Why does Ron Paul’s version of libertarianism so often align w interests of authoritarians and dictators? http://t.co/ON2MTdk4wx
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) February 24, 2014Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Welcome to Miami! Except...
Killer and attention houndGeorge Zimmerman confronted by cross beachgoers.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Kunstler: Savagery for All
Savagery for All
A glance through the annals of history tells us that the Golden Age of Ukraine occurred just as western Europe was emerging from its long, dark, post-Roman coma around the 10th and 11th centuries, A.D. After that, it was a kind of polo field for sundry sweeping hordes of mounted hell-bringers: Tatars, Turks, Cossacks, Bulgars, Napoleon’s grand army. In modern times, its population was divided between allegiance to Russia or to the Germanic states of the west. The Russian soviet regime treated it very badly. As many Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s “terror famine” of 1932-1933 as Jews and others were killed later in Hitler’s death camps. Stalin went on to try and totally erase Ukraine’s ethnic identity.
The Nazis wanted to go even further: to erase the Slavic population altogether so that the great fertile “breadbasket” of Ukraine could provide lebensraum for German colonizers. Stalin foolishly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939 — had he not read Mein Kampf? Less than two years later, Germany turned around and invaded Russia, using Ukraine as doormat and mud-room for a horrific struggle that left Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine, a virtual ashtray, and 28,000 villages destroyed.
Culture, as we know, is resilient. But given that history, one wonders what the current disposition of all these historical tides portends. The few thousand Americans not completely distracted by tweeting the content of their breakfasts or shooting naked selfies or texting behind the wheel — yea, even the gallant minority not mentally colonized by the slave-masters of Silicon Valley — must wonder what the heck happened in the streets of Kiev last week. Or, as Sir Mick Jagger famously said at the deadly Altamont Speedway festival, “Who’s fighting, and what for?” By the way, don’t count the editors of The New York Times among the aforementioned gallant minority of digital idiocy resisters. Today’s front page contained this rich nugget:
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s acting interior minister issued a warrant on Monday for the arrest of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych, accusing him of mass killing of civilian protesters in demonstrations last week…. Arsen Avakov, the acting official, made the announcement on his official Facebook page Monday.
Perhaps there’s a trend in this: all government information around the world will henceforth be transmitted by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will come to lead a New World Order of universal friendship. Remind me to send a friend request to Arsen Avakov and de-friend Victor F. Yanukovych.
I suppose the geopolitical bottom-line in all this is that the Ukrainians must feel more comfortable tilting toward a de-Nazified Germany than submitting to the attentions of a de-sovietized Russia. Both would-be patrons are dangling money before a rather cash-strapped Ukraine, which is faced by bond interest payouts that it can’t possibly come up with, not to mention some scratch to just keep the streetcars running. (Forgive me for pointing out that Ukraine at least has streetcars, unlike the USA, which just has cars on streets.)
Given the International Monetary Fund’s record as the West’s official loan shark, would a Ukraine government be wise to turn there for a handout? Meanwhile, is everybody pretending that the Ukraine is not crisscrossed by a great web of natural gas pipelines? And is it not obvious that the gas flows in one direction: from Russia to Europe. So, how exactly would it benefit western Europe if Ukraine got more cuddly with them? Russia could still shut down the gas valve at the source? If the Europeans had any common sense, you’d think they would just butt out of this struggle and quit dangling money and offers of friendship to a nation whose greatest potential is to be a perpetual battleground in yet another unnecessary dreadful conflict.
Let’s hope the American government is just grandstanding in the background because we have less business in this feud than in the doings of Middle Earth. National Security Advisor Susan Rice was flogging ultimatums around on “Meet the Press” yesterday — some blather about right of the Ukrainian people “to fulfill their aspirations and be democratic and be part of Europe, which they choose to be.”
If anything, the uprising in Kiev last week should remind us that Europe’s history is long and deep in bloodshed and that one particular Ukrainian politician who employs snipers to shoot through the hearts of his adversaries is not the only person or party across that broad region capable of reawakening the hell-bringers. There are quite a few other countries over there that could disintegrate politically in the months ahead, nations faced with insurmountable financial and economic troubles. The USA has enough problems of its own. Maybe it should tweet a message to itself.
A glance through the annals of history tells us that the Golden Age of Ukraine occurred just as western Europe was emerging from its long, dark, post-Roman coma around the 10th and 11th centuries, A.D. After that, it was a kind of polo field for sundry sweeping hordes of mounted hell-bringers: Tatars, Turks, Cossacks, Bulgars, Napoleon’s grand army. In modern times, its population was divided between allegiance to Russia or to the Germanic states of the west. The Russian soviet regime treated it very badly. As many Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s “terror famine” of 1932-1933 as Jews and others were killed later in Hitler’s death camps. Stalin went on to try and totally erase Ukraine’s ethnic identity.
The Nazis wanted to go even further: to erase the Slavic population altogether so that the great fertile “breadbasket” of Ukraine could provide lebensraum for German colonizers. Stalin foolishly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939 — had he not read Mein Kampf? Less than two years later, Germany turned around and invaded Russia, using Ukraine as doormat and mud-room for a horrific struggle that left Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine, a virtual ashtray, and 28,000 villages destroyed.
Culture, as we know, is resilient. But given that history, one wonders what the current disposition of all these historical tides portends. The few thousand Americans not completely distracted by tweeting the content of their breakfasts or shooting naked selfies or texting behind the wheel — yea, even the gallant minority not mentally colonized by the slave-masters of Silicon Valley — must wonder what the heck happened in the streets of Kiev last week. Or, as Sir Mick Jagger famously said at the deadly Altamont Speedway festival, “Who’s fighting, and what for?” By the way, don’t count the editors of The New York Times among the aforementioned gallant minority of digital idiocy resisters. Today’s front page contained this rich nugget:
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s acting interior minister issued a warrant on Monday for the arrest of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych, accusing him of mass killing of civilian protesters in demonstrations last week…. Arsen Avakov, the acting official, made the announcement on his official Facebook page Monday.
Perhaps there’s a trend in this: all government information around the world will henceforth be transmitted by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will come to lead a New World Order of universal friendship. Remind me to send a friend request to Arsen Avakov and de-friend Victor F. Yanukovych.
I suppose the geopolitical bottom-line in all this is that the Ukrainians must feel more comfortable tilting toward a de-Nazified Germany than submitting to the attentions of a de-sovietized Russia. Both would-be patrons are dangling money before a rather cash-strapped Ukraine, which is faced by bond interest payouts that it can’t possibly come up with, not to mention some scratch to just keep the streetcars running. (Forgive me for pointing out that Ukraine at least has streetcars, unlike the USA, which just has cars on streets.)
Given the International Monetary Fund’s record as the West’s official loan shark, would a Ukraine government be wise to turn there for a handout? Meanwhile, is everybody pretending that the Ukraine is not crisscrossed by a great web of natural gas pipelines? And is it not obvious that the gas flows in one direction: from Russia to Europe. So, how exactly would it benefit western Europe if Ukraine got more cuddly with them? Russia could still shut down the gas valve at the source? If the Europeans had any common sense, you’d think they would just butt out of this struggle and quit dangling money and offers of friendship to a nation whose greatest potential is to be a perpetual battleground in yet another unnecessary dreadful conflict.
Let’s hope the American government is just grandstanding in the background because we have less business in this feud than in the doings of Middle Earth. National Security Advisor Susan Rice was flogging ultimatums around on “Meet the Press” yesterday — some blather about right of the Ukrainian people “to fulfill their aspirations and be democratic and be part of Europe, which they choose to be.”
If anything, the uprising in Kiev last week should remind us that Europe’s history is long and deep in bloodshed and that one particular Ukrainian politician who employs snipers to shoot through the hearts of his adversaries is not the only person or party across that broad region capable of reawakening the hell-bringers. There are quite a few other countries over there that could disintegrate politically in the months ahead, nations faced with insurmountable financial and economic troubles. The USA has enough problems of its own. Maybe it should tweet a message to itself.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Ukraine
Dmitri Orlov's post on the Ukrainian situation. He observes that Ukraine is basically two countries: Eastern Poland (Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic) and Western Russia (Russian-speaking, Orthodox).
Friday, February 21, 2014
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Monday, February 17, 2014
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Friday, February 14, 2014
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Scoundrels
A list in progress. Links added to underscore why they are listed here.
Donna Alderman-Crosby, proprietor of The Forks Pit Stop in Walterboro, South Carolina.
Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia) for this and this. And "moderate" senator Bob Corker (R-TN) for this: When two sexual-assault survivors confronted Republican senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, he said, “I know this is enjoyable to y’all.” “It is not enjoyable,” Tracey Corder, the director of Racial Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, responded. “It is not fun for us to tell our stories.”
Adrien Broner.
Clay Higgins.
Leslie E. Gibson, candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, for insulting via Twitter a survivor of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Though he apologized, he deactivated his personal Twitter account <@LeslieEGibson2> and made private his campaign Twitter account, Gibson 4 Maine House <@Gibson_house>. At least, unlike Morgan Roof (younger sister of murderer Dylann), he didn't actually bring weapons to school, and hope protesting students would get shot. (16 March 2018 update: Faced with challenges from a novice Democrat and a former Republican state senator, both of whom declared at the last minute, Gibson has dropped out of the race.)
Disgraced gymnastics coach John Geddert. Will he get even a bit of the scrutiny his crony Nassar has received?
Carl Higbie, former chief of external affairs of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Brianna Rae Brochu.
Milo Yiannopoulos. For this and so much more. If Justin Bieber doesn't change his ways, he'll look like him and he doesn't want that.
Katie Quackenbush.
Greg Gianforte, his spokesman Shane Scanlon, and anyone who approves of his assault of a reporter.
Yale dean June Chu.
Talib Kweli Greene and Ben Shapiro.
Christopher Duntsch.
South Carolina state representative Chris Corley.
Dae Hae Moon.
Christian Gutierrez.
William Spingler.
Caleb Joseph Illig.
Michelle Herren.
Jennifer Boyle.
Tucker and Buckley Carlson, and Christopher Bedford.
Louisiana sheriff Louis Ackal. Is his middle initial J? It's the most fitting for him.
Brandon Phillips, former Georgia state director for the Trump campaign. Was he remorseful or tried to make amends with his victims? The article doesn't say.
Rodrigo Duterte.
Marc Wabafiyebazu.
Stanley Vernon Majors.
Dani Mathers.
Alex André Moraes Soeiro.
Steven Arnold "Steve" King, Iowa congressman, lover of guns and meat, English-only custard shops, watcher of Mexican migrants' "cantaloupe" calves, hater of Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill.
Howard Sparber, spurned loser.
Serial vandal of national parks Casey Nocket.
Tennessee candidate Rick Tyler, who wants to make America "white again." He's also against "miscegenators."
Christopher Mohrlang.
Nevada judge Conrad Hafen.
Rachel and Nyomi Fee.
John R. K. Howard and the other defendants. (9 January 2017 update: And Deputy Attorney General Casey Hemmer, for saying this assault doesn't amount to a sex crime.
https://www.change.org/p/idaho-state-senate-recall-deputy-state-attorny-general-casey-hemmer
Larry Thomas, barber.
Azealia Banks.
Jason M. Feldman. (His law firm page includes this: "He is active member of the National College of DUI Defense ... and has made it his personal goal to make miracles happen on daily basis." Where are the indefinite articles?)
Peter Kema, Sr. and Jaylin Kema.
Tennessee state representative Jeremy Durham, alleged sexual harasser, co-sponsor of anti-trans bathroom bill. Of course, he announced earlier this month that he'll seek re-election.
Former policeman Douglas Ioven, for assault and false imprisonment.
Fort Worth police officer W. Figueroa, for pepper-spraying motorcyclists as they were riding by.
Hawaii State Rep. Isaac W. Choy.
Michigan State Senator Virgil Smith, Jr.
Leonard Debello.
Robert Rialmo.
Former Arizona Congressman Ben Quayle.
Rep. Mitch Holmes. Not so much for his dress code but for his assertion that men don't need a dress code because they look "professional" already. Cf. Montana State Rep. David Moore (R) and his proposed ban on yoga pants.
Katr1na P1ers0n.
Ragheb Nouman.
Joshua Warren Killets.
Roselle Park, Councilwoman. At least she resigned.
Jodie Marie Burchard-Risch of Coon(!) Rapids, Minnesota.
Dr. Steven Anagn0st and Rick Perry.
Marshall W. Leonard.
Officer Bobby Harrison, HPD.
James Declan Basile, Christian Guy, Tucker Cole Steil, Austin Rice, Kyle Hughes, and whoever in the college let them off easy.
Triceten Bickford.
Chase Utley.
Jennifer Connell and William Beckert.
Dr. Geoff Marcy. (He has since resigned.)
Matt Bevin. (He has now won the governorship of Kentucky.)
The Gawkerites.
Donald Anthony Watson.
Natalie Munroe.
Poppy Harlow. I just found out about this story when I read a Mark Ames article. Sympathy for the devils, indeed!
Justin Harris.
Ikemefuna Enemkpali.
Ariana B. Kelly
Pamela Bullock
The as-yet unidentified Fox News anchor who inexplicably called Rory McIlroy a leprechaun and said she couldn't stand him.
Rachel Dolezal, impostor extraordinaire.
Sean Toon and his unnamed high school cronies.
Matt Bruenig.
Matthew Makela.
Gemma Wale.
Nevada assemblywoman Michele Fiore.
Robin Paul.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, for pulling an Alvin Greene*. (*This man.)
Jeff Roe.
Maria Valdes, Cypress Bay H.S.
John Hancock.
Thom Tillis, for advocating this loophole, and writer Luke Brinker, for making such a to-do about it. I wash my hands of both of them!
Kirby Delauter and Billy Shreve.
Elizabeth Lauten.
Mark Fuller.
Carlo Dellaverson. See also Scott Bentley.
Toure Neblett.
Jurger Klinsmann and his son Jonathan Klinsmann.
Shannon K. Smith.
Sharlene Simon.
"Guru" Bikram Choudhury.
These people.(names forthcoming)
One refused her cup of iced tea without a lid and a straw.
"Hashtag activists" (about as useful as "momagers").
Laura Ingraham.
Sara Netanyahu.
Bill Newcomer.
Kevin Kavanaugh and Tim Russell.
Laura Bush.
Jeff Orr.
Drew Paahao and Koa Alii Keaulana.
Faye Hanohano. She is no Helene Hale! In fact, she didn't even show up for Helene Hale's memorial service.
Michael Dunn.
Rick Perry, for his tepid "condemnation" of Ted Nugent's "subhuman mongrel" rant after earlier saying he didn't personally take offense.
Justin Bieber, of course, but also his father and partner in crime, Jeremy Jack Bieber.
"Pastor" David "Scott" Lemley, arrested on charges he raped a 20-year-old woman with the mental age of seven. Also the woman's father who urged her to have sex with the pastor. (And look at the photo. What a cretin.)
The soldiers who made funny poses around a flag-draped casket then posted the photo on Instagram.
(I mean the tag to read BAD behavior. BAD, from Paul Fussell's book of the same title. Bieber, for instance, is BAD. Not a bad singer like William Hung, who was so bad he was good, but a BAD celebrity: donning gas masks, (allegedly;P) egging a neighbor's house, drag-racing a rental car, etc.)
Donna Alderman-Crosby, proprietor of The Forks Pit Stop in Walterboro, South Carolina.
Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia) for this and this. And "moderate" senator Bob Corker (R-TN) for this: When two sexual-assault survivors confronted Republican senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, he said, “I know this is enjoyable to y’all.” “It is not enjoyable,” Tracey Corder, the director of Racial Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, responded. “It is not fun for us to tell our stories.”
Adrien Broner.
Clay Higgins.
Leslie E. Gibson, candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, for insulting via Twitter a survivor of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Though he apologized, he deactivated his personal Twitter account <@LeslieEGibson2> and made private his campaign Twitter account, Gibson 4 Maine House <@Gibson_house>. At least, unlike Morgan Roof (younger sister of murderer Dylann), he didn't actually bring weapons to school, and hope protesting students would get shot. (16 March 2018 update: Faced with challenges from a novice Democrat and a former Republican state senator, both of whom declared at the last minute, Gibson has dropped out of the race.)
Disgraced gymnastics coach John Geddert. Will he get even a bit of the scrutiny his crony Nassar has received?
Carl Higbie, former chief of external affairs of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Brianna Rae Brochu.
Milo Yiannopoulos. For this and so much more. If Justin Bieber doesn't change his ways, he'll look like him and he doesn't want that.
Katie Quackenbush.
Greg Gianforte, his spokesman Shane Scanlon, and anyone who approves of his assault of a reporter.
Yale dean June Chu.
Talib Kweli Greene and Ben Shapiro.
Christopher Duntsch.
South Carolina state representative Chris Corley.
Dae Hae Moon.
Christian Gutierrez.
William Spingler.
Caleb Joseph Illig.
Michelle Herren.
Jennifer Boyle.
Tucker and Buckley Carlson, and Christopher Bedford.
Louisiana sheriff Louis Ackal. Is his middle initial J? It's the most fitting for him.
Brandon Phillips, former Georgia state director for the Trump campaign. Was he remorseful or tried to make amends with his victims? The article doesn't say.
Rodrigo Duterte.
Marc Wabafiyebazu.
Stanley Vernon Majors.
Dani Mathers.
Alex André Moraes Soeiro.
Steven Arnold "Steve" King, Iowa congressman, lover of guns and meat, English-only custard shops, watcher of Mexican migrants' "cantaloupe" calves, hater of Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill.
Howard Sparber, spurned loser.
Serial vandal of national parks Casey Nocket.
Tennessee candidate Rick Tyler, who wants to make America "white again." He's also against "miscegenators."
Christopher Mohrlang.
Nevada judge Conrad Hafen.
Rachel and Nyomi Fee.
John R. K. Howard and the other defendants. (9 January 2017 update: And Deputy Attorney General Casey Hemmer, for saying this assault doesn't amount to a sex crime.
https://www.change.org/p/idaho-state-senate-recall-deputy-state-attorny-general-casey-hemmer
Larry Thomas, barber.
Azealia Banks.
Jason M. Feldman. (His law firm page includes this: "He is active member of the National College of DUI Defense ... and has made it his personal goal to make miracles happen on daily basis." Where are the indefinite articles?)
Peter Kema, Sr. and Jaylin Kema.
Tennessee state representative Jeremy Durham, alleged sexual harasser, co-sponsor of anti-trans bathroom bill. Of course, he announced earlier this month that he'll seek re-election.
Former policeman Douglas Ioven, for assault and false imprisonment.
Fort Worth police officer W. Figueroa, for pepper-spraying motorcyclists as they were riding by.
Hawaii State Rep. Isaac W. Choy.
Michigan State Senator Virgil Smith, Jr.
Leonard Debello.
Robert Rialmo.
Former Arizona Congressman Ben Quayle.
Rep. Mitch Holmes. Not so much for his dress code but for his assertion that men don't need a dress code because they look "professional" already. Cf. Montana State Rep. David Moore (R) and his proposed ban on yoga pants.
Katr1na P1ers0n.
Ragheb Nouman.
Joshua Warren Killets.
Roselle Park, Councilwoman. At least she resigned.
Jodie Marie Burchard-Risch of Coon(!) Rapids, Minnesota.
Dr. Steven Anagn0st and Rick Perry.
Marshall W. Leonard.
Officer Bobby Harrison, HPD.
James Declan Basile, Christian Guy, Tucker Cole Steil, Austin Rice, Kyle Hughes, and whoever in the college let them off easy.
Triceten Bickford.
Chase Utley.
Jennifer Connell and William Beckert.
Dr. Geoff Marcy. (He has since resigned.)
Matt Bevin. (He has now won the governorship of Kentucky.)
The Gawkerites.
Donald Anthony Watson.
Natalie Munroe.
Poppy Harlow. I just found out about this story when I read a Mark Ames article. Sympathy for the devils, indeed!
Justin Harris.
Ikemefuna Enemkpali.
Ariana B. Kelly
Pamela Bullock
The as-yet unidentified Fox News anchor who inexplicably called Rory McIlroy a leprechaun and said she couldn't stand him.
Rachel Dolezal, impostor extraordinaire.
Sean Toon and his unnamed high school cronies.
Matt Bruenig.
Matthew Makela.
Gemma Wale.
Nevada assemblywoman Michele Fiore.
Robin Paul.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, for pulling an Alvin Greene*. (*This man.)
Jeff Roe.
Maria Valdes, Cypress Bay H.S.
John Hancock.
Thom Tillis, for advocating this loophole, and writer Luke Brinker, for making such a to-do about it. I wash my hands of both of them!
Kirby Delauter and Billy Shreve.
Elizabeth Lauten.
Mark Fuller.
Carlo Dellaverson. See also Scott Bentley.
Toure Neblett.
Jurger Klinsmann and his son Jonathan Klinsmann.
Shannon K. Smith.
Sharlene Simon.
"Guru" Bikram Choudhury.
These people.
"Hashtag activists" (about as useful as "momagers").
Laura Ingraham.
Sara Netanyahu.
Bill Newcomer.
Kevin Kavanaugh and Tim Russell.
Laura Bush.
Jeff Orr.
Drew Paahao and Koa Alii Keaulana.
Faye Hanohano. She is no Helene Hale! In fact, she didn't even show up for Helene Hale's memorial service.
Michael Dunn.
Rick Perry, for his tepid "condemnation" of Ted Nugent's "subhuman mongrel" rant after earlier saying he didn't personally take offense.
Justin Bieber, of course, but also his father and partner in crime, Jeremy Jack Bieber.
"Pastor" David "Scott" Lemley, arrested on charges he raped a 20-year-old woman with the mental age of seven. Also the woman's father who urged her to have sex with the pastor. (And look at the photo. What a cretin.)
The soldiers who made funny poses around a flag-draped casket then posted the photo on Instagram.
(I mean the tag to read BAD behavior. BAD, from Paul Fussell's book of the same title. Bieber, for instance, is BAD. Not a bad singer like William Hung, who was so bad he was good, but a BAD celebrity: donning gas masks, (allegedly;P) egging a neighbor's house, drag-racing a rental car, etc.)
Monday, February 10, 2014
Saturday, February 08, 2014
Thursday, February 06, 2014
More on CVS Decision to Phase Out Tobacco
Repost at Townhall of an AP article about the decision by CVS to stop selling tobacco products. The comments are mostly people gnashing their teeth about the alleged agenda behind the decision.
Longs Drugs was acquired by CVSa while ago in 2008 and today's Tribune-Herald has an article about the local impact. I think the hardcore smokers will go to 808 Tobacco and Irie Smoke Shop (Boom!) for their cigarettes. And I think smokers will likely "stock up" at Longs, causing the shelves to empty months earlier than October.
Longs Drugs was acquired by CVS
Wednesday, February 05, 2014
What "Downside"?
Louis Proyect notes, a little too smugly, that Prince Charles, three years his junior "looks nearly old enough to be my father. Just look at my photo below...".
Of course Prince Charles, who has spent a lifetime outdoors (polo, yachting, etc.), will have weathered skin, compared to Proyect, who has "spent my time indoors pouring [sic] over the Grundrisse, etc."
But Prince Charles has aged into a very distinguished-looking man.
(Grundrisse)
Of course Prince Charles, who has spent a lifetime outdoors (polo, yachting, etc.), will have weathered skin, compared to Proyect, who has "spent my time indoors pouring [sic] over the Grundrisse, etc."
But Prince Charles has aged into a very distinguished-looking man.
(Grundrisse)
Hole>Nirvana?
Hole was a better band than Nirvana. #ConfessYourUnpopularOpinion
— Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn) December 4, 2013Hole had some good songs such as "Malibu" and "Doll Parts."
Courtney Love was seen as a Yoko Ono--not a serious artist in her own right but a talentless gold-digger/social climber latching onto a brillian musician. So in the popular imagination, especially when Kurt Cobain killed himself almost twenty years ago, Hole was just a footnote.
Monday, February 03, 2014
"Talk Good English or Get Out!"
@Millie__Weaver @Vir_Superanus I think English Only advocates should to write in English, don't you?
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 3, 2014Sunday, February 02, 2014
Friday, January 31, 2014
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Trouble at The American Conservative
This article details the conflict between the publisher and editor of The American Conservative. The magazine, founded in 2002, has never been a moneymaker (true of almost all journals of opinion). It has an amazingly high cover price (about $10 an issue!) and subscription price.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/congressman-michael-grimm-at-the-caribbean-tropics.html
.@Trackerinblue let's see how many times Rep. Grimm is referred to as a "thug" versus how many times Richard Sherman was.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 29, 2014Monday, January 27, 2014
Kunstler: Like Your Hair's on Fire
Kunstler: Like Your Hair's on Fire.
Kunstler sees Breaking Bad as a metaphor for American life. I regard it as one of the most overrated TV shows this decade.
Kunstler sees Breaking Bad as a metaphor for American life. I regard it as one of the most overrated TV shows this decade.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
An Interesting Blog About the `60s and `70s
I just found this a few minutes ago.
http://sixtiesandseventiesblog.wordpress.com/about/
http://sixtiesandseventiesblog.wordpress.com/about/
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
The Disenchantment of American Politics and the Coming Uproar
Kunstler writes essays for the Peak Prosperity site. Linked here is part one of his latest, "The Disenchantment of American Politics and the Coming Uproar."
Monday, January 20, 2014
Kunstler: "Warrior Land"
Kunstler: Warrior Land
Looking around America these days, if you can stand it, the sense of what it means to be a man has become a very shaky business. I was studying one particular tattooed moron, twenty-something, in the gym Saturday. He had on display a full sleeve-job of “tribal” skin décor in that curvy blade-like motif that invokes a general idea of ninja swordplay. Perhaps he really was a dangerous dude, a Navy Seal just back from slitting Taliban throats in Nangarhar. More likely, he was a fork-lift operator in the local Ace Hardware distribution center. He seemed to resent my attention — but then why had he taken so many pains to adorn himself?
Is it not interesting that so many males in America affect to be warriors? What does this tell us about the psychological dimensions of manhood in this country? If I have to guess, I’d venture that many people of the male persuasion hereabouts can’t imagine any other way of being a man — other than as a fine-tuned bringer-of-death, preferably some species of cyborg, with “techno” bells and whistles. This is obvious fodder from the many Transformer and Robocop movies, the dream of becoming a most excellent killing machine.
This ethos was on hyperwarp display in Sunday’s NFL football playoffs, football being, after all, mock warfare with mock warriors. San Francisco quarterback Colin Kapernick’s arm tattoos were hard to decipher even on a large high-def flatscreen. At first I thought they were maps of suburban Milwaukee, or perhaps the full text of Jude the Obscure but it turns out (I looked it up) they record his ongoing life “narrative,” his triumphs and distinctions, his mom’s heart transplant, and his dealings with the fugitive deity known as Jesus Christ. Between scoring drives, Colin vamped on the sidelines in a red Cholo hat, one of those ball caps featuring an exquisitely flattened brim designed to make the wearer look like a homicidal clown — which is the favored motif of aspiring criminals abroad in the land nowadays. As Lon Chaney, the master of horror, once remarked apropos of his character creation technique, “There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.” The objective: to look as ridiculous as possible and yet give off a vibe of unpredictable danger and violence.
Colin was hardly the sole creature on the field adorned with ink. At times, the scrimmage looked like the recreation yard at the Washington State Penitentiary. But that brings us to another theme of contemporary American manhood having to do with the grand initiation rite of serving time in prison. There is a meme on the loose, especially among the hopeless idealists, that American jails are filled with “political prisoners.” This is just not so. Though our drug laws are certainly idiotic, cruel, and pointless, I believe sincerely that the prison system is filled with psychopathic monsters. They may be creations of our monster-making culture, in all its depravity and pernicious falsity, but they are monsters nonetheless.
But the romance of monsterdom is yet another theme in the current caboodle of American manhood. Boys are in love with monsters, and want to be them, or like them, or with them, and nowadays many succeed at that. The indulgence in all these juvenile enthusiasms presents in the absence of any better models of a way to be. The time is not distant when a lot of things are going to shake loose in this land, and when that happens, there will be monsters amongst us everywhere: tattooed clowns in baby clothes with large muscles and weapons. Really, what are the chances that such people reared on dreams of triumphal violence will operate on the basis of kindness, generosity, and consideration of any future beyond the next fifteen minutes.
Let’s face it, the reason we do the things we do, and act the way we act, is because American manhood is in full failure mode, in full retreat from what used to be known as virtue. We wouldn’t know what this is anymore if it jumped up and bit us on the lips. I’m afraid it will take very stern leadership to reform all these current trends. When it comes around, it will look like Dolly Parton meets Hitler.
Looking around America these days, if you can stand it, the sense of what it means to be a man has become a very shaky business. I was studying one particular tattooed moron, twenty-something, in the gym Saturday. He had on display a full sleeve-job of “tribal” skin décor in that curvy blade-like motif that invokes a general idea of ninja swordplay. Perhaps he really was a dangerous dude, a Navy Seal just back from slitting Taliban throats in Nangarhar. More likely, he was a fork-lift operator in the local Ace Hardware distribution center. He seemed to resent my attention — but then why had he taken so many pains to adorn himself?
Is it not interesting that so many males in America affect to be warriors? What does this tell us about the psychological dimensions of manhood in this country? If I have to guess, I’d venture that many people of the male persuasion hereabouts can’t imagine any other way of being a man — other than as a fine-tuned bringer-of-death, preferably some species of cyborg, with “techno” bells and whistles. This is obvious fodder from the many Transformer and Robocop movies, the dream of becoming a most excellent killing machine.
This ethos was on hyperwarp display in Sunday’s NFL football playoffs, football being, after all, mock warfare with mock warriors. San Francisco quarterback Colin Kapernick’s arm tattoos were hard to decipher even on a large high-def flatscreen. At first I thought they were maps of suburban Milwaukee, or perhaps the full text of Jude the Obscure but it turns out (I looked it up) they record his ongoing life “narrative,” his triumphs and distinctions, his mom’s heart transplant, and his dealings with the fugitive deity known as Jesus Christ. Between scoring drives, Colin vamped on the sidelines in a red Cholo hat, one of those ball caps featuring an exquisitely flattened brim designed to make the wearer look like a homicidal clown — which is the favored motif of aspiring criminals abroad in the land nowadays. As Lon Chaney, the master of horror, once remarked apropos of his character creation technique, “There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.” The objective: to look as ridiculous as possible and yet give off a vibe of unpredictable danger and violence.
Colin was hardly the sole creature on the field adorned with ink. At times, the scrimmage looked like the recreation yard at the Washington State Penitentiary. But that brings us to another theme of contemporary American manhood having to do with the grand initiation rite of serving time in prison. There is a meme on the loose, especially among the hopeless idealists, that American jails are filled with “political prisoners.” This is just not so. Though our drug laws are certainly idiotic, cruel, and pointless, I believe sincerely that the prison system is filled with psychopathic monsters. They may be creations of our monster-making culture, in all its depravity and pernicious falsity, but they are monsters nonetheless.
But the romance of monsterdom is yet another theme in the current caboodle of American manhood. Boys are in love with monsters, and want to be them, or like them, or with them, and nowadays many succeed at that. The indulgence in all these juvenile enthusiasms presents in the absence of any better models of a way to be. The time is not distant when a lot of things are going to shake loose in this land, and when that happens, there will be monsters amongst us everywhere: tattooed clowns in baby clothes with large muscles and weapons. Really, what are the chances that such people reared on dreams of triumphal violence will operate on the basis of kindness, generosity, and consideration of any future beyond the next fifteen minutes.
Let’s face it, the reason we do the things we do, and act the way we act, is because American manhood is in full failure mode, in full retreat from what used to be known as virtue. We wouldn’t know what this is anymore if it jumped up and bit us on the lips. I’m afraid it will take very stern leadership to reform all these current trends. When it comes around, it will look like Dolly Parton meets Hitler.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Just spoke to great group at Congregational Church in Coral Gables. United Church of Christ is gearing up to back #BDS & the Kairos document
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 19, 2014Saturday, January 18, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
What is the Matter With Florida?
Just got to Tampa, everyone's talking about the local cop who shot a man to death for texting in a movie theater: http://t.co/e0glULnqVh
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 15, 2014I saw a bit of Cross Creek on Monday (I think). It starred Mary Steenburgen as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who moved to rural Florida and wrote The Yearling, itself recently discussed in Harper's. Her husband was appalled at her wanting to move to some "hick town" in Florida.
I've never been to Florida, which might retain some of the beauty M.K. Rawlings saw. But what I hear is not good. Florida seems to concentrate much what is bad about the mainland.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Fracking and Cracking
I just found Resilience.org, via a tweet by Richard Heinberg. "Next Oil Sands Threat: Cracking Caprock."
And the French energy company Total, banned from fracking in its own country, has invested heavily in the emerging British oil-shale industry.
And the French energy company Total, banned from fracking in its own country, has invested heavily in the emerging British oil-shale industry.
My System of Movie-Watching Worthiness (with Examples)
Go to the Prince Kuhio Stadium Cinemas: (Nothing really. Might grudgingly go to Ride Along. Her will more likely come to the Palace.)
Go to the Kress: The Wolf of Wall Street or Saving Mr. Banks
Wait till it comes to video:Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
Wait till it airs on TV: American Hustle
Don't ever plan to watch: The Lone Ranger, 12 Years a Slave
Go to the Kress: The Wolf of Wall Street or Saving Mr. Banks
Wait till it comes to video:Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
Wait till it airs on TV: American Hustle
Don't ever plan to watch: The Lone Ranger, 12 Years a Slave
Monday, January 13, 2014
Kunstler: The Fate of a City
I see Hattie is already in California, which is "still home." Likewise, New York is home to Kunstler, who grew up in the city. I might add some appropriate links to this column later.
The Fate of a City.
I was born and raised in New York City, on the east side of Manhattan (with a brief intermezzo in the long Island Suburbs (1954–1957) though I have lived upstate, two hundred miles north of the city, for decades since. I go back from time to time to see publishers and get some cosmopolitan thrills. One spring morning a couple of years back, toward the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, I was walking across Central Park from my hotel on West 75th Street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I had an epiphany.
Which was that Central Park, and indeed much of the city, had never been in such good condition in my lifetime. The heart of New York had gone through a phenomenal restoration. When I was a child in the 1960s, districts like Tribeca, Soho, and the Bowery were the realms of winos and cockroaches. The brutes who worked in the meatpacking district had never seen a supermodel. Brooklyn was as remote and benighted as Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. The Central Park Zoo was like a set from Riot in Cellblock D, and the park itself was desecrated with the aging detritus of Robert Moses’s awful experiments in chain-link fencing as a decorative motif. Then, of course, came the grafitti-plagued 1970s summed up by the infamous newspaper headline [President] Ford to City: Drop Dead.
Now, the park was sparkling. The sheep’s meadow was lovingly re-sodded, many of Frederick Law Olmsted’s original structures, the dairy, the bow bridge, the Bethesda Fountain, were restored. Million dollar condos were selling on the Bowery. Where trucks once unloaded flyblown cattle carcasses was now the hangout of movie and fashion celebrities. Brooklyn was a New Jerusalem of the lively arts. And my parents could never have afforded the 2BR/2bath apartment (with working fireplace) that I grew up in on East 68th Street.
The catch to all this was that the glorious rebirth of New York City was entirely due to the financialization of the economy. Untold billions had streamed into this special little corner of the USA since the 1980s, into the bank accounts of countless vampire squidlets engaged in the asset-stripping of the rest of the nation. So, in case you were wondering, all the wealth of places like Detroit, Akron, Peoria, Waukegan, Chattanooga, Omaha, Hartford, and scores of other towns that had been gutted and retrofitted for suburban chain-store imperialism, or served up to the racketeers of “Eds and Meds,” or just left for dead — all that action had been converted, abracadabra, into the renovation of a few square miles near the Atlantic Ocean.
Nobody in the lamebrain New York based media really understands this dynamic, nor do they have a clue what will happen next, which is that the wealth-extraction process is now complete and that New York City has moved over the top of the arc of rebirth and is now headed down a steep, nauseating slope of breakdown and deterioration, starting with the reign of soon-to-be hapless Bill de Blasio.
Mayor Bloomberg was celebrated for, among other things, stimulating a new generation of skyscraper building. There is theory which states that an empire puts up its greatest monumental buildings just before it collapses. I think it is truthful. This is what you are now going to see in New York, especially as regards the empire of Wall Street finance, which is all set to blow up. The many new skyscrapers recently constructed for the fabled “one percent”— the Frank Gehry condos and the Robert A.M. Stern hedge fund aeries — are already obsolete. The buyers don’t know it. In the new era of capital scarcity that we are entering, these giant buildings cannot be maintained (and, believe me, such structures require incessant, meticulous, and expensive upkeep). Splitting up the ownership of mega-structures into condominiums under a homeowners’ association (HOA) is an experiment that has never been tried before and now we are going to watch it fail spectacularly. All those towering monuments to the beneficent genius of Michael Bloomberg will very quickly transform from assets to liabilities.
This is only one feature of a breakdown in mega-cities that will astonish those who think the trend of hypergrowth is bound to just continue indefinitely. It will probably be unfair to blame poor Mr. de Blasio (though he surely can make the process worse), even as it would be erroneous to credit Michael Bloomberg for what financialization of the economy accomplished in one small part of America.
The Fate of a City.
I was born and raised in New York City, on the east side of Manhattan (with a brief intermezzo in the long Island Suburbs (1954–1957) though I have lived upstate, two hundred miles north of the city, for decades since. I go back from time to time to see publishers and get some cosmopolitan thrills. One spring morning a couple of years back, toward the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, I was walking across Central Park from my hotel on West 75th Street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I had an epiphany.
Which was that Central Park, and indeed much of the city, had never been in such good condition in my lifetime. The heart of New York had gone through a phenomenal restoration. When I was a child in the 1960s, districts like Tribeca, Soho, and the Bowery were the realms of winos and cockroaches. The brutes who worked in the meatpacking district had never seen a supermodel. Brooklyn was as remote and benighted as Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. The Central Park Zoo was like a set from Riot in Cellblock D, and the park itself was desecrated with the aging detritus of Robert Moses’s awful experiments in chain-link fencing as a decorative motif. Then, of course, came the grafitti-plagued 1970s summed up by the infamous newspaper headline [President] Ford to City: Drop Dead.
Now, the park was sparkling. The sheep’s meadow was lovingly re-sodded, many of Frederick Law Olmsted’s original structures, the dairy, the bow bridge, the Bethesda Fountain, were restored. Million dollar condos were selling on the Bowery. Where trucks once unloaded flyblown cattle carcasses was now the hangout of movie and fashion celebrities. Brooklyn was a New Jerusalem of the lively arts. And my parents could never have afforded the 2BR/2bath apartment (with working fireplace) that I grew up in on East 68th Street.
The catch to all this was that the glorious rebirth of New York City was entirely due to the financialization of the economy. Untold billions had streamed into this special little corner of the USA since the 1980s, into the bank accounts of countless vampire squidlets engaged in the asset-stripping of the rest of the nation. So, in case you were wondering, all the wealth of places like Detroit, Akron, Peoria, Waukegan, Chattanooga, Omaha, Hartford, and scores of other towns that had been gutted and retrofitted for suburban chain-store imperialism, or served up to the racketeers of “Eds and Meds,” or just left for dead — all that action had been converted, abracadabra, into the renovation of a few square miles near the Atlantic Ocean.
Nobody in the lamebrain New York based media really understands this dynamic, nor do they have a clue what will happen next, which is that the wealth-extraction process is now complete and that New York City has moved over the top of the arc of rebirth and is now headed down a steep, nauseating slope of breakdown and deterioration, starting with the reign of soon-to-be hapless Bill de Blasio.
Mayor Bloomberg was celebrated for, among other things, stimulating a new generation of skyscraper building. There is theory which states that an empire puts up its greatest monumental buildings just before it collapses. I think it is truthful. This is what you are now going to see in New York, especially as regards the empire of Wall Street finance, which is all set to blow up. The many new skyscrapers recently constructed for the fabled “one percent”— the Frank Gehry condos and the Robert A.M. Stern hedge fund aeries — are already obsolete. The buyers don’t know it. In the new era of capital scarcity that we are entering, these giant buildings cannot be maintained (and, believe me, such structures require incessant, meticulous, and expensive upkeep). Splitting up the ownership of mega-structures into condominiums under a homeowners’ association (HOA) is an experiment that has never been tried before and now we are going to watch it fail spectacularly. All those towering monuments to the beneficent genius of Michael Bloomberg will very quickly transform from assets to liabilities.
This is only one feature of a breakdown in mega-cities that will astonish those who think the trend of hypergrowth is bound to just continue indefinitely. It will probably be unfair to blame poor Mr. de Blasio (though he surely can make the process worse), even as it would be erroneous to credit Michael Bloomberg for what financialization of the economy accomplished in one small part of America.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Narendra Modi
India, and the world, should be wary of Narendra Modi: http://t.co/hzt5WMMcwI @rezaaslan @_michaelbrooks #India
— Fair Observer (@myfairobserver) January 3, 2014The Indian General Election of 2014. As far as I can tell, it will be held this spring.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Rep. Louie Gohmert Piles on Max Blumenthal
Gohmert condemned me as anti-Semitic during an extended rant warning that BDS will lead to the second Holocaust http://t.co/xLu7E8WNgY #PT
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 10, 2014Max is mentioned at the 3h 17m mark.
A discussion about this is on Max Blumenthal's Twitter account. What stands out to me is the unseemliness of Gohmert, a Gentile, calling Blumenthal, a Jew, anti-Semitic, for his vocal and sustained anti-Zionism.
11 January update: A transcript of the remarks.
Thursday, January 09, 2014
Armond White's "Better Than" List
I like Armond White too, and don't always agree with him either. Nor did I always concur with John Simon.
I don't always agree with Armond White but he's probably the most important American film critic right now: http://t.co/meDL2lKlPl
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) January 9, 2014Monday, January 06, 2014
Kunstler: Forecast 2014: Burning Down the House
Kunstler's latest, which is excerpted below. It was worth the wait and is worth reading in its entirety (see link). Some comments of mine are after the excerpts.
Kunstler: Forecast 2014: Burning Down the House
Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It’s like being buried alive in Jell-O. It’s embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war.
Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical “recovery” and the “shale gas miracle” on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations.
Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt — with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage. Some of us are anxious to get on with the job, to expel all the rats, bats, bedbugs, roaches, and lice, tear out the stinking shag carpet and the moldy sheet-rock, rip off the crappy plastic siding, and start rebuilding along lines that are consistent with the demands of the future — namely, the reality of capital and material resource scarcity. But it has been apparent for a while that the current owners of the house would prefer to let it fall down, or burn down rather than renovate.
Some of us now take that outcome for granted and are left to speculate on how it will play out. These issues were the subjects of my recent non-fiction books, The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic (as well as excellent similar books by Richard Heinberg, John Michael Greer, Dmitry Orlov, and others). They describe the conditions at the end of the cheap energy techno-industrial phase of history and they laid out a conjectural sequence of outcomes that might be stated in shorthand as collapse and re-set. I think the delay in the onset of epochal change can be explained pretty simply. As the peak oil story gained traction around 2005, and was followed (as predicted) by a financial crisis, the established order fought back for its survival, utilizing its remaining dwindling capital and the tremendous inertia of its own gigantic scale, to give the appearance of vitality at all costs.
At the heart of the matter was (and continues to be) the relationship between energy and economic growth. Without increasing supplies of cheap energy, economic growth — as we have known it for a couple of centuries — does not happen anymore. At the center of the economic growth question is credit. Without continued growth, credit can’t be repaid, and new credit cannot be issued honestly — that is, with reasonable assurance of repayment — making it worthless. So, old debt goes bad and the new debt is generated knowing that it is worthless. To complicate matters, the new worthless debt is issued to pay the interest on the old debt, to maintain the pretense that it is not going bad. ...
Miscellany
I get a lot of email on the subject of Bitcoin. Here’s how I feel about it.
It’s an even more abstract form of “money” than fiat currencies or securities based on fiat currencies. Do we need more abstraction in our economic lives? I don’t think so. I believe the trend will be toward what is real. For the moment, Bitcoin seems to be enjoying some success as it beats back successive crashes. I’m not very comfortable with the idea of investing in an algorithm. I don’t see how it is impervious to government hacking. In fact, I’d bet that somewhere in the DOD or the NSA or the CIA right now some nerd is working on that. Bitcoin is provoking imitators, other new computer “currencies.” Why would Bitcoin necessarily enjoy dominance? And how many competing algorithmic currencies can the world stand? Wouldn’t that defeat the whole purpose of an alternative “go to” currency? All I can say is that I’m not buying Bitcoins.
Will ObamaCare crash and burn. It’s not doing very well so far. In fact, it’s a poster-child for Murphy’s Law (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong). I suppose the primary question is whether they can enroll enough healthy young people to correct the actuarial nightmare that health insurance has become. That’s not looking so good either now. But really, how can anyone trust a law that was written by the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? And how can it be repealed when so many individuals, groups, companies, have already lost their pre-ObamaCare policies? What is there to go back to? Therefore, I’d have to predict turmoil in the health care system for 2014. The failure to resolve the inadequacies of ObamaCare also may be a prime symptom of the increasing impotence of the federal government to accomplish anything. That failure would prompt an even faster downscaling of governance as states, counties, communities, and individuals realize that they are on their own.
Sorry to skip around, but a few stray words about the state of American culture. Outside the capitals of the “one percent” — Manhattan, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, etc. — American material culture is in spectacular disrepair. Car culture and chain store tyranny have destroyed the physical fabric of our communities and wrecked social relations. These days, a successful Main Street is one that has a wig shop and a check-cashing office.^ It is sickening to see what we have become. Our popular entertainments are just what you would design to produce a programmed population of criminals and sex offenders. The spectacle of the way our people look —overfed, tattooed, pierced, clothed in the raiment of clowns — suggests an end-of-empire zeitgeist more disturbing than a Fellini movie. The fact is, it simply mirrors the way we act, our gross, barbaric collective demeanor. A walk down any airport concourse makes the Barnum & Bailey freak shows of yore look quaint. In short, the rot throughout our national life is so conspicuous that a fair assessment would be that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished.
Elsewhere in the World
Globalism, in the Tom Friedman euphoric sense, is unwinding. Currency wars are wearing down the players, conflicts and tensions are breaking out where before there were only Wal-Mart share price triumphs and Foxconn profits. Both American and European middle-classes are too exhausted financially to continue the consumer orgy of the early millennium. The trade imbalances are horrific. Unpayable debt saturates everything. Sick economies will weigh down commodity prices except for food-related things. The planet Earth has probably reached peak food production, including peak fertilizer. Supplies of grain will be inadequate in 2014 to feed the still-expanding masses of the poor places in the world.
The nervous calm in finance and economies since 2008 has its mirror in the relative calm of the political scene. Uprisings and skirmishes have broken out, but nothing that so far threatens the peace between great powers. There have been the now-historic revolts in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other Middle East and North African (MENA) states. Iraq is once again disintegrating after a decade of American “nation-building.” Greece is falling apart. Spain and Italy should be falling apart but haven’t yet. France is sinking into bankruptcy. The UK is in on the grift with the USA and insulated from the Euro, but the British Isles are way over-populated with a volatile multi-ethnic mix and not much of an economy outside the financial district of London. There were riots in — of all places — Sweden this year. Turkey entered crisis just a few weeks ago along with Ukraine.
I predict more colorful political strife in Europe this year, boots in the street, barricades, gunfire, and bombs. The populations of these countries will want relief measures from their national governments, but the sad news is that these governments are broke, so austerity seems to be the order of the day no matter what. I think this will prod incipient revolts in a rightward nationalist direction. If it was up to Marine LePen’s rising National Front party, they would solve the employment problem by expelling all the recent immigrants — though the mere attempt would probably provoke widespread race war in France.
The quarrel between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands is a diversion from the real action in the South China Sea, said to hold large underwater petroleum reserves. China is the world’s second greatest oil importer. Their economy and the credibility of its non-elected government depends on keeping the oil supply up. They are a long way from other places in the world where oil comes from, hence their eagerness to secure and dominate the South China Sea. The idea is that China would make a fuss over the Senkaku group, get Japan and the US to the negotiating table, and cede the dispute over them to Japan in exchange for Japan and the US supporting China’s claims in the South China Sea against the other neighbors there: Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
The catch is that Japan may be going politically insane just now between the rigors of (Shinzo) Abenomics and the mystical horrors of Fukushima. Japan’s distress appears to be provoking a new mood of nationalist militarism of a kind not seen there since the 1940s. They’re talking about arming up, rewriting the pacifist articles in their constitution. Scary, if you have a memory of the mid-20th century. China should know something about national psychotic breaks, having not so long ago endured the insanity of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-71). So they might want to handle Japan with care. On the other hand, China surely nurtures a deep, deadly grudge over the crimes perpetrated by Japan in the Second World War, and now has a disciplined, world-class military, and so maybe they would like to kick Japan’s ass. It’s a hard one to call. I suspect that in 2014, the ball is in Japan’s court. What will they do? If the US doesn’t stay out of the way of that action, then we are insane, too.
That said, I stick by my story from last year’s forecast: Japan’s ultimate destination is to “go medieval.”* They’re never going to recover from Fukushima, their economy is unraveling, they have no fossil fuels of their own and have to import everything, and their balance of payments is completely out of whack. The best course for them will be to just throw in the towel on modernity. Everybody else is headed that way, too, eventually, so Japan might as well get there first and set a good example.
By “go medieval” I mean re-set to a pre-industrial World Made By Hand level of operation. I’m sure that outcome seems laughably implausible to most readers, but I maintain that both the human race and the planet Earth need a “time out” from the ravages of “progress,” and circumstances are going to force the issue anyway, so we might as well kick back and get with the program: go local, downscale, learn useful skills, cultivate our gardens, get to know our neighbors, learn how to play a musical instrument, work, dine, and dance with our friends.
As it happens, the third in the series of my World Made By Hand novels, set in upstate New York in the post-collapse economy, will be published in September by the Atlantic Monthly Press. It’s a ripping yarn. Whether anyone will have enough money to buy a copy, I can’t predict. Happy 2014, Everybody!
===
Eventually, there'll be
^I went to the Kuhio Plaza on Friday, and after our breakfast at IHOP, walked around a bit. Big Island Surf closed, but an HIC opened in the old Waldenbooks space next to Radio Shack. At one end, it's bustling with the new Zippy's and Sports Authority, but throughout the mall are vacant spaces or stores that barely occupy their spaces and sell cheap stuff. Near IHOP, what used to be Suncoast Video was more recently an anime shop (that could have fit in a smaller space; it was cavernous). Now it's closed and serves as an occasional meeting room, which itself was moved from the original Footlocker space to make way for a calendar shop. I'd like your thoughts on the Plaza: what it was like? where it's going? It's been in operation almost thirty years (opening in 1985). The Kaiko`o Mall was around for about that long before it closed. (To malihini and visitors: that giant courthouse in midtown Hilo is on the site of the mall.) Downtown is mixed: pockets of gentrification, longtime businesses, and some downscaling and "frivilousation" (e.g., a good toy shop replaced with a nail salon; the Farmers Exchange, with a bar and a tattoo parlor).
*As I posted recently, our cable system broadcasts a free preview of the Nippon Golden Network around New Year's (this year it ran from 30 December through 3 January). Many of the movies are samurai films from the `50s and `60s. Will Japan go back to the time of the shogunate? Probably not.
Kunstler: Forecast 2014: Burning Down the House
Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It’s like being buried alive in Jell-O. It’s embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war.
Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical “recovery” and the “shale gas miracle” on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations.
Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt — with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage. Some of us are anxious to get on with the job, to expel all the rats, bats, bedbugs, roaches, and lice, tear out the stinking shag carpet and the moldy sheet-rock, rip off the crappy plastic siding, and start rebuilding along lines that are consistent with the demands of the future — namely, the reality of capital and material resource scarcity. But it has been apparent for a while that the current owners of the house would prefer to let it fall down, or burn down rather than renovate.
Some of us now take that outcome for granted and are left to speculate on how it will play out. These issues were the subjects of my recent non-fiction books, The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic (as well as excellent similar books by Richard Heinberg, John Michael Greer, Dmitry Orlov, and others). They describe the conditions at the end of the cheap energy techno-industrial phase of history and they laid out a conjectural sequence of outcomes that might be stated in shorthand as collapse and re-set. I think the delay in the onset of epochal change can be explained pretty simply. As the peak oil story gained traction around 2005, and was followed (as predicted) by a financial crisis, the established order fought back for its survival, utilizing its remaining dwindling capital and the tremendous inertia of its own gigantic scale, to give the appearance of vitality at all costs.
At the heart of the matter was (and continues to be) the relationship between energy and economic growth. Without increasing supplies of cheap energy, economic growth — as we have known it for a couple of centuries — does not happen anymore. At the center of the economic growth question is credit. Without continued growth, credit can’t be repaid, and new credit cannot be issued honestly — that is, with reasonable assurance of repayment — making it worthless. So, old debt goes bad and the new debt is generated knowing that it is worthless. To complicate matters, the new worthless debt is issued to pay the interest on the old debt, to maintain the pretense that it is not going bad. ...
Miscellany
I get a lot of email on the subject of Bitcoin. Here’s how I feel about it.
It’s an even more abstract form of “money” than fiat currencies or securities based on fiat currencies. Do we need more abstraction in our economic lives? I don’t think so. I believe the trend will be toward what is real. For the moment, Bitcoin seems to be enjoying some success as it beats back successive crashes. I’m not very comfortable with the idea of investing in an algorithm. I don’t see how it is impervious to government hacking. In fact, I’d bet that somewhere in the DOD or the NSA or the CIA right now some nerd is working on that. Bitcoin is provoking imitators, other new computer “currencies.” Why would Bitcoin necessarily enjoy dominance? And how many competing algorithmic currencies can the world stand? Wouldn’t that defeat the whole purpose of an alternative “go to” currency? All I can say is that I’m not buying Bitcoins.
Will ObamaCare crash and burn. It’s not doing very well so far. In fact, it’s a poster-child for Murphy’s Law (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong). I suppose the primary question is whether they can enroll enough healthy young people to correct the actuarial nightmare that health insurance has become. That’s not looking so good either now. But really, how can anyone trust a law that was written by the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? And how can it be repealed when so many individuals, groups, companies, have already lost their pre-ObamaCare policies? What is there to go back to? Therefore, I’d have to predict turmoil in the health care system for 2014. The failure to resolve the inadequacies of ObamaCare also may be a prime symptom of the increasing impotence of the federal government to accomplish anything. That failure would prompt an even faster downscaling of governance as states, counties, communities, and individuals realize that they are on their own.
Sorry to skip around, but a few stray words about the state of American culture. Outside the capitals of the “one percent” — Manhattan, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, etc. — American material culture is in spectacular disrepair. Car culture and chain store tyranny have destroyed the physical fabric of our communities and wrecked social relations. These days, a successful Main Street is one that has a wig shop and a check-cashing office.^ It is sickening to see what we have become. Our popular entertainments are just what you would design to produce a programmed population of criminals and sex offenders. The spectacle of the way our people look —overfed, tattooed, pierced, clothed in the raiment of clowns — suggests an end-of-empire zeitgeist more disturbing than a Fellini movie. The fact is, it simply mirrors the way we act, our gross, barbaric collective demeanor. A walk down any airport concourse makes the Barnum & Bailey freak shows of yore look quaint. In short, the rot throughout our national life is so conspicuous that a fair assessment would be that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished.
Elsewhere in the World
Globalism, in the Tom Friedman euphoric sense, is unwinding. Currency wars are wearing down the players, conflicts and tensions are breaking out where before there were only Wal-Mart share price triumphs and Foxconn profits. Both American and European middle-classes are too exhausted financially to continue the consumer orgy of the early millennium. The trade imbalances are horrific. Unpayable debt saturates everything. Sick economies will weigh down commodity prices except for food-related things. The planet Earth has probably reached peak food production, including peak fertilizer. Supplies of grain will be inadequate in 2014 to feed the still-expanding masses of the poor places in the world.
The nervous calm in finance and economies since 2008 has its mirror in the relative calm of the political scene. Uprisings and skirmishes have broken out, but nothing that so far threatens the peace between great powers. There have been the now-historic revolts in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other Middle East and North African (MENA) states. Iraq is once again disintegrating after a decade of American “nation-building.” Greece is falling apart. Spain and Italy should be falling apart but haven’t yet. France is sinking into bankruptcy. The UK is in on the grift with the USA and insulated from the Euro, but the British Isles are way over-populated with a volatile multi-ethnic mix and not much of an economy outside the financial district of London. There were riots in — of all places — Sweden this year. Turkey entered crisis just a few weeks ago along with Ukraine.
I predict more colorful political strife in Europe this year, boots in the street, barricades, gunfire, and bombs. The populations of these countries will want relief measures from their national governments, but the sad news is that these governments are broke, so austerity seems to be the order of the day no matter what. I think this will prod incipient revolts in a rightward nationalist direction. If it was up to Marine LePen’s rising National Front party, they would solve the employment problem by expelling all the recent immigrants — though the mere attempt would probably provoke widespread race war in France.
The quarrel between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands is a diversion from the real action in the South China Sea, said to hold large underwater petroleum reserves. China is the world’s second greatest oil importer. Their economy and the credibility of its non-elected government depends on keeping the oil supply up. They are a long way from other places in the world where oil comes from, hence their eagerness to secure and dominate the South China Sea. The idea is that China would make a fuss over the Senkaku group, get Japan and the US to the negotiating table, and cede the dispute over them to Japan in exchange for Japan and the US supporting China’s claims in the South China Sea against the other neighbors there: Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
The catch is that Japan may be going politically insane just now between the rigors of (Shinzo) Abenomics and the mystical horrors of Fukushima. Japan’s distress appears to be provoking a new mood of nationalist militarism of a kind not seen there since the 1940s. They’re talking about arming up, rewriting the pacifist articles in their constitution. Scary, if you have a memory of the mid-20th century. China should know something about national psychotic breaks, having not so long ago endured the insanity of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-71). So they might want to handle Japan with care. On the other hand, China surely nurtures a deep, deadly grudge over the crimes perpetrated by Japan in the Second World War, and now has a disciplined, world-class military, and so maybe they would like to kick Japan’s ass. It’s a hard one to call. I suspect that in 2014, the ball is in Japan’s court. What will they do? If the US doesn’t stay out of the way of that action, then we are insane, too.
That said, I stick by my story from last year’s forecast: Japan’s ultimate destination is to “go medieval.”* They’re never going to recover from Fukushima, their economy is unraveling, they have no fossil fuels of their own and have to import everything, and their balance of payments is completely out of whack. The best course for them will be to just throw in the towel on modernity. Everybody else is headed that way, too, eventually, so Japan might as well get there first and set a good example.
By “go medieval” I mean re-set to a pre-industrial World Made By Hand level of operation. I’m sure that outcome seems laughably implausible to most readers, but I maintain that both the human race and the planet Earth need a “time out” from the ravages of “progress,” and circumstances are going to force the issue anyway, so we might as well kick back and get with the program: go local, downscale, learn useful skills, cultivate our gardens, get to know our neighbors, learn how to play a musical instrument, work, dine, and dance with our friends.
As it happens, the third in the series of my World Made By Hand novels, set in upstate New York in the post-collapse economy, will be published in September by the Atlantic Monthly Press. It’s a ripping yarn. Whether anyone will have enough money to buy a copy, I can’t predict. Happy 2014, Everybody!
===
Eventually, there'll be
^I went to the Kuhio Plaza on Friday, and after our breakfast at IHOP, walked around a bit. Big Island Surf closed, but an HIC opened in the old Waldenbooks space next to Radio Shack. At one end, it's bustling with the new Zippy's and Sports Authority, but throughout the mall are vacant spaces or stores that barely occupy their spaces and sell cheap stuff. Near IHOP, what used to be Suncoast Video was more recently an anime shop (that could have fit in a smaller space; it was cavernous). Now it's closed and serves as an occasional meeting room, which itself was moved from the original Footlocker space to make way for a calendar shop. I'd like your thoughts on the Plaza: what it was like? where it's going? It's been in operation almost thirty years (opening in 1985). The Kaiko`o Mall was around for about that long before it closed. (To malihini and visitors: that giant courthouse in midtown Hilo is on the site of the mall.) Downtown is mixed: pockets of gentrification, longtime businesses, and some downscaling and "frivilousation" (e.g., a good toy shop replaced with a nail salon; the Farmers Exchange, with a bar and a tattoo parlor).
*As I posted recently, our cable system broadcasts a free preview of the Nippon Golden Network around New Year's (this year it ran from 30 December through 3 January). Many of the movies are samurai films from the `50s and `60s. Will Japan go back to the time of the shogunate? Probably not.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Protesting B.D.S. While Divesting From Palestinian Universities
Louis Proyect: "Bard College and the American Studies Vote"
In an apparent breach with two other prestigious universities, Botstein has refused to break ties with Al Quds University in occupied Palestinian territory. Although Syracuse University and Brandeis University are both opposed to boycotting Israeli institutions, they had no problem breaking ties with Al Quds on grounds far less substantial than those that are fueling the BDS movement. Supposedly, a rally by Islamic Jihad on the East Jerusalem campus of Al Quds was punctuated by Nuremberg type Nazi salutes. Without conducting any serious investigation into the matter, Syracuse and Brandeis abandoned Al Quds. Why would Leon Botstein, an ardent supporter of the state of Israel that now puts forward the demand that the Palestinians recognize it as a “Jewish state”, not follow suit? The explanation for that requires understanding the particular place that Bard occupies in the American academy and the pressure that Botstein would be under to maintain the illusion that he is committed to free speech. ...To understand Leon Botstein’s stance in the Al Quds controversy, you have to start with his need to go one step further in reconciling Mammon and God. Bard College has a reputation as being some kind of “progressive” liberal arts institution and cutting ties to Al Quds would be counter-productive from a marketing standpoint. Let’s say you are some successful professional in New York who voted for DiBlasio and subscribes to the Nation Magazine and NPR. Would you want to send your kid to a school that broke with a Palestinian university on the basis of a witch-hunt organized by the Israeli right and its friends in the U.S. like Pamela Geller?
Corey Robin: "When It Comes to the Boycott of Israel, Who Has the Real Double Standard?"
In an apparent breach with two other prestigious universities, Botstein has refused to break ties with Al Quds University in occupied Palestinian territory. Although Syracuse University and Brandeis University are both opposed to boycotting Israeli institutions, they had no problem breaking ties with Al Quds on grounds far less substantial than those that are fueling the BDS movement. Supposedly, a rally by Islamic Jihad on the East Jerusalem campus of Al Quds was punctuated by Nuremberg type Nazi salutes. Without conducting any serious investigation into the matter, Syracuse and Brandeis abandoned Al Quds. Why would Leon Botstein, an ardent supporter of the state of Israel that now puts forward the demand that the Palestinians recognize it as a “Jewish state”, not follow suit? The explanation for that requires understanding the particular place that Bard occupies in the American academy and the pressure that Botstein would be under to maintain the illusion that he is committed to free speech. ...To understand Leon Botstein’s stance in the Al Quds controversy, you have to start with his need to go one step further in reconciling Mammon and God. Bard College has a reputation as being some kind of “progressive” liberal arts institution and cutting ties to Al Quds would be counter-productive from a marketing standpoint. Let’s say you are some successful professional in New York who voted for DiBlasio and subscribes to the Nation Magazine and NPR. Would you want to send your kid to a school that broke with a Palestinian university on the basis of a witch-hunt organized by the Israeli right and its friends in the U.S. like Pamela Geller?
Corey Robin: "When It Comes to the Boycott of Israel, Who Has the Real Double Standard?"
Friday, January 03, 2014
Too Middle Class, Too Rural, Too Urban, Too...
"BBC Axed My Family for Being Too Middle Class.
I've seen reruns of this show on BBC America; it was nice. It reminds me of how, at the beginning of the seventies, TV networks cancelled many rural-themed sitcoms like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies, some of which still had high ratings, and started a wave of gritty urban programs.
I've seen reruns of this show on BBC America; it was nice. It reminds me of how, at the beginning of the seventies, TV networks cancelled many rural-themed sitcoms like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies, some of which still had high ratings, and started a wave of gritty urban programs.
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
Kinpira
One of our local New Year's traditions is the free preview offered by our cable system of the Nippon Golden Network. This preview of NGN and NGN3 lasts from 30 December through 3 January. This morning I saw Kinpira, about a yakuza boss's daughter who starts a pirate TV broadcast. One of the characters, a hapless yuppie drawn into her scheme, is named Gobo (burdock root in English).
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Indian Music Countdown
This seems to be a countdown of Indian (or Pakistani) music from exactly twenty-five years ago.
Monday, December 30, 2013
Kunstler: "The End of Pretend"
Next week will be his forecast for 2014.--P.Z.
...December 30, 2013 The End of Pretend
If being wealthy was the same as pretending to be wealthy then people who care about reality would have a little less to complain about. But pretending is a poor way for a society to negotiate its way through history. It makes for accumulating distortions which eventually undermine the society’s ability to function, especially when the pretending is about money, which is society’s operating system.
The distortion that even simple people care about is that the gap between the rich and the poor is as plain, vast, and grotesque as at any time in our history — except perhaps during slavery times in Dixieland, when many of the poor did not even own their existence. We’ve had plenty of reminders of that in pop culture the last couple of years, including Quentin Tarantino’s fiercely stupid movie Django Unchained and the more recent melodrama 12 Years a Slave. But you have to wonder what young adults weighed down by unpayable college debt think when they go to see them, because without a rebellion that millennial generation will not own their own lives either. They must know it, but they must not know what to do about it.
The pretense and distortions start at the top of American life with a President who broadcasts the message that some kind of “recovery” has occurred in the economic affairs of the country. Either he just wants the public feel better, or he is misled by the people and agencies in his own government, or perhaps he just lies to keep the lid on. To truly recover from the dislocations of 2008, we would have to make a consensual decision to start behaving differently in the process of adapting to the new circumstances that the arc of history is presenting to us. We’d have to decide to leave behind the economy of financialization, suburban sprawl, car dependency, Wal-Mart consumerism, and prepare for a different way of inhabiting North America.
The dislocations of 2008 when the banking system nearly imploded were Nature’s way of telling us that dishonesty has consequences. The immediate dishonesty of that day was the racket in securitizing worthless mortgages — promises to pay large sums of money over long periods of time. The promises were false and the collateral was janky. It got so bad and ran so far and deep that it essentially destroyed the mechanism of credit creation as it had been known until then, and it has not been repaired.
Since then, we have pretended to repair the operations of credit by falsely substituting bank bailouts and Federal Reserve “quantitative easing” (QE) or digital money-printing for plain dealing in borrowed money between honest brokers at the local level. The unfortunate consequence is that in the process we have distorted — and possibly destroyed — the value of our money and the various things denominated in it, especially securities, bonds, stocks and other money-like paper.
The crash of the mortgage racket occurred not just because of swindling and fraud among bankers; in fact, that was only a nasty symptom of something larger: peak oil. I know that many people have come to disbelieve in the idea of peak oil, but that is only another mode of playing pretend. Peak oil, which essentially arrived in 2006, undermined the basic conditions of credit creation in an advanced techno-industrial society dependent on increasing supplies of fossil fuels. Most people, including practically all credentialed economists, fail to understand this. There is a fundamental relationship between ever-increasing energy supplies > economic growth > and credit-based money (or “money,” if you will). When the energy inputs flatten out or decrease, growth stops, wealth is no longer generated, old loans can’t be repaid, and new loans can’t be generated honestly, i.e. with the expectation of repayment. That has been our predicament since 2008 and nothing has changed. We are pretending to compensate by issuing new unpayable debt to pay the interest on our old accumulated debt. This pretense can only go on so long before our economic relations reflect the basic dishonesty of it. Reality is a harsh mistress.
In the meantime, we amuse ourselves with fairy tales about “the shale oil revolution” and “the manufacturing renaissance.” 2014 could be the year that the forces of Nature compel our attention and give us a reason to stop all this pretending. I’ll address this question in next week’s annual yearly forecast.
...December 30, 2013 The End of Pretend
If being wealthy was the same as pretending to be wealthy then people who care about reality would have a little less to complain about. But pretending is a poor way for a society to negotiate its way through history. It makes for accumulating distortions which eventually undermine the society’s ability to function, especially when the pretending is about money, which is society’s operating system.
The distortion that even simple people care about is that the gap between the rich and the poor is as plain, vast, and grotesque as at any time in our history — except perhaps during slavery times in Dixieland, when many of the poor did not even own their existence. We’ve had plenty of reminders of that in pop culture the last couple of years, including Quentin Tarantino’s fiercely stupid movie Django Unchained and the more recent melodrama 12 Years a Slave. But you have to wonder what young adults weighed down by unpayable college debt think when they go to see them, because without a rebellion that millennial generation will not own their own lives either. They must know it, but they must not know what to do about it.
The pretense and distortions start at the top of American life with a President who broadcasts the message that some kind of “recovery” has occurred in the economic affairs of the country. Either he just wants the public feel better, or he is misled by the people and agencies in his own government, or perhaps he just lies to keep the lid on. To truly recover from the dislocations of 2008, we would have to make a consensual decision to start behaving differently in the process of adapting to the new circumstances that the arc of history is presenting to us. We’d have to decide to leave behind the economy of financialization, suburban sprawl, car dependency, Wal-Mart consumerism, and prepare for a different way of inhabiting North America.
The dislocations of 2008 when the banking system nearly imploded were Nature’s way of telling us that dishonesty has consequences. The immediate dishonesty of that day was the racket in securitizing worthless mortgages — promises to pay large sums of money over long periods of time. The promises were false and the collateral was janky. It got so bad and ran so far and deep that it essentially destroyed the mechanism of credit creation as it had been known until then, and it has not been repaired.
Since then, we have pretended to repair the operations of credit by falsely substituting bank bailouts and Federal Reserve “quantitative easing” (QE) or digital money-printing for plain dealing in borrowed money between honest brokers at the local level. The unfortunate consequence is that in the process we have distorted — and possibly destroyed — the value of our money and the various things denominated in it, especially securities, bonds, stocks and other money-like paper.
The crash of the mortgage racket occurred not just because of swindling and fraud among bankers; in fact, that was only a nasty symptom of something larger: peak oil. I know that many people have come to disbelieve in the idea of peak oil, but that is only another mode of playing pretend. Peak oil, which essentially arrived in 2006, undermined the basic conditions of credit creation in an advanced techno-industrial society dependent on increasing supplies of fossil fuels. Most people, including practically all credentialed economists, fail to understand this. There is a fundamental relationship between ever-increasing energy supplies > economic growth > and credit-based money (or “money,” if you will). When the energy inputs flatten out or decrease, growth stops, wealth is no longer generated, old loans can’t be repaid, and new loans can’t be generated honestly, i.e. with the expectation of repayment. That has been our predicament since 2008 and nothing has changed. We are pretending to compensate by issuing new unpayable debt to pay the interest on our old accumulated debt. This pretense can only go on so long before our economic relations reflect the basic dishonesty of it. Reality is a harsh mistress.
In the meantime, we amuse ourselves with fairy tales about “the shale oil revolution” and “the manufacturing renaissance.” 2014 could be the year that the forces of Nature compel our attention and give us a reason to stop all this pretending. I’ll address this question in next week’s annual yearly forecast.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Peak Oil is Real, Says a Former BP Geologist
Peak oil doesn't command public attention the way it did ten or even five years ago, especially as the fracking boom and extraction of oil from shale and tar sands, lulls people into a false sense of petro-abundance. But as a former BP geologist recently said, it poses a real threat.
Peak Oil is Real and Can Break Economies
Peak Oil is Real and Can Break Economies
How Many of Kunstler's Predictions for 2013 Have Come to Pass?
About this time, Kunstler issues his annual forecast for the year ahead. Here's his look at 2013: Forecast 2013: Contraction, Contagion, and Contradiction
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Monday, December 23, 2013
Hannemann Hijinks
http://www.ilind.net/2010/08/26/hannemanns-1974-arrest-record-still-making-the-rounds/
Sunday, December 22, 2013
2019: After the Fall of New York (1983)
I found this movie by chance on YouTube last night, and was watching it during Saturday Night Live.
The American Studies Association Endures a Backlash for Its B.D.S. Resolution
More soon.
Links added as I find them.
Tax-Exempt Status of ASA Challenged Because of Boycott.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2013/12/israel_academic_boycott_american_studies_association_joins_the_fight.html
Brandeis Withdraws from ASA.
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lobby-launches-fierce-counterattack-against-american-studies-association
Max Blumenthal, keeping up with this matter, as always:
Links added as I find them.
My statement on ASA boycott
http://t.co/p78lw3Z50p
— Alison Byerly (@alisonbyerly) December 29, 2013@MaxBlumenthal @AliAbunimah Univ. of Ind. Pres. bypasses Dept. of Am. Studies and withdraws ASA membership. http://t.co/HYmzMUDY3j
— Kirk K. (@Kirk__K) December 23, 2013Tax-Exempt Status of ASA Challenged Because of Boycott.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2013/12/israel_academic_boycott_american_studies_association_joins_the_fight.html
Brandeis Withdraws from ASA.
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lobby-launches-fierce-counterattack-against-american-studies-association
Max Blumenthal, keeping up with this matter, as always:
@DianaValerie @ThaddeusRussell academic institutions in US are in deep with Israel, not North Korea or Zimbabwe or Syria.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 22, 2013Friday, December 20, 2013
The Kaleidoscopic Tones of Christmas
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/20/the-kaleidoscopic-tones-of-christmas/
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Various Things
Another Kunstler column on financial hijinks.
If I entertain at home, I'd make sure to serve fresh and tasty food kept at the proper temperature. One can never go wrong with crackers or Melba toast with tapenade, pesto, etc. An array of drinks, and so forth.
If I entertain at home, I'd make sure to serve fresh and tasty food kept at the proper temperature. One can never go wrong with crackers or Melba toast with tapenade, pesto, etc. An array of drinks, and so forth.
BAD Plans
Wednesday's Tribune-Herald had a front-pager about the Naniloa Resort and its new owners' plans for it, including a three-story-high sculpture of a whale! Because a lot of art and artifacts will be on display throughout the hotel, the owners want to play up the museum aspect, to the point where visitors can't tell whether it's a hotel or a museum. To that end, bellhops will be called "curators", and instead of keys, guests will open their doors with so-called "museum passes." If Ken Fujiyama turned the Naniloa into a bad hotel, the new owners will turn it into a BAD* hotel.
(*See Paul Fussell's BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America, which in fact deals with BAD hotels.)
22 December update: The 5 February 2012 edition of the Tribune-Herald had an article titled, "Rebirth: Can Naniloa Reclaim Former Glory?" splashed across the front page. It began: "With a little imagination, the Naniloa Volcanoes Resort has the potential to be great." The article reveals that only one of the hotel's three towers, the Mauna Kea, was fully refurbished.
(*See Paul Fussell's BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America, which in fact deals with BAD hotels.)
22 December update: The 5 February 2012 edition of the Tribune-Herald had an article titled, "Rebirth: Can Naniloa Reclaim Former Glory?" splashed across the front page. It began: "With a little imagination, the Naniloa Volcanoes Resort has the potential to be great." The article reveals that only one of the hotel's three towers, the Mauna Kea, was fully refurbished.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Kunstler on the Federal Reserve, etc.
Another Kunstler column on the Federal Reserve and financial shananigans.
Belatedly posted because Kunstler.com was down Monday, I was busy cleaning Tuesday, and had a molar extracted on Wednesday morning, from which procedure I had to rest the remainder of the day.
==
I got the December issue of Harper's, which wasn't that special. There was a good "Easy Chair" column by Thomas Frank on Chicago: once a gritty working-class city that is now "home to the largest concentration of hipsters outside Brooklyn." But "beyond the perimeter of the nicer neighborhoods ... Chicago now leads the nation in homicides; just before my last visit, the crime wave crested in a South Side park, where a gunman unloaded his semiautomatic rifle into a group of kids playing basketball, hiting thirteen of them. Similar acts were occurring almost daily." (Frank doesn't mention that many Chicagoans refer to their city as "Chiraq", pronounced like eye-rack.) And a somewhat interesting account by Colson Whitehead of a 1991 road trip to Las Vegas he and two friends took. The best part of the article was the comparison of Vegas to a jellyfish flopping on the desert floor. Otherwise a standard contrarian piece proclaiming that the best thing about Vegas is its tackiness.
Compared with Joyce Carol Oates's recent story, "I Can Say Many Nice Things" by Ben Marcus was a letdown: a workshop-fiction kind of story about a fiction workshop held on a cruise ship. The author's new book will be published by Knopf next month. Based on what I've read, I don't think I'm missing much.
Belatedly posted because Kunstler.com was down Monday, I was busy cleaning Tuesday, and had a molar extracted on Wednesday morning, from which procedure I had to rest the remainder of the day.
==
I got the December issue of Harper's, which wasn't that special. There was a good "Easy Chair" column by Thomas Frank on Chicago: once a gritty working-class city that is now "home to the largest concentration of hipsters outside Brooklyn." But "beyond the perimeter of the nicer neighborhoods ... Chicago now leads the nation in homicides; just before my last visit, the crime wave crested in a South Side park, where a gunman unloaded his semiautomatic rifle into a group of kids playing basketball, hiting thirteen of them. Similar acts were occurring almost daily." (Frank doesn't mention that many Chicagoans refer to their city as "Chiraq", pronounced like eye-rack.) And a somewhat interesting account by Colson Whitehead of a 1991 road trip to Las Vegas he and two friends took. The best part of the article was the comparison of Vegas to a jellyfish flopping on the desert floor. Otherwise a standard contrarian piece proclaiming that the best thing about Vegas is its tackiness.
Compared with Joyce Carol Oates's recent story, "I Can Say Many Nice Things" by Ben Marcus was a letdown: a workshop-fiction kind of story about a fiction workshop held on a cruise ship. The author's new book will be published by Knopf next month. Based on what I've read, I don't think I'm missing much.
Sunday, December 08, 2013
With the end of The Oil Drum, its bloggers have started or joined other sites. Euan Mearns, of Energy Matters, points out a report on the future of the oil supply.
Saturday, December 07, 2013
Not Yet in the Christmas Spirit
We're still catching up on work but I hope to start preparing for Christmas this week. It takes work, and doesn't just happen.
Tuesday, December 03, 2013
Monday, December 02, 2013
Packed room at the National Press Club to hear me discuss Goliath. @cspan is here to film. pic.twitter.com/iOUAszSymx
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 2, 2013Saturday, November 30, 2013
A Belated Acknowledgment of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Broadcast of The Day After
The Day After first aired nationally on 20 November 1983, on the ABC network. (There was a special screening a few days earlier in West Germany, for an audience of dignitaries.) I was in the second grade and the teacher said we ought to watch it. My mother said no, so I didn't. When I saw it a few years later (1989?) I'm glad I wasn't allowed to watch it as a seven year old.
====
====
Friday, November 29, 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Century's End
Five writers, including Kunstler, predict the state of things at the end of the century.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
@MaxBlumenthal's excellent GOLIATH makes Israeli government and nationalism sound like China's; same combo of power and insecurity
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) November 20, 2013True. China feels a need to prove something. If you're inclined to boycott a country's goods, it's relatively easy to boycott Israeli products, but what about China's.
Monday, November 18, 2013
George Zimmerman Arrested--Again
George Zimmerman arrested on domestic violence charge after allegedly pointing a shotgun at his pregnant girlfriend's face. N.b. He is still married to Shellie Zimmerman, although they are estranged. Apprarently, Zimmerman and his girlfriend were breaking up.
The Field Negro's post.
A lot is coming out. Shellie Zimmerman's lawyer was finally able to serve her estranged husband with divorce papers--while he was in jail. And yesterday's Politics Nation with Al Sharpton concluded with Al interviewing a psychologist on Zimmerman's mental state.
The Field Negro's post.
A lot is coming out. Shellie Zimmerman's lawyer was finally able to serve her estranged husband with divorce papers--while he was in jail. And yesterday's Politics Nation with Al Sharpton concluded with Al interviewing a psychologist on Zimmerman's mental state.
Schilling Shilling
Kunstler takes on notions of energy independence and the seeming abundance of the shale boom.
Schilling Shilling
Such is the power of wishful thinking that a set of fool-making memes now pulses through the word-clouds of financial chatter in America spreading the false good cheer that our economic troubles are behind us and pimping for perpetual motion in wealth expansion. A poster boy for this bundle of falsehoods is financial analyst A. Gary Schilling. Just last week, he was talking out of his cloacal vent about US “energy independence” and “the manufacturing renaissance” that will allow this country to magically decouple from the compressive contraction driving the rest of the world.
Shilling is among the growing chorus of cheerleaders who believe that the shale oil and gas boom will make it possible for so-called “consumers” (what we foolishly call ourselves) to keep driving to Wal-Mart forever — which is the master wish behind all the current fantasies of endless expansion. That idea is going to leave a lot of people disappointed and put the nation further behind in the necessary reorganization of all the key systems that support everyday civilized life, namely: food production, commerce, transport, and the management of capital.
Here’s what’s actually going to happen with shale oil and gas. Best case scenario: shale oil production rises for three more years to about 2.3 million barrels a day and then crashes so quickly that in 10 years the shale oil industry ceases to exist. A less rosy forecast would admit that the exorbitant costs of drilling-and-fracking will not find the necessary capital to even take the industry that far. Rather, dwindling capital will see the shocking decline rates of shale wells (commonly 50 percent the first year and double digits the following) and will run shrieking for other places to hide.
Contrary to Gary Schilling’s blather, America is not practicing “energy conservation.” Rather, an economy engineered strictly to run on cheap oil has gotten crushed by oil that is not cheap. Does Schilling believe, for example, that American suburbia works just as well on $90-a-barrel oil as it did on $11-a-barrel oil, or that it has a future as the basic armature of daily life, or that we are doing anything meaningful to alter the burdens of living this way? My guess is that he has never thought about it.
Likewise, as the American economy got crushed by no-longer-cheap oil, all the working classes in this country below the one-percenters got crushed, hammered, and trashed. Among other things they can no longer afford is gasoline. Total vehicle miles driven has gone down by almost 3 percent since 2007. It will keep going down, and the Happy Motoring matrix will collapse for another reason: capital scarcity will translate into fewer available car loans for Americans, and fewer qualified borrowers, and Americans are used to buying their cars on installment loans.
The shale gas situation is also not the “energy savior” it’s cracked up to be. Because it costs so much to export the stuff, and we don’t have the export infrastructure in place — ocean terminals, fleets of special (expensive!) tanker ships — shale gas is hostage to the US domestic market. The initial boom was so extravagant that it produced a gas glut, which drove the price way below the level that makes it economically rational to drill for the stuff. Now, a lot of those drilling rigs are migrating to North Dakota, where the Bakken shale oil fields require perpetual increases in rig-counts to offset the rapid decline of existing wells.
The shale gas regions of Barnett (Fort Worth), Haynesville (Louisiana), and Fayetteville, Arkansas, are already dwindling. The “sweet spots” turned out to be smaller than the hype suggested. The Marcellus (Pennsylvania and New York) is next. Several of the other hyped shale gas “plays” — the Antrim and the Utica — proved too unpromising to even bother with and never made it out of the wish bag.
The problems with fracking and groundwater pollution are secondary to the economic quandaries as far as the fate of the industry is concerned. At under $8 a unit (1000 cubic feet), shale gas is not worth drilling-and-fracking for. It’s currently around $4. Above $8, Americans are going to have a hard time paying for it. So, enjoy the temporary glut and now stand back and watch the industry begin to dry up and blow away.
As for the “industrial renaissance,” clowns like Gary Shilling can’t put together the obvious trends. The talked-about new factories will be operated by robots, so there would be no employment renaissance to go along with them. Then there is the question of who might the products be sold to? To Americans who have no jobs and no money? To Europeans who are also going broke and also have the ability to roboticize industrial production and impoverish their own working people? To Asia, which is already at industrial over-capacity — and which will only grow worse as Americans and Europeans buy less stuff? I guess that leaves South America and Africa. Well, good luck with that.
Schilling is really only shilling for delusional stock market psychology, which tends to be a self-reinforcing racket until it reaches a threshold of credulity criticality and then implodes from a sudden loss of faith, ruining even a great many one percenters. Money may indeed keep pouring into the US stock markets, especially from other countries, where the money is frightened. I’ll tell you what it ought to be really frightened about: that it doesn’t represent genuine capital, i.e. has no real value. One day not distant, all the nations will discover that their money is only notional and that notions have a way of going up in a vapor. Foolish ideas, though, appear more durable and plentiful. They just keep coming, no matter what’s going on in reality.
My basic wish is that we would quit all our wishing in America and get on with the job of transforming our economic arrangements to a scale and mode that are consistent with the resource and capital realities of these times — before they whap us upside the head and put and end to the project of remaining civilized.
Schilling Shilling
Such is the power of wishful thinking that a set of fool-making memes now pulses through the word-clouds of financial chatter in America spreading the false good cheer that our economic troubles are behind us and pimping for perpetual motion in wealth expansion. A poster boy for this bundle of falsehoods is financial analyst A. Gary Schilling. Just last week, he was talking out of his cloacal vent about US “energy independence” and “the manufacturing renaissance” that will allow this country to magically decouple from the compressive contraction driving the rest of the world.
Shilling is among the growing chorus of cheerleaders who believe that the shale oil and gas boom will make it possible for so-called “consumers” (what we foolishly call ourselves) to keep driving to Wal-Mart forever — which is the master wish behind all the current fantasies of endless expansion. That idea is going to leave a lot of people disappointed and put the nation further behind in the necessary reorganization of all the key systems that support everyday civilized life, namely: food production, commerce, transport, and the management of capital.
Here’s what’s actually going to happen with shale oil and gas. Best case scenario: shale oil production rises for three more years to about 2.3 million barrels a day and then crashes so quickly that in 10 years the shale oil industry ceases to exist. A less rosy forecast would admit that the exorbitant costs of drilling-and-fracking will not find the necessary capital to even take the industry that far. Rather, dwindling capital will see the shocking decline rates of shale wells (commonly 50 percent the first year and double digits the following) and will run shrieking for other places to hide.
Contrary to Gary Schilling’s blather, America is not practicing “energy conservation.” Rather, an economy engineered strictly to run on cheap oil has gotten crushed by oil that is not cheap. Does Schilling believe, for example, that American suburbia works just as well on $90-a-barrel oil as it did on $11-a-barrel oil, or that it has a future as the basic armature of daily life, or that we are doing anything meaningful to alter the burdens of living this way? My guess is that he has never thought about it.
Likewise, as the American economy got crushed by no-longer-cheap oil, all the working classes in this country below the one-percenters got crushed, hammered, and trashed. Among other things they can no longer afford is gasoline. Total vehicle miles driven has gone down by almost 3 percent since 2007. It will keep going down, and the Happy Motoring matrix will collapse for another reason: capital scarcity will translate into fewer available car loans for Americans, and fewer qualified borrowers, and Americans are used to buying their cars on installment loans.
The shale gas situation is also not the “energy savior” it’s cracked up to be. Because it costs so much to export the stuff, and we don’t have the export infrastructure in place — ocean terminals, fleets of special (expensive!) tanker ships — shale gas is hostage to the US domestic market. The initial boom was so extravagant that it produced a gas glut, which drove the price way below the level that makes it economically rational to drill for the stuff. Now, a lot of those drilling rigs are migrating to North Dakota, where the Bakken shale oil fields require perpetual increases in rig-counts to offset the rapid decline of existing wells.
The shale gas regions of Barnett (Fort Worth), Haynesville (Louisiana), and Fayetteville, Arkansas, are already dwindling. The “sweet spots” turned out to be smaller than the hype suggested. The Marcellus (Pennsylvania and New York) is next. Several of the other hyped shale gas “plays” — the Antrim and the Utica — proved too unpromising to even bother with and never made it out of the wish bag.
The problems with fracking and groundwater pollution are secondary to the economic quandaries as far as the fate of the industry is concerned. At under $8 a unit (1000 cubic feet), shale gas is not worth drilling-and-fracking for. It’s currently around $4. Above $8, Americans are going to have a hard time paying for it. So, enjoy the temporary glut and now stand back and watch the industry begin to dry up and blow away.
As for the “industrial renaissance,” clowns like Gary Shilling can’t put together the obvious trends. The talked-about new factories will be operated by robots, so there would be no employment renaissance to go along with them. Then there is the question of who might the products be sold to? To Americans who have no jobs and no money? To Europeans who are also going broke and also have the ability to roboticize industrial production and impoverish their own working people? To Asia, which is already at industrial over-capacity — and which will only grow worse as Americans and Europeans buy less stuff? I guess that leaves South America and Africa. Well, good luck with that.
Schilling is really only shilling for delusional stock market psychology, which tends to be a self-reinforcing racket until it reaches a threshold of credulity criticality and then implodes from a sudden loss of faith, ruining even a great many one percenters. Money may indeed keep pouring into the US stock markets, especially from other countries, where the money is frightened. I’ll tell you what it ought to be really frightened about: that it doesn’t represent genuine capital, i.e. has no real value. One day not distant, all the nations will discover that their money is only notional and that notions have a way of going up in a vapor. Foolish ideas, though, appear more durable and plentiful. They just keep coming, no matter what’s going on in reality.
My basic wish is that we would quit all our wishing in America and get on with the job of transforming our economic arrangements to a scale and mode that are consistent with the resource and capital realities of these times — before they whap us upside the head and put and end to the project of remaining civilized.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Friday, November 15, 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
