June 9, 2014
That Was Then, This is Now
I was in Buffalo, New York, over the weekend at the annual conclave of New Urbanists — a movement started in the 1990s to rescue American towns and cities. The scale of desolation of that city is not as spectacular or vast as Detroit’s, but the visible symptoms of the illness are the same. One of the events was a bicycle tour of Buffalo’s neglected East Side, [Link added by me.--P.Z.] where maybe 80 percent of the houses are gone and the few that remain stand amid spring wildflower meadows and the human density per acre appears too low even for successful drug-selling.
The old economy is gone and is replaced now by a “social services economy,” meaning government checks, SNAP cards, and purposelessness. There were zero signs of commerce there block after block, not even a place to buy potato chips. So, as it works out, the few remaining denizens of this place must spend half their waking hours journeying to a food store. How they make that journey is hard to tell. There were almost no cars anywhere nor buses to be seen. Before long surely the people will all be gone, too, ending a chapter in American urban history.
At one edge of the East Side neighborhood stood the hulking, gigantic remnants of the Larkin soap company, a haunted brick behemoth plangent with silence, ailanthus trees sprouting from the parapets and birds nesting in the gigantic, rusted ventilation fans. The administration building of this deeply paternalistic company was famously designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, completed in 1906, and demolished in 1950 — a blink of an eye. It is considered the architect’s lost masterpiece. The site became a parking lot and now is just an empty asphalt pad with mulleins and sumacs spiking up in the pavement.
At its height of success a hundred years ago, the Larkin Company provided a stupendous bounty of social support services for its 4,500 employees: a dental office at nominal prices, dedicated rooms at local hospitals, an on-premises branch of the city library, subsidized night school classes, gyms, lounges, sports clubs, a credit union, insurance plans, and more. The people could ride streetcars all over the “Electric City,” as Buffalo styled itself because of its fortunate proximity to the bonanza of hydro power from Niagara Falls.
A hundred years ago, Buffalo was widely regarded as the city of the future. The boon of electrification made it the Silicon Valley of its day. It was among the top ten US cities in population and wealth. Its steel industry was second to Pittsburgh and for a while it was second to Detroit in cars. Now, nobody seems to know what Buffalo might become, if anything. It will be especially interesting when the suburban matrix around it enters its own inevitable cycle of abandonment.
I’m convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century. On this bike tour the other day, I rode awhile beside a woman who spends all her spare time photographing industrial ruins. She was serenely adamant that the world will never see anything like that era and its artifacts again. I tend to agree. We cannot grok the stupendous specialness of the past century, and certainly not the fact that it is bygone for good.
When people use the term “post-industrial” these days, they don’t really mean it, and, more mysteriously, they don’t know that they don’t mean it. They expect complex, organized, high-powered industry to still be here, only in a new form. They almost always seem to imply (or so I infer) that we can remain “modern” by moving beyond the old smoke and clanking machinery into a nirvana of computer-printed reality. I doubt that we can maintain the complex supply chains of our dwindling material resources and run all those computer operations — even if we can still manage to get some electricity from Niagara Falls.
In my forthcoming novel A History of the Future (third installment of the World Made By Hand series), two of my characters journey to Buffalo a couple of decades from now. They find a town with its back turned to abandoned monuments of the industrial age. All the action is on the Lake Erie waterfront where trade is conducted by sailing ships at the scale of Sixteenth century, but with an identifiable American gloss. I’d be surprised if one in a thousand educated people in this country (including the New Urbanists) can take that vision seriously. But do you suppose that the executives of an enterprise like the Larkin Company in 1915 would have ever imagined the desolation of Buffalo a mere 99 years later?
Monday, June 09, 2014
Friday, June 06, 2014
Monday, June 02, 2014
Kunstler: Coasting Toward Zero
DISCLAIMER: Toward the end of an otherwise typical column on the decline of the American economy, Kunstler veers into a rant about transgenderism, which he calls "sexual confusion." I don't expect nuance on gender from Kunstler, and one can easily disregard that part of the column (second-to-last paragraph).
Coasting Toward Zero.
I n just about any realm of activity this nation does not know how to act. We don’t know what to do about our mounting crises of economy. We don’t know what to do about our relations with other nations in a strained global economy. We don’t know what to do about our own culture and its traditions, the useful and the outworn. We surely don’t know what to do about relations between men and women. And we’re baffled to the point of paralysis about our relations with the planetary ecosystem.
To allay these vexations, we just coast along on the momentum generated by the engines in place — the turbo-industrial flow of products to customers without the means to buy things; the gigantic infrastructures of transport subject to remorseless decay; the dishonest operations of central banks undermining all the world’s pricing and cost structures; the political ideologies based on fallacies such as growth without limits; the cultural transgressions of thought-policing and institutional ass-covering.
This is a society in deep danger that doesn’t want to know it. The nostrum of an expanding GDP is just statistical legerdemain performed to satisfy stupid news editors, gull loose money into reckless positions, and bamboozle the voters. If we knew how to act we would bend every effort to prepare for the end of mass motoring, but instead we indulge in fairy tales about the “shale oil miracle” because it offers the comforting false promise that we can drive to WalMart forever (in self-driving cars!). Has it occurred to anyone that we no longer have the capital to repair the vast network of roads, streets, highways, and bridges that all these cars are supposed to run on? Or that the capital will not be there for the installment loans Americans are accustomed to buy their cars with?
The global economy is withering quickly because it was just a manifestation of late-stage cheap oil. Now we’re in early-stage of expensive oil and a lot of things that seemed to work wonderfully well before, don’t work so well now. The conveyer belt of cheap manufactured goods from China to the WalMarts and Target stores doesn’t work so well when the American customers lose their incomes, and have to spend their government stipends on gasoline because they were born into a world where driving everywhere for everything is mandatory, and because central bank meddling adds to the horrendous inflation of food prices.
Now there’s great fanfare over a “manufacturing renaissance” in the United States, based on the idea that the work will be done by robots. What kind of foolish Popular Mechanicsporn fantasy is this? If human beings have only a minor administrative role in this set-up, what do two hundred million American adults do for a livelihood? And who exactly are the intended customers of these products? You can be sure that the people of China, Brazil, and Korea will have enough factories of their own, making every product imaginable. Are they going to buy our stuff now? Are they going to completely roboticize their own factories and impoverish millions of their own factory workers?
The lack of thought behind this dynamic is staggering, especially because it doesn’t account for the obvious political consequence — which is to say the potential for uprising, revolution, civic disorder, cruelty, mayhem, and death, along with the kind of experiments in psychopathic governance that the 20th century was a laboratory for. Desperate populations turn to maniacs. You can be sure that scarcity beats a fast path to mass homicide.
What preoccupies the USA now, in June of 2014? According to the current cover story Time Magazine, the triumph of “transgender.” Isn’t it wonderful to celebrate sexual confusion as the latest and greatest achievement of this culture? No wonder the Russians think we’re out of our minds and want to dissociate from the West. I’ve got news for the editors of Time Magazine: the raptures of sexual confusion are not going to carry American civilization forward into the heart of this new century.
In fact, just the opposite. We don’t need confusion of any kind. We need clarity and an appreciation of boundaries in every conceivable sphere of action and thought. We don’t need more crybabies, or excuses, or wishful thinking, or the majestic ass-covering that colors the main stream of our national life.
Coasting Toward Zero.
I n just about any realm of activity this nation does not know how to act. We don’t know what to do about our mounting crises of economy. We don’t know what to do about our relations with other nations in a strained global economy. We don’t know what to do about our own culture and its traditions, the useful and the outworn. We surely don’t know what to do about relations between men and women. And we’re baffled to the point of paralysis about our relations with the planetary ecosystem.
To allay these vexations, we just coast along on the momentum generated by the engines in place — the turbo-industrial flow of products to customers without the means to buy things; the gigantic infrastructures of transport subject to remorseless decay; the dishonest operations of central banks undermining all the world’s pricing and cost structures; the political ideologies based on fallacies such as growth without limits; the cultural transgressions of thought-policing and institutional ass-covering.
This is a society in deep danger that doesn’t want to know it. The nostrum of an expanding GDP is just statistical legerdemain performed to satisfy stupid news editors, gull loose money into reckless positions, and bamboozle the voters. If we knew how to act we would bend every effort to prepare for the end of mass motoring, but instead we indulge in fairy tales about the “shale oil miracle” because it offers the comforting false promise that we can drive to WalMart forever (in self-driving cars!). Has it occurred to anyone that we no longer have the capital to repair the vast network of roads, streets, highways, and bridges that all these cars are supposed to run on? Or that the capital will not be there for the installment loans Americans are accustomed to buy their cars with?
The global economy is withering quickly because it was just a manifestation of late-stage cheap oil. Now we’re in early-stage of expensive oil and a lot of things that seemed to work wonderfully well before, don’t work so well now. The conveyer belt of cheap manufactured goods from China to the WalMarts and Target stores doesn’t work so well when the American customers lose their incomes, and have to spend their government stipends on gasoline because they were born into a world where driving everywhere for everything is mandatory, and because central bank meddling adds to the horrendous inflation of food prices.
Now there’s great fanfare over a “manufacturing renaissance” in the United States, based on the idea that the work will be done by robots. What kind of foolish Popular Mechanicsporn fantasy is this? If human beings have only a minor administrative role in this set-up, what do two hundred million American adults do for a livelihood? And who exactly are the intended customers of these products? You can be sure that the people of China, Brazil, and Korea will have enough factories of their own, making every product imaginable. Are they going to buy our stuff now? Are they going to completely roboticize their own factories and impoverish millions of their own factory workers?
The lack of thought behind this dynamic is staggering, especially because it doesn’t account for the obvious political consequence — which is to say the potential for uprising, revolution, civic disorder, cruelty, mayhem, and death, along with the kind of experiments in psychopathic governance that the 20th century was a laboratory for. Desperate populations turn to maniacs. You can be sure that scarcity beats a fast path to mass homicide.
What preoccupies the USA now, in June of 2014? According to the current cover story Time Magazine, the triumph of “transgender.” Isn’t it wonderful to celebrate sexual confusion as the latest and greatest achievement of this culture? No wonder the Russians think we’re out of our minds and want to dissociate from the West. I’ve got news for the editors of Time Magazine: the raptures of sexual confusion are not going to carry American civilization forward into the heart of this new century.
In fact, just the opposite. We don’t need confusion of any kind. We need clarity and an appreciation of boundaries in every conceivable sphere of action and thought. We don’t need more crybabies, or excuses, or wishful thinking, or the majestic ass-covering that colors the main stream of our national life.
Sunday, June 01, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
Kunstler: Homeless
Homeless
History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the USA. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory. The USA is going nowhere because it doesn’t like the new place where history wants to take it.
That is, first of all, a place of far less influence on everybody else, in a new era of desperate struggle to remain modern. That fading modern world is the house that America built, the great post World War Two McMansion stuffed with dubious luxuries in a Las Vegas of the collective mind. History’s bank has foreclosed on it and all the nations and people of the world have been told to make new arrangements for daily life. The USA wants everybody to stay put and act as if nothing has changed.
Therefore, change will be forced on the USA. It will take the form of things breaking and not getting fixed. Unfortunately, America furnished its part of the house with stapled-together crap designed to look better than it really was. We like to keep the blinds drawn now so as not to see it all coming apart. Barack Obama comes and goes like a pliable butler, doing little more than carrying trays of policy that will be consumed like stale tea cakes — while the wallpaper curls, and the boilers fail down in the basement, and veneers delaminate, and little animals scuttle ominously around in the attic.
Everybody I know is distressed by this toxic languor, this sense of being stuck waiting in a place they want desperately to move on from — like the prison of elder-care where so many find themselves hostage to the futility of staving off a certain ending, while all the family resources drain into various bureaucratic black holes. Do we care that the generations to come will have nothing left, nothing at all?
This Memorial Day the usual pieties are noticeably muted. Few politicians dare to utter sanctimonies about our brave soldiers maimed on far-flung battlefields, when so many of them are stuck waiting alone in dark rooms with only their wounds and phantom limbs for company. If regular civilian medicine is a cruel, hopeless, quasi-criminal racket, imagine what medicine for army veterans must be like — all that plus an overlay of profound government ineptitude and institutionalized ass-covering
Even the idle chatter about American Dreaming has faded out lately, because too much has happened to families and individuals to demonstrate that people need more than dreams and wishes to make things happen. It’s kind of a relief to not have to listen to those inane exhortations anymore, especially the idiotic shrieking that “We’re number one!”
Others have got our number now. They are going their own way whether we like it or not. The Russians and the Chinese. The voters in Europe. The moiling masses of Arabia and its outlands. The generals in Thailand. Too bad the people of Main Street USA don’t want to do anything but sit on their hands waiting for the rafters to tumble down. My guess is that nothing will bestir us until we wake up one morning surrounded by rubble and dust. By then, America will be a salvage operation.
There’s a long and comprehensive To-Do list that has been waiting for us since at least 2008, when the nation received one forceful blow upside its thick head. We refuse to pay attention. First item on the list: restructure the banks. Other items: reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act; disassemble the ridiculous “security” edifice under the NSA; upgrade the US electric grid; close down most of our military bases overseas (and some of our bases in the USA); draw up a constitutional amendment re-defining the alleged “personhood” of corporations; fix the passenger railroad system to prepare for the end of Happy Motoring; rebuild Main Street commerce to prepare for the death of WalMart and things like it; outlaw GMO foods and promote local food production; shut down casino gambling.
That’s just my list. What’s yours? And when will you step out of this rotting house into the sunshine?
History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the USA. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory. The USA is going nowhere because it doesn’t like the new place where history wants to take it.
That is, first of all, a place of far less influence on everybody else, in a new era of desperate struggle to remain modern. That fading modern world is the house that America built, the great post World War Two McMansion stuffed with dubious luxuries in a Las Vegas of the collective mind. History’s bank has foreclosed on it and all the nations and people of the world have been told to make new arrangements for daily life. The USA wants everybody to stay put and act as if nothing has changed.
Therefore, change will be forced on the USA. It will take the form of things breaking and not getting fixed. Unfortunately, America furnished its part of the house with stapled-together crap designed to look better than it really was. We like to keep the blinds drawn now so as not to see it all coming apart. Barack Obama comes and goes like a pliable butler, doing little more than carrying trays of policy that will be consumed like stale tea cakes — while the wallpaper curls, and the boilers fail down in the basement, and veneers delaminate, and little animals scuttle ominously around in the attic.
Everybody I know is distressed by this toxic languor, this sense of being stuck waiting in a place they want desperately to move on from — like the prison of elder-care where so many find themselves hostage to the futility of staving off a certain ending, while all the family resources drain into various bureaucratic black holes. Do we care that the generations to come will have nothing left, nothing at all?
This Memorial Day the usual pieties are noticeably muted. Few politicians dare to utter sanctimonies about our brave soldiers maimed on far-flung battlefields, when so many of them are stuck waiting alone in dark rooms with only their wounds and phantom limbs for company. If regular civilian medicine is a cruel, hopeless, quasi-criminal racket, imagine what medicine for army veterans must be like — all that plus an overlay of profound government ineptitude and institutionalized ass-covering
Even the idle chatter about American Dreaming has faded out lately, because too much has happened to families and individuals to demonstrate that people need more than dreams and wishes to make things happen. It’s kind of a relief to not have to listen to those inane exhortations anymore, especially the idiotic shrieking that “We’re number one!”
Others have got our number now. They are going their own way whether we like it or not. The Russians and the Chinese. The voters in Europe. The moiling masses of Arabia and its outlands. The generals in Thailand. Too bad the people of Main Street USA don’t want to do anything but sit on their hands waiting for the rafters to tumble down. My guess is that nothing will bestir us until we wake up one morning surrounded by rubble and dust. By then, America will be a salvage operation.
There’s a long and comprehensive To-Do list that has been waiting for us since at least 2008, when the nation received one forceful blow upside its thick head. We refuse to pay attention. First item on the list: restructure the banks. Other items: reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act; disassemble the ridiculous “security” edifice under the NSA; upgrade the US electric grid; close down most of our military bases overseas (and some of our bases in the USA); draw up a constitutional amendment re-defining the alleged “personhood” of corporations; fix the passenger railroad system to prepare for the end of Happy Motoring; rebuild Main Street commerce to prepare for the death of WalMart and things like it; outlaw GMO foods and promote local food production; shut down casino gambling.
That’s just my list. What’s yours? And when will you step out of this rotting house into the sunshine?
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Learning New Things Every Day
Reading the comments at Hattie's Web today, I saw this: "a ... Fundie Cacklick running for PM in Newfoundland." The commenter is referring to this politician. After a few minutes wondering what a "Cacklick" was, I sounded the word out and realized, Oh, Catholic.
It's a beastly mispronunciation* used to ironic effect. (Cf. Jeebus.)
(*I have and recommend the book.)
It's a beastly mispronunciation* used to ironic effect. (Cf. Jeebus.)
(*I have and recommend the book.)
Friday, May 23, 2014
The Blog That Ate Manhattan
The Blog That Ate Manhattan. I found this on the blogroll of A Little Red Hen, and might add it to my own list of links.
I've been very busy so recent posts have been brief statements and embedded tweets. I hope to have more time soon to write substantially.
I've been very busy so recent posts have been brief statements and embedded tweets. I hope to have more time soon to write substantially.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Journalists
This image captures the horror of #Egypt's crackdown on the free press. http://t.co/oGRnm3KfVA #FreeAJStaff today pic.twitter.com/kZUOUbxadE
— Stephanie Hancock (@hancock_steph) May 22, 2014Meanwhile, Gregg Jarrett was arrested and jailed for public drunkenness at a Minneapolis airport, then was released.
Fox News Anchor #GreggJarrett Calls #DonLemon ‘Al Sharpton of CNN’ Over #DunnVerdict http://t.co/UIkwy9zNo2
— Hinterland Gazette (@hinterlandg) February 18, 2014Wednesday, May 21, 2014
The "Slight" App
I'm not surprised. And what would Paul Fussell have made of this?
"Texting to someone in the same room."
It's called Slight. And it lets you talk anonymously with everyone in the room: https://t.co/yIG6JP4SVE
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) May 21, 2014"Texting to someone in the same room."
Gabriel Kolko, R.I.P.
Gabriel Kolko, 1932-2014, historian of war and big business, claimed by radicals & libertarians alike: CounterPunch:http://t.co/7GJIx00my7
— Chase Madar (@ChMadar) May 20, 2014Monday, May 19, 2014
The 9/11 Museum charges $24 entry and has a gift shop. Museums have a way of showing us who we are, and not only through their displays.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) May 19, 2014The USHMM also has a gift shop. They've been de rigueur at museums for years.
Before "BringBackOurGirls"
234 girls were kidnapped from a physics test in Nigeria and no one seems to give a shit. http://t.co/m24LvoKLrU #findthegirls
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) April 27, 2014Sunday, May 18, 2014
Some Random Tweets
Right-wing sugardaddy Richard Mellon Scaife is terminally ill: http://t.co/GtsP9ktIsR On Scaife's political empire: http://t.co/U3Gb6j3n7X
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 18, 2014ONLY HOLOGRAM WE ACKNOWLEDGE IS JEM.
— Xavier D'Leau (@TheXDExperience) May 19, 2014#peakoil Where the World’s Unsold Cars Go To Die: In the past several years, one of the topics covered in deta... http://t.co/6Lk9TMoMtL
— peak oil news (@peaktweat) May 17, 2014"Oh just grow a pear." - me to underabundant pear tree
— Jennette McCurdy (@jennettemccurdy) May 17, 2014Friday, May 16, 2014
Narendra Modi Wins Election
Narendra Modi wins election for Prime Minister of India.
More on the 2014 elections at The Hindu. and India Today.
#India Elects Hard-Right Hindu Nationalist as New Indian PM Backed by Corporate Interests http://t.co/cJXqcnzopG pic.twitter.com/AUabWtljxV
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) May 16, 2014More on the 2014 elections at The Hindu. and India Today.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
I had no idea today was the anniversary of the MOVE bombing, although I was reading about it this morning.
Luv #BobSeger but #FamilyGuy just did wildest Seger gags imaginable. Topped by mad #FionaApple satire.
— armond white (@3xchair) May 5, 2014As a fan of Fiona Apple I took the joke about her in stride. #considerthesource
Monday, May 12, 2014
Kunstler: Whose Client State?
Kunstler: Whose Client State?
My country can cry all it likes about yesterday’s referendum vote in eastern Ukraine, but we set the process in motion by sponsoring the overthrow of an elected Kiev government that was tilting toward Russia and away from NATO overtures. The president elected in 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, might have been a grifter and a scoundrel, but so was his opponent, the billionaire gas oligarch Yulia Tymoshenko. The main lesson that US authorities have consistently failed to learn in more than a decade of central Asian misadventures: when you set events in motion in distant lands, events, not policy planners at the State Department, end up in the driver’s seat.
And so now they’ve had the referendum vote and the result is about 87 percent of the voters in eastern Ukraine would prefer to align politically with Russia rather than the failing Ukraine state governed out of Kiev. It’s easy to understand why. First, there’s the ethnic divide at the Dnieper River: majority Russian-speakers to the east. Second, the Kiev government, as per above, shows all the signs of a failing state — that is, a state that can’t manage any basic responsibilities starting with covering the costs of maintaining infrastructure and institutions. The Kiev government is broke. Of course, so are most other nations these days, but unlike, say, the USA or France, Ukraine doesn’t have an important enough currency or powerful enough central bank to play the kind of accounting games that allow bigger nations to pretend they’re solvent.
Kiev owes $3.5 billion to Russia for past-due gas bills and Moscow has asked Kiev to pre-pay for June deliveries. This is about the same thing that any local gas company in the USA would demand from a deadbeat customer. The International Monetary Fund has offered to advance a loan of $3 billion, of which Kiev claims it could afford to fork over $2.6 billion to Russia (presumably needing the rest to run the country, pay police salaries, et cetera). Ukraine is in a sad and desperate situation for sure, but is Russia just supposed to supply it with free gas indefinitely? As wonderful as life is in the USA, the last time I checked most of us are expected to pay our heating bills. How long, exactly, does the IMF propose to pay Ukraine’s monthly gas bill? In September, the question is liable to get more urgent — but by then the current situation could degenerate into civil war.
The USA and its NATO allies would apparently like to have Ukraine become a client state, but they’re not altogether willing to pay for it. This kind of raises the basic question: if Russia ultimately has to foot the bill for Ukraine, whose client state is it? And who is geographically next door to Ukraine? And whose national histories are intimately mingled?
I’m not persuaded that Russia and its president, Mr. Putin, are thrilled about the dissolution of Ukraine. Conceivably, they would have been satisfied with a politically stable, independent Ukraine and reliable long-term leases on the Black Sea ports. Russia is barely scraping by financially on an oil, gas, and mineral based economy that allows them to import the bulk of their manufactured goods. They don’t need the aggravation of a basket-case neighbor to support, but it has pretty much come to that. At least, it appears that Russia will support the Russian-speaking region east of the Dnieper.
My guess is that the Kiev-centered western Ukraine can’t support itself as a modern state, that is, with the high living standards of a techno-industrial culture. It just doesn’t have the fossil fuel juice. It’s at the mercies of others for that. In recent years, Ukraine has even maintained an independent space program (which is more than one can say of the USA). It will be looked back on with nostalgic amazement. Like other regions of the world, Ukraine’s destiny is to go medieval, to become a truly post-industrial agriculture-based society with a lower population and lower living standards. It is one [of] the world’s leading grain-growing regions, a huge advantage for the kind of future the whole world faces — if it can avoid becoming a stomping ground in the elephant’s graveyard of collapsing industrial anachronisms.
Ukraine can pretend to be a ward of the West for only a little while longer. The juice and the money just isn’t there, though. Probably sooner than later, the IMF will stop paying its gas bills. Within the same time-frame, the IMF may have to turn its attention to the floundering states of western Europe. That floundering will worsen rapidly if those nations can’t get gas from Russia. You can bet that Europe will think twice before tagging along with America on anymore cockamamie sanctions. Meanwhile, the USA is passing up the chance to care for a more appropriate client state: itself. Why on earth should the USA be lending billions of dollars to Ukraine when we don’t have decent train service between New York City and Chicago?
My country can cry all it likes about yesterday’s referendum vote in eastern Ukraine, but we set the process in motion by sponsoring the overthrow of an elected Kiev government that was tilting toward Russia and away from NATO overtures. The president elected in 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, might have been a grifter and a scoundrel, but so was his opponent, the billionaire gas oligarch Yulia Tymoshenko. The main lesson that US authorities have consistently failed to learn in more than a decade of central Asian misadventures: when you set events in motion in distant lands, events, not policy planners at the State Department, end up in the driver’s seat.
And so now they’ve had the referendum vote and the result is about 87 percent of the voters in eastern Ukraine would prefer to align politically with Russia rather than the failing Ukraine state governed out of Kiev. It’s easy to understand why. First, there’s the ethnic divide at the Dnieper River: majority Russian-speakers to the east. Second, the Kiev government, as per above, shows all the signs of a failing state — that is, a state that can’t manage any basic responsibilities starting with covering the costs of maintaining infrastructure and institutions. The Kiev government is broke. Of course, so are most other nations these days, but unlike, say, the USA or France, Ukraine doesn’t have an important enough currency or powerful enough central bank to play the kind of accounting games that allow bigger nations to pretend they’re solvent.
Kiev owes $3.5 billion to Russia for past-due gas bills and Moscow has asked Kiev to pre-pay for June deliveries. This is about the same thing that any local gas company in the USA would demand from a deadbeat customer. The International Monetary Fund has offered to advance a loan of $3 billion, of which Kiev claims it could afford to fork over $2.6 billion to Russia (presumably needing the rest to run the country, pay police salaries, et cetera). Ukraine is in a sad and desperate situation for sure, but is Russia just supposed to supply it with free gas indefinitely? As wonderful as life is in the USA, the last time I checked most of us are expected to pay our heating bills. How long, exactly, does the IMF propose to pay Ukraine’s monthly gas bill? In September, the question is liable to get more urgent — but by then the current situation could degenerate into civil war.
The USA and its NATO allies would apparently like to have Ukraine become a client state, but they’re not altogether willing to pay for it. This kind of raises the basic question: if Russia ultimately has to foot the bill for Ukraine, whose client state is it? And who is geographically next door to Ukraine? And whose national histories are intimately mingled?
I’m not persuaded that Russia and its president, Mr. Putin, are thrilled about the dissolution of Ukraine. Conceivably, they would have been satisfied with a politically stable, independent Ukraine and reliable long-term leases on the Black Sea ports. Russia is barely scraping by financially on an oil, gas, and mineral based economy that allows them to import the bulk of their manufactured goods. They don’t need the aggravation of a basket-case neighbor to support, but it has pretty much come to that. At least, it appears that Russia will support the Russian-speaking region east of the Dnieper.
My guess is that the Kiev-centered western Ukraine can’t support itself as a modern state, that is, with the high living standards of a techno-industrial culture. It just doesn’t have the fossil fuel juice. It’s at the mercies of others for that. In recent years, Ukraine has even maintained an independent space program (which is more than one can say of the USA). It will be looked back on with nostalgic amazement. Like other regions of the world, Ukraine’s destiny is to go medieval, to become a truly post-industrial agriculture-based society with a lower population and lower living standards. It is one [of] the world’s leading grain-growing regions, a huge advantage for the kind of future the whole world faces — if it can avoid becoming a stomping ground in the elephant’s graveyard of collapsing industrial anachronisms.
Ukraine can pretend to be a ward of the West for only a little while longer. The juice and the money just isn’t there, though. Probably sooner than later, the IMF will stop paying its gas bills. Within the same time-frame, the IMF may have to turn its attention to the floundering states of western Europe. That floundering will worsen rapidly if those nations can’t get gas from Russia. You can bet that Europe will think twice before tagging along with America on anymore cockamamie sanctions. Meanwhile, the USA is passing up the chance to care for a more appropriate client state: itself. Why on earth should the USA be lending billions of dollars to Ukraine when we don’t have decent train service between New York City and Chicago?
The greatest music ever: 1970s Iranian psychedelic funk. http://t.co/tVavUUuGhq
— Thaddeus Russell (@ThaddeusRussell) May 12, 2014I don't know if it's the "greatest music ever" but it's worth listening to. At the least, it's preferable to 2010s Canadian-American hip-pop fluff (Bieber).
Friday, May 09, 2014
Testing
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I've had problems posting images to my blog for a while, and my posts were text, with some video embeds thrown in. If this works, expect to see more pictures here.
Wednesday, May 07, 2014
What We All Want
@CommunityParty1 @MTVNews
Please God, make him shut up.
— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) May 3, 2014She's referring to Suge Knight and his assertion that Tupac Shakur is alive.
Monday, May 05, 2014
Kunstler's Latest
"Lying or Just Stupid?"
It’s not always easy to define what exactly is wrong with America, but what ever it is, it’s huge.
— Roel Ilargi Meijer, The Automatic Earth.com
Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we’re having all this trouble with our Republic.
— Tom McGuane, Ninety-Two in the Shade
Despite its Valley Girl origins, the simple term clueless turns out to be the most accurate descriptor for America’s degenerate zeitgeist. Nobody gets it — the “it” being a rather hefty bundle of issues ranging from our energy bind to the official mismanagement of money, the manipulation of markets, the crimes in banking, the blundering foreign misadventures, the revolving door corruption in governance, the abandonment of the rule-of-law, the ominous wind-down of the Happy Motoring fiasco and the related tragedy of obsolete suburbia, the contemptuous disregard for the futures of young people, the immersive Kardashian celebrity twerking sleaze, the downward spiral of the floundering classes into pizza and Pepsi induced obesity, methedrine psychosis, and tattooed savagery, and the thick patina of public relations dishonesty that coats all of it like some toxic bacterial overgrowth. The dwindling life of our nation, where anything goes and nothing matters.
It’s not just the individual cluelessness of ordinary people leading lives too frantic for a moment’s reflection about anything, but the appalling institutional cluelessness of enterprises where you’d think combined intellects might tend toward a more faithful view of reality. But these days all we get is a low-order of wishful and clownish group-think, such as this item from today’s New York Times discussing a proposed reversal of Gazprom pipelines along the Ukraine / Slovakian frontier as the solution to the Kiev government’s fuel problem:
Get that? To avoid depending on Russian gas, they’re going to buy Russian gas from sources other than Russia. What New York Times editor can read this story without spraying her video display with coffee? What genius in John Kerry’s “Haircut-in-Search-of-a-Brain” State Department dreamed up this dodge? Who would think that you could improve a Chinese fire drill by tacking on a Polish blanket trick (i.e. trying to make your blanket longer by cutting a foot from the top and sewing it onto the bottom).
The only conclusion the casual observer can come to is, to put it mildly, these institutions have gone completely meshugga. Since I follow the behavior of these organizations, I know that this is not an isolated example. For the State Department, the entire gambit in Ukraine has been a chain of obvious bungles and miscalculations, starting with our sponsored overthrow of the original elected Kiev government, and the absurd presumption that Russia had no legitimate interest in that region’s stability to the strategy of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot financial sanctions. The New York Times (once America’s “Newspaper of Record”), is now a completely unreliable conduit for un-parsed White House backgrounder propaganda and raw State Department spin, with an overlay of editorial PMS brain fog.
Another humdinger on a somewhat different issue caught my attention the other day in the formerly eminent, now degenerate journal Foreign Affairs (May / June 2014): The United States of Gas, by Robert Hefner III. This idiotic article in the current issue hits on all the usual wishful thinking delusions du jour concerning this country’s energy prospects, namely: due to fracking in shale deposits we’ve entered an energy-and-manufacturing renaissance, we’re soon-to-be the premier energy exporter to the world, and US “consumers” (i.e. citizens) can be assured of driving to WalMart forever — in other words, all economic problems solved. These idiots (editors and fact-checkers included) must get all their information straight out of the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) PR handouts. CERA, of course, is the official public relations shop of the oil and gas industry.
It’s one thing that this article is patently misleading. What’s worse is the complete absence of any understanding of the fundamental dynamic between the high cost of unconventional oil and gas and its effect on capital formation. In other words, the capital investment for continued future drilling will simply not exist. What a surprise that will be to the people who run this land.
There comes a point in the destiny of a failing nation when official lying is no longer distinct from official stupidity. We’ve crossed that boundary in the USA. It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
It’s not always easy to define what exactly is wrong with America, but what ever it is, it’s huge.
— Roel Ilargi Meijer, The Automatic Earth.com
Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we’re having all this trouble with our Republic.
— Tom McGuane, Ninety-Two in the Shade
Despite its Valley Girl origins, the simple term clueless turns out to be the most accurate descriptor for America’s degenerate zeitgeist. Nobody gets it — the “it” being a rather hefty bundle of issues ranging from our energy bind to the official mismanagement of money, the manipulation of markets, the crimes in banking, the blundering foreign misadventures, the revolving door corruption in governance, the abandonment of the rule-of-law, the ominous wind-down of the Happy Motoring fiasco and the related tragedy of obsolete suburbia, the contemptuous disregard for the futures of young people, the immersive Kardashian celebrity twerking sleaze, the downward spiral of the floundering classes into pizza and Pepsi induced obesity, methedrine psychosis, and tattooed savagery, and the thick patina of public relations dishonesty that coats all of it like some toxic bacterial overgrowth. The dwindling life of our nation, where anything goes and nothing matters.
It’s not just the individual cluelessness of ordinary people leading lives too frantic for a moment’s reflection about anything, but the appalling institutional cluelessness of enterprises where you’d think combined intellects might tend toward a more faithful view of reality. But these days all we get is a low-order of wishful and clownish group-think, such as this item from today’s New York Times discussing a proposed reversal of Gazprom pipelines along the Ukraine / Slovakian frontier as the solution to the Kiev government’s fuel problem:
Nearly all the gas Washington and Brussels would like to get moving into Ukraine from Europe originally came from Russia, which pumps gas westward across Ukraine, into Slovakia and then on to customers in Germany and elsewhere. Once the gas is sold, however, Gazprom ceases to be its owner and loses its power to set the terms of its sale.
Get that? To avoid depending on Russian gas, they’re going to buy Russian gas from sources other than Russia. What New York Times editor can read this story without spraying her video display with coffee? What genius in John Kerry’s “Haircut-in-Search-of-a-Brain” State Department dreamed up this dodge? Who would think that you could improve a Chinese fire drill by tacking on a Polish blanket trick (i.e. trying to make your blanket longer by cutting a foot from the top and sewing it onto the bottom).
The only conclusion the casual observer can come to is, to put it mildly, these institutions have gone completely meshugga. Since I follow the behavior of these organizations, I know that this is not an isolated example. For the State Department, the entire gambit in Ukraine has been a chain of obvious bungles and miscalculations, starting with our sponsored overthrow of the original elected Kiev government, and the absurd presumption that Russia had no legitimate interest in that region’s stability to the strategy of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot financial sanctions. The New York Times (once America’s “Newspaper of Record”), is now a completely unreliable conduit for un-parsed White House backgrounder propaganda and raw State Department spin, with an overlay of editorial PMS brain fog.
Another humdinger on a somewhat different issue caught my attention the other day in the formerly eminent, now degenerate journal Foreign Affairs (May / June 2014): The United States of Gas, by Robert Hefner III. This idiotic article in the current issue hits on all the usual wishful thinking delusions du jour concerning this country’s energy prospects, namely: due to fracking in shale deposits we’ve entered an energy-and-manufacturing renaissance, we’re soon-to-be the premier energy exporter to the world, and US “consumers” (i.e. citizens) can be assured of driving to WalMart forever — in other words, all economic problems solved. These idiots (editors and fact-checkers included) must get all their information straight out of the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) PR handouts. CERA, of course, is the official public relations shop of the oil and gas industry.
It’s one thing that this article is patently misleading. What’s worse is the complete absence of any understanding of the fundamental dynamic between the high cost of unconventional oil and gas and its effect on capital formation. In other words, the capital investment for continued future drilling will simply not exist. What a surprise that will be to the people who run this land.
There comes a point in the destiny of a failing nation when official lying is no longer distinct from official stupidity. We’ve crossed that boundary in the USA. It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
Sunday, May 04, 2014
Friday, May 02, 2014
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Rock of Ages/Ages of Rock
As I posted yesterday, I'm thinking about historical periods, how they're defined, how one decade or century shades into the next, or how things, historically, can change instantly.
Spin magazine debunks the popular idea that Nirvana, and grunge generally, killed hair metal. It points out that toward the end of the eighties, several hair groups gave up their makeup and teased coifs, stripping down their music and their look to the basics. This was largely thanks to Axl Rose. (He himself had teased hair in the first Guns n'Roses video, then went natural in the next one.)
Spin magazine debunks the popular idea that Nirvana, and grunge generally, killed hair metal. It points out that toward the end of the eighties, several hair groups gave up their makeup and teased coifs, stripping down their music and their look to the basics. This was largely thanks to Axl Rose. (He himself had teased hair in the first Guns n'Roses video, then went natural in the next one.)
Monday, April 28, 2014
How History is Periodized
On periodization and the concepts of long and short eras.
E.g., the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) or the short 1980s (1983-89).
http://medievalala.blogspot.com/2012/04/long-middle-ages.html
E.g., the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) or the short 1980s (1983-89).
http://medievalala.blogspot.com/2012/04/long-middle-ages.html
Kunstler: Piketty Dikitty Rikitty
Kunstler: "Piketty Dikitty Rikitty."
The debate over Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is as dumb as every other issue-set in the public arena these days — a product of failed mental models, historical blindness, hubris, and wishful thinking. Piketty’s central idea is that wealth will continue to accumulate and concentrate among individual rich families at ever-greater rates and therefore that nation-states should take a number of steps to prevent that from happening or at least attempt to correct it.
The first mistake of Piketty fans such as New York Times op-ed ass Paul Krugman is the assumption that the dynamic labeled “capitalism” is an ism, a belief system that you can subscribe to or drop out of, depending on your political correctitude. That’s just not true. So-called capitalism is more like gravity, a set of laws that apply to and describe the behavior of surplus wealth, in particular wealth generated by industrial societies, which is to say unprecedented massive wealth. The human race never saw anything quite like it before. It became both a moral embarrassment and a political inconvenience. So among the intellectual grandiosities of modern times is the idea that this massive wealth can be politically managed to produce an ideal equitable society — with no side effects.
Hence, the bold but hapless 20th century experiment with statist communism, which pretended to abolish wealth but succeeded mainly in converting wealth into industrial waste and pollution, while directing the remainder to a lawless gangster government elite that ruled an expendable mass peasantry with maximum cruelty and injustice.
In the other industrial nations, loosely called “the west,” the pretense to abolish wealth altogether never completely took, but a great deal of wealth was “socialized” for the purpose of delivering public goods. That seemed to work fairly well in post-war Europe and a bit less-well in the USA after the anomalous Eisenhower decade when industrial labor enjoyed a power moment of wage arbitrage. Now that system is unraveling, and for the reason that Piketty & Company largely miss: industrial economies are winding down with the decline of cheap fossil fuels.
Piketty and his fans assume that the industrial orgy will continue one way or another, in other words that some mysterious “they” will “come up with innovative new technologies” to obviate the need for fossil fuels and that the volume of wealth generated will more or less continue to increase. This notion is childish, idiotic, and wrong. Energy and technology are not substitutable with each other. If you run out of the former, you can’t replace it with the latter (and by “run out” I mean get it at a return of energy investment that makes sense). The techno-narcissist Jeremy Rifkins and Ray Kurzweils among us propound magical something-for-nothing workarounds for our predicament, but they are just blowing smoke up the collective fundament of a credulous ruling plutocracy. In fact, we’re faced with an unprecedented contraction of wealth, and a shocking loss of ability to produce new wealth. That‘s the real “game-changer,” not the delusions about shale oil and the robotic “industrial renaissance” and all the related fantasies circulating among a leadership that checked its brains at the Microsoft window.
Of course, even in a general contraction wealth will still exist, and Piketty is certainly right that it will tend to remain concentrated (where it isn’t washed away in the deluge of broken promises to pay this and that obligation). But he is quite incorrect that the general conditions we enjoy at this moment in history will continue a whole lot longer — for instance the organization of giant nation-states and their ability to control populations. I suppose it’s counter-intuitive in this moment of the “Deep State” with all its Orwellian overtones of electronic surveillance and omnipotence, but I’d take the less popular view that the Deep State will choke to death on the diminishing returns of technology and that nation-states in general will first degenerate into impotence and then break up into smaller units. What’s more, I’d propose that the whole world is apt to be going medieval, so to speak, as we contend with our energy predicament and its effects on wealth generation, banking, and all the other operations of modern capital. That is, they’ll become a lot less modern.
As all this occurs, some families and individuals will hang onto wealth, and that wealth is apt to increase, though not at the scales and volumes afforded by industrial activities. Political theorizing a la Marx or Thomas Piketty is not liable to deprive them of it, but other forces will. The most plausible framework for understanding that is the circulation of elites. This refers to the tendency in history for one ruling elite to be overturned and replaced by another group, often by violence, and then become the new ruling elite. It always happens one way or another, and even the case of the Bolsheviks in Russia during the industrial 20th century can be seen this way.
In any case, just because human affairs follow certain patterns these days, don’t assume that all these patterns will persist. I doubt that the Warren Buffets and Jamie Dimons of the world will see their wealth confiscated via some new policy of the Internal Revenue Service — e.g. the proposed “tax on wealth.” Rather, its more likely that they’ll be strung up on lampposts or dragged over three miles of pavement behind their own limousines. After all, the second leading delusion in our culture these days, after the wish for a something-for-nothing magic energy rescue remedy, is the idea that we can politically organize our way out of the epochal predicament of civilization that we face. Piketty just feeds that secondary delusion.
The debate over Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is as dumb as every other issue-set in the public arena these days — a product of failed mental models, historical blindness, hubris, and wishful thinking. Piketty’s central idea is that wealth will continue to accumulate and concentrate among individual rich families at ever-greater rates and therefore that nation-states should take a number of steps to prevent that from happening or at least attempt to correct it.
The first mistake of Piketty fans such as New York Times op-ed ass Paul Krugman is the assumption that the dynamic labeled “capitalism” is an ism, a belief system that you can subscribe to or drop out of, depending on your political correctitude. That’s just not true. So-called capitalism is more like gravity, a set of laws that apply to and describe the behavior of surplus wealth, in particular wealth generated by industrial societies, which is to say unprecedented massive wealth. The human race never saw anything quite like it before. It became both a moral embarrassment and a political inconvenience. So among the intellectual grandiosities of modern times is the idea that this massive wealth can be politically managed to produce an ideal equitable society — with no side effects.
Hence, the bold but hapless 20th century experiment with statist communism, which pretended to abolish wealth but succeeded mainly in converting wealth into industrial waste and pollution, while directing the remainder to a lawless gangster government elite that ruled an expendable mass peasantry with maximum cruelty and injustice.
In the other industrial nations, loosely called “the west,” the pretense to abolish wealth altogether never completely took, but a great deal of wealth was “socialized” for the purpose of delivering public goods. That seemed to work fairly well in post-war Europe and a bit less-well in the USA after the anomalous Eisenhower decade when industrial labor enjoyed a power moment of wage arbitrage. Now that system is unraveling, and for the reason that Piketty & Company largely miss: industrial economies are winding down with the decline of cheap fossil fuels.
Piketty and his fans assume that the industrial orgy will continue one way or another, in other words that some mysterious “they” will “come up with innovative new technologies” to obviate the need for fossil fuels and that the volume of wealth generated will more or less continue to increase. This notion is childish, idiotic, and wrong. Energy and technology are not substitutable with each other. If you run out of the former, you can’t replace it with the latter (and by “run out” I mean get it at a return of energy investment that makes sense). The techno-narcissist Jeremy Rifkins and Ray Kurzweils among us propound magical something-for-nothing workarounds for our predicament, but they are just blowing smoke up the collective fundament of a credulous ruling plutocracy. In fact, we’re faced with an unprecedented contraction of wealth, and a shocking loss of ability to produce new wealth. That‘s the real “game-changer,” not the delusions about shale oil and the robotic “industrial renaissance” and all the related fantasies circulating among a leadership that checked its brains at the Microsoft window.
Of course, even in a general contraction wealth will still exist, and Piketty is certainly right that it will tend to remain concentrated (where it isn’t washed away in the deluge of broken promises to pay this and that obligation). But he is quite incorrect that the general conditions we enjoy at this moment in history will continue a whole lot longer — for instance the organization of giant nation-states and their ability to control populations. I suppose it’s counter-intuitive in this moment of the “Deep State” with all its Orwellian overtones of electronic surveillance and omnipotence, but I’d take the less popular view that the Deep State will choke to death on the diminishing returns of technology and that nation-states in general will first degenerate into impotence and then break up into smaller units. What’s more, I’d propose that the whole world is apt to be going medieval, so to speak, as we contend with our energy predicament and its effects on wealth generation, banking, and all the other operations of modern capital. That is, they’ll become a lot less modern.
As all this occurs, some families and individuals will hang onto wealth, and that wealth is apt to increase, though not at the scales and volumes afforded by industrial activities. Political theorizing a la Marx or Thomas Piketty is not liable to deprive them of it, but other forces will. The most plausible framework for understanding that is the circulation of elites. This refers to the tendency in history for one ruling elite to be overturned and replaced by another group, often by violence, and then become the new ruling elite. It always happens one way or another, and even the case of the Bolsheviks in Russia during the industrial 20th century can be seen this way.
In any case, just because human affairs follow certain patterns these days, don’t assume that all these patterns will persist. I doubt that the Warren Buffets and Jamie Dimons of the world will see their wealth confiscated via some new policy of the Internal Revenue Service — e.g. the proposed “tax on wealth.” Rather, its more likely that they’ll be strung up on lampposts or dragged over three miles of pavement behind their own limousines. After all, the second leading delusion in our culture these days, after the wish for a something-for-nothing magic energy rescue remedy, is the idea that we can politically organize our way out of the epochal predicament of civilization that we face. Piketty just feeds that secondary delusion.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Not a Pawn
@cvaldary @Julia_C_Salazar we will stay where we are and not be chess pieces in a rapture ready Christian Zionist's childlike fantasy.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 27, 2014Saturday, April 26, 2014
Friday, April 25, 2014
"Gas is Awesome!"
In honor of Earth Day, I just filled up with gas. Thanks, Earth! Gas is awesome!
— Eric Hankins (@HankinsEric) April 22, 2014Indeed. Kunstler says nothing can adequately replace petroleum as a fuel to run things. So what happens when it becomes scarce? More later.
Monday, April 21, 2014
Kunstler: What's Been and What's Next
April 21, 2014
What’s Been and What’s Next
The wonder is that more Americans are not ticked off about the state of our country than whatever is happening ten thousand miles away. For instance, how come the US Department of Justice is not as avid to prosecute the pervasive racketeering in the US economy as the State Department is for provoking unnecessary wars in foreign lands on the other side of the planet, over matters that have little bearing on life here? This racketeering, by the way, amounts to a war against American citizens.
I’m speaking especially of the US military racket, the banking and finance rackets, the health care racket and the college loan racket, all of which have evolved insidiously and elegantly to swindle the public in order to support a claque of American oligarchs. In other civilized lands, health care and college are considered the highest priority public goods (i.e. responsibilities of government), and national resources are applied to support them under the theory that bankrupting people for an appendectomy or a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering is not in the public interest. In our land, that would be considered “socialism.” Instead, we “socialize” the costs of supporting Too Big To Fail banks — so their employees can drive Beemers to their Hamptons summer house parties — and a military machine that goes around the world wrecking one country after another to support a parasitical class of contractors, lobbyists, and bought-off politicians in their northern Virginia McMansions.
Hence, the laughable conceit pinging through the news media lately that some dynastic grifter like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton will slide into the White House in 2016 as easily as a watermelon seed popped into a shot glass. I don’t think it’s going to work out that way. The US political system needs to be turned upside down and inside out, and I expect that it will be. Either it happens within the bounds of electoral politics, or you’ll see it playing out in the streets and the windswept plains.
Just a glance around the USA these days ought to nauseate the casual observer. We have an infrastructure for everyday life that is failing in every way imaginable. Are you disturbed by the asteroid belts of vacant strip malls outside your town? Or the empty store fronts along your Main Streets? What do you suppose these places will be like in ten years when the mirage of shale oil dissolves in a mist of disappointment and political grievance? How are Americans going to feel, do you suppose, when gasoline just isn’t there at a price they can pay, and they are marooned in delaminating strand-board-and-vinyl houses 23 miles away from anything? Does the sheer immersive ugliness of the human imprint on the American landscape not give you the shivers?
Look at the pathetic and disgusting appearance of our cities, which for the most part present themselves as demolition derby arenas or war zones — except the strongholds of the red-white-and-blue oligarchs: Washington, San Francisco, and especially New York, Financialization Central.
What happens at the “magic moment” when Facebook stops being a narcissistic virtual playground for “selfies” and becomes a bulletin board for political revolution? Think that can’t happen here? And what if that revolution is a kind that doesn’t appeal to you — say, a revolution of race hatred, or fascist zealotry, or Marxist gangsterism of the type that took Russia hostage for 70 years?
All this is happening, incidentally, because the supposed best minds in our nation are paying no attention whatsoever to the most important story of our lifetime: the winding down of the techno-industrial global economy. It doesn’t really matter anymore why they don’t get it. Hubris. Greed. Distraction. Denial. All that matters is that they can’t be depended on and when that happens authority loses legitimacy. And when it comes to that, all bets are off.
The disintegration of Ukraine would be best understood by Americans as a mirror of ourselves and our sclerotic republic, poised to sink into poverty and disorder. Everything we do and say rings hollow now. What used to be called The Establishment has run out of ways to even pretend to save itself. We have no idea what’s next, but it’s not going to be more of what’s been.
What’s Been and What’s Next
The wonder is that more Americans are not ticked off about the state of our country than whatever is happening ten thousand miles away. For instance, how come the US Department of Justice is not as avid to prosecute the pervasive racketeering in the US economy as the State Department is for provoking unnecessary wars in foreign lands on the other side of the planet, over matters that have little bearing on life here? This racketeering, by the way, amounts to a war against American citizens.
I’m speaking especially of the US military racket, the banking and finance rackets, the health care racket and the college loan racket, all of which have evolved insidiously and elegantly to swindle the public in order to support a claque of American oligarchs. In other civilized lands, health care and college are considered the highest priority public goods (i.e. responsibilities of government), and national resources are applied to support them under the theory that bankrupting people for an appendectomy or a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering is not in the public interest. In our land, that would be considered “socialism.” Instead, we “socialize” the costs of supporting Too Big To Fail banks — so their employees can drive Beemers to their Hamptons summer house parties — and a military machine that goes around the world wrecking one country after another to support a parasitical class of contractors, lobbyists, and bought-off politicians in their northern Virginia McMansions.
Hence, the laughable conceit pinging through the news media lately that some dynastic grifter like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton will slide into the White House in 2016 as easily as a watermelon seed popped into a shot glass. I don’t think it’s going to work out that way. The US political system needs to be turned upside down and inside out, and I expect that it will be. Either it happens within the bounds of electoral politics, or you’ll see it playing out in the streets and the windswept plains.
Just a glance around the USA these days ought to nauseate the casual observer. We have an infrastructure for everyday life that is failing in every way imaginable. Are you disturbed by the asteroid belts of vacant strip malls outside your town? Or the empty store fronts along your Main Streets? What do you suppose these places will be like in ten years when the mirage of shale oil dissolves in a mist of disappointment and political grievance? How are Americans going to feel, do you suppose, when gasoline just isn’t there at a price they can pay, and they are marooned in delaminating strand-board-and-vinyl houses 23 miles away from anything? Does the sheer immersive ugliness of the human imprint on the American landscape not give you the shivers?
Look at the pathetic and disgusting appearance of our cities, which for the most part present themselves as demolition derby arenas or war zones — except the strongholds of the red-white-and-blue oligarchs: Washington, San Francisco, and especially New York, Financialization Central.
What happens at the “magic moment” when Facebook stops being a narcissistic virtual playground for “selfies” and becomes a bulletin board for political revolution? Think that can’t happen here? And what if that revolution is a kind that doesn’t appeal to you — say, a revolution of race hatred, or fascist zealotry, or Marxist gangsterism of the type that took Russia hostage for 70 years?
All this is happening, incidentally, because the supposed best minds in our nation are paying no attention whatsoever to the most important story of our lifetime: the winding down of the techno-industrial global economy. It doesn’t really matter anymore why they don’t get it. Hubris. Greed. Distraction. Denial. All that matters is that they can’t be depended on and when that happens authority loses legitimacy. And when it comes to that, all bets are off.
The disintegration of Ukraine would be best understood by Americans as a mirror of ourselves and our sclerotic republic, poised to sink into poverty and disorder. Everything we do and say rings hollow now. What used to be called The Establishment has run out of ways to even pretend to save itself. We have no idea what’s next, but it’s not going to be more of what’s been.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Saturday, April 19, 2014
I agree that test-mania will look silly in retrospect, but must point out that the word is Khmer.
One day we'll look back on this testing craze as the batshit, Kmehr-Rouge-like experiment in reverse, episode of mass hysteria that it is.
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) April 10, 2014Thursday, April 17, 2014
Cassiber: Our Colourful Culture
Today's discovery.
==(18 April update) Still Finding New Music==
A few days ago (maybe the 14th), thanks to a post on Proyect's blog, I learned about Fred Ho, a saxophonist and composer who recently died.
I found Cassiber yesterday when I read an Economist article on the vogue in Britain for German culture, both popular and high, which mentioned the avant-garde composer Heiner Goebbels. His Wikipedia page led me to the one for Cassiber. Then I found a video on YouTube (see above).
==(18 April update) Still Finding New Music==
A few days ago (maybe the 14th), thanks to a post on Proyect's blog, I learned about Fred Ho, a saxophonist and composer who recently died.
I found Cassiber yesterday when I read an Economist article on the vogue in Britain for German culture, both popular and high, which mentioned the avant-garde composer Heiner Goebbels. His Wikipedia page led me to the one for Cassiber. Then I found a video on YouTube (see above).
The Decline of the New England "WASP-ocracy"
Here.
Hawaii and New England have many ties, mainly through the missionaries. Hiram Bingham was a leader of missionaries to Hawaii. His grandson Hiram Bingham III not only discovered Machu Picchu, but later became a U.S. Senator.
Hawaii and New England have many ties, mainly through the missionaries. Hiram Bingham was a leader of missionaries to Hawaii. His grandson Hiram Bingham III not only discovered Machu Picchu, but later became a U.S. Senator.
lil chocolate kitten. pic.twitter.com/tpIRqoCeJi
— Emergency Kittens (@EmrgencyKittens) April 17, 2014Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Mexican-Punjabis in California
Mexican-Punjabis from California featured in "Beyond Bollywood" @SmithsonianAPA @SLC_Latino pic.twitter.com/WczpwLJrq7
— Ranald (@ranaldw) February 27, 2014More here on the Punjabi-Mexican-American community, part of the larger Indian diaspora.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Obsession is part of journalistic duty! Looking cool is for posers and PR monkeys. @MarkAmesExiled
— Yasha Levine (@yashalevine) April 14, 2014Retirement is Bad!
Because there's no Hebrew word for it.
I'll watch this video. Maybe I'll be convinced. Or maybe not.
I'll watch this video. Maybe I'll be convinced. Or maybe not.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Armond White is the New Movie Critic at National Review!
I just learned Armond White is the new movie critic at National Review.
He has two reviews published so far.
He has two reviews published so far.
Friday, April 11, 2014
Arundhati Roy Discusses India
Democracy Now!: "Is India on a Totalitarian Path?"
India has just begun a nine-phase election in which over 800 million people will vote. It isprobably the largest election in history. Amy Goodman pointed out that the number of participants is more than the combined population of the United States and the European Union.
India has just begun a nine-phase election in which over 800 million people will vote. It is
Tuesday, April 08, 2014
Narendra Modi and the rise of India's neo-fascist far-right: http://t.co/U08gENIsoY via @loonwatchers
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 8, 2014Monday, April 07, 2014
Kunstler and Ilind
Kunstler: Forward Guidance Not one of Kunstler's best columns; a standard rant against the Fed, decadent American culture, etc. I think the Kardashians are his stand-in for reality TV in general, particularly the "celebreality" genre.
Ilind.net: Is "Degrowth" the Next Big Thing More interesting this week is Ian Lind's post about "degrowth", discussed thoroughly in OfTwoMinds.
Ilind.net: Is "Degrowth" the Next Big Thing More interesting this week is Ian Lind's post about "degrowth", discussed thoroughly in OfTwoMinds.
Sunday, April 06, 2014
Friday, April 04, 2014
New Challenges and Opportunities in Journalism
Through today's post on Ilind.net I learned of a new Twitter feed called @themediaisdying, a plan by producers of NPR's program This American life to self-distribute, and also a service that plans to sell individual articles from magazines and newspapers, a la iTunes with songs.
By chance yesterday, I found this list of articles on Amazon.com by a local writer, Lisa Ishikawa. What I guess is that she got back her copyright and uploaded her articles to Amazon, where she can sell them as digital downloads.
(6 April update: The Editorial Dead Zone has kept track of media closings for years.)
(A sample tweet from @themediaisdying. Note the photo of a page from The Honolulu Advertiser.)
==
11 April update: Opinion piece on newspapers and the Koch brothers, et al. filling the gap
It doesn't mention when the Kochs tried to buy the Tribune news company, though.
By chance yesterday, I found this list of articles on Amazon.com by a local writer, Lisa Ishikawa. What I guess is that she got back her copyright and uploaded her articles to Amazon, where she can sell them as digital downloads.
(6 April update: The Editorial Dead Zone has kept track of media closings for years.)
(A sample tweet from @themediaisdying. Note the photo of a page from The Honolulu Advertiser.)
I have seen the future of newspapers: pic.twitter.com/UfmWt2OTCP
— Michael Moran (@TheMichaelMoran) January 29, 2014==
11 April update: Opinion piece on newspapers and the Koch brothers, et al. filling the gap
It doesn't mention when the Kochs tried to buy the Tribune news company, though.
The Shondes: "On Your Side"
I first heard of them tonight by a tweet they left at Max Blumenthal's Twitter.
Thursday, April 03, 2014
Another Tsunami Warning
Yesterday afternoon, with news of a Richter 8.2 earthquake in Chile, came the anticipation of a tsunami that would arrive about 3:30 a.m., sixty-eight years after a tidal wave crashed into Hilo and Laupahoehoe (although that tsunami originated in the Aleutian Islands). We've had many tsunami warnings, watches, and advisories in recent years, to the point where people become complacent. But the 2011 tsunami from Japan wrecked the Kona Village Resort and even washed a beach house into Kealakekua Bay.
That afternoon I wondered if I should postpone meeting Hattie at the farmer's market the next morning, but the evening news pointed out no flooding was predicted. The ocean would be rough. I decided to go downtown the next day.
Nearing the market today, I could smell the salt air.
That afternoon I wondered if I should postpone meeting Hattie at the farmer's market the next morning, but the evening news pointed out no flooding was predicted. The ocean would be rough. I decided to go downtown the next day.
Nearing the market today, I could smell the salt air.
Tuesday, April 01, 2014
Monday, March 31, 2014
Kunstler: Attention Deficit
Kunstler: Attention Deficit.
Apparently someone at the US State Department put out the fire in John Kerry’s magnificent head of hair, because he has stopped declaiming (for now) on the urgent need to start World War Three over Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula. In my lifetime, there has never been a more pointless and unnecessary international crisis than the current rumble over Ukraine, and it’s pretty much all our doing.
After all, we kicked it off by financing the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. How do you suppose the US would feel if Moscow engineered the overthrow of the Mexican government? Perhaps a little insecure? Perhaps even tempted to post some troops on the border?
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has engaged in a nonstop projection of power around the world with grievous results in every case except in the breakup of Yugoslavia. The latest adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been the most expensive — at least a trillion dollars — and mayhem still rules in both places. In fact, news reports out of Kabul on NPR this morning raised doubts that the scheduled elections could take place later this week. The country’s so-called Independent Election Commission has been under rocket attack for days, the most popular hotel for foreign journalists was the site of a massacre two weeks ago, and the Taliban remains active slaughtering civilians in the lawless territory outside of the Afghan capital.
Of course, even those dreadful incidents raise the rather fundamental question as to why anything about Afghanistan really matters to the USA. How many years will it take for us to get over the fact that Osama bin Laden ran a training camp for jihadists there? Right now you can be sure that somewhere between Casablanca and East Timor there are training camps for religious maniacs and thousands more casual meet-ups among aggrieved young men with testosterone boiling in their brains and nothing else to occupy their time but playing with guns. Are we going to invade every land where this goes on?
One part of our ever-evolving reality is that the global economy is in the process of cracking up. Despite the claims of one Tom Friedman at The New York Times, Globalism was not a permanent installation in the human condition. Rather, it was a set of transient economic relations brought about by special circumstances in a particular time of history — namely, a hundred years of cheap energy and about fifty years of relative peace between the larger nations. That’s all it was. And now it’s dissolving because energy is increasingly non-cheap and that is causing a lot of friction between nations utterly addicted to high flows of cheap oil and gas.
The friction is manifesting especially in the realm of money and finance. The high energy addicted nations have been trying to offset the rising cost of their addiction, and the absence of conventional economic “growth,” by borrowing ever more money, that is, generating ever more debt. This ends up expressing itself in “money printing,” that range of computerized banking activities that pumps more and more “liquidity” into “advanced” economies. The result of all that is the mis-pricing of just about everything (including especially the cost of borrowing money), and an increasingly antagonistic climate of currency war as all players vie for the supposed advantages devaluation — most particularly the ability to dissolve their own sovereign debts via inflation.
The finer points of all that are debatable as to eventual consequences but we can easily draw some larger conclusions about the macro trends. The global orgy of cheap goods and bubble finance is ending. Nations and indeed regions within nations are going to have to find a new way of making a living on the smaller scale. This is sure to include new arrangements for governance. The breakup of nation states is well underway and is moving from the margins inward to the political center — from the hopeless scrublands of overpopulated nations that will never “develop” to the increasingly sclerotic giants.
The USA is exhibiting pretty severe signs of that sclerosis in the demented behavior of its leaders in episodes such as the current unnecessary manufactured fiasco over Ukraine to the physical deterioration of our towns, roads, bridges, and all the plastic crap we managed to smear over the mutilated landscape to the comportment of our demoralized, mentally inert, drugged-up, tattoo-bedizened populace of twerking slobs.
In short, it is self-evident that Russians have an abiding interest in the Crimea and we have none, while both the material and cultural life of the US is in a shambles and much more worthy of our own attention.
Apparently someone at the US State Department put out the fire in John Kerry’s magnificent head of hair, because he has stopped declaiming (for now) on the urgent need to start World War Three over Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula. In my lifetime, there has never been a more pointless and unnecessary international crisis than the current rumble over Ukraine, and it’s pretty much all our doing.
After all, we kicked it off by financing the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. How do you suppose the US would feel if Moscow engineered the overthrow of the Mexican government? Perhaps a little insecure? Perhaps even tempted to post some troops on the border?
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has engaged in a nonstop projection of power around the world with grievous results in every case except in the breakup of Yugoslavia. The latest adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been the most expensive — at least a trillion dollars — and mayhem still rules in both places. In fact, news reports out of Kabul on NPR this morning raised doubts that the scheduled elections could take place later this week. The country’s so-called Independent Election Commission has been under rocket attack for days, the most popular hotel for foreign journalists was the site of a massacre two weeks ago, and the Taliban remains active slaughtering civilians in the lawless territory outside of the Afghan capital.
Of course, even those dreadful incidents raise the rather fundamental question as to why anything about Afghanistan really matters to the USA. How many years will it take for us to get over the fact that Osama bin Laden ran a training camp for jihadists there? Right now you can be sure that somewhere between Casablanca and East Timor there are training camps for religious maniacs and thousands more casual meet-ups among aggrieved young men with testosterone boiling in their brains and nothing else to occupy their time but playing with guns. Are we going to invade every land where this goes on?
One part of our ever-evolving reality is that the global economy is in the process of cracking up. Despite the claims of one Tom Friedman at The New York Times, Globalism was not a permanent installation in the human condition. Rather, it was a set of transient economic relations brought about by special circumstances in a particular time of history — namely, a hundred years of cheap energy and about fifty years of relative peace between the larger nations. That’s all it was. And now it’s dissolving because energy is increasingly non-cheap and that is causing a lot of friction between nations utterly addicted to high flows of cheap oil and gas.
The friction is manifesting especially in the realm of money and finance. The high energy addicted nations have been trying to offset the rising cost of their addiction, and the absence of conventional economic “growth,” by borrowing ever more money, that is, generating ever more debt. This ends up expressing itself in “money printing,” that range of computerized banking activities that pumps more and more “liquidity” into “advanced” economies. The result of all that is the mis-pricing of just about everything (including especially the cost of borrowing money), and an increasingly antagonistic climate of currency war as all players vie for the supposed advantages devaluation — most particularly the ability to dissolve their own sovereign debts via inflation.
The finer points of all that are debatable as to eventual consequences but we can easily draw some larger conclusions about the macro trends. The global orgy of cheap goods and bubble finance is ending. Nations and indeed regions within nations are going to have to find a new way of making a living on the smaller scale. This is sure to include new arrangements for governance. The breakup of nation states is well underway and is moving from the margins inward to the political center — from the hopeless scrublands of overpopulated nations that will never “develop” to the increasingly sclerotic giants.
The USA is exhibiting pretty severe signs of that sclerosis in the demented behavior of its leaders in episodes such as the current unnecessary manufactured fiasco over Ukraine to the physical deterioration of our towns, roads, bridges, and all the plastic crap we managed to smear over the mutilated landscape to the comportment of our demoralized, mentally inert, drugged-up, tattoo-bedizened populace of twerking slobs.
In short, it is self-evident that Russians have an abiding interest in the Crimea and we have none, while both the material and cultural life of the US is in a shambles and much more worthy of our own attention.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Tough Times for Small Colleges
It was recently announced that BYU-Hawaii would phase out its athletic program within three years.
And the historically black St. Paul's University, which closed last June, is selling its campus on 9 April, in hopes of finding another college to adopt it as an educational institution.
And the historically black St. Paul's University, which closed last June, is selling its campus on 9 April, in hopes of finding another college to adopt it as an educational institution.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Much to Say
I need some time to hash out some things about journalism and politics.
In the meantime I'm glad for the sunny days.
In the meantime I'm glad for the sunny days.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Scientific American: Fracking Hammers Clean Energy Research
The illusion of abundant energy through fracking distracts from renewable-energy research. I found this article through Richard Heinberg's Twitter. Fracking Hammers Clean Energy Research.
Kunstler: Weak Sister
In which Kunstler discusses Russia, Ukraine, and proposals to undercut Russian power with American exports of natural gas to Europe (a.k.a. fracking for freedom).
24 March evening update: John McCain talks tough about Russia but in
this oldie-but-a-goodie of an article, McCain has cultivated extensive ties to the Kremlin. (Another reason I'm glad I never voted for him.) Romney also had harsh things to say about Russia in 2012, and recently, but he had invested in Gazprom through his equity fund, later divesting himself of Russian investments around the start of the 2012 campaign. The Russia Today article is boosterish about the country's business climate, as befits the output of a state-owned network, but it's good to know.
Kunstler: Weak Sister
Was it such a good thing in the post-cold-war decades that the US was regarded as the supreme sole super-power? Look what we did with that privilege: fumbled around like an overfed stumblebum, blundering from one foreign occupation to another, breaking a lot of things and killing a lot of people — under the clownishly-conceived rubric of a “war on terror.”
Why is it in our interest which way Ukraine tilts? It has been in the Russian orbit for hundreds of years under one administration or another. Are we disappointed now that Kiev won’t answer to the floundering Eurocrats of Brussels? Was that ever a realistic expectation? Really, the best outcome for western Europe would be a return to the prior condition of Ukraine as a mute bearskin rug with oil and gas pipelines running through it to the oil and gas starved West. The idea that the US could supply Europe with oil and gas instead of Russia is a preposterous fantasy. Anybody wondering whether Ukraine might turn its armed forces loose on Russian forces supposedly massing at its border should ask themselves how Ukrainian soldiers will get paid.
I’m sure Russia can’t afford to annex all of Ukraine. Russia can barely maintain its paved roads. But it obviously couldn’t afford to give up its rented warm water ports and naval bases in the Crimea, either, with the new Kiev government making so much anti-Russian noise since the “revolution.” The annexation of Crimea changes nothing materially about the disposition of Russian military force in the region. They were already there. Given the size of their navy compared to the other nations in the neighborhood, the Black Sea is Russia’s bathtub and has been as long as anyone can remember. Was the brass at the US State Department shocked to discover this two weeks ago?
The recognition that there are some places on the planet where the US can’t exert its influence has also come as a shock to the so-called American Deep State — that matrix of bureaucratic toxic sludge that labors to pretend to control everything and succeeds mainly in embarrassing itself in a world that is now deeply tending away from the centralized control of anything. Nations are breaking up everywhere and for the moment there is no coherent public discussion of the ramifications. Venice voted the other day to secede from Italy — that is, to not send anymore tax revenue to Rome. That should be interesting. How about Scotland’s independence vote scheduled for September? Judging by the British newspapers, there is next-to-zero concern about that. Then there is the list of failed states, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and probably half the manufactured nations of sub-Saharan Africa, places with no viable economy or polity and too many clamoring poor people. These are parts of the world that will neither develop nor redevelop. In a hundred years they could be no-go zones or just return to howling wilderness.
The US would be better served these days to literally mind its own business. With Detroit in bankruptcy, why would we send Kiev billions of dollars? American urban infrastructures — water, sewer, gas, and electric lines — are falling apart. We have no idea how we’re going to manage most of the crucial economic activities of daily life in ten years, when the illusions of shale gas and shale evaporate in a dark cloud of disenchantment, when we no longer have an airline industry, and most Americans won’t have the means to own automobiles, and there’s not enough diesel fuel to plow Iowa mega-farms, or enough oil and gas based fertilizers or herbicides to pour into the eroding topsoil, and not enough fossil water left in the Oglala aquifer or enough electricity to run the center-pivot sprinklers where the prairie meets the desert? How are Americans going to live and eat and get from Point A to Point B and keep a roof over our heads in this beat-down land?
We’re having no conversation about these things and the political landscape in this country is a wasteland of mirages and dust devils. That is the true weakness of the USA now. We’re incapable of seeing the disorder in our own house. Why should we even glance overseas at others?
24 March evening update: John McCain talks tough about Russia but in
this oldie-but-a-goodie of an article, McCain has cultivated extensive ties to the Kremlin. (Another reason I'm glad I never voted for him.) Romney also had harsh things to say about Russia in 2012, and recently, but he had invested in Gazprom through his equity fund, later divesting himself of Russian investments around the start of the 2012 campaign. The Russia Today article is boosterish about the country's business climate, as befits the output of a state-owned network, but it's good to know.
Kunstler: Weak Sister
Was it such a good thing in the post-cold-war decades that the US was regarded as the supreme sole super-power? Look what we did with that privilege: fumbled around like an overfed stumblebum, blundering from one foreign occupation to another, breaking a lot of things and killing a lot of people — under the clownishly-conceived rubric of a “war on terror.”
Why is it in our interest which way Ukraine tilts? It has been in the Russian orbit for hundreds of years under one administration or another. Are we disappointed now that Kiev won’t answer to the floundering Eurocrats of Brussels? Was that ever a realistic expectation? Really, the best outcome for western Europe would be a return to the prior condition of Ukraine as a mute bearskin rug with oil and gas pipelines running through it to the oil and gas starved West. The idea that the US could supply Europe with oil and gas instead of Russia is a preposterous fantasy. Anybody wondering whether Ukraine might turn its armed forces loose on Russian forces supposedly massing at its border should ask themselves how Ukrainian soldiers will get paid.
I’m sure Russia can’t afford to annex all of Ukraine. Russia can barely maintain its paved roads. But it obviously couldn’t afford to give up its rented warm water ports and naval bases in the Crimea, either, with the new Kiev government making so much anti-Russian noise since the “revolution.” The annexation of Crimea changes nothing materially about the disposition of Russian military force in the region. They were already there. Given the size of their navy compared to the other nations in the neighborhood, the Black Sea is Russia’s bathtub and has been as long as anyone can remember. Was the brass at the US State Department shocked to discover this two weeks ago?
The recognition that there are some places on the planet where the US can’t exert its influence has also come as a shock to the so-called American Deep State — that matrix of bureaucratic toxic sludge that labors to pretend to control everything and succeeds mainly in embarrassing itself in a world that is now deeply tending away from the centralized control of anything. Nations are breaking up everywhere and for the moment there is no coherent public discussion of the ramifications. Venice voted the other day to secede from Italy — that is, to not send anymore tax revenue to Rome. That should be interesting. How about Scotland’s independence vote scheduled for September? Judging by the British newspapers, there is next-to-zero concern about that. Then there is the list of failed states, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and probably half the manufactured nations of sub-Saharan Africa, places with no viable economy or polity and too many clamoring poor people. These are parts of the world that will neither develop nor redevelop. In a hundred years they could be no-go zones or just return to howling wilderness.
The US would be better served these days to literally mind its own business. With Detroit in bankruptcy, why would we send Kiev billions of dollars? American urban infrastructures — water, sewer, gas, and electric lines — are falling apart. We have no idea how we’re going to manage most of the crucial economic activities of daily life in ten years, when the illusions of shale gas and shale evaporate in a dark cloud of disenchantment, when we no longer have an airline industry, and most Americans won’t have the means to own automobiles, and there’s not enough diesel fuel to plow Iowa mega-farms, or enough oil and gas based fertilizers or herbicides to pour into the eroding topsoil, and not enough fossil water left in the Oglala aquifer or enough electricity to run the center-pivot sprinklers where the prairie meets the desert? How are Americans going to live and eat and get from Point A to Point B and keep a roof over our heads in this beat-down land?
We’re having no conversation about these things and the political landscape in this country is a wasteland of mirages and dust devils. That is the true weakness of the USA now. We’re incapable of seeing the disorder in our own house. Why should we even glance overseas at others?
When Mike Huckabee Was Fat-Shaming the Schoolchildren of Arkansas
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16994609/ns/health-childrens_health/t/arkansas-obesity-report-cards-get-failing-grade/
As governor, Mike Huckabee lost a considerable amount of weight through diet and exercise, then got self-righteous about it: wriing a book titled Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork and having children's BMIs (body mass indexes) on their report cards. Not only is the BMI an imprecise measurement of how overweight one is (e.g., muscle weighs more than fat, so a very muscular child could be considered obese), what else did Huckabee do to help reduce obesity among Arkansan schoolchildren?
As governor, Mike Huckabee lost a considerable amount of weight through diet and exercise, then got self-righteous about it: wriing a book titled Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork and having children's BMIs (body mass indexes) on their report cards. Not only is the BMI an imprecise measurement of how overweight one is (e.g., muscle weighs more than fat, so a very muscular child could be considered obese), what else did Huckabee do to help reduce obesity among Arkansan schoolchildren?
Keystone Kochs
The biggest lease holder in Keystone XL isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers. http://t.co/TcpTMgYzyL
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 23, 201424 March update: Like those who urge "fracking for freedom", some point to oil spills as a reason why we need the Keystone XL pipeline.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Saturday, March 22, 2014
The USDA Economic Research Service
The website of theEconomic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The ERS also has a Twitter account.
The ERS also has a Twitter account.
#Nutrition programs are projected to receive 80% of funds under the #farmbill. http://t.co/isBSKuUHsN pic.twitter.com/HZi3qc7OJm
— USDA_ERS (@USDA_ERS) March 12, 2014Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Moving Beyond the Automobile: Highway Removal
I didn't know there was an effort to demolish freeways. A welcome development.
Moving Beyond the Automobile: Highway Removal from Streetfilms on Vimeo.
Sometimes I watch Rachel Maddow for laughs but tonight she is on an anti-Putin rant cheer leading for sanctions. I. Just. Can't.
— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) March 18, 2014Well, I saw the first part of The Rachel Maddow Show yesterday, and she discussed the immensity of ExxonMobil (the most profitable company in history), a company exceeded in size by Russia's state oil company. They're uniting in a $500 billion venture.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Saturday, March 15, 2014
While @jstreetu is silent, conservative FIRE slams the suspension of @NortheasternSJP and chilling of campus speech http://t.co/ZaN5oNYDwV
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 16, 2014Fracking for Freedom (a post in progress)
I've intended to write this post for about a week or so. Basically, the unrest in Ukraine has given pro-fracking advocates an excuse to push for the United States to drill and frack for natural gas, convert it to liquid form (liquefied natural gas, or LNG) and export it to Europe in order to undermine Putin's control of natural gas supplies and routes to Europe. Some pro-frackers throw in criticism of Obama's supposed inaction for good measure. Fracking and exporting are neither cheap nor simple. Here I will post some links to articles and videos.
Fracking Ban Momentum Builds on Both Sides of the Atlantic.
At least twenty liquefication plants are proposed.
Krauthammer urges Obama to get tough with Putin and expedite 25 LNG plants in the process.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) Joins Call for Natural Gas Exports in Response to Ukrainian Crisis.
The article mentions The Natural Gas Act of 1938.
The New York Times: U.S. Seeks to Reduce Ukraine's Reliance on Russia for Natural Gas.
The article notes that "Congressional Republicans have joined major oil and gas producers like ExxonMobil in urging the administration to speed up oil and natural gas exports. Although environmentalists, some Democrats and American manufacturing companies that depend on the competitive advantage of cheap domestic natural gas oppose the effort, they have fallen to the sidelines in the rush." It adds, "The United States does not yet export its natural gas. But the Energy Department has begun to issue permits to American companies to export natural gas starting in 2015. American companies have submitted 21 applications to build port facilities in the United States to export liquefied natural gas by tanker. The agency has approved six of the applications."
Though this isn't about fracking to export LNG, it is about the Ukraine. Orlov asks, Is Anyone Really in Control in Ukraine?
Fracking is not the only thing being pushed in the name of "national security" and "protecting our friends and allies." On Thursday, retired general James Jones (a former national security advisor in the Obama administration) testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. Rejecting it would make Putin's day, he says. Jones did not disclose his extensive industry ties before testifying. (FYI: There are no disclosure rules for hearing witnesses in the United States Senate.)
This is a C-SPAN video of the hearing.
17 March update: The idea that America can displace Russia as the provider of natural gas is not new, as Orlov points out in his blog post "Shale Gas: The View from Russia."
24 March update: The Nation: "How the Gas Lobby is Using the Crimea Crisis to Push Bad Policy and Make More Money."
Fracking Ban Momentum Builds on Both Sides of the Atlantic.
At least twenty liquefication plants are proposed.
Krauthammer urges Obama to get tough with Putin and expedite 25 LNG plants in the process.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) Joins Call for Natural Gas Exports in Response to Ukrainian Crisis.
The article mentions The Natural Gas Act of 1938.
The New York Times: U.S. Seeks to Reduce Ukraine's Reliance on Russia for Natural Gas.
The article notes that "Congressional Republicans have joined major oil and gas producers like ExxonMobil in urging the administration to speed up oil and natural gas exports. Although environmentalists, some Democrats and American manufacturing companies that depend on the competitive advantage of cheap domestic natural gas oppose the effort, they have fallen to the sidelines in the rush." It adds, "The United States does not yet export its natural gas. But the Energy Department has begun to issue permits to American companies to export natural gas starting in 2015. American companies have submitted 21 applications to build port facilities in the United States to export liquefied natural gas by tanker. The agency has approved six of the applications."
Though this isn't about fracking to export LNG, it is about the Ukraine. Orlov asks, Is Anyone Really in Control in Ukraine?
Fracking is not the only thing being pushed in the name of "national security" and "protecting our friends and allies." On Thursday, retired general James Jones (a former national security advisor in the Obama administration) testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. Rejecting it would make Putin's day, he says. Jones did not disclose his extensive industry ties before testifying. (FYI: There are no disclosure rules for hearing witnesses in the United States Senate.)
This is a C-SPAN video of the hearing.
17 March update: The idea that America can displace Russia as the provider of natural gas is not new, as Orlov points out in his blog post "Shale Gas: The View from Russia."
24 March update: The Nation: "How the Gas Lobby is Using the Crimea Crisis to Push Bad Policy and Make More Money."
Thursday, March 13, 2014
D.J. Max Blumenthal
Tonight Max Blumenthal was a guest DJ on the New Jersey-based freeform radio station WFMU and played these songs. The show concluded just before 9 p.m. Hawaii time. He was glad for this change of pace.
More soon.
More soon.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
More on the Future of Oil, and Rand Paul's Proposal to Export Natural Gas
Best Peak Oil interview in months. http://t.co/p1bJDjVlct
— Richard Heinberg (@richardheinberg) February 17, 2014'Peak is Dead' and the Future of Oil Supply."
Dan Dicker, an oil trader, was on All In With Chris Hayes tonight (10 March) to discuss Rand Paul's proposal on Fox News Sunday to drill everywhere for petroleum*. Chris noted the irony of Rand Paul's pro-drilling stance, as he represents a state where coal is the main energy source. In other words, fracking has displaced coal.
Dicker says not only is it unprofitable to export liquefied natural gas, high prices for LNG are not guaranteed. Most of all, the United States risks becoming a petrostate like Venezuela or--Russia, using petroleum as political leverage.
Again, I'll try to compile some of the CPAC material about fracking for freedom soon.
11 March update. From CounterPunch: "Up in Smoke: A Record 36 Percent of North Dakota Fracked Gas Flared in December.
* From the Fox News Sunday transcript (linked above):
PAUL: ...The other thing is Putin needs to be warned, and I'm perfectly willing to tell him, that if he does occupy Ukraine, it will be chaos for him and for the world. If he creates a Syria out of Ukraine, what's going to happen is 80 percent of his oil and gas is going through Ukraine. It will be a disaster for him. And so, he needs to be fully aware of that.
The other thing I've said is that I would do something differently than the president because that would immediately get every obstacle out of the way for our export of oil and gas, and I would begin drilling in every possible conceivable place within our territories in order to have production that we could supply Europe with if it's interrupted from Ukraine.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Kunstler: Deep State Descending
Kunstler: Deep State Descending.
And so it’s back to the Kardashians for the US of ADD. As of Sunday The New York Times kicked Ukraine off its front page, a sure sign that the establishment (let’s revive that useful word) is sensitive to the growing ridicule over its claims of national interest in that floundering, bedraggled crypto-nation. The Kardashians* sound enough like one of the central Asian ethnic groups battling over the Crimea lo these many centuries — Circassians, Meskhetian Turkmen, Tatars, Karachay-Cherkessians — so the sore-beset American public must be content that they’re getting the news-of-the-world. Perhaps one of those groups was once led by a Great Kanye.
Secretary of State John Kerry has shut his pie-hole, too, for the moment, as it becomes more obvious that Ukraine happens to be Russia’s headache (and neighbor). The playbook of great nations is going obsolete in this new era of great nations having, by necessity, to become smaller broken-up nations. It could easily happen in the USA too as our grandiose Deep State descends further into incompetence, irrelevance, buffoonery, and practical bankruptcy.
Theories abound about what drives this crisis and all the credible stories revolve around the question of natural gas. I go a little further, actually, and say that the specter of declining energy sources worldwide is behind this particular eruption of disorder in one sad corner of the globe and that we’re sure to see more symptoms of that same basic problem in one country after another from here on, moving from the political margins to the centers. The world is out of cheap oil and gas and, at the same time, out of capital to produce the non-cheap oil and gas. So what’s going on is a scramble between desperate producers and populations worried about shivering in the dark. The Ukraine is just a threadbare carpet-runner between them.
Contributing to our own country’s excessive vanity in the arena of nations is the mistaken belief that we have so much shale gas of our own that we barely know what to do with it. This is certainly the view, for instance, of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who complained last week about bureaucratic barriers to the building of new natural gas export terminals, with the idea that we could easily take over the European gas market from Russia.** Boehner is out of his mind. Does he not know that the early big American shale gas plays (Barnett in Texas, Haynesville in Louisiana, Fayettville in Arkansas) are already winding down after just ten years of production? That’s on top of the growing austerity in available capital for the so-far-unprofitable shale gas industry. That’s on top of the scarcity of capital for building new liquid natural gas terminals and ditto the fleet of specialized refrigerated tanker ships required to haul the stuff across the ocean. File under “not going to happen.”
Even the idea that we will have enough natural gas for our own needs in the USA beyond the short term ought to be viewed with skepticism. What happens, for instance, when we finally realize that it costs more to frack it out of the ground than people can pay for it? I’ll tell you exactly what will happen: the gas will remain underground bound up in its “tight rock,” possibly forever, and a lot of Americans will freeze to death.
The most amazing part of the current story is that US political leaders are so ignorant of the facts. They apparently look only to the public relations officers in the oil-and-gas industries and no further. Does Barack Obama still believe, as he said in 2011, that we have a hundred years of shale gas?” That was just something that a flack from the Chesapeake Corporation told to some White House aide over a bottle of Lalou Bize-Leroy Domaine d’Auvenay Les Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru. [I added a link should you want to learn more about this wine.--P.Z.] Government officials believe similar fairy tales about shale oil from the Bakken in North Dakota — a way overhyped resource play likely to pass its own peak at the end of this year.
If you travel around the upper Hudson Valley, north of Albany, where I live, you would see towns and landscapes every bit as desolate as a former Soviet republic. In fact, our towns look infinitely worse than the street-views of Ukraine’s population centers. Ours were built of glue and vinyl, with most of the work completed thirty years ago so that it’s all delaminating under a yellow-gray patina of auto emissions. Inside these miserable structures, American citizens with no prospects and no hope huddle around electric space heaters. They have no idea how they’re going to pay the bill for that come April. They already spent the money on tattoos and heroin.
===
*I like the recent episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which I began watching again. In fact, they (Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, and Rob) are part-Armenian. Their father was the high-powered attorney Robert Kardashian, best known for being one of O.J. Simpson's defense lawyers. The show usually airs in tandem with #Rich Kids of Beverly Hills, that I'll discuss in another post.
** This was a big topic at CPAC. I call it "Fracking for freedom." I'll address this in more detail later.
And so it’s back to the Kardashians for the US of ADD. As of Sunday The New York Times kicked Ukraine off its front page, a sure sign that the establishment (let’s revive that useful word) is sensitive to the growing ridicule over its claims of national interest in that floundering, bedraggled crypto-nation. The Kardashians* sound enough like one of the central Asian ethnic groups battling over the Crimea lo these many centuries — Circassians, Meskhetian Turkmen, Tatars, Karachay-Cherkessians — so the sore-beset American public must be content that they’re getting the news-of-the-world. Perhaps one of those groups was once led by a Great Kanye.
Secretary of State John Kerry has shut his pie-hole, too, for the moment, as it becomes more obvious that Ukraine happens to be Russia’s headache (and neighbor). The playbook of great nations is going obsolete in this new era of great nations having, by necessity, to become smaller broken-up nations. It could easily happen in the USA too as our grandiose Deep State descends further into incompetence, irrelevance, buffoonery, and practical bankruptcy.
Theories abound about what drives this crisis and all the credible stories revolve around the question of natural gas. I go a little further, actually, and say that the specter of declining energy sources worldwide is behind this particular eruption of disorder in one sad corner of the globe and that we’re sure to see more symptoms of that same basic problem in one country after another from here on, moving from the political margins to the centers. The world is out of cheap oil and gas and, at the same time, out of capital to produce the non-cheap oil and gas. So what’s going on is a scramble between desperate producers and populations worried about shivering in the dark. The Ukraine is just a threadbare carpet-runner between them.
Contributing to our own country’s excessive vanity in the arena of nations is the mistaken belief that we have so much shale gas of our own that we barely know what to do with it. This is certainly the view, for instance, of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who complained last week about bureaucratic barriers to the building of new natural gas export terminals, with the idea that we could easily take over the European gas market from Russia.** Boehner is out of his mind. Does he not know that the early big American shale gas plays (Barnett in Texas, Haynesville in Louisiana, Fayettville in Arkansas) are already winding down after just ten years of production? That’s on top of the growing austerity in available capital for the so-far-unprofitable shale gas industry. That’s on top of the scarcity of capital for building new liquid natural gas terminals and ditto the fleet of specialized refrigerated tanker ships required to haul the stuff across the ocean. File under “not going to happen.”
Even the idea that we will have enough natural gas for our own needs in the USA beyond the short term ought to be viewed with skepticism. What happens, for instance, when we finally realize that it costs more to frack it out of the ground than people can pay for it? I’ll tell you exactly what will happen: the gas will remain underground bound up in its “tight rock,” possibly forever, and a lot of Americans will freeze to death.
The most amazing part of the current story is that US political leaders are so ignorant of the facts. They apparently look only to the public relations officers in the oil-and-gas industries and no further. Does Barack Obama still believe, as he said in 2011, that we have a hundred years of shale gas?” That was just something that a flack from the Chesapeake Corporation told to some White House aide over a bottle of Lalou Bize-Leroy Domaine d’Auvenay Les Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru. [I added a link should you want to learn more about this wine.--P.Z.] Government officials believe similar fairy tales about shale oil from the Bakken in North Dakota — a way overhyped resource play likely to pass its own peak at the end of this year.
If you travel around the upper Hudson Valley, north of Albany, where I live, you would see towns and landscapes every bit as desolate as a former Soviet republic. In fact, our towns look infinitely worse than the street-views of Ukraine’s population centers. Ours were built of glue and vinyl, with most of the work completed thirty years ago so that it’s all delaminating under a yellow-gray patina of auto emissions. Inside these miserable structures, American citizens with no prospects and no hope huddle around electric space heaters. They have no idea how they’re going to pay the bill for that come April. They already spent the money on tattoos and heroin.
===
*I like the recent episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which I began watching again. In fact, they (Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, and Rob) are part-Armenian. Their father was the high-powered attorney Robert Kardashian, best known for being one of O.J. Simpson's defense lawyers. The show usually airs in tandem with #Rich Kids of Beverly Hills, that I'll discuss in another post.
** This was a big topic at CPAC. I call it "Fracking for freedom." I'll address this in more detail later.
Proyect vs. Blumenthal
The things one finds at three in the morning.
Louis Proyect: Thoughts Triggered by Max Blumenthal Tweets About Ukrainian Fascists.
Louis Proyect: Thoughts Triggered by Max Blumenthal Tweets About Ukrainian Fascists.
Friday, March 07, 2014
Proyect vs. Orlov
Proyect: The Disinformation Campaign on the Ukraine Gathers Momentum.
Orlov: Reichstag Fire in Kiev. Proyect doesn't even deign to mention Orlov's name.
I don't know much about what's happening there, like most everyone, and one can dispute Orlov's article, but dismissing it as a "pile of garbage" means not bothering to read Orlov's other posts, in which he addresses the post-Soviet collapse, which he attributes to a crash in oil revenues, not the U.S.-Russian arms race.
Orlov: Reichstag Fire in Kiev. Proyect doesn't even deign to mention Orlov's name.
I don't know much about what's happening there, like most everyone, and one can dispute Orlov's article, but dismissing it as a "pile of garbage" means not bothering to read Orlov's other posts, in which he addresses the post-Soviet collapse, which he attributes to a crash in oil revenues, not the U.S.-Russian arms race.
Thursday, March 06, 2014
Archaeological Survey of India
I added the website of the Archaeological Survey of India to my list of links. See All Links in the sidebar.
12 Years a Slave
In time, people will realize 12 Years a Slave was the Crash of 2013.
Comparing 12 Years a Slave with Gordon Parks's Solomon Northup's Odyssey.
Comparing 12 Years a Slave with Gordon Parks's Solomon Northup's Odyssey.
Monday, March 03, 2014
The Oscars
The Oscars is a nickname. ABC should go back to titling it the Academy Awards.
https://twitter.com/3xchair
https://twitter.com/3xchair
Only in Chelsea can you hear young men leaving #Oscar parties singing that awful #Frozen song
— armond white (@3xchair) March 3, 2014When #DarleneLove sang gospel @Oscars why did ABC cut to #SteveMcQueen? pic.twitter.com/E1OGxhRDzX
— armond white (@3xchair) March 3, 2014Kunstler: Let's You and Him Fight
Kunstler on Russia vs. Ukraine.
So, now we are threatening to start World War Three because Russia is trying to control the chaos in a failed state on its border — a state that our own government spooks provoked into failure? The last time I checked, there was a list of countries that the USA had sent troops, armed ships, and aircraft into recently, and for reasons similar to Russia’s in Crimea: the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, none of them even anywhere close to American soil. I don’t remember Russia threatening confrontations with the USA over these adventures.
The phones at the White House and the congressional offices ought to be ringing off the hook with angry US citizens objecting to the posturing of our elected officials. There ought to be crowds with bobbing placards in Farragut Square reminding the occupant of 1400 [sic] Pennsylvania Avenue* how ridiculous this makes us look.
The saber-rattlers at The New York Times were sounding like the promoters of a World Wrestling Federation stunt Monday morning when they said in a Page One story:
“The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and at its heart, the advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin?”
Are they out of their chicken-hawk minds over there? It sounds like a ploy out of the old Eric Berne playbook: Let’s You and Him Fight. What the USA and its European factotums ought to do is mind their own business and stop issuing idle threats. They set the scene for the Ukrainian melt-down by trying to tilt the government their way, financing a pro-Euroland revolt, only to see their sponsored proxy dissidents give way to a claque of armed neo-Nazis, whose first official act was to outlaw the use of the Russian language in a country with millions of long-established Russian-speakers. This is apart, of course, from the fact Ukraine had been until very recently a province of Russia’s former Soviet empire.
Secretary of State John Kerry — a haircut in search of a brain — is winging to Kiev tomorrow to pretend that the USA has a direct interest in what happens there. Since US behavior is so patently hypocritical, it raises the pretty basic question: what are our motives? I don’t think they amount to anything more than international grandstanding — based on the delusion that we have the power and the right to control everything on the planet, which is based, in turn, on our current mood of extreme insecurity as our own ongoing spate of bad choices sets the table for a banquet of consequences.
America can’t even manage its own affairs. We ignore our own gathering energy crisis, telling ourselves the fairy tale that shale oil will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. We paper over all of our financial degeneracy and wink at financial criminals. Our infrastructure is falling apart. We’re constructing an edifice of surveillance and social control that would make the late Dr. Joseph Goebbels turn green in his grave with envy while we squander our dwindling political capital on stupid gender confusion battles.
The Russians, on the other hand, have every right to protect their interests along their own border, to protect the persons and property of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, not long ago, were citizens of a greater Russia, to discourage neo-Nazi activity in their back-yard, and most of all to try to stabilize a region that has little history and experience with independence. They also have to contend with the bankruptcy of Ukraine, which may be the principal cause of its current crack-up. Ukraine is deep in hock to Russia, but also to a network of Western banks, and it remains to be seen whether the failure of these linked obligations will lead to contagion throughout the global financial system. It only takes one additional falling snowflake to push a snow-field into criticality.
Welcome to the era of failed states. We’ve already seen plenty of action around the world and we’re going to see more as resource and capital scarcities drive down standards of living and lower the trust horizon. The world is not going in the direction that Tom Friedman and the globalists thought. Anything organized at the giant scale is now in trouble, nation-states in particular. The USA is not immune to this trend, whatever we imagine about ourselves for now.
===
* It's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.--P.Z.
So, now we are threatening to start World War Three because Russia is trying to control the chaos in a failed state on its border — a state that our own government spooks provoked into failure? The last time I checked, there was a list of countries that the USA had sent troops, armed ships, and aircraft into recently, and for reasons similar to Russia’s in Crimea: the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, none of them even anywhere close to American soil. I don’t remember Russia threatening confrontations with the USA over these adventures.
The phones at the White House and the congressional offices ought to be ringing off the hook with angry US citizens objecting to the posturing of our elected officials. There ought to be crowds with bobbing placards in Farragut Square reminding the occupant of 1400 [sic] Pennsylvania Avenue* how ridiculous this makes us look.
The saber-rattlers at The New York Times were sounding like the promoters of a World Wrestling Federation stunt Monday morning when they said in a Page One story:
“The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and at its heart, the advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin?”
Are they out of their chicken-hawk minds over there? It sounds like a ploy out of the old Eric Berne playbook: Let’s You and Him Fight. What the USA and its European factotums ought to do is mind their own business and stop issuing idle threats. They set the scene for the Ukrainian melt-down by trying to tilt the government their way, financing a pro-Euroland revolt, only to see their sponsored proxy dissidents give way to a claque of armed neo-Nazis, whose first official act was to outlaw the use of the Russian language in a country with millions of long-established Russian-speakers. This is apart, of course, from the fact Ukraine had been until very recently a province of Russia’s former Soviet empire.
Secretary of State John Kerry — a haircut in search of a brain — is winging to Kiev tomorrow to pretend that the USA has a direct interest in what happens there. Since US behavior is so patently hypocritical, it raises the pretty basic question: what are our motives? I don’t think they amount to anything more than international grandstanding — based on the delusion that we have the power and the right to control everything on the planet, which is based, in turn, on our current mood of extreme insecurity as our own ongoing spate of bad choices sets the table for a banquet of consequences.
America can’t even manage its own affairs. We ignore our own gathering energy crisis, telling ourselves the fairy tale that shale oil will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. We paper over all of our financial degeneracy and wink at financial criminals. Our infrastructure is falling apart. We’re constructing an edifice of surveillance and social control that would make the late Dr. Joseph Goebbels turn green in his grave with envy while we squander our dwindling political capital on stupid gender confusion battles.
The Russians, on the other hand, have every right to protect their interests along their own border, to protect the persons and property of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, not long ago, were citizens of a greater Russia, to discourage neo-Nazi activity in their back-yard, and most of all to try to stabilize a region that has little history and experience with independence. They also have to contend with the bankruptcy of Ukraine, which may be the principal cause of its current crack-up. Ukraine is deep in hock to Russia, but also to a network of Western banks, and it remains to be seen whether the failure of these linked obligations will lead to contagion throughout the global financial system. It only takes one additional falling snowflake to push a snow-field into criticality.
Welcome to the era of failed states. We’ve already seen plenty of action around the world and we’re going to see more as resource and capital scarcities drive down standards of living and lower the trust horizon. The world is not going in the direction that Tom Friedman and the globalists thought. Anything organized at the giant scale is now in trouble, nation-states in particular. The USA is not immune to this trend, whatever we imagine about ourselves for now.
===
* It's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.--P.Z.
Sunday, March 02, 2014
Where's the Agency?
12 Years A Slave: "Black viewers are shown a portrait of themselves only as sufferers and victims." http://t.co/QdC5DxMgwt
— Thaddeus Russell (@ThaddeusRussell) March 2, 2014As I've read elsewhere, will they ever show a movie about Nat Turner?
Also, Stanley Crouch mentioned in a recent column that in 1984 Gordon Parks made a movie for PBS based on Solomon Northrup's life. It's probably a lot different from 12 Years a Slave.
Friday, February 28, 2014
Hey America, you can skip the cliched Charlie Sheenish d-baggery of THE WOLF OF WALL ST & just read @Eileen15Jones: https://t.co/DzSvkzXXUy
— Matt Karp (@karpmj) February 28, 2014Or you can just watch Wall Street, which starred Charlie Sheen, in his best role.
The Baffler vs. The New York Times
The Baffler vs. The New York Times And this after The Times referred to The Baffler as "A compendium of literary curveballs."
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
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