fxh/ho*
*first time heard and heard of
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Friday, June 07, 2013
Driving thru Texas and Louisiana, I turn on the radio and discover right-wing authoritarians have suddenly morphed into civil libertarians.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 6, 2013
To which I'd add, And vice versa? Better late than never?
Thursday, June 06, 2013
Honolulu Weekly Ends Publication, Possibly For Good
Honolulu Weekly is folding.
So much to say. I'll point out that the Weekly bought the Hawai`i Island Journal a few years before it closed. And I remember when the Stephens company put out Big Island Weekly to compete with HIJ. Big Island Weekly had some substance when it began, but now....
The Weekly seems to have hit its peak in the early-to late-nineties, with talented writers and cartoonists like Bob Rees, Curt Sanburn, and Bob Pritchett. Borders in Hilo carried the paper for a time, too.
http://bambooridge.com/blog.aspx?bid=441
As Hattie says in the comments, Tiffany Edwards-Hunt publishes the Big Island Chronicle, a spinoff of her blog of the same name. But it's hard. If you like a magazine, newspaper, or blog, especially a small, struggling one, consider a donation.
And again, I'll have more to say later.
Former Weekly writer Chad Blair remembers the paper. He provides details of Honolulu Weekly's acquisition of Hawaii Island Journal in 2005. It was part of a plan to extend the Weekly's reach statewide. Blair doesn't mention it but in December 2006, Stephens issued Big Island Weekly (you know it from its hot pink vending boxes). HIJ was a relaunch of Kau Landing (1992-99), premiering in late 1999 and ending in 2008.
So much to say. I'll point out that the Weekly bought the Hawai`i Island Journal a few years before it closed. And I remember when the Stephens company put out Big Island Weekly to compete with HIJ. Big Island Weekly had some substance when it began, but now....
The Weekly seems to have hit its peak in the early-to late-nineties, with talented writers and cartoonists like Bob Rees, Curt Sanburn, and Bob Pritchett. Borders in Hilo carried the paper for a time, too.
http://bambooridge.com/blog.aspx?bid=441
As Hattie says in the comments, Tiffany Edwards-Hunt publishes the Big Island Chronicle, a spinoff of her blog of the same name. But it's hard. If you like a magazine, newspaper, or blog, especially a small, struggling one, consider a donation.
And again, I'll have more to say later.
Former Weekly writer Chad Blair remembers the paper. He provides details of Honolulu Weekly's acquisition of Hawaii Island Journal in 2005. It was part of a plan to extend the Weekly's reach statewide. Blair doesn't mention it but in December 2006, Stephens issued Big Island Weekly (you know it from its hot pink vending boxes). HIJ was a relaunch of Kau Landing (1992-99), premiering in late 1999 and ending in 2008.
Monday, June 03, 2013
Cliography
I've never heard of cliography before today.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1031461X.2011.640694
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1031461X.2011.640694
Kunstler: Out on a Limb
Kunstler elaborates on his statement that Japan will return to a medieval way of life. (Hattie, I read your comment about Kunstler and inner immigration, and I'll have something soon about Kunstler's general worldview.)
Out On a Limb
By James Howard Kunstler
on June 3, 2013 9:24 AM
There is one supreme and universal law of human relations in all its manifestations, social, political, economic, cultural: people create no end of mischief in the hours when they are not sleeping. Any vision of history-yet-to-come must be predicated on this principle.
A correspondent of mine objected to the idea I floated a couple of times that Japan would be the first advanced industrial nation to "go medieval." This prompts me to clarify that emphasis should be on the word "first." The re-set to a much lower scale and intensity of human activity is certain for all nations; the only questions are the time-frame and the quality of the journey and those are sure to vary from one group of people to another.
I picked on Japan because their journey seems to have compressed and accelerated in recent years and also because there's a lot to admire in their possible destination if history is any guide: a graceful culture of lower energy and high artistry. The transition between that older culture and the point of industrial take-off was also much sharper for Japan than so-called Western societies. They did not look back on the startling episode of Rome and they didn't experience a thrilling "Renaissance" of rediscovery in its technical achievements -- which eventuated in the Western discovery of a "new world" and all its exploitable resources. The Japanese were pestered by Catholic missionaries for a brief time beginning in the 1540s, but tossed them out in 1620s, along with the merchants who accompanied them -- and then very consciously barred the door. They even gave up on the guns that the Euro-people had introduced, regarding them as unsportsmanlike. Finally, Commodore Perry from the USA landed in the 1850s, with all the weight of Western technological momentum behind him, and demanded access to trade there and Japan, in effect, surrendered to modernity.
They also thrived on it for a while. For one thing, they had a lot of beautifully-made exotic cultural objects to trade with the west, and their artisan skill level in things like ceramics and metallurgy made the transition to industrial technology of their own easy. In half a century, Japan went from an isolated archipelago of tea ceremonies and silks to building steel battleships and airplanes, and we all know the mischief that led to during the first half of the horrid 20th century: the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the bombing of Tokyo, and Hiroshima. Then came Act 2: postwar economic revival, the SONY stereo, Mitsubishi, major league baseball, and really excellent automobiles. That went on for while, too. About 40 years.
There was one insurmountable problem lurking in the background: Japan did not possess any fossil fuels, oil or methane gas, to run all the equipment of modernity that they had ramped up. That didn't matter so much when imported oil was $11-a-barrel, but it became crucial when the cost quickly rose to $100-a-barrel, as it did in recent years. It also began to matter that Japan's bigger neighbor and age-old rival (and sometimes victim), China, ramped up its own industrial economy which, of course, consumed a healthy portion of what the world oil market put up for sale. By the early 21st century, China was eating Japan's lunch (its bento box, shall we say) by manufacturing the same stuff that the Japanese had excelled at making, and all of a sudden the whole project of modernity in Japan hit the skids.
Then came the TÅhoku earthquake of 2011, and the giant wall of water that slammed, among other things, the multiple nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The Japanese industrial confederation had taken a certain amount of comfort in its ability to keep the electricity going by other means than fossil fuels. Now, all of a sudden, a nuclear dragon was loose upon the land, a veritable Godzilla, Japan's worst nightmare. A year later, all but two of Japan's nuclear power plants were shut down. By no coincidence, Japan also found itself wallowing in a trade deficit after decades of enjoying trade surpluses, due to the amount of oil and gas the nation had to import to keep the electricity running.
Japan's energy predicament is expressing itself in a financial crisis, naturally enough, since finance is a set of abstract markers for what is happening in an economy -- and the country's finances are pretty much running amok as its political leaders try desperately to adjust to the new realities of powerdown. They are employing accounting fraud to offset the inescapable failures of capital formation under the circumstances, the same as all the other advanced industrial nations. As a purely financial matter it simply amounts to no longer being able to generate enough new wealth to pay the interest on old credit, or to justify the creation of new credit. Since credit is the lifeblood of industrialism, the sun is setting on that phase of history. Japan finds itself in a dishonorable quandary and in tune with some of its older cultural infrastructure appears to be committing suicide with a sword thrust into the guts of its banking system.
America, in contrast, is driving over the edge of the Grand Canyon, Thelma-and-Louise-style. Europe is drinking a poison cup in sumptuous seclusion. China and India will just look like lemming marches into the increasingly vacant sea.
Financial hara-kiri might be the best outcome for Japan -- better, say, than a war with China over some desolate islands -- if Japan were to retreat as rapidly back into a traditional artisan economy as it bailed out of in the 1860s. I realize this is a long-shot and includes many knotty elements not under discussion here, such as population reduction and the fate of Fukushima. Also, history is almost never symmetrical. Things don't retrace the arc they came up. The journey will surely be bumpier. But Japan might get there first and set some interesting precedents for the rest of us.
At the heart of the matter is this. Industrialism is an entropic project. It accelerates and intensifies entropy, which is to say the drive toward disorder and death. Tradition in human societies is the great moderator of entropy. Of course nothing stays the same forever, but some of us would like to see the human project continue, and to get to place where it can feel comfortable with itself for a while, perhaps even something resembling a new (and completely unfamiliar) golden age, when the people not asleep can be trusted.
===
Update [P.Z.]: Much to consider here. I'll have more on Kunstler's general worldview soon, in particular, his view on gender and why he doesn't put much stock in renewable energy sources ever replacing fossil fuels.
Out On a Limb
By James Howard Kunstler
on June 3, 2013 9:24 AM
There is one supreme and universal law of human relations in all its manifestations, social, political, economic, cultural: people create no end of mischief in the hours when they are not sleeping. Any vision of history-yet-to-come must be predicated on this principle.
A correspondent of mine objected to the idea I floated a couple of times that Japan would be the first advanced industrial nation to "go medieval." This prompts me to clarify that emphasis should be on the word "first." The re-set to a much lower scale and intensity of human activity is certain for all nations; the only questions are the time-frame and the quality of the journey and those are sure to vary from one group of people to another.
I picked on Japan because their journey seems to have compressed and accelerated in recent years and also because there's a lot to admire in their possible destination if history is any guide: a graceful culture of lower energy and high artistry. The transition between that older culture and the point of industrial take-off was also much sharper for Japan than so-called Western societies. They did not look back on the startling episode of Rome and they didn't experience a thrilling "Renaissance" of rediscovery in its technical achievements -- which eventuated in the Western discovery of a "new world" and all its exploitable resources. The Japanese were pestered by Catholic missionaries for a brief time beginning in the 1540s, but tossed them out in 1620s, along with the merchants who accompanied them -- and then very consciously barred the door. They even gave up on the guns that the Euro-people had introduced, regarding them as unsportsmanlike. Finally, Commodore Perry from the USA landed in the 1850s, with all the weight of Western technological momentum behind him, and demanded access to trade there and Japan, in effect, surrendered to modernity.
They also thrived on it for a while. For one thing, they had a lot of beautifully-made exotic cultural objects to trade with the west, and their artisan skill level in things like ceramics and metallurgy made the transition to industrial technology of their own easy. In half a century, Japan went from an isolated archipelago of tea ceremonies and silks to building steel battleships and airplanes, and we all know the mischief that led to during the first half of the horrid 20th century: the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the bombing of Tokyo, and Hiroshima. Then came Act 2: postwar economic revival, the SONY stereo, Mitsubishi, major league baseball, and really excellent automobiles. That went on for while, too. About 40 years.
There was one insurmountable problem lurking in the background: Japan did not possess any fossil fuels, oil or methane gas, to run all the equipment of modernity that they had ramped up. That didn't matter so much when imported oil was $11-a-barrel, but it became crucial when the cost quickly rose to $100-a-barrel, as it did in recent years. It also began to matter that Japan's bigger neighbor and age-old rival (and sometimes victim), China, ramped up its own industrial economy which, of course, consumed a healthy portion of what the world oil market put up for sale. By the early 21st century, China was eating Japan's lunch (its bento box, shall we say) by manufacturing the same stuff that the Japanese had excelled at making, and all of a sudden the whole project of modernity in Japan hit the skids.
Then came the TÅhoku earthquake of 2011, and the giant wall of water that slammed, among other things, the multiple nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The Japanese industrial confederation had taken a certain amount of comfort in its ability to keep the electricity going by other means than fossil fuels. Now, all of a sudden, a nuclear dragon was loose upon the land, a veritable Godzilla, Japan's worst nightmare. A year later, all but two of Japan's nuclear power plants were shut down. By no coincidence, Japan also found itself wallowing in a trade deficit after decades of enjoying trade surpluses, due to the amount of oil and gas the nation had to import to keep the electricity running.
Japan's energy predicament is expressing itself in a financial crisis, naturally enough, since finance is a set of abstract markers for what is happening in an economy -- and the country's finances are pretty much running amok as its political leaders try desperately to adjust to the new realities of powerdown. They are employing accounting fraud to offset the inescapable failures of capital formation under the circumstances, the same as all the other advanced industrial nations. As a purely financial matter it simply amounts to no longer being able to generate enough new wealth to pay the interest on old credit, or to justify the creation of new credit. Since credit is the lifeblood of industrialism, the sun is setting on that phase of history. Japan finds itself in a dishonorable quandary and in tune with some of its older cultural infrastructure appears to be committing suicide with a sword thrust into the guts of its banking system.
America, in contrast, is driving over the edge of the Grand Canyon, Thelma-and-Louise-style. Europe is drinking a poison cup in sumptuous seclusion. China and India will just look like lemming marches into the increasingly vacant sea.
Financial hara-kiri might be the best outcome for Japan -- better, say, than a war with China over some desolate islands -- if Japan were to retreat as rapidly back into a traditional artisan economy as it bailed out of in the 1860s. I realize this is a long-shot and includes many knotty elements not under discussion here, such as population reduction and the fate of Fukushima. Also, history is almost never symmetrical. Things don't retrace the arc they came up. The journey will surely be bumpier. But Japan might get there first and set some interesting precedents for the rest of us.
At the heart of the matter is this. Industrialism is an entropic project. It accelerates and intensifies entropy, which is to say the drive toward disorder and death. Tradition in human societies is the great moderator of entropy. Of course nothing stays the same forever, but some of us would like to see the human project continue, and to get to place where it can feel comfortable with itself for a while, perhaps even something resembling a new (and completely unfamiliar) golden age, when the people not asleep can be trusted.
===
Update [P.Z.]: Much to consider here. I'll have more on Kunstler's general worldview soon, in particular, his view on gender and why he doesn't put much stock in renewable energy sources ever replacing fossil fuels.
Sunday, June 02, 2013
Sauce for the Gander, Sauce for the Goose
NAACP's official magazine defends Obama's drone policy. Because it's Obama's policy? mobile.twitter.com/thecrisismag/s…
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 2, 2013
Some of the most trenchant criticism of the Administration comes from the Black Left (e.g., Adolph Reed, Margaret Kimberley, Glen Ford).
Saturday, June 01, 2013
Chris Farren and Amy Holland, "Learn to Love Again"
From the soundtrack of Night of the Comet (1984):
Friday, May 31, 2013
Time After Time
The latest cover of Time (U.S. edition) has the very apt headline "Chicago Bull" (a profile of Rahm Emanuel). The international editions are headlined "Why Gitmo Will Never Close." Interesting what Time thinks will grab American vs. overseas readers.
The Mermaid "Documentary"
Being busy (for reasons I'll divulge soon), I hadn't heard about Animal Planet's mermaid "documentary" until a friend of mine called Monday and left a message about a program she figured I'd be interested in. I returned her call and she said Animal Planet had a show on mermaids and the evidence for their existence. So I tuned in and thought, Hmmm. More later.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/mermaids_aren_t_real_animal_planet_s_fake_documentaries_misrepresent_ocean.html?wpisrc=most_viral
(I wouldn't call the show a mockumentary, because it claims to present facts, although there was a disclaimer. Anyway, I saw a little bit then changed channels.)
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/mermaids_aren_t_real_animal_planet_s_fake_documentaries_misrepresent_ocean.html?wpisrc=most_viral
(I wouldn't call the show a mockumentary, because it claims to present facts, although there was a disclaimer. Anyway, I saw a little bit then changed channels.)
Monday, May 27, 2013
Kunstler: "Let's All Go Medieval"
Let's All Go Medieval
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 27, 2013 9:34 AM
That voice! All a'quiver with the dread of self-knowledge that it is confabulating a story, much like the "money" that his Open Market Committee spins out of the increasingly carbonized air. His words fill the vacuum of the collectively blank American mind, where hopes and dreams spin like debris in an Oklahoma twister, only to fall incoherently on a landscape of man-made ruins. If Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke were hooked up to a polygraph machine when he made a public statement -- such as last Wednesday's testimony before congress -- I bet the output graph would look something like a seismic record of the 9.0 Fukushima megathrust, all fretful spikes and dips.
When historians of the future ponder our fate around their campfires, they will marvel that this society invited such a temporizing little nerd to act as its Oracle-in-Chief... that he made periodic visits to sit before the poobahs of the land, and issued prophesies that nobody could really understand -- and that the fate of the people in this land hung on his muttered ambiguities. Let's face it: people need oracles when they don't know what the fuck is going on.
What's going on is as follows: America's central bank is trying to compensate for a floundering economy that will never return to its prior state. The economy is floundering because its scale and mode of operation are no longer consistent with what reality offers in the way of available resources at the right price, especially oil. So, rather than change the scale and mode of operations in this economy -- that is, do things differently -- we try to keep doing things the same by flushing more "money" into the system, as though it were a captive beast receiving nutriment.
One problem with that is that the "money" is no longer money. That is, it's not really an effective store of value, or pricing reference. It remains for the moment a medium of exchange, but the persons exchanging it grow suspicious of what this "money" purports to represent. Does it stand for promises of future repayment? Hmmmm. Those promises are looking sketchy lately, especially since this is an economy that does not generate enough new real wealth to make the interest payments, let alone manage to pay back the principal. Is it a claim on future work? Some are afraid that the future work deliverable will be less than they expect. Whatever else it is, does it find respect in other societies where different money is used?
These questions are making a lot of people nervous these days. Of course, a time will come when all matters concerning this particular incarnation of money will be seen as strictly ceremonial. Ben Bernanke, we will understand, was not stating facts before congress but rather singing a song, or rather chanting in a low, repetitive, tedious way in the primal manner of a frightened person trying to comfort himself with reassuring sound -- that is, prayer. You'd be surprised how well that goes over in a place like congress, which is stuffed with prayerful characters, people who exist in a religious delirium. These are not the people who are nervous, by the way. The nervous tend to be more secular, and inhabit the margins of life where unconventional thinking thrives weedlike at a remove from all the mental toxicity at the center.
These nervous ones are looking ever more closely these days at the distant nation of Japan, where an interesting scenario is playing out: the last days of a giant industrial-technocratic economy. The story there is actually pretty simple if you peel away the quasi-metaphysical bullshit it comes wrapped in these days from astrologasters like John Mauldin and Paul Krugman, viz. Japan has no fossil fuel resources. Zip. You can't run their kind of economy without the stuff. And they can't. Japan is crapping out, as they say in Las Vegas. Tilt! Game over. As this happens, Japan issues a lot of distracting financial noise that involves evermore "creation" of their own "money," and the knock-on effects of that, but it's all just noise. Japan's only good choice is to go medieval, that is, to give up on the rather hopeless 150-year-long project of being an industrial-technocratic modern super-state, and go back to being an island of a beautiful artistic hand-made culture. I call that "going medieval," though you could quibble as to whether that's the best word for it, since I'm not talking about cathedrals or crusades.
One of Japan's other choices is to "go mad-dog," something they actually tried back in the mid-20th century. It didn't work out too well then. The Japanese leadership is making noises about "re-arming," and a nice state of conflict is already simmering between them and their age old rivals-victims next door in China, a country that has lately enjoyed the upper hand in the industrial-techno racket (though it will be faced with the same choices as Japan not too many years hence). Do the Japanese start another world war on their side of the planet? Let's hope not. Let's hope they lay down their robotics and their nuclear reactors gently and go back to making netsuke. Just give it up and do things differently -- after all, that's what all the human beings on the planet have to do now.
For what it's worth, Japan's stock market has tanked a hearty 14 percent in the past five days, if that means anything, and I'm not sure it does considering the aforesaid "noise," but there you have it. Our own stock markets are mercifully closed this holiday, having given American worriers an extra day of anxious reflection on the state of things out there. My own opinion is that we're all going medieval sooner rather than later and the big remaining question is how much of a mess we'll make on the journey to it.
Also, personally, I don't like these manufactured holidays when the landscape is cluttered with morons enjoying motorsports. I'll be working today, and grateful when it blows over.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
Kunstler: The New Abnormal
Go to the original link to see accompanying images.
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 20, 2013 10:03 AM
The collective state of mind in the USA these days may be even more peculiar than what went on in Germany in the early 1930s, when the Nazis were freely elected to lead the country and reconstructed the battered national psyche into a superman cult that soon beat a path to mass death and ruin. America has its own way of going crazy. We don't goose-step to tragedy; we coalesce into an insane clown posse and stumble into it by pratfall -- juggaloes dancing backwards off the cliff edge.
We've been softened up and made extra-stupid on a 60-year-long diet of TV and kreme-filled donuts. Instead of a "master race," our political fantasies revolve around a master wish - to get something for nothing. Want to feel good about yourself? Smoke some crank. Want to become economically secure? Buy a Powerball ticket or drive to the local casino. Want political esteem? Plug a flag pin into your lapel. Want status? Borrow free money from the Federal Reserve at zero interest and arbitrage it into massive earnings for your primary dealer bank. All these behaviors are the consequence of a culture that elevated advertising to such a high social good, it ended up drowning in its own manufactured bullshit.
A subset of our master wish has been on vivid display in recent months, namely the idea that God has blessed the USA with a limitless supply of new oil that will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. This propaganda from an oil industry desperate for capital investment has been swallowed whole by people in authority who ought to know better, just as that same class of people in Germany of 1934 should have known better about what they were bargaining for in economic well-being with the Nazi agenda. In our case, the propaganda drumbeat is being led by formerly respectable news organizations. The New York Times, National Public Radio, Bloomberg News, Forbes, and The Atlantic Magazine [Note: The Atlantic has changed over the years from a literary to a general magazine focused on "Big Ideas"==P.Z.] are media giants that have lately spread the "good news" that America will soon be 1) "energy independent," 2) the world's leading oil exporter (greater than Saudi Arabia is now!), and the "go-to nation" for cheap manufacturing.
All of these claims are false, by the way. The American way-of-life was designed to run on $20-a-barrel oil, not $90-a-barrel oil, and "new technology" has not changed that. The unfortunate and, to some extent, mendacious memes about the wonders of "new technology" have only snookered the public into a false sense of security about a future that will disappoint them badly and probably provoke an extreme political reaction as the reality of our predicament sweeps through daily life.
Most of the current "endless oil" fantasy revolves around shale oil. Just to get a visual idea of what this amounts to, consider this map. It depicts the two major shale oil production regions of the USA: the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford "play" in Texas. Bakken production is confined almost entirely to four counties in North Dakota (Williams, Mountrail, McKenzie, Dunn). The Eagle Ford region touches perhaps ten Texas counties. Now, realize that the oil fields all over the rest of the USA (including Alaska) are in decline. Here's where the "bonanza" of new oil all comes from:
The oil coming out of these places is high cost and low flow-rate oil. This is exactly the opposite of what US oil production used to be (low cost and high flow-rate) when we were busy building all the freeways, strip malls, housing subdivisions, suburban office parks and all of the other stranded assets that now make up the infrastructure of daily life in this country. Those were the days when you could pound a single pipe vertically 1000 feet down (not much deeper than many home water wells) into the temperate wheatfields of Oklahoma (drive to work in shirtsleeve weather!) and after that modest investment in drilling you could kick back and depend on a great flow rate (5,000 barrels-a-day, not unusual) of sweet light petroleum for years.
Horizontal drilling (often more than 10,000 feet down + many "laterals" an additional 10,000 feet horizontally) and then fracturing "tight" rock for shale oil is not only a way larger capital expense (lots of steel!) but the flow rates per well (82 barrels-a-day average) are laughable compared to the halcyon days of conventional oil -- little better than "stripper" wells. Consider also that shale oil well flow-rates decline greater than 60 percent in the first year (rapidly thereafter, too) and you can see easily that there will be no "kicking back" to run the pump-jacks like cash registers, as in the old days. In fact, the rapid depletion only prompts more frantic drilling and re-drilling to keep the production at its current rate - the "Red Queen Syndrome" ("I'm running as fast as I can to stay where I am"), which means fantastic capital expenditure to keep drilling and fracking more wells (even more steel!). Consider also, that the small "sweet spots" in the shale oil regions were the ones drilled first (in earnest after 2003), for the simple reason that they were the most promising. This was the "low hanging fruit" -- easy to pick. Outside these sweet spots the oil may be too meager or difficult or costly to bother drilling for.
This is a picture of a boomlet that may run a few more years -- if the banking system doesn't implode and the massive stream of capital doesn't quit flowing to the shale counties. The excitement will all be over before 2020, but I suspect that troubles in finance and banking will put the schnitz on the shale gas mania long before that date. What will happen when the American public discovers that they were lied to about yet another important matter? The discovery will coincide with very severe changes in daily life that won't be avoidable. Everyone will be affected. Many will be impoverished and suffer real hardship. That's when the public goes apeshit and starts tearing down the house.
Apart from the issue of sheer economic suffering and all the damage that will ensue, consider that it will be generations before anyone believes the "authorities" again -- though, like the oil age itself, the era of giant national media will probably prove to be a one-shot deal, too. Future generations -- if they are lucky -- may read the news on one-page circulating broadsides, printed laboriously in hand-set type by letterpress. Or maybe they'll be reduced to just parsing out rumors.
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 20, 2013 10:03 AM
The collective state of mind in the USA these days may be even more peculiar than what went on in Germany in the early 1930s, when the Nazis were freely elected to lead the country and reconstructed the battered national psyche into a superman cult that soon beat a path to mass death and ruin. America has its own way of going crazy. We don't goose-step to tragedy; we coalesce into an insane clown posse and stumble into it by pratfall -- juggaloes dancing backwards off the cliff edge.
We've been softened up and made extra-stupid on a 60-year-long diet of TV and kreme-filled donuts. Instead of a "master race," our political fantasies revolve around a master wish - to get something for nothing. Want to feel good about yourself? Smoke some crank. Want to become economically secure? Buy a Powerball ticket or drive to the local casino. Want political esteem? Plug a flag pin into your lapel. Want status? Borrow free money from the Federal Reserve at zero interest and arbitrage it into massive earnings for your primary dealer bank. All these behaviors are the consequence of a culture that elevated advertising to such a high social good, it ended up drowning in its own manufactured bullshit.
A subset of our master wish has been on vivid display in recent months, namely the idea that God has blessed the USA with a limitless supply of new oil that will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. This propaganda from an oil industry desperate for capital investment has been swallowed whole by people in authority who ought to know better, just as that same class of people in Germany of 1934 should have known better about what they were bargaining for in economic well-being with the Nazi agenda. In our case, the propaganda drumbeat is being led by formerly respectable news organizations. The New York Times, National Public Radio, Bloomberg News, Forbes, and The Atlantic Magazine [Note: The Atlantic has changed over the years from a literary to a general magazine focused on "Big Ideas"==P.Z.] are media giants that have lately spread the "good news" that America will soon be 1) "energy independent," 2) the world's leading oil exporter (greater than Saudi Arabia is now!), and the "go-to nation" for cheap manufacturing.
All of these claims are false, by the way. The American way-of-life was designed to run on $20-a-barrel oil, not $90-a-barrel oil, and "new technology" has not changed that. The unfortunate and, to some extent, mendacious memes about the wonders of "new technology" have only snookered the public into a false sense of security about a future that will disappoint them badly and probably provoke an extreme political reaction as the reality of our predicament sweeps through daily life.
Most of the current "endless oil" fantasy revolves around shale oil. Just to get a visual idea of what this amounts to, consider this map. It depicts the two major shale oil production regions of the USA: the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford "play" in Texas. Bakken production is confined almost entirely to four counties in North Dakota (Williams, Mountrail, McKenzie, Dunn). The Eagle Ford region touches perhaps ten Texas counties. Now, realize that the oil fields all over the rest of the USA (including Alaska) are in decline. Here's where the "bonanza" of new oil all comes from:
The oil coming out of these places is high cost and low flow-rate oil. This is exactly the opposite of what US oil production used to be (low cost and high flow-rate) when we were busy building all the freeways, strip malls, housing subdivisions, suburban office parks and all of the other stranded assets that now make up the infrastructure of daily life in this country. Those were the days when you could pound a single pipe vertically 1000 feet down (not much deeper than many home water wells) into the temperate wheatfields of Oklahoma (drive to work in shirtsleeve weather!) and after that modest investment in drilling you could kick back and depend on a great flow rate (5,000 barrels-a-day, not unusual) of sweet light petroleum for years.
Horizontal drilling (often more than 10,000 feet down + many "laterals" an additional 10,000 feet horizontally) and then fracturing "tight" rock for shale oil is not only a way larger capital expense (lots of steel!) but the flow rates per well (82 barrels-a-day average) are laughable compared to the halcyon days of conventional oil -- little better than "stripper" wells. Consider also that shale oil well flow-rates decline greater than 60 percent in the first year (rapidly thereafter, too) and you can see easily that there will be no "kicking back" to run the pump-jacks like cash registers, as in the old days. In fact, the rapid depletion only prompts more frantic drilling and re-drilling to keep the production at its current rate - the "Red Queen Syndrome" ("I'm running as fast as I can to stay where I am"), which means fantastic capital expenditure to keep drilling and fracking more wells (even more steel!). Consider also, that the small "sweet spots" in the shale oil regions were the ones drilled first (in earnest after 2003), for the simple reason that they were the most promising. This was the "low hanging fruit" -- easy to pick. Outside these sweet spots the oil may be too meager or difficult or costly to bother drilling for.
This is a picture of a boomlet that may run a few more years -- if the banking system doesn't implode and the massive stream of capital doesn't quit flowing to the shale counties. The excitement will all be over before 2020, but I suspect that troubles in finance and banking will put the schnitz on the shale gas mania long before that date. What will happen when the American public discovers that they were lied to about yet another important matter? The discovery will coincide with very severe changes in daily life that won't be avoidable. Everyone will be affected. Many will be impoverished and suffer real hardship. That's when the public goes apeshit and starts tearing down the house.
Apart from the issue of sheer economic suffering and all the damage that will ensue, consider that it will be generations before anyone believes the "authorities" again -- though, like the oil age itself, the era of giant national media will probably prove to be a one-shot deal, too. Future generations -- if they are lucky -- may read the news on one-page circulating broadsides, printed laboriously in hand-set type by letterpress. Or maybe they'll be reduced to just parsing out rumors.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The Great Ghastly
I'm dreading the Baz/Leo version of The Great Gatsby tonight since it seems that every generation gets The Great Gatsby movie it deserves...
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) May 14, 2013
Baz Lurhmann's awful "The Great Gatsby" seems like some kind of ghastly Illuminati prank with Leo fighting against it and losing, decimated.
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) May 15, 2013
==
20 May update: According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, The Great Gatsby has a budget of $105 million, and has earned a little over $90 million domestically. What is the point of all this?
Thursday, May 09, 2013
American #Morans: Chants of "USA! USA! USA!" erupt outside courtroom after conviction of Jodi Arias nydailynews.com/news/crime/jod…
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 8, 2013
I wouldn't call them "morons" (correct spelling) for chanting "USA", although I'd exclaim something like "Hallelujah!" or "Praise God!"
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
A Worthy Mini-Screed
A recent comment at NancyNall.com by coozledad, typical of his blitzkrieg prose. On the "neofeudalism" he says the Republicans want, it will/might happen (and not by design) in the Long Emergency that Kunstler has described in his book of the same name, and
detailed in his subsequent World Made by Hand fiction series. But at the same time, much wealth (which exists only on paper and in computers) will vanish. Think of the Great Depression. (Some say it'll just change hands). In other words, a lot of rich people, especially those with most of their money in stocks and other investments, will become poor.
===
38.coozledad said on May 8, 2013 at 12:05 pm
You have to remember the Republicans are essentially frustrated dynasts, and Bill Clinton, while politically indistinguishable from the Republicans, shit all over their plans when he defeated Bush the elder at the polls.
They want a sort of Christo-monarchy so they can mop up the last bits of natural resources and finish centralizing wealth in a neofeudal gambit. They’ve got plenty of willing little monkeys with that fundie mindset, and the ones that aren’t quite that stupid get snookered by the pseudohistories of Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg.
Another distinguishing feature of the authoritarian mind is that reliance on hero figures that most modern cultures seek to discourage through higher education. The weepfest among American rightists(and virtually no one else) over the long overdue death of Margaret Thatcher gives some insight into their reflexive death occultism, and the eternal defensive crouch of the information deficient.
===
detailed in his subsequent World Made by Hand fiction series. But at the same time, much wealth (which exists only on paper and in computers) will vanish. Think of the Great Depression. (Some say it'll just change hands). In other words, a lot of rich people, especially those with most of their money in stocks and other investments, will become poor.
===
38.coozledad said on May 8, 2013 at 12:05 pm
You have to remember the Republicans are essentially frustrated dynasts, and Bill Clinton, while politically indistinguishable from the Republicans, shit all over their plans when he defeated Bush the elder at the polls.
They want a sort of Christo-monarchy so they can mop up the last bits of natural resources and finish centralizing wealth in a neofeudal gambit. They’ve got plenty of willing little monkeys with that fundie mindset, and the ones that aren’t quite that stupid get snookered by the pseudohistories of Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg.
Another distinguishing feature of the authoritarian mind is that reliance on hero figures that most modern cultures seek to discourage through higher education. The weepfest among American rightists(and virtually no one else) over the long overdue death of Margaret Thatcher gives some insight into their reflexive death occultism, and the eternal defensive crouch of the information deficient.
===
Monday, May 06, 2013
The Associates: "13 Feelings"
I found this while browsing on Armond White's Twitter. It's the first time I've heard or heard of The Associates.
Saturday, May 04, 2013
A Belated Acknowledgment of May Day (a.k.a Lei Day)
May Day is observed the world over in various ways. In Hawaii it's known as Lei Day and was celebrated with pageants. I don't know if schools observe it the same way they did when I went to school, but it was a huge deal, particularly in elementary school (e.g., Keaukaha in the early-to-mid-1980s).
Here's an article on a Lei Day pageant held in Hilo a few years ago.
General busyness and an illness in the family have precluded me from actually observing May Day this year (no lei, no wearing an aloha shirt), but I must acknowledge it, and sometime I plan to look for photos of old May Days, and share them.
Here's an article on a Lei Day pageant held in Hilo a few years ago.
General busyness and an illness in the family have precluded me from actually observing May Day this year (no lei, no wearing an aloha shirt), but I must acknowledge it, and sometime I plan to look for photos of old May Days, and share them.
Friday, May 03, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
@the_real_fly I think Collins wants a parade now.Who The F**k cares! #nohomo
— Akolea (@akolea) April 29, 2013
Sunday, April 28, 2013
"Day by Day"
A version of this song was featured on tonight's Simpsons ("Pulpit Friction" [24: 18, 28 April 2013]).
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Eat More Kale vs. Chick-fil-A
I just saw this article on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling in favor of Chick-fil-A vs. a Vermont entrepreneur who sells merchandise with the slogan "Eat More Kale." (Chick-fil-A's slogan is "Eat mor chik'n.")
I'll have more later. Until then, see my 29 July post, visit EatMoreKale.com, and don't forget to eat more kale!
I'll have more later. Until then, see my 29 July post, visit EatMoreKale.com, and don't forget to eat more kale!
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Georgie Fame: "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde"
I've never heard of either the singer or the song until today.
Monday, April 22, 2013
More on Ebert
http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/2013/04/10
Update: Do I agree that Ebert liked only middle-of-the-road stuff? Not necessarily. Did Ebert always like Spielberg's movies? And if he did, why couldn't he and Armond White, who were mutually antagonistic, have that in common?
Movie critics don't have the role, so to speak, in the larger culture that they once did. Ebert is the last great mainstream movie critic (at least for now). I liked him, but for sheer erudition and prose style, John Simon is unparalleled. Not that I always agreed with his reviews.
1 May update: Nancy Nall has always loved him.
@wideasleepnima @mlake9 As I told @antloewenstein, release hasn't been officially announced, but I will do that soon. Thx for supporting!
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 22, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Richard Heinberg on Twitter
Here is the Twitter of peak oil writer Richard Heinberg.
A recent tweet of his:
nice article from Chris Nelder on why peak oil is still relevant. ow.ly/k2BN7
— Richard Heinberg (@richardheinberg) April 14, 2013
This is the Indiegogo page for his upcoming book Snake Oil: How Big Energy's Misleading Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Boratland
What's Chechnya? To most Americans, it's all Boratland.
See this map, for example.
20 April evening update: Bill Maher argues with professor Brian Levin about Islam.
The Chechens are an ancient and distinct people.
See this map, for example.
20 April evening update: Bill Maher argues with professor Brian Levin about Islam.
The Chechens are an ancient and distinct people.
Friday, April 19, 2013
Skee-Lo
@skeelo_musik Congrats on the "I Wish" track on the Toyota Rav4 "Wish Granted" Commercial!!!
— MUSTAFA M SHABAZZ (@SUCKERFREERADIO) April 15, 2013
@robertecrump @mlake9 every frat douche i went to college with wore a white hat like that.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 18, 2013
I found this through Max Blumenthal's Twitter.
One thing for sure. Muslims can't seem to live in peace with anyone. Even each other. FACT.
— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) April 19, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
NYRB Founding Editor Robert Silvers
An interview with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books, which has just had its fiftieth anniversary.
The New Leader was around for eight decades, approaching nine, if one counts its online version.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Boston Marathon Explosion
News broke on TV about 9:15 a.m. Hawaii time. There's already a Wikipedia article on the Boston Marathon explosion and Max Blumenthal, listening to a scanner, has been tweeting updates.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Louis Proyect's Latest
Two recent posts by Louis Proyect reaffirm why I regularly visit his blog. The first, "The Koch Brothers Hedge Their Bets," takes on fracking and more. And the second is a review of the documentaries American Meat and The Revolutionary.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
The return of Mad Men is nigh! For lovers of great TV, tonight is a high holiday because Mad Men is the best show on TV right now.
— Touré (@Toure) April 8, 2013
I've never watched it. But The Carrie Diaries is the most wonderful show of 2013.
A List of British Movies Yet Unreleased on Region 2 DVD
A list from IMDb.com of British movies and TV shows made in 1977 yet to be released on region 2 DVD.
One can get a sense of the time just before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Monday, April 08, 2013
Sunday, April 07, 2013
All In With Chris Hayes: Should It be Moved to Another Timeslot?
This article details the ratings trouble All In and a new CNN show have encountered. All In is opposite ratings juggernaut The O'Reilly Factor. *Should it be moved to another timeslot? Or should it be left where it is and emphasize its difference from the Factor, the way The Rachel Maddow Show, opposite Hannity, differentiates itself from that show? (see below)
It's good to know they're giving All In a chance, the way networks used to give a chance to shows that weren't initially ratings blockbusters.
===
*I found out that Who's the Boss? first aired on 20 September 1984, the same day The Cosby Show premiered. For its first month, Who's the Boss? was broadcast on Thursdays opposite Family Ties (which immediately followed Cosby), and suffered in the ratings. The next month, it was moved to Tuesdays, where it stayed for several years, and the show became one of the top-rated sitcoms of the late `80s.
It's good to know they're giving All In a chance, the way networks used to give a chance to shows that weren't initially ratings blockbusters.
===
*I found out that Who's the Boss? first aired on 20 September 1984, the same day The Cosby Show premiered. For its first month, Who's the Boss? was broadcast on Thursdays opposite Family Ties (which immediately followed Cosby), and suffered in the ratings. The next month, it was moved to Tuesdays, where it stayed for several years, and the show became one of the top-rated sitcoms of the late `80s.
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
Have any great journalists come out of a journalism program? Or great writers from an MFA program?
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) April 1, 2013
Max Blumenthal's New Book Goliath Release Date Pushed Back to June
Searching online for reviews of Max Blumenthal's new book Goliath, I found none. The book's Amazon page might explain why. The release date is now 11 June, for whatever reason.
Louis Proyect: "Thoughts on Harper's Magazine and Intellectual Property"
In which he finds Harper's not as relevant as it used to be. He recommends subscribing to n+1 instead.
Proyect mentions, but doesn't include a link to, this interview with former Harper's editor Roger Hodge, in which Hodge points out problems that potentially spell the end of the magazine.
4 April update: I posted a comment to Proyect's blog. I subscribe to Harper's and Bookforum. Will Harper's go defunct before my sub runs out in Nov. 2015? If I didn't subscribe to either magazine, and browsed them at the newsstand, which one would I be more likely to buy? At this point I'd say Bookforum ($4.95), with its many, many book reviews and edgy writing. Harper's ($6.95) is more of a mixed bag. Its "Easy Chair" and "Anti-Economist" columns are a play for the Washington relevance The Atlantic enjoys, and its choice of Readings is more predictable than what I remember from the `90s, when I first began subscribing. Yet the March issue has a lengthy report on the cost of North Dakota's fracking boom, a review of a biography on P.G. Wodehouse and a feature on adult animation coming of age with the fX show Archer. It's this variety of writing, and a certain remove from the buzz-chasing world of opinion magazines, that are among Harper's strengths.
No one magazine can do it all. What Harper's lacks, an n+1 might have. But n+1 lacks what Harper's has. So I read the (relatively) edgy and stodgy together.
Proyect mentions, but doesn't include a link to, this interview with former Harper's editor Roger Hodge, in which Hodge points out problems that potentially spell the end of the magazine.
4 April update: I posted a comment to Proyect's blog. I subscribe to Harper's and Bookforum. Will Harper's go defunct before my sub runs out in Nov. 2015? If I didn't subscribe to either magazine, and browsed them at the newsstand, which one would I be more likely to buy? At this point I'd say Bookforum ($4.95), with its many, many book reviews and edgy writing. Harper's ($6.95) is more of a mixed bag. Its "Easy Chair" and "Anti-Economist" columns are a play for the Washington relevance The Atlantic enjoys, and its choice of Readings is more predictable than what I remember from the `90s, when I first began subscribing. Yet the March issue has a lengthy report on the cost of North Dakota's fracking boom, a review of a biography on P.G. Wodehouse and a feature on adult animation coming of age with the fX show Archer. It's this variety of writing, and a certain remove from the buzz-chasing world of opinion magazines, that are among Harper's strengths.
No one magazine can do it all. What Harper's lacks, an n+1 might have. But n+1 lacks what Harper's has. So I read the (relatively) edgy and stodgy together.
Monday, April 01, 2013
Kunstler: "Are You Going to Entropy Faire?"
Here.
An excerpt:
Meanwhile, at the fifth annual BRICS* summit, held in Durban, representatives from the five member nations began negotiations to establish a bank to counter the influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
According to the MarketWatch article linked to above:
"Collectively, the five BRICS nations account for 42% of world population, 20% of output, and nearly all of current growth in the global economy."
(*BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Formerly known as BRIC until South Africa joined the bloc in 2010.)
An excerpt:
While The New York Times focuses on the momentous issue of real estate sales in the Hamptons, Russia and China will build gold-backed currencies aimed at monopolizing the trade in mineral and energy resources, leaving America and much of Europe to freeze in the dark and sit on gasoline lines at the empty filling stations. For a while that will work to the East's advantage - until it becomes clear that the entropic contraction of industrial economies is for everyone as we veer into a literal world made by hand. That's right, sooner or later Russia and China will get theirs, too. But in the meantime they have the ability to make the story a lot more interesting.
There's plenty of suspense this Easter weekend as observers nervously await the breaking action, to find out how much the oft-cited fear of confiscation has penetrated the regional money centers around Europe. Slovenia, a fairy-tale republic somewhere between Austria and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has been nominated by observers as the place most likely to be whacked by EU treasure confiscators. It owes about 10 billion Euros to the EU entropy cloud, with exactly zero chances of meeting its obligations.
Meanwhile, at the fifth annual BRICS* summit, held in Durban, representatives from the five member nations began negotiations to establish a bank to counter the influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
According to the MarketWatch article linked to above:
"Collectively, the five BRICS nations account for 42% of world population, 20% of output, and nearly all of current growth in the global economy."
(*BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Formerly known as BRIC until South Africa joined the bloc in 2010.)
Friday, March 29, 2013
Roger Ebert's review of Pasolini's The Gospel of St. Matthew (1964), which he saw not long after watching Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004).
Hitting the Stage.com
Reading Ilind.net today, I found out about Hitting the Stage, a website about Hawaii's theater scene. I might add it when I revamp my list of links.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Monday, March 25, 2013
Kunstler: Money Worries (a.k.a. Cyprus Ills)
Kunstler's latest. It would have been better titled "Cyprus Ills"
Money Worries
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 25, 2013 8:20 AM
Of course, everybody should have been worried a lot sooner than last week because the basic operating system of global banking is accounting fraud, and has become that stealthily, insidiously, for about fifteen years now. Nothing is what it appears to be anymore. Compound interest has not really been working since 2008 because the world can't increase its energy production enough to generate the additional surplus wealth needed to cover the aggregate interest due all around the world.
What remains are games of musical chairs, Ponzi schemes, frauds, swindles, stonewalls, ruses, ploys, scams, dodges, bluffs, subterfuges, QE martingales, interventions, rehypothecations, pretenses and other modes of evading or disguising reality. The reality is that there is not enough real wealth to go around, certainly not enough to cover the giant web of obligations that masquerades as "money." So, now whenever somebody or some company or government or entity is called upon to put up or shut up, the danger arises that the whole web will disintegrate, since all the participants are broke. You want "your" money? Wait three days. Make that four days. Check that, let's say next week. How about two months from now? Oh, forget about it.... No wonder folks are spooked.
This is really getting out of hand. That's why the ills of the poor, untoward, tiny crypto-nation of Cyprus have got everyone's knickers in a twist. Cyprus is everybody writ small. Cyprus ran out of pretense. It's banks are toast. It can't take care of itself. It is too poor to be a "modern" economy. It failed trying to be a money laundromat for the brigands of Russia and the dope merchants of the Eastern Mediterranean. The tourists and retirees may even have to pack up and leave now because there will be no access to ready cash for day-to-day living.
The terms of the latest bailout announced Sunday night are curious. The New York Times reports that, "the deal would scrap the highly controversial idea of a tax on bank deposits, although it would still require forced losses for depositors and bondholders." Say, what? In fact, there is no material difference between the so-called "tax" and the "forced losses." That was just semantics. The word tax had been bandied about two weeks ago when the EU first proposed that the Cyprus government might pass a legislative act skinning its bank depositors. That didn't go down, of course, so now its just an EU mandated haircut on deposits over E-100,000 and bank bondholders. As for the deposits under E-100,000... you're welcome to them, the catch being that the banks aren't open for business... and the EU bailout money will not arrive in Cyprus until May. They are sending it by packet boat from Antwerp and hoping for fair winds.
Cyprus has to become somebody's ward again. Cyprus was either Turkey's or Great Britain's ward for most of the past 400 years. The population is ethnically split about 60 / 40 Greek / Turkish making for chronically uncomfortable governance. The island remains physically divided into two separate and hostile north-south zones. If you look at it on the map, it is nowhere near Greece, but rather tucked right up under Turkey's bosom. It is strategically a naval hub of the Middle East and is occupied both by NATO troops and by two remaining British military bases - a convenience given the ongoing deterioration in Middle East geopolitics, as nation after nation melts down, and threatens to impinge on much of the world's oil supply. My guess is that Turkey will eventually recover administration of Cyprus by dint of sheer geographical proximity. It is said to possess considerable offshore gas, but the politics there are so problematic that the stuff may not be logistically recoverable, especially with the rest of the Middle East in flames.
The current bailout deal with its confiscations and haircuts is the first time in the multi-year melodrama of the wobbling EU that big-shot EU officials had voiced the idea that they had any authority to snatch private property (money) of a member's citizens. So, instantly the notion reverberated around Europe that they could easily do the same thing in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece - the usual broke suspects - if the EU was pushed too hard. And a few nervous nellies stateside began to wonder out loud when the US government might try some confiscational monkey business, such as the much-blogged-about notion of forcing retirees to put all their money in US Treasury instruments.
More to the point perhaps was the additional notion that the money was not there in the first place. Or anywhere. It was not snatchable. The banks were insolvent. They had pissed their meager reserves away on bad paper - like every other financial enterprise around the world - and the collateral was a joke. Depositors in Cyprus banks might indeed lose their money, but the EU would not collect any theoretical plunder either, so the whole bailout exercise was just another empty bluster. Even more to the point was the additional notion that no money in any bank in any sovereign EU member would be plunderable because there is no money in any of them, and the fiasco in Cyprus was leading to the recognition of the utter bankruptcy of the system.
In other words, this charade is far from over. There will be more bank runs. They may or may not take the form of disgruntled depositors physically standing in line along the pleasant blocks of Europe's cities as the street trees burst into lovely spring bud and flower. In the first flush of activity post-Cyprus, a lot of hypothetical cash will probably just end up shifting out of Europe altogether and into the clutches of Jamie Dimon and his fellow miracle workers, primed for grand new acts of rehypothication with the inflow.
The chatter around this crisis has not included any consideration of the dark forces roiling in the alternate universe of rackets known as derivatives -- which should now be primed to detonate whatever remains of financial legitimacy even while governments and central banks rally with new sets of excuses and "ring-fence" strategies for the floundering banks. All the ruling parties this whole world round won't face the fact that absolutely nobody can cover his losses, and the losses just keep mounting with every central bank keystroke. Welcome to the age of phantom money.
Money Worries
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 25, 2013 8:20 AM
Of course, everybody should have been worried a lot sooner than last week because the basic operating system of global banking is accounting fraud, and has become that stealthily, insidiously, for about fifteen years now. Nothing is what it appears to be anymore. Compound interest has not really been working since 2008 because the world can't increase its energy production enough to generate the additional surplus wealth needed to cover the aggregate interest due all around the world.
What remains are games of musical chairs, Ponzi schemes, frauds, swindles, stonewalls, ruses, ploys, scams, dodges, bluffs, subterfuges, QE martingales, interventions, rehypothecations, pretenses and other modes of evading or disguising reality. The reality is that there is not enough real wealth to go around, certainly not enough to cover the giant web of obligations that masquerades as "money." So, now whenever somebody or some company or government or entity is called upon to put up or shut up, the danger arises that the whole web will disintegrate, since all the participants are broke. You want "your" money? Wait three days. Make that four days. Check that, let's say next week. How about two months from now? Oh, forget about it.... No wonder folks are spooked.
This is really getting out of hand. That's why the ills of the poor, untoward, tiny crypto-nation of Cyprus have got everyone's knickers in a twist. Cyprus is everybody writ small. Cyprus ran out of pretense. It's banks are toast. It can't take care of itself. It is too poor to be a "modern" economy. It failed trying to be a money laundromat for the brigands of Russia and the dope merchants of the Eastern Mediterranean. The tourists and retirees may even have to pack up and leave now because there will be no access to ready cash for day-to-day living.
The terms of the latest bailout announced Sunday night are curious. The New York Times reports that, "the deal would scrap the highly controversial idea of a tax on bank deposits, although it would still require forced losses for depositors and bondholders." Say, what? In fact, there is no material difference between the so-called "tax" and the "forced losses." That was just semantics. The word tax had been bandied about two weeks ago when the EU first proposed that the Cyprus government might pass a legislative act skinning its bank depositors. That didn't go down, of course, so now its just an EU mandated haircut on deposits over E-100,000 and bank bondholders. As for the deposits under E-100,000... you're welcome to them, the catch being that the banks aren't open for business... and the EU bailout money will not arrive in Cyprus until May. They are sending it by packet boat from Antwerp and hoping for fair winds.
Cyprus has to become somebody's ward again. Cyprus was either Turkey's or Great Britain's ward for most of the past 400 years. The population is ethnically split about 60 / 40 Greek / Turkish making for chronically uncomfortable governance. The island remains physically divided into two separate and hostile north-south zones. If you look at it on the map, it is nowhere near Greece, but rather tucked right up under Turkey's bosom. It is strategically a naval hub of the Middle East and is occupied both by NATO troops and by two remaining British military bases - a convenience given the ongoing deterioration in Middle East geopolitics, as nation after nation melts down, and threatens to impinge on much of the world's oil supply. My guess is that Turkey will eventually recover administration of Cyprus by dint of sheer geographical proximity. It is said to possess considerable offshore gas, but the politics there are so problematic that the stuff may not be logistically recoverable, especially with the rest of the Middle East in flames.
The current bailout deal with its confiscations and haircuts is the first time in the multi-year melodrama of the wobbling EU that big-shot EU officials had voiced the idea that they had any authority to snatch private property (money) of a member's citizens. So, instantly the notion reverberated around Europe that they could easily do the same thing in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece - the usual broke suspects - if the EU was pushed too hard. And a few nervous nellies stateside began to wonder out loud when the US government might try some confiscational monkey business, such as the much-blogged-about notion of forcing retirees to put all their money in US Treasury instruments.
More to the point perhaps was the additional notion that the money was not there in the first place. Or anywhere. It was not snatchable. The banks were insolvent. They had pissed their meager reserves away on bad paper - like every other financial enterprise around the world - and the collateral was a joke. Depositors in Cyprus banks might indeed lose their money, but the EU would not collect any theoretical plunder either, so the whole bailout exercise was just another empty bluster. Even more to the point was the additional notion that no money in any bank in any sovereign EU member would be plunderable because there is no money in any of them, and the fiasco in Cyprus was leading to the recognition of the utter bankruptcy of the system.
In other words, this charade is far from over. There will be more bank runs. They may or may not take the form of disgruntled depositors physically standing in line along the pleasant blocks of Europe's cities as the street trees burst into lovely spring bud and flower. In the first flush of activity post-Cyprus, a lot of hypothetical cash will probably just end up shifting out of Europe altogether and into the clutches of Jamie Dimon and his fellow miracle workers, primed for grand new acts of rehypothication with the inflow.
The chatter around this crisis has not included any consideration of the dark forces roiling in the alternate universe of rackets known as derivatives -- which should now be primed to detonate whatever remains of financial legitimacy even while governments and central banks rally with new sets of excuses and "ring-fence" strategies for the floundering banks. All the ruling parties this whole world round won't face the fact that absolutely nobody can cover his losses, and the losses just keep mounting with every central bank keystroke. Welcome to the age of phantom money.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Al Jarreau: "One Shot"
Another of tonight's discoveries. This is the B side to the "All or Nothing at All" single (1988), included on the 2012 reissue of Heart's Horizon (1988).
A March Miscellany
Last night Nightline marked the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with stories on "tween" girls dressing provocatively, children distracting their parents while driving, Tiger Woods's new girlfriend, and only at program's end, a brief overview of the war, according to the reporter, a mixed bag. There was untold carnage, but did you know there are now 21 million cellular phones in Iraq?
Power-walking with Michele Bachmann.
How Far is Heaven? Jack Schaap, former pastor of the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, (The megatacky megachurch building was Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month last August.) was sentenced to twelve years in prison for having sex with a seventeen-year-old parishioner.
Power-walking with Michele Bachmann.
How Far is Heaven? Jack Schaap, former pastor of the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, (The megatacky megachurch building was Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month last August.) was sentenced to twelve years in prison for having sex with a seventeen-year-old parishioner.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Monday, March 18, 2013
Friday, March 15, 2013
James Salter
Described as perhaps the last great American prose stylist, James Salter is a writer whose work I should check out.
16 March update: Searching the state library catalog, I find six books of Salter's in the system: Burning the Days, The Hunters, Last Night, Light Years, Solo Faces, and Then and There: The Travel Writing of James Salter. Three are available at the Hilo library, and two of these are only at the Hilo library.
His latest novel, All That Is, comes out in April.
16 March update: Searching the state library catalog, I find six books of Salter's in the system: Burning the Days, The Hunters, Last Night, Light Years, Solo Faces, and Then and There: The Travel Writing of James Salter. Three are available at the Hilo library, and two of these are only at the Hilo library.
His latest novel, All That Is, comes out in April.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Seventh Anniversary
This is the seventh anniversary of the founding of Poppa Zao, a blog which I use to comment on and make sense of this immense world.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Just Found Out Thomas Naylor Has Died; New Pope Chosen
All kinds of people are on Twitter, so I wondered if secession activist Thomas Naylor also tweets. It turns out that he died last December.
As I type this, at eight-ten in the morning, news has broken that a new Pope is chosen.
As I type this, at eight-ten in the morning, news has broken that a new Pope is chosen.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Proyect Mentions Kunstler
I had to give Louis Proyect props for mentioning Kunstler in his post about a woman fighting the gentrification of Williamsburg. Did you know that he interviewed Jane Jacobs in 2000? I hope he can get permission to publish that interview on his own site.
12 March update: I spoke too soon. It turns out the interview is on his site.
14 March update: And Metropolis Magazine, in which the interview originally appeared, is still around at age thirty.
12 March update: I spoke too soon. It turns out the interview is on his site.
14 March update: And Metropolis Magazine, in which the interview originally appeared, is still around at age thirty.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Friday, March 08, 2013
Too Much Magic
Yesterday I picked up the copy of Kunstler's Too Much Magic that I'd ordered a few weeks ago. It's reviewed here but I should have my own brief review up soon.
Monday, March 04, 2013
Kunstler vs. Gary North, or Kunstler vs. Big Box Retail and Its Apologists
Reply To Gary North
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 3, 2013 6:56 PM
Last week, extreme right-wing, hyper-patriot blogger and "Christian Reconstructionist" Gary North published a piece that bounced around the Web titled "James Howard Kunstler: Foul-Mouthed Apologist for the Good Old Boys." Gary North was inflamed because I had put out a recent blog inveighing against the chain-store rape of local economies from sea to shining sea. North wrote:
Consider his [JHK's] most recent screed. It begins with an attack on the most successful free market retailing operation on earth, Walmart. He uses Walmart as a representative company for all of the low-price, high-volume box stores. He hates them all.
In the United States, millions of customers return day after day to buy at stores like these. But Kunstler, who is an arrogant Leftie elitist, dismisses them as helpless rubes who need protection from price competitive retailers. And who will supply this protection? The Good Old Boys.
My point, of course was that the chain store business model, and WalMart in particular, has destroyed local Main Street economies all over America, as well as the networks of social relations that went with these economies, in which local business owners employed local people and had to take responsibility for how they treated them. The damage to American civic life ought to be self-evident in the desolation of thousands of crumbling traditional downtowns, the extermination of a whole class of local business owners (and the local institutions they cared for), the funneling of business profits out of every local community to a few corporate bank accounts in distant places, as well as the desecration of the once-rural landscape outside our towns, now a uniformly profaned wilderness of parking lots and the tilt-up warehouses of chain-store commerce.
My further point was that the WalMart model of business now faces its own demise as America contends with the realities of a what will prove to be a permanent energy and capital formation crisis, requiring us to downscale our activities and rebuild fine-grained local networks of economic interdependency.
Gary North's intemperate response to these ideas illustrates everything that has become malignant and dishonorable in conservative politics lately. It also displays a brand of shocking stupidity that bodes darkly for America's political future. There are many towns across America where WalMart is not just the only place to buy all goods, but the chief employer, too. How is it a good thing for anyone's home town to be dominated by such a single despotic entity? How does it square with the rhetoric about "liberty" spouted by conservatives? How is it so different in kind from the tyrannical one-party rule of the old soviet system that is the pole star of conservative animus?
WalMart is the largest corporate employer in the USA and most of its rank-and-file store workers barely get paid enough to live on (those with children fall statistically below the official poverty line). They have no control over their working lives, are cruelly deprived of full-time status in order to avoid giving them health insurance, have been subject to lock-ins during late-shifts, and are forced to attend off-hour browbeating ("coaching") sessions with no pay. WalMart trumpets "made-in-America" propaganda around its stores but buys the majority of its merchandise from foreign countries -- over $20 billion in merchandise from China every year, and more from other overseas vendors.
For Gary North, the supposed benefits of "bargain shopping" trump the fantastic damage that this mode of commerce wreaks on the nation. It was some bargain to sacrifice all the local business enterprises in this land, and the careers that went with them, and the incomes they produced, and the choices they represented so that underpaid chain store serfs could save five bucks on a toaster-oven. Gary North writes:
Kunstler is merely one more hapless defender of local business oligopolies. He stands in front of the freight train of price competition, yelling: "Stop!" He will be run over, just as they all have been run over.
Gary North is not being ironic when he characterizes the Americans whose independent businesses, lives, and towns were destroyed by WalMart as "good ole boys." The owners of all those shuttered mom-and-pop stores along the vacant Main Streets of America were oligarchs?
Gary North is exactly what I have in mind when I refer to the "corn-pone Nazis" who threaten the political future of this country. Either he's a hostage to his own ideological rigor mortis or he is a genuine fool. He's certainly a fake patriot. He literally knows not what he actually stands for. There is no precedent for such malign totalitarian nonsense in American history. But it matches the spell that Germany fell under in 1933. And it can happen here, too.
====
All Publicity is Good Publicity
On 28 January 2005, John Stossel hosted a special on ABC, 20/20: Lies, Myths and Nasty Behavior with John Stossel. Among other things, he set out to prove suburban sprawl was actually good because it supposedly gave young families the chance to buy houses. (In retrospect, this was the time of the housing bubble.) And he had
a confrontational interview with Kunstler:
I told Kunstler "smart growth" is destroying the lives of poor people, that he's basically telling low-income people who want back yards that they can't have one.
"Well, you can't have everything," Kunstler said.
I could have written him off as an arrogant ass, and some doubtless have. But Kunstler was new to me. The idea of peak oil was also new. That June I saw a TV movie, Oil Storm, that supposed an oil shortage brought on by a hurricane. Though not strictly about peak oil, the movie underscored modern society's dependence on oil, and the difficulties people encounter for lack thereof. Then in the early fall, I went to a talk on peak oil by Shepherd Bliss. Among the books I saw on display was a new one, The Long Emergency, by that crusty old guy, James Howard Kunstler.
Just as I discovered Kunstler through his contentious exchange with John Stossel, so some readers of the North column just might be intrigued by that elitist. Incidentally, North praises Wal-Mart, etc. as the free market in action, but doesn't take into account the massive government subsidies it receives.
I ordered Kunstler's latest book Too Much Magic through a local bookstore and hope to pick it up soon.
Friday, March 01, 2013
Monday, February 25, 2013
Zero Dark Thirty's Paltry Takehome
Glenn Greenwald rejoices that Zero Dark Thirty won just one Oscar, for Sound Editing, which it had to share with Skyfall. Here.
Kunstler: "Not So Smart"
I'd be interested in what he has to say about the Oscars or the shootout in Las Vegas.
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/02/not-so-smart.html
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/02/not-so-smart.html
Sunday, February 24, 2013
The Oscars
As seen through the two-part Jem episode "Hollywood Jem." Jem is nominated for the Best Actress Oscar along with "Sigourney Reever", "Meryl Saint", and "Geraldine Pathos." (Where the customary fifth nominee is, I don't know.) The four nominees appear on a talk show, (about a minute into the first video) where Pathos takes offense at Jem's admission of never having studied acting formally:
Can you imagine Emmanuelle Riva launching into Quvenzhané Wallis like that?
"Hollywood Jem, Part 1: For Your Consideration"
"Hollywood Jem, Part 2: And the Winner Is..."
(to Jem): You never studied?! Yet you presume to compete with actresses who have spent years, decades at their craft.
(Standing up, arms akimbo): That's it! I refuse to share an interview with someone who became an actress for frivolous reasons.
Can you imagine Emmanuelle Riva launching into Quvenzhané Wallis like that?
"Hollywood Jem, Part 1: For Your Consideration"
"Hollywood Jem, Part 2: And the Winner Is..."
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
Kunstler: Scale Implosion (and My Own View of Local vs. Mainland-Owned Businesses)
Today's Kunstler column is on a topic--mass retail--I can understand better than the machinations of high finance. Hilo has a Wal-Mart (open since 1996), a Target (opened in summer 2011), and a few other semi-big box stores (Ross, OfficeMax, etc.) Hawaii, this island in particular, has never supported big box stores and chain retail in the same way the mainland (or Oahu) does. In some ways, our retail environment, especially restaurants, has actually become more localized. This deserves a more thorough treatment, but for now, let me say:
Target and Wal-Mart are lucrative in Hilo, but many local businesses are holding their own against them. I haven't been gone to Wal-Mart in years.
We have a larger (appx. 61,000 sq. ft.), fancier Safeway. But KTA has a nearly 100-year presence and strong customer loyalty. Longtime Hiloans remember Sure Save and Food Fair.
Borders is sorely missed, but there are still Book Gallery and Basically Books, as well as CD Wizard, Hilo Bay Books, Big Island BookBuyers, and Still Life Books.
We have McDonald's and Burger King but not many of the casual dining restaurants that Hattie does not like. We have innumerable small places, including two Indian restaurants. (Akmal's, which has existed in one form or another since its beginnings in Frankfurt in 1974, opened in Hilo in 2005 at the strip mall on Lanikaula Street. It was the first Indian restaurant not only in Hilo but on the island.)
http://hawaii2050.org/images/uploads/futures_scenarios.pdf
Scale Implosion
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 18, 2013 9:06 AM
Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle. The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won -- for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).
The chain stores won not only because they flung money around -- sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials -- but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry. The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?
Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: people get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.
The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.) Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving.
Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can't print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.
The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies. At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population 2500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main Street. The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over.
What we're on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy. I hope young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to work. It's already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture.
The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community. On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. We can get that all back, but it won't be a bargain.
Target and Wal-Mart are lucrative in Hilo, but many local businesses are holding their own against them. I haven't been gone to Wal-Mart in years.
We have a larger (appx. 61,000 sq. ft.), fancier Safeway. But KTA has a nearly 100-year presence and strong customer loyalty. Longtime Hiloans remember Sure Save and Food Fair.
Borders is sorely missed, but there are still Book Gallery and Basically Books, as well as CD Wizard, Hilo Bay Books, Big Island BookBuyers, and Still Life Books.
We have McDonald's and Burger King but not many of the casual dining restaurants that Hattie does not like. We have innumerable small places, including two Indian restaurants. (Akmal's, which has existed in one form or another since its beginnings in Frankfurt in 1974, opened in Hilo in 2005 at the strip mall on Lanikaula Street. It was the first Indian restaurant not only in Hilo but on the island.)
http://hawaii2050.org/images/uploads/futures_scenarios.pdf
Scale Implosion
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 18, 2013 9:06 AM
Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle. The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won -- for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).
The chain stores won not only because they flung money around -- sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials -- but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry. The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?
Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: people get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.
The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.) Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving.
Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can't print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.
The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies. At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population 2500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main Street. The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over.
What we're on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy. I hope young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to work. It's already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture.
The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community. On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. We can get that all back, but it won't be a bargain.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Friday, February 15, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
@aleithead See all my tweets here: storify.com/MaxBlumenthal/… Was using an iPhone app called 5-0 Radio.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 13, 2013
I managed to pick up police scanner of Dorner chase thru an iPhone app. There is chatter of "cabin identified." "Where are u on the cabin?"
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 12, 2013
On the Pope's Resignation
I will post here links as I find them.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2013/02/12/a-godly-man-in-an-ungodly-age/
http://www.telospress.com/on-pope-benedict-xvis-enduring-legacy/
http://www.religionnews.com/2013/02/18/analysis-conservatives-vent-disappointment-over-benedicts-papacy/
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2013/02/12/a-godly-man-in-an-ungodly-age/
http://www.telospress.com/on-pope-benedict-xvis-enduring-legacy/
http://www.religionnews.com/2013/02/18/analysis-conservatives-vent-disappointment-over-benedicts-papacy/
Monday, February 11, 2013
Kunstler's State of the Union Address
State of the Union
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 11, 2013 9:09 AM
The fog of chatter about Federal Reserve money-printing shenanigans, currency wars, fiscal intransigence, exchange rates, and alphabetized rescue operations conceals the central reality of the historical moment: that all industrial economies now face epic contraction, even rip-roaring China in its absurd and spectacular bid to become the latest drive-in utopia. The so-called advanced nations of the world are all sliding toward something less than they wish to be, and the so-called developing nations will backslide further into poverty and anarchy where development will never happen.
The implacable contraction underway is the simple result of growing scarcity of cheap oil, the master resource. Thus, in a world where fantasy has replaced analysis, the propaganda channels brim with false news of America's coming "energy independence" and the rebirth of domestic manufacturing, the coming electric car fleet, and space tourism. There is also chatter among the paranoid that an imagined elite has deliberately engineered American collapse for fun and profit, with sideshows about the Department of Homeland Security promoting social upheaval in order to make a show of putting it down. This is all bullshit concealing the futile machinations of people so unfortunate as to hold political office in an unraveling they can't control. Where control is no longer possible, paranoid fantasies fill the vacuum of wishing for control.
One thing you can be sure of: the current sociopolitical weather will change. A front will blow through and sweep the fog away. So many circles of hazard are spinning around events that some fast-turning object will come off its axis and start smashing all the fantasies. When that happens, it will be every community for itself, and where there are no real communities -- for instance, the vast matrix of suburban noplaces that America emergently composed itself out of in a tragic quest to become its own televised fantasy -- we'll discover the dark side of the "liberty" that so-called conservatives endlessly invoke, in all its screaming eagle iconography.
Not since the Civil War (1861 - 65) has anything bad of this scale happened within the United States itself and the public is unprepared despite our total immersion in the on-screen ersatz heroics of avatars such as Dwayne Johnson. The terrible convulsion of the 1860s was preceded by a political time much like ours is now, with figures (calling them leaders is inaccurate) of no conviction backpedaling furiously toward strife.
Remember these things if you tune in to watch President Obama move his lips on Tuesday amid the incessant applause in the House chamber. He'll speak the words "climate change" and the hall will rock with thunderous handclapping -- but it won't mean anything because both the president and the people have no intention of changing the way we live. Mr. Obama will cheerlead for economic growth and he will be talking out of his ass. It's the nature of this contraction that economic growth is absent. You can have plenty of economic activity -- especially if you re-form (literally) the systems we depend on, such as farming, commerce, medicine, and transportation -- but it won't be expressed favorably in the GDP stats or the balance sheets of CitiGroup and Morgan Stanley.
At the core of this contraction is the disappearing act of real capital -- that is, accumulated wealth -- for the excellent reason that we are squandering what remains of it in the futile effort to keep living the way we do. But it will be vanishing fast, contrary to the view of such fantasists as David Leonhardt, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times -- catch him on the current Slate Political Gabfest -- who thinks that the Growth Fairy is about to land on the south lawn of the White House.
The State of the Union Address is happening in a peculiar quiet moment when all the financial brushfires of the time have been reduced temporarily to a smolder that conceals the full involvement of the roots under the surface. Our economic system is burning down. Nobody wants to talk about the system that will have to replace it, which I call a world made by hand.
The fortunate few will be those who have already established themselves in an authentic community of helping hands, who have some tools -- and I don't mean Adobe Photoshop or the latest iPhone app -- and laid in some bits of silver and gold.
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 11, 2013 9:09 AM
The fog of chatter about Federal Reserve money-printing shenanigans, currency wars, fiscal intransigence, exchange rates, and alphabetized rescue operations conceals the central reality of the historical moment: that all industrial economies now face epic contraction, even rip-roaring China in its absurd and spectacular bid to become the latest drive-in utopia. The so-called advanced nations of the world are all sliding toward something less than they wish to be, and the so-called developing nations will backslide further into poverty and anarchy where development will never happen.
The implacable contraction underway is the simple result of growing scarcity of cheap oil, the master resource. Thus, in a world where fantasy has replaced analysis, the propaganda channels brim with false news of America's coming "energy independence" and the rebirth of domestic manufacturing, the coming electric car fleet, and space tourism. There is also chatter among the paranoid that an imagined elite has deliberately engineered American collapse for fun and profit, with sideshows about the Department of Homeland Security promoting social upheaval in order to make a show of putting it down. This is all bullshit concealing the futile machinations of people so unfortunate as to hold political office in an unraveling they can't control. Where control is no longer possible, paranoid fantasies fill the vacuum of wishing for control.
One thing you can be sure of: the current sociopolitical weather will change. A front will blow through and sweep the fog away. So many circles of hazard are spinning around events that some fast-turning object will come off its axis and start smashing all the fantasies. When that happens, it will be every community for itself, and where there are no real communities -- for instance, the vast matrix of suburban noplaces that America emergently composed itself out of in a tragic quest to become its own televised fantasy -- we'll discover the dark side of the "liberty" that so-called conservatives endlessly invoke, in all its screaming eagle iconography.
Not since the Civil War (1861 - 65) has anything bad of this scale happened within the United States itself and the public is unprepared despite our total immersion in the on-screen ersatz heroics of avatars such as Dwayne Johnson. The terrible convulsion of the 1860s was preceded by a political time much like ours is now, with figures (calling them leaders is inaccurate) of no conviction backpedaling furiously toward strife.
Remember these things if you tune in to watch President Obama move his lips on Tuesday amid the incessant applause in the House chamber. He'll speak the words "climate change" and the hall will rock with thunderous handclapping -- but it won't mean anything because both the president and the people have no intention of changing the way we live. Mr. Obama will cheerlead for economic growth and he will be talking out of his ass. It's the nature of this contraction that economic growth is absent. You can have plenty of economic activity -- especially if you re-form (literally) the systems we depend on, such as farming, commerce, medicine, and transportation -- but it won't be expressed favorably in the GDP stats or the balance sheets of CitiGroup and Morgan Stanley.
At the core of this contraction is the disappearing act of real capital -- that is, accumulated wealth -- for the excellent reason that we are squandering what remains of it in the futile effort to keep living the way we do. But it will be vanishing fast, contrary to the view of such fantasists as David Leonhardt, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times -- catch him on the current Slate Political Gabfest -- who thinks that the Growth Fairy is about to land on the south lawn of the White House.
The State of the Union Address is happening in a peculiar quiet moment when all the financial brushfires of the time have been reduced temporarily to a smolder that conceals the full involvement of the roots under the surface. Our economic system is burning down. Nobody wants to talk about the system that will have to replace it, which I call a world made by hand.
The fortunate few will be those who have already established themselves in an authentic community of helping hands, who have some tools -- and I don't mean Adobe Photoshop or the latest iPhone app -- and laid in some bits of silver and gold.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
A Review of Kunstler's Too Much Magic
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-09-12/review-too-much-magic-james-kunstler
Monday, February 04, 2013
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