the sheer awfulness of all that mud, twisted steel, radioactive trash, and decomposing human bodies scattered amongst and within it. The cost of it seems beyond calculation, but the first questions might be how does a deeply-in-debt Japan raise some cash to begin digging out and (possibly) rebuilding (and I add that qualification because I don't know that a lot of this lost stuff will be rebuilt at all). But it will be cleaned up and sorted out. The obvious answer to the funding question is that Japan sells foreign bonds, namely US and European.
That will not be a good thing for Euro-America. Japan was the quiet benefactor last time the European sick countries had to roll over their debt payments, and nobody wanted to buy their paper. Japan went in and hosed up their debt, allowing them to enjoy one last Christmas of seeming political normality. Now it's rollover time again in the Euro-Zone and not only will kindly Uncle Japan not be present for the bond sales, they will be selling off the stuff they already hold, and it is hard to see how the European banks digest that ugly bolus of reality.
Similarly, in the US. Japan has accumulated about 800-billion in US debt paper. They have more-than-generously propped up our operations here for years by buying the stuff. Now they would seem to have little choice but to liquidate a bunch of it and cancel their seats at the upcoming auctions of new paper issues. That leaves Ben Bernanke alone in his office with a shit sandwich for lunch. What to do now, Ben? Who on this planet is going to buy more debt of a people who spend their lives in zombie-like thrall to the Kardashian sisters? No, Ben's going to have to eat the sandwich himself, a least until the end of QE-2. Or watch interest go way way up to the point where the risks are acceptable to outside parties - but that would only destroy the US Economy and American government at all levels, since we can't meet our obligations even at ZIRP levels - and, anyway, who would step forward now to buy this crap under any circumstances? (Echo answers....)
The most beguiling financial idea of the week comes from Jim Rickards of Omnis on Eric King's interview website who says that the sheer load of stuff in the Fed's vaults is now so enormous that further QE is quite unnecessary to continue monetizing America's debt. All they have to do over at the Fed is roll over the maturing securities they hold and take the money and buy more securities! In other words we now have at our disposal a perpetual motion money-generating engine. And, by the way, if I do sound a tad facetious its not because I disbelieve what Mr. Rickards is telling us. I do, however demur when it comes to the question of consequences. Despite the elegance of that operation, it still remains a fixed law of the universe that you can' get something for nothing. What Mr. Rickards describes is a trick for buying just a little more time using the residues of wealth that already exists. But then the time comes when you have even burned through the residues of your wealth, and then what?
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Jerks on a Shopping Spree II
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2011/02/18/jerks-on-a-shopping-spree-ii/
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Monday, March 07, 2011
"Reality Optional Nation"
Any links within Kunstler's essay are mine.--P.Z.
Reality Optional Nation
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 7, 2011 9:38 AM
Before retiring to a casket packed with clods of my native soil, I tuned in the Sunday night late news to find the political struggles of Araby banished from the screen. Charlie Sheen was all over the place, his defiant chin thrust forward as if auditioning for the role as our next president. I hope the execs at Fox News were paying attention, especially now that they've lost half their commentary squad to the toils of campaigning. Think of it: Charlie Sheen in the White House. With a pound of pharmaceutical-grade blow. More intellect in one seat than since the night Thomas Jefferson dined with his water spaniel, Hercules. No mouthy "advisors" cluttering up the West Wing (or disrupting the laser light show of Charlie's thoughts). And there is, of course, the memory of his dad, who a lot of prayerful Americans recall as a president, somewhere maybe between Clinton and Bush Two.
An Alzheimers fog creeps across this land, from sea to shining sea, as its intellectual class - theoretically the brains of this outfit - utterly fails to get a grip on what is transpiring in this world. The failure of leadership in America is comprehensive and deep. President Obama's top aide, Bill Daley, floated out the notion that we might draw down America's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) so that the imprudent folk who traded-in clunkers for new Ford F110s and Cadillac Escalades won't feel any pain from four-dollar gasoline.
Harken, now - a reminder to the rest of you out there who do not have tubeworms boring tunnels through your brain-pans: there's a reason the petroleum reserve is called "strategic." We didn't stockpile that oil to pretend to be the world's "swing producer" for a month and a half, just to knock the price down twenty-seven cents a gallon so that soccer moms could feel more comfortable bidding for an Auslini Veneto crocodile leather handbag on The Shopping Channel. Strategic was meant to imply when something really really bad happens, like a national emergency, say, with military overtones.
The failure of the news media, trapped by the diminishing returns of technology, grows more epic every week. We've never had more media outlets in the history of this land, or been more poorly informed. Mental fossil George Will fired off a salvo last week against fixing the US railroads. [Note: A sharp-eyed Grist.org reader found a Will column from 2001 advocating high-speed rail.--P.Z.] He thinks it's just a sinister ploy to snatch the people's "individualism." Perhaps George hasn't noticed that other things are operating out there in the polity-space to turn the folks of this land into zombies. After all, they were long ago transformed from "citizens" into "consumers" - without a peep of complaint from anybody - so, having already surrendered their duties, obligations, and responsibilities to anything beyond their hunger for Cheez Doodles, they might now find themselves suddenly devoid of "individualism," staggering down the highways in mobs wherever a whiff of blood emanates from a strip mall?
I'd have to guess that the Maryland DOT ran a few lanes of the Beltway through George Will's head, perhaps so he could drag race with Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Senator Jim DeMint to see who can get America to drive off a cliff fastest. Oddly, the basic question that now thunders through North Africa and the Middle East has not been heard on the fruited plains of this-land-is-your-land - viz: who gave this cohort of morons the right to tell us what to do and think?
Which gets us to the true matter at hand: the matter that the world is suddenly exploding in an epic phase-change rearrangement of the political order, starting with the lands that own most of the world's exportable oil. In this vein, a message to readers of George Will and other old-line "thought-leaders" of America's commentary regime: If you think the action in the streets will be limited to these sandy outlands seven thousand miles away, then your last thoughts will not be comforting when the zombies you helped to create turn up slavering in your driveway.
By the way, this doesn't let President Obama off the hook. His consistent failure to tell the truth about the fragility of our situation, to make the case for getting our citizens out of their car-prisons, to promote modes of living that comport with reality - the president's apparent cluelessness in every dimension of this crisis is something that historians of the future will shake theirs heads over in wonder and nausea (if the notion of history even survives the oil age). And for the moment we'll put aside some other rather pressing matters such as the AWOL rule-of-law in our banking operations.
One historian, Michael Klare of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass, made the trenchant point last week that oil nations which undergo political upheaval invariably end up producing far less oil, permanently, no matter whether the political outcome is better or worse than before. So, notwithstanding the media fantasy in our land to the effect that America's founding fathers have been reincarnated in places like Egypt the past month, it is unlikely that there would be anything but an extreme downside effect on the world's oil supply, even if the successor to Hosni Mubarak (as yet unknown) turned up in a powdered wig and waistcoat, with the Bill of Rights magically translated into Arabic in his beneficent hand.
I was a young newspaper reporter during the 1973 OPEC oil "embargo" (so-called). Whatever else history records it as having consisted of - bluffing, hoarding, fear-mongering, market manipulation - a few things are inarguable. It arose suddenly out of a political conflict (the Yom Kippur War), and it disrupted life in the USA to a degree unknown since the Second World War - or for that matter until the present day, even counting the trauma of 9/11/01. My sense of things is that we are now entering an oil crisis much more severe and very likely permanent. If production is lost through political strife in Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Iran, Iraq, or even a lesser combination of them, it will crater the global economy and change how we do everything here. George Will may even find himself having to ride a bicycle down the freeway in his head.
Reality Optional Nation
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 7, 2011 9:38 AM
Before retiring to a casket packed with clods of my native soil, I tuned in the Sunday night late news to find the political struggles of Araby banished from the screen. Charlie Sheen was all over the place, his defiant chin thrust forward as if auditioning for the role as our next president. I hope the execs at Fox News were paying attention, especially now that they've lost half their commentary squad to the toils of campaigning. Think of it: Charlie Sheen in the White House. With a pound of pharmaceutical-grade blow. More intellect in one seat than since the night Thomas Jefferson dined with his water spaniel, Hercules. No mouthy "advisors" cluttering up the West Wing (or disrupting the laser light show of Charlie's thoughts). And there is, of course, the memory of his dad, who a lot of prayerful Americans recall as a president, somewhere maybe between Clinton and Bush Two.
An Alzheimers fog creeps across this land, from sea to shining sea, as its intellectual class - theoretically the brains of this outfit - utterly fails to get a grip on what is transpiring in this world. The failure of leadership in America is comprehensive and deep. President Obama's top aide, Bill Daley, floated out the notion that we might draw down America's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) so that the imprudent folk who traded-in clunkers for new Ford F110s and Cadillac Escalades won't feel any pain from four-dollar gasoline.
Harken, now - a reminder to the rest of you out there who do not have tubeworms boring tunnels through your brain-pans: there's a reason the petroleum reserve is called "strategic." We didn't stockpile that oil to pretend to be the world's "swing producer" for a month and a half, just to knock the price down twenty-seven cents a gallon so that soccer moms could feel more comfortable bidding for an Auslini Veneto crocodile leather handbag on The Shopping Channel. Strategic was meant to imply when something really really bad happens, like a national emergency, say, with military overtones.
The failure of the news media, trapped by the diminishing returns of technology, grows more epic every week. We've never had more media outlets in the history of this land, or been more poorly informed. Mental fossil George Will fired off a salvo last week against fixing the US railroads. [Note: A sharp-eyed Grist.org reader found a Will column from 2001 advocating high-speed rail.--P.Z.] He thinks it's just a sinister ploy to snatch the people's "individualism." Perhaps George hasn't noticed that other things are operating out there in the polity-space to turn the folks of this land into zombies. After all, they were long ago transformed from "citizens" into "consumers" - without a peep of complaint from anybody - so, having already surrendered their duties, obligations, and responsibilities to anything beyond their hunger for Cheez Doodles, they might now find themselves suddenly devoid of "individualism," staggering down the highways in mobs wherever a whiff of blood emanates from a strip mall?
I'd have to guess that the Maryland DOT ran a few lanes of the Beltway through George Will's head, perhaps so he could drag race with Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Senator Jim DeMint to see who can get America to drive off a cliff fastest. Oddly, the basic question that now thunders through North Africa and the Middle East has not been heard on the fruited plains of this-land-is-your-land - viz: who gave this cohort of morons the right to tell us what to do and think?
Which gets us to the true matter at hand: the matter that the world is suddenly exploding in an epic phase-change rearrangement of the political order, starting with the lands that own most of the world's exportable oil. In this vein, a message to readers of George Will and other old-line "thought-leaders" of America's commentary regime: If you think the action in the streets will be limited to these sandy outlands seven thousand miles away, then your last thoughts will not be comforting when the zombies you helped to create turn up slavering in your driveway.
By the way, this doesn't let President Obama off the hook. His consistent failure to tell the truth about the fragility of our situation, to make the case for getting our citizens out of their car-prisons, to promote modes of living that comport with reality - the president's apparent cluelessness in every dimension of this crisis is something that historians of the future will shake theirs heads over in wonder and nausea (if the notion of history even survives the oil age). And for the moment we'll put aside some other rather pressing matters such as the AWOL rule-of-law in our banking operations.
One historian, Michael Klare of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass, made the trenchant point last week that oil nations which undergo political upheaval invariably end up producing far less oil, permanently, no matter whether the political outcome is better or worse than before. So, notwithstanding the media fantasy in our land to the effect that America's founding fathers have been reincarnated in places like Egypt the past month, it is unlikely that there would be anything but an extreme downside effect on the world's oil supply, even if the successor to Hosni Mubarak (as yet unknown) turned up in a powdered wig and waistcoat, with the Bill of Rights magically translated into Arabic in his beneficent hand.
I was a young newspaper reporter during the 1973 OPEC oil "embargo" (so-called). Whatever else history records it as having consisted of - bluffing, hoarding, fear-mongering, market manipulation - a few things are inarguable. It arose suddenly out of a political conflict (the Yom Kippur War), and it disrupted life in the USA to a degree unknown since the Second World War - or for that matter until the present day, even counting the trauma of 9/11/01. My sense of things is that we are now entering an oil crisis much more severe and very likely permanent. If production is lost through political strife in Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Iran, Iraq, or even a lesser combination of them, it will crater the global economy and change how we do everything here. George Will may even find himself having to ride a bicycle down the freeway in his head.
Saturday, March 05, 2011
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Huckabee Watch: A List in Progress
(Child of the Corn, indeed.) Illustration from the mighty Buffalo Beast, about which I knew way back when.
Huckabee Watch at the LibertyPapers.org
Huckabee: On the Issues
"Huckabee's Anti-Christian Stand on Palestinians"
"Gov. Idiot"
"Huckabee Again Lashes Out At Media Matters Over Portman Remarks" (March 15, 2011 3:08 pm ET
From the March 14 edition of Fox News Radio's Kilmeade & Friends)
"Huckabee Inadvertently Proves His Media Matters Out-Of-Context Charge Is A Lie" (March 09, 2011 4:02 pm ET)
"Huckabee's Latest False Defense: Media Matters Took My Remarks Out-Of-Context" (March 09, 2011 10:20 am ET
From the March 9 edition of WLAC's The Steve Gill Show)
3 April 2011: Will this be well-publicized? Probably not, but here it is.
4 April update: Huckabee hides his administration records.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Lookalikes
Sam Rockwell has built his career playing smarmy characters like Eric Knox in Charlie's Angels. If a movie comes from the Wisconsin protests, who better to portray Scott Walker. Notice the puckered smirks on both men's faces.
Monday, February 21, 2011
"White is the New Black"
Kunstler's latest.
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 21, 2011 8:55 AM
Let it be remembered that as the world was blowing up, Fashion Week gave the New York news media a case of the vapors. But let them tell it. In the immortal words of The New York Times's Cathy Horyn: "...amid the parkas and the managed pant-suits there was a story here: the amount of embellishment and new technology...."
The mantra of New Technology is on everybody's lips, of course. New Technology is the New Jesus. It's descending from out of the holy ethers to float us across the rivers of Babylon to the New Jerusalem - although, now that fashion has got its hooks into the stuff, I dunno, it could be game over for New Technology. Nothing goes out of fashion like fashion. The same newspaper, by the way, tells us that "long-form blogs" are also joining the Dodo and Paris Hilton in the Museum of Extinct Curiosities. But I wouldn't want to try this on Twitter. And the mosh-pit of Facebook seems an uncongenial place for my brand of high-toned comedy. I guess I'll have to soldier on here.
Around the same time that Kanye West was perusing the gift bags at the Alexander Wang show on Pier 94, I heard a curious thing on NPR. Some cheeky young envoy from the realm of New Technology was complaining that the "public space" of Twitter and Facebook had to be respected world-wide as "the new town square," and wasn't it appalling that the authorities tried to shut these things down in places like Egypt, Algeria, and the lesser kingdoms of Arabia?
This is the kind of virtual thinking that passes for mental exercise these days in the land ruled by Lady Gaga. Hello. We (meaning the USA) do not run these foreign countries - I know it may come as a surprise to the paranoid conspiracy crowd. Even when these faraway places blow up and their former tyrants beat it to Monte Carlo, Zurich, or Riyadh, we do not step in and run them. We try to meddle a little, of course, but in the moiling red mists of revolution nobody even has the authority to pay attention to one of our perspiring attaches, and they don't want to hear our bullshit anyway, even when it comes with a suitcase full of cash.
The idea that the rest of the world owes Jeff Zuckerberg and the creators of Twitter a certain respect is unrealistic, though it goes against the grain of our own First Amendment and the cardinal beliefs of Rachel Maddow. The clinical psychologists often speak of boundary problems - the inability to recognize where your stuff leaves off and the other person's stuff begins - but what we're seeing now in the American thought-sphere is explicitly geographic (and ethnographic) confusion. We don't understand that we are not them, and they are not us.
Likewise, the infantile idea that these nations in the throes of revolt will slide from disorder into natural democracy like falafels into a pita pocket. What you generally get in political upheavals throughout history are protracted periods of confusion, factional fighting, and violence. More often than not, they resolve in the rise of a new tyrant, some figure who seems to know what he is doing when everybody else around him does not - which is the essence of human charisma, being a declension of the following:
1.) People who know what they are doing.
2.) People who seem to know what they are doing.
3.) People who pretend to know what they re doing.
4.) And people who don't know what they are doing.
Most of the human race is composed of the fourth category, which is why the figures in the categories above them claim their attention and allegience. Sometimes, the results are very unfortunate.
The world is now blowing up politically at the same time that it is blowing up financially, and there should be little doubt about the relation of these two conditions. At a time of rising resource scarcity (oil, metals, fertilizers), and capital scarcity (unpaid loans vanishing in the black hole of default), and raucous weather in places where grain crops usually grow (Russia, Australia, Argentina), you can be sure that things will get weird.
They are finally getting weird in the streets of the USA now, too. Wisconsin is surely just the first of many hashes that cry to be settled - and that state is not nearly as broke as broke as Illinois, New Jersey, and California. A lot of stuff is shaking loose out there. Our charismatic leaders, alas, have been drawn mostly from category 3, and out of all their pretending comes a banking system that is flying apart like a Chrysler Slant Six engine that somebody poured Karo syrup into, thinking it might work as an "alternative fuel." The reverberations will be felt in every household, business, and office in the land.
Some wags out there are even blaming Ben Bernanke for the worldwide rise in food prices, and the cause-and-effect relationship there is rather plausible. You juice the world money supply with an artificial $100 billion a month, at least, and the juice flows somewhere, lately into stock and commodity markets because who the heck wants bonds when no issuing entity has a prayer of staving off some kind of default, and the interest rates are a joke anyway.
Americans lost in the Techno-rapture and the inane transports of Fashion Week have no idea how fragile our vital supply chain system is. If the lands around the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea continue to fall apart politically, you can be sure that something required by the oil markets will get broken over there - whether it is an oil terminal, or a shipping channel, or a royal skull - and before you can say Mike Huckabee the shipments of food to America's supermarkets will be interrupted, with predictable results.
This could be a helluva week. We've flattered ourselves for years about how wonderful it is that everything is connected in this world - the Tom Friedman fantasy about the eternal sunshine of the global economy. Now, we're more likely to see the dark side of connectedness, as the planet's goodie-bag deflates and folks in colorful costumes start fighting over what's left.
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 21, 2011 8:55 AM
Let it be remembered that as the world was blowing up, Fashion Week gave the New York news media a case of the vapors. But let them tell it. In the immortal words of The New York Times's Cathy Horyn: "...amid the parkas and the managed pant-suits there was a story here: the amount of embellishment and new technology...."
The mantra of New Technology is on everybody's lips, of course. New Technology is the New Jesus. It's descending from out of the holy ethers to float us across the rivers of Babylon to the New Jerusalem - although, now that fashion has got its hooks into the stuff, I dunno, it could be game over for New Technology. Nothing goes out of fashion like fashion. The same newspaper, by the way, tells us that "long-form blogs" are also joining the Dodo and Paris Hilton in the Museum of Extinct Curiosities. But I wouldn't want to try this on Twitter. And the mosh-pit of Facebook seems an uncongenial place for my brand of high-toned comedy. I guess I'll have to soldier on here.
Around the same time that Kanye West was perusing the gift bags at the Alexander Wang show on Pier 94, I heard a curious thing on NPR. Some cheeky young envoy from the realm of New Technology was complaining that the "public space" of Twitter and Facebook had to be respected world-wide as "the new town square," and wasn't it appalling that the authorities tried to shut these things down in places like Egypt, Algeria, and the lesser kingdoms of Arabia?
This is the kind of virtual thinking that passes for mental exercise these days in the land ruled by Lady Gaga. Hello. We (meaning the USA) do not run these foreign countries - I know it may come as a surprise to the paranoid conspiracy crowd. Even when these faraway places blow up and their former tyrants beat it to Monte Carlo, Zurich, or Riyadh, we do not step in and run them. We try to meddle a little, of course, but in the moiling red mists of revolution nobody even has the authority to pay attention to one of our perspiring attaches, and they don't want to hear our bullshit anyway, even when it comes with a suitcase full of cash.
The idea that the rest of the world owes Jeff Zuckerberg and the creators of Twitter a certain respect is unrealistic, though it goes against the grain of our own First Amendment and the cardinal beliefs of Rachel Maddow. The clinical psychologists often speak of boundary problems - the inability to recognize where your stuff leaves off and the other person's stuff begins - but what we're seeing now in the American thought-sphere is explicitly geographic (and ethnographic) confusion. We don't understand that we are not them, and they are not us.
Likewise, the infantile idea that these nations in the throes of revolt will slide from disorder into natural democracy like falafels into a pita pocket. What you generally get in political upheavals throughout history are protracted periods of confusion, factional fighting, and violence. More often than not, they resolve in the rise of a new tyrant, some figure who seems to know what he is doing when everybody else around him does not - which is the essence of human charisma, being a declension of the following:
1.) People who know what they are doing.
2.) People who seem to know what they are doing.
3.) People who pretend to know what they re doing.
4.) And people who don't know what they are doing.
Most of the human race is composed of the fourth category, which is why the figures in the categories above them claim their attention and allegience. Sometimes, the results are very unfortunate.
The world is now blowing up politically at the same time that it is blowing up financially, and there should be little doubt about the relation of these two conditions. At a time of rising resource scarcity (oil, metals, fertilizers), and capital scarcity (unpaid loans vanishing in the black hole of default), and raucous weather in places where grain crops usually grow (Russia, Australia, Argentina), you can be sure that things will get weird.
They are finally getting weird in the streets of the USA now, too. Wisconsin is surely just the first of many hashes that cry to be settled - and that state is not nearly as broke as broke as Illinois, New Jersey, and California. A lot of stuff is shaking loose out there. Our charismatic leaders, alas, have been drawn mostly from category 3, and out of all their pretending comes a banking system that is flying apart like a Chrysler Slant Six engine that somebody poured Karo syrup into, thinking it might work as an "alternative fuel." The reverberations will be felt in every household, business, and office in the land.
Some wags out there are even blaming Ben Bernanke for the worldwide rise in food prices, and the cause-and-effect relationship there is rather plausible. You juice the world money supply with an artificial $100 billion a month, at least, and the juice flows somewhere, lately into stock and commodity markets because who the heck wants bonds when no issuing entity has a prayer of staving off some kind of default, and the interest rates are a joke anyway.
Americans lost in the Techno-rapture and the inane transports of Fashion Week have no idea how fragile our vital supply chain system is. If the lands around the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea continue to fall apart politically, you can be sure that something required by the oil markets will get broken over there - whether it is an oil terminal, or a shipping channel, or a royal skull - and before you can say Mike Huckabee the shipments of food to America's supermarkets will be interrupted, with predictable results.
This could be a helluva week. We've flattered ourselves for years about how wonderful it is that everything is connected in this world - the Tom Friedman fantasy about the eternal sunshine of the global economy. Now, we're more likely to see the dark side of connectedness, as the planet's goodie-bag deflates and folks in colorful costumes start fighting over what's left.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Curtis Narimatsu
is a treasure trove of local (i.e., East Hawaii) history, and now has his own site.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Monday, February 07, 2011
Kunstler on Egypt and the Super Bowl
Here.
...
Case in point: the Superbowl halftime show. My Gawd, what a farrago of auto-erotic triumphalism tarted up in the raiment of techno-grandiosity. The renowned Black Eyed Peas vocal krew descended on cables from the ethers of Cowboys Stadium stuffed into carapace-like costumes that lit them up like robotic waterbugs while something like a thousand worshipful myrmidons in LED-rigged suits capered about the pulsating stage like bits of discarded CGI FX from the latest installment of the Tron saga. Message: this is a nation so dangerously intoxicated on fumes from the arson of its own culture that it will soon melt down into a smoldering puddle of techno-narcissistic glop. Our bread and circus hijinks (or, should I say, Nacho and Fuhball), make the lat
e Romans' antics look like a simple summer evening at the frog pond. In fact, nothing would make me happier in 2011 than the coming-true of the threatened NFL "lock-out" - except maybe if Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) were nabbed in flagrante delicto at a Super-8 Motel with a nineteen-year-old sheet-rocker of the undocumented persuasion. For that, I would definitely open the bottle of Lambrusco that somebody left at my Christmas party.
[My note: Kunstler should have been glad that the two teams are among the oldest in the NFL, thus having strong connections to America's small-town and manufacturing past, and that one, the Packers, is communally-owned, hence Harvey Wasserman's article in today's CounterPunch,
...
Case in point: the Superbowl halftime show. My Gawd, what a farrago of auto-erotic triumphalism tarted up in the raiment of techno-grandiosity. The renowned Black Eyed Peas vocal krew descended on cables from the ethers of Cowboys Stadium stuffed into carapace-like costumes that lit them up like robotic waterbugs while something like a thousand worshipful myrmidons in LED-rigged suits capered about the pulsating stage like bits of discarded CGI FX from the latest installment of the Tron saga. Message: this is a nation so dangerously intoxicated on fumes from the arson of its own culture that it will soon melt down into a smoldering puddle of techno-narcissistic glop. Our bread and circus hijinks (or, should I say, Nacho and Fuhball), make the lat
e Romans' antics look like a simple summer evening at the frog pond. In fact, nothing would make me happier in 2011 than the coming-true of the threatened NFL "lock-out" - except maybe if Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) were nabbed in flagrante delicto at a Super-8 Motel with a nineteen-year-old sheet-rocker of the undocumented persuasion. For that, I would definitely open the bottle of Lambrusco that somebody left at my Christmas party.[My note: Kunstler should have been glad that the two teams are among the oldest in the NFL, thus having strong connections to America's small-town and manufacturing past, and that one, the Packers, is communally-owned, hence Harvey Wasserman's article in today's CounterPunch,
"Socialism Triumphs at the Super Bowl." (The link was broken at the time I posted this but it's now fixed.) And the Black Eyed Peas' halftime show had to be glitzy; it's just what they do.
This Super Bowl halftime event looks like the talent show from Revenge of the Nerds. ]--Seth MacFarlane
What he forgets is that it was wildly popular.
Judge for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mRG2oAQhso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ9lnBN7nrg
Back in Cairo, events have momentarily devolved to a standoff between the mummy's minions and a lot of people who are, apparently, just sick of the old grinding status quo that had Mubarak-Ho-Tep funneling the endless fruits of their miserable labors into the vaults of banks here, there, and everywhere. The Web is notoriously shifty where facts are concerned, of course, but somewhere in The Cloud I saw the mummy's ill-gotten family fortune estimated at around $50-billion. That's a lot of tana leaves, any way you cut it, and of all possible outcomes in the script-factory, recovering the loot would seem the least likely scenario.
More interesting to watch right now are the peculiar gyrations of the US Government, which is acting a bit like a victim of Tourette Syndrome, with various figures up to the president himself emitting strange blurted squawks that resemble policy pronouncements but lack both conviction and official sanction. What it adds up to are the rather painful exertions of a world power that has lost its power to affect events in the world. I imagine that leaders in other nations - and even their rivals for leadership beyond the levers of power - have not failed to notice the American impotence over Egypt. But then, to me it's not so much different than watching the US government's ineffectual dealings with its own affairs, especially the ones involving money. Virtually everything about them is false, dishonest, mendacious, and ruinous.
The Middle East gives every sign of blowing up into widespread disorder these coming weeks and months. We hear other little splurts and wheezes from the media sidelines to the effect that all this hugger-mugger could end up expressing itself at the US gas pumps - the only touch-point in American life where reality meets perception. To put it a little more bluntly, you kind of wonder when the people around the region might really start blowing stuff up. Revolution, once started, is rather like the insidious invasion of water through the eaves of a house when the ice-dams build up (as they are doing now all over the northeastern US). Seeps appear here and there on the junctions between the wall and ceiling, and before you know it an electric circuit inside the wall starts sparking, and that's all she wrote for your house. Water within, water without, first the flood, the fire next time....
This Super Bowl halftime event looks like the talent show from Revenge of the Nerds. ]--Seth MacFarlane
What he forgets is that it was wildly popular.
Judge for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mRG2oAQhso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ9lnBN7nrg
Back in Cairo, events have momentarily devolved to a standoff between the mummy's minions and a lot of people who are, apparently, just sick of the old grinding status quo that had Mubarak-Ho-Tep funneling the endless fruits of their miserable labors into the vaults of banks here, there, and everywhere. The Web is notoriously shifty where facts are concerned, of course, but somewhere in The Cloud I saw the mummy's ill-gotten family fortune estimated at around $50-billion. That's a lot of tana leaves, any way you cut it, and of all possible outcomes in the script-factory, recovering the loot would seem the least likely scenario.
More interesting to watch right now are the peculiar gyrations of the US Government, which is acting a bit like a victim of Tourette Syndrome, with various figures up to the president himself emitting strange blurted squawks that resemble policy pronouncements but lack both conviction and official sanction. What it adds up to are the rather painful exertions of a world power that has lost its power to affect events in the world. I imagine that leaders in other nations - and even their rivals for leadership beyond the levers of power - have not failed to notice the American impotence over Egypt. But then, to me it's not so much different than watching the US government's ineffectual dealings with its own affairs, especially the ones involving money. Virtually everything about them is false, dishonest, mendacious, and ruinous.
The Middle East gives every sign of blowing up into widespread disorder these coming weeks and months. We hear other little splurts and wheezes from the media sidelines to the effect that all this hugger-mugger could end up expressing itself at the US gas pumps - the only touch-point in American life where reality meets perception. To put it a little more bluntly, you kind of wonder when the people around the region might really start blowing stuff up. Revolution, once started, is rather like the insidious invasion of water through the eaves of a house when the ice-dams build up (as they are doing now all over the northeastern US). Seeps appear here and there on the junctions between the wall and ceiling, and before you know it an electric circuit inside the wall starts sparking, and that's all she wrote for your house. Water within, water without, first the flood, the fire next time....
Sunday, February 06, 2011
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