Worth thinking about.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/how-english-ruined-indian-literature.html?_r=0
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Monday, April 20, 2015
Kunstler: Change They Don't Believe In
With a Bush-Clinton matchup, people will either abstain from casting their presidential votes for the Big Two or will choose from among the third parties.--P.Z.
Kunstler: Change They Don't Believe In.
The unfortunate consequence of not allowing the process of “creative destruction” to occur in banking and Big Business is that the historic forces behind it will seek expression elsewhere in the realm of politics and governance. The desperate antics of central banks to cover up financial failure can’t help but provoke political upheaval, including war.
It’s a worldwide phenomenon and one result will be the crackup of economic relations — thought by many to be permanent — that we call “globalism.” The USA has suffered mightily from globalism, by which a bonanza of cheap “consumer” products made by Asian factory slaves has masked the degeneration of local economic vitality, family life, behavioral norms, and social cohesion. That crackup is already underway in the currency wars aptly named by Jim Rickards, [Link added by me.--P.Z.] and you can bet that soon enough it will lead to the death of the 12,000-mile supply lines from China to WalMart — eventually to the death of WalMart itself (and everything like it). Another result will be the interruption of oil export supply lines.
The USA as currently engineered (no local economies, universal suburban sprawl, big box commerce, despotic agribiz) won’t survive these disruptions and one might also wonder whether our political institutions will survive. The crop of 2016 White House aspirants shows no comprehension for the play of these forces and the field is ripe for epic disruption. The prospect of another Clinton – Bush election contest is a perfect setup for the collapse of the two parties sponsoring them, ushering in a period of wild political turmoil. Just because you don’t see it this very moment, doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking on the margins.
This same moment (in history) the American thinking classes are lost in raptures of techno-wishfulness. They can imagine the glory of watching Fast and Furious 7 on a phone in a self-driving electric car, but they can’t imagine rebuilt local economies where citizens get to play both an economic and social role in their communities. They can trumpet the bionic engineering of artificial hamburger meat, but not careful, small-scale farming in which many hands can find work and meaning.
The true genius of Hillary is that she manages to epitomize every failure of our current political life: the obsessive micro-manipulation of image, the obscene moneygrubbing, the tired cronyism, the entitlement masquerading as sexual equality. Mostly, though, she has no idea where history is taking us, in case you’re wondering at the stupefying platitudes offered up as representative of her thinking. I’m not advocating for this gentleman, but it will at least be interesting to see Martin O’Malley jump into the race and call bullshit on her, which he will do, literally, because he has nothing to lose by doing it. The eunuchs on The New York Times Op Ed page certainly won’t do it.
What happens on the world financial scene will determine the flow of events up into the 2016 election. The built-up tensions and fragilities are begging for release. The defining instant might be Greece’s unwillingness to fork over another debt payment, or the death of the shale oil “miracle,” or some act by Saudi Arabia’s enemies, or some chain of exploding booby-traps in the shadow banking netherworld. The great surprise for America especially will be the recognition that our current living arrangements have no future. That’s the only thing that will prompt a new consensus to form around some alternate, more plausible future, and the emergence of a generation willing to fight for it, even if it requires some real creative destruction of the things that are killing us anyway.
Kunstler: Change They Don't Believe In.
The unfortunate consequence of not allowing the process of “creative destruction” to occur in banking and Big Business is that the historic forces behind it will seek expression elsewhere in the realm of politics and governance. The desperate antics of central banks to cover up financial failure can’t help but provoke political upheaval, including war.
It’s a worldwide phenomenon and one result will be the crackup of economic relations — thought by many to be permanent — that we call “globalism.” The USA has suffered mightily from globalism, by which a bonanza of cheap “consumer” products made by Asian factory slaves has masked the degeneration of local economic vitality, family life, behavioral norms, and social cohesion. That crackup is already underway in the currency wars aptly named by Jim Rickards, [Link added by me.--P.Z.] and you can bet that soon enough it will lead to the death of the 12,000-mile supply lines from China to WalMart — eventually to the death of WalMart itself (and everything like it). Another result will be the interruption of oil export supply lines.
The USA as currently engineered (no local economies, universal suburban sprawl, big box commerce, despotic agribiz) won’t survive these disruptions and one might also wonder whether our political institutions will survive. The crop of 2016 White House aspirants shows no comprehension for the play of these forces and the field is ripe for epic disruption. The prospect of another Clinton – Bush election contest is a perfect setup for the collapse of the two parties sponsoring them, ushering in a period of wild political turmoil. Just because you don’t see it this very moment, doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking on the margins.
This same moment (in history) the American thinking classes are lost in raptures of techno-wishfulness. They can imagine the glory of watching Fast and Furious 7 on a phone in a self-driving electric car, but they can’t imagine rebuilt local economies where citizens get to play both an economic and social role in their communities. They can trumpet the bionic engineering of artificial hamburger meat, but not careful, small-scale farming in which many hands can find work and meaning.
The true genius of Hillary is that she manages to epitomize every failure of our current political life: the obsessive micro-manipulation of image, the obscene moneygrubbing, the tired cronyism, the entitlement masquerading as sexual equality. Mostly, though, she has no idea where history is taking us, in case you’re wondering at the stupefying platitudes offered up as representative of her thinking. I’m not advocating for this gentleman, but it will at least be interesting to see Martin O’Malley jump into the race and call bullshit on her, which he will do, literally, because he has nothing to lose by doing it. The eunuchs on The New York Times Op Ed page certainly won’t do it.
What happens on the world financial scene will determine the flow of events up into the 2016 election. The built-up tensions and fragilities are begging for release. The defining instant might be Greece’s unwillingness to fork over another debt payment, or the death of the shale oil “miracle,” or some act by Saudi Arabia’s enemies, or some chain of exploding booby-traps in the shadow banking netherworld. The great surprise for America especially will be the recognition that our current living arrangements have no future. That’s the only thing that will prompt a new consensus to form around some alternate, more plausible future, and the emergence of a generation willing to fight for it, even if it requires some real creative destruction of the things that are killing us anyway.
Library Book Sale
I picked up two boxes of books at the library book sale on Saturday. More later.
20 April update. Among my finds:
--Outline of Philippine Mythology by F. Landa Jocano (Manila, 1969).
20 April update. Among my finds:
--Outline of Philippine Mythology by F. Landa Jocano (Manila, 1969).
Auwe.
MT @JohnFea1: No desks in OAH hotel rooms. Owners say Millennials don't like them. http://t.co/LITGb1kRRA #OAH2015 pic.twitter.com/jqhOBNGQXR
— Seth Denbo (@seth_denbo) April 18, 2015Thursday, April 16, 2015
HB 464 Would Require Minor Party Nominees to Pay Filing Fees
A press release from the Libertarian Party on HB 464.
----
For immediate release
April 13, 2015
Texas Republican attacks Libertarian voting rights
Republican state representative Drew Springer of Muenster, Texas has filed HB 464, a bill to require minor party nominees to pay filing fees.
Libertarian National Committee executive director Wes Benedict commented, "Republican Drew Springer's bill is a poll tax on minor parties, including the Libertarian Party. It's an injustice, and it's unconstitutional."
The bill would require all minor party nominees to pay fees to be allowed to appear on the November election ballot. The fees range as high as $5,000, depending on the office.
Kurt Hildebrand, chair of the Libertarian Party of Texas, said, "This law would effectively shut down third parties in Texas, and I believe that is the intent behind it."
According to ballot access expert Richard Winger, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled twice that this sort of filing fee is unconstitutional.
On April 6, the Texas House Elections Committee voted 5-1 in favor of the bill. (Five Republicans voted yes, one Democrat voted no.)
Similar bills have been filed by Texas Republicans in past legislative sessions.
Benedict explained, "Republicans have claimed in the past that their bills make things 'fair' because Republicans and Democrats have to pay filing fees for their primaries. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"Republicans and Democrats have to pay primary fees because their primary elections are financed by taxpayers. Political parties are private organizations, even though they are regulated by the state. Nevertheless, taxpayers are forced to hand over a lot of money to help the Republicans and Democrats pick their nominees. The filing fees pay for a tiny fraction of these costs.
"Libertarians and Greens, on the other hand, don't use primaries. We don't force the taxpayers to pay for our nomination process. So there's no reason our candidates should be forced to pay any fees.
"If Republicans and Democrats are upset about their primary filing fees, they should just get rid of them. They control 100% of the seats in the legislature, so it should be pretty easy for them.
"The purpose of Drew Springer's bill is simple: it has nothing to do with fairness, it's just an attempt to shut all minor parties out of the election process. If this bill gets passed, there will be many more unopposed Republicans and unopposed Democrats in the 2016 elections.
"Representative Drew Springer has also filed a bill to prohibit school districts from offering same-sex couples the same benefits as opposite-sex couples. That gives us an idea of what 'fair' means to him.
"I urge legislators who support democracy to oppose this poll tax, which is designed to silence minority opinions.
"This is America. The people should decide who gets to run for office, not the incumbents. Libertarians stand for freedom on every issue, and we oppose bullies who would try to stop us from participating in the election process."
Benedict added, "Texas isn't the only place that Republicans are trying to step on voting rights. In New Hampshire, the Republican National Committee is trying to get involved in a lawsuit over the state's petitioning law. The law was changed in 2013 to make it harder for small parties to get petition signatures to appear on the ballot. The Libertarian Party filed a lawsuit against the change, but the Republican National Committee is trying to intervene in support of the change."
Wes Benedict is the executive director of the Libertarian National Committee, and he served as executive director of the Libertarian Party of Texas from 2004 to 2008.
----
For immediate release
April 13, 2015
Texas Republican attacks Libertarian voting rights
Republican state representative Drew Springer of Muenster, Texas has filed HB 464, a bill to require minor party nominees to pay filing fees.
Libertarian National Committee executive director Wes Benedict commented, "Republican Drew Springer's bill is a poll tax on minor parties, including the Libertarian Party. It's an injustice, and it's unconstitutional."
The bill would require all minor party nominees to pay fees to be allowed to appear on the November election ballot. The fees range as high as $5,000, depending on the office.
Kurt Hildebrand, chair of the Libertarian Party of Texas, said, "This law would effectively shut down third parties in Texas, and I believe that is the intent behind it."
According to ballot access expert Richard Winger, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled twice that this sort of filing fee is unconstitutional.
On April 6, the Texas House Elections Committee voted 5-1 in favor of the bill. (Five Republicans voted yes, one Democrat voted no.)
Similar bills have been filed by Texas Republicans in past legislative sessions.
Benedict explained, "Republicans have claimed in the past that their bills make things 'fair' because Republicans and Democrats have to pay filing fees for their primaries. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"Republicans and Democrats have to pay primary fees because their primary elections are financed by taxpayers. Political parties are private organizations, even though they are regulated by the state. Nevertheless, taxpayers are forced to hand over a lot of money to help the Republicans and Democrats pick their nominees. The filing fees pay for a tiny fraction of these costs.
"Libertarians and Greens, on the other hand, don't use primaries. We don't force the taxpayers to pay for our nomination process. So there's no reason our candidates should be forced to pay any fees.
"If Republicans and Democrats are upset about their primary filing fees, they should just get rid of them. They control 100% of the seats in the legislature, so it should be pretty easy for them.
"The purpose of Drew Springer's bill is simple: it has nothing to do with fairness, it's just an attempt to shut all minor parties out of the election process. If this bill gets passed, there will be many more unopposed Republicans and unopposed Democrats in the 2016 elections.
"Representative Drew Springer has also filed a bill to prohibit school districts from offering same-sex couples the same benefits as opposite-sex couples. That gives us an idea of what 'fair' means to him.
"I urge legislators who support democracy to oppose this poll tax, which is designed to silence minority opinions.
"This is America. The people should decide who gets to run for office, not the incumbents. Libertarians stand for freedom on every issue, and we oppose bullies who would try to stop us from participating in the election process."
Benedict added, "Texas isn't the only place that Republicans are trying to step on voting rights. In New Hampshire, the Republican National Committee is trying to get involved in a lawsuit over the state's petitioning law. The law was changed in 2013 to make it harder for small parties to get petition signatures to appear on the ballot. The Libertarian Party filed a lawsuit against the change, but the Republican National Committee is trying to intervene in support of the change."
Wes Benedict is the executive director of the Libertarian National Committee, and he served as executive director of the Libertarian Party of Texas from 2004 to 2008.
Monday, April 13, 2015
Kunstler: "She's Back."
Kunstler comments on Hillary Clinton's formal announcement of her presidential campaign.
Kunstler: "She's Back."
Kunstler: "She's Back."
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Friday, April 10, 2015
#untoldhistories
I've been checking out the Twitter of @ArchivesNext for a few weeks now. Through it I've found many fascinating things about archives, archival science, and its practitioners. There was a retweet from @jmddrake, the Twitter of digital archivist Jarrett M. Drake, which led me to his Twitter, where I saw this.
Robinson "Break the rules, save the records: human rights archives and the search for justice in East Timor" #untoldhistories
— Jarrett M. Drake (@jmddrake) April 10, 2015Wednesday, April 08, 2015
Various Things
Some movie reviews by Armond White. (Furious 7, Effie Gray).
Seedy Rahm won a second term as mayor of Chicago.
Seedy Rahm won a second term as mayor of Chicago.
Students at @uwoshkosh are now using Pop Up to search & discover oral histories from @WIS_History: http://t.co/lEp1OQ6qXU h/t @pehedges!
— Pop Up Archive (@PopUpArchive) April 7, 2015Via @lynnemthomas ALA Fact Sheet w/list of libraries in need of book donations. http://t.co/UmdIaFUMgc
— Kate Theimer (@archivesnext) April 8, 2015It's finally starting to feel like spring! pic.twitter.com/YiA9XL4xub
— Otter Emergency (@Otter_Emergency) April 7, 2015Monday, April 06, 2015
Friday, April 03, 2015
The Drought in California
When I went to Sacramento last August, California was in its drought. I remember brilliantly sunny skies, but it was never blazingly hot, as we were told to expect. And now there is even less water. (I still plan to write about my trip. It's too significant not to.)
Residents Conserving Water During Drought.
Residents Conserving Water During Drought.
Monday, March 30, 2015
Kunstler: The Way Out
Kunstler: The Way Out.
It’s not what most people think: a return to some hypothetical “normality,” with the ghost of Ronnie Reagan beaming down like a sun-god under his lopsided pompadour, and all the happy self-driving GM cars toodling back and forth from WalMart-to-home loaded to the scuppers with new electric pop-tart warmers and 3-D underwear printers. (Or drone deliveries of same from Amazon.com.)
I mean, surely the thinking folk out there must be asking themselves: what is the way out of this Federal Reserve three-card-monte, one-percenter-stuffing, so-called “economy,” and what is the destination of this society when that mendacious model for living fails?
I digress for a moment: there was a chap named Richard Duncan on the pod-waves this weekend (FSN Network) putting out the charming idea that quantitative easing (QE — governments “printing” money to buy their own bonds) had the effect of “cancelling debt” and that it could continue for decades to come. I don’t doubt that there are Federal Reserve officers who believe this. The part they leave out — and Mr. Duncan also left it out until pressed — is that there are consequences. Consult the operating manual of the universe, and you will find that there really is no free lunch or get-out-of-jail card.
The truth is, when you rig a money system with price interventions, distortions, and perversions, they will eventually express themselves in ways destructive to the system. In the present case of world-wide QE and central bank monkey business, these rackets are expressing themselves, finally, in wobbling currencies. In many nations, people are deeply unsure of what their money is worth, and how much it might be worth a month from now. This includes the USA, except for the moment our money is said to be magically appreciating in value compared to everyone else’s. Aren’t we special?
Get this: nothing is more hazardous than undermining people’s trust in their money.
All of this financial perfidy conceals the basic fact that the human race has reached the limits of techno-industrialism. There are too many people and not enough basic resources to grow more of them — oil, fishes, soil, ores, fertilizers — and there is no steady-state “solution” to keep that economy going. In other words, it must either grow or contract, and it can’t really grow anymore (despite the exertions of government statisticians), so the authorities are trying to provide a monetary illusion of growth, when instead we’re in contraction.
Yes, contraction. The way out is to get with the program, shed the dead-weight and go where reality wants to take you. In the USA that means do everything possible to quit supporting giant failing systems — Big Box shopping, mass motoring, GMO agribiz, TBTF banks — and get behind local Main Street integrated economies, walkable towns, regular railroads, smaller and more numerous farms, local medical clinic health care, artistry in public works, and community caretaking of the unfit. All this surely implies a reduced role for the national government, and maybe the states, too. You could call it a lower standard of living, or just a different way to live.
I don’t think we’ll go there via rational political discourse. The current instabilities around the world are so sinister that they are liable to lead to even more strenuous efforts at the top to pretend that everything’s working, and even war is one way to pretend you’re okay (and the “other guy” isn’t). Of course, war has already broken out, in the MidEast and Ukraine, and it has everything to do with the sequential failure of nations, in one way or another, to overcome the limits of techno-industrialism. America will be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization of what it needs to do. The 2016 election will be the convulsion point.
It’s not what most people think: a return to some hypothetical “normality,” with the ghost of Ronnie Reagan beaming down like a sun-god under his lopsided pompadour, and all the happy self-driving GM cars toodling back and forth from WalMart-to-home loaded to the scuppers with new electric pop-tart warmers and 3-D underwear printers. (Or drone deliveries of same from Amazon.com.)
I mean, surely the thinking folk out there must be asking themselves: what is the way out of this Federal Reserve three-card-monte, one-percenter-stuffing, so-called “economy,” and what is the destination of this society when that mendacious model for living fails?
I digress for a moment: there was a chap named Richard Duncan on the pod-waves this weekend (FSN Network) putting out the charming idea that quantitative easing (QE — governments “printing” money to buy their own bonds) had the effect of “cancelling debt” and that it could continue for decades to come. I don’t doubt that there are Federal Reserve officers who believe this. The part they leave out — and Mr. Duncan also left it out until pressed — is that there are consequences. Consult the operating manual of the universe, and you will find that there really is no free lunch or get-out-of-jail card.
The truth is, when you rig a money system with price interventions, distortions, and perversions, they will eventually express themselves in ways destructive to the system. In the present case of world-wide QE and central bank monkey business, these rackets are expressing themselves, finally, in wobbling currencies. In many nations, people are deeply unsure of what their money is worth, and how much it might be worth a month from now. This includes the USA, except for the moment our money is said to be magically appreciating in value compared to everyone else’s. Aren’t we special?
Get this: nothing is more hazardous than undermining people’s trust in their money.
All of this financial perfidy conceals the basic fact that the human race has reached the limits of techno-industrialism. There are too many people and not enough basic resources to grow more of them — oil, fishes, soil, ores, fertilizers — and there is no steady-state “solution” to keep that economy going. In other words, it must either grow or contract, and it can’t really grow anymore (despite the exertions of government statisticians), so the authorities are trying to provide a monetary illusion of growth, when instead we’re in contraction.
Yes, contraction. The way out is to get with the program, shed the dead-weight and go where reality wants to take you. In the USA that means do everything possible to quit supporting giant failing systems — Big Box shopping, mass motoring, GMO agribiz, TBTF banks — and get behind local Main Street integrated economies, walkable towns, regular railroads, smaller and more numerous farms, local medical clinic health care, artistry in public works, and community caretaking of the unfit. All this surely implies a reduced role for the national government, and maybe the states, too. You could call it a lower standard of living, or just a different way to live.
I don’t think we’ll go there via rational political discourse. The current instabilities around the world are so sinister that they are liable to lead to even more strenuous efforts at the top to pretend that everything’s working, and even war is one way to pretend you’re okay (and the “other guy” isn’t). Of course, war has already broken out, in the MidEast and Ukraine, and it has everything to do with the sequential failure of nations, in one way or another, to overcome the limits of techno-industrialism. America will be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization of what it needs to do. The 2016 election will be the convulsion point.
Sorry, ultranationalist suckers—Modi going back on campaign promise to provide universal health care http://t.co/iYzx5mRkaU
— exiledonline.com (@exiledonline) March 27, 2015Sunday, March 29, 2015
#Hist1161 the @JournAmHist Podcast series is a great, open resource on US History: http://t.co/FthH16NkNA
— Brandon Morgan (@CNMBrandon) March 27, 2015#Foodwaste represents missed opp to improve food security. Reducing food wastage footprint: http://t.co/tLMghxMb2n #UNFAO #savefood
— FAOKnowledge (@FAOKnowledge) March 26, 2015Discussing Racism in the SBC
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2015/03/27/395815996/southern-baptists-dont-shy-away-from-talking-about-their-racist-past
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Librarians to Follow on Twitter
http://www.mattanderson.org/blog/2013/01/22/125-librarians-to-follow-on-twitter/
Various Tweets on Archiving and Radio
Shepperd: media preservation (esp of radio) allows historians to research groups underrepresented in paper trail of most archives #AVSymp
— Jesse Johnston (@jesseajohnston) March 27, 2015I think of the many radio broadcasts in Hawaii alone that are probably lost forever.
Shepperd: Radio between 1917 + 1946 remains virtually untouched in the historical record. #AVSymp
— ArchivesAmericanArt (@ArchivesAmerArt) March 27, 2015Friday, March 27, 2015
A better question: Why did you think that tie would go with that jacket?
Here we go.
Robertson: ‘Was the co-pilot a Muslim? Why did he want to kill all those people?’ http://t.co/5wcwjlYzuy pic.twitter.com/gBGNf9bqKs
— Imraan Siddiqi (@imraansiddiqi) March 26, 2015Spreading the Word 2
My newest: Germanwings crash speculation & airline union-busting from Reagan to Merkel @PandoDaily http://t.co/f4TIINAMrE
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 26, 2015Spreading the Word
600 corporations writing secret #TPP doesn't sound like #democracy! #NoFastTrack for #TPP! http://t.co/iJ2OQuOm9Z #p2 pic.twitter.com/v4imx65jhe
— Expose The TPP (@ExposeTPP) March 24, 2015Monday, March 23, 2015
Various Tweets from @archivesnext
"A digital file that represents a non-copyrightable object [like a screw] will be protected by copyright even if..." (head explodes)
— Michael Peter Edson (@mpedson) March 23, 2015Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin 1st female dept head @Harvard http://t.co/FJt1pOOTYW #histSTM #WomensHistoryMonth pic.twitter.com/XRkwB2bwDH
— Alexi Baker (@AlexiBaker) March 21, 2015Mass State Archives: new site for digital records incl @DevalPatrick correspondence http://t.co/POtnXxFrSE cc @BostonGlobe #maracnea15
— Paige Roberts (@paige_roberts) March 21, 2015BRICS Bank
http://www.globalresearch.ca/%E2%80%8Brussia-ratifies-100bn-brics-new-development-bank/5433304
Armond White Acknowledging Madonna
#Madonna by popular demand. Her most mature video. Read now. http://t.co/UHGa9mTUvR pic.twitter.com/VdUdoGLJ33
— armond white (@3xchair) March 18, 2015Queen and King of music videos. Read it now. http://t.co/WZu6sopdQm pic.twitter.com/rTLcMEQOvi
— armond white (@3xchair) March 14, 2015Sunday, March 15, 2015
Pierre Omidyar, Again
There's probably something to occasion this teeth-gnashing about Pierre Omidyar. I'd say Richard Smart had a lot more charm and personality.
Basically Omidyar is the Vinod Khosla asshole of Hawaii http://t.co/YubDlOgQg8
— exiledonline.com (@exiledonline) March 15, 2015Saturday, March 14, 2015
Dublin Review of Books
Sometime I'll have to clean up my list of links, but I added a link to its Book Review section.
Dublin Review of Books
Dublin Review of Books
Richard Heinberg: "Only Less Will Do"
Who knew violin manufacturing at a mass scale had such an impact as what he describes?
http://www.postcarbon.org/only-less-will-do/
http://www.postcarbon.org/only-less-will-do/
This Blog's Ninth Anniversary
Nine years ago today I began Poppa Zao. So much has changed since then, and so much has stayed the same.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Health Care Costs
A subject I'll be considering more here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_costs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_costs
Seedy Rahm and "The Red Light Rip-Off"
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/03/11/5_signs_rahm_may_be_doomed_125888.html
Max Blumenthal's New Book: Due This Summer
However, Goliath was delayed a few times as he put more material in. Don't be surprised if his new book might be published a little later for the same reason.
Seems like an appropriate time to announce my next book - The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza http://t.co/Swa13HCvao Due out in July
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 11, 2015Monday, March 09, 2015
Ferguson mayor brags about privatizing red-light cameras to company accused of fixing stoplights to increase tickets http://t.co/hPjHMX4iMV
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 8, 2015(Link below contained in the Pando story)
http://www.alternet.org/story/145752/cities_shortening_yellow_traffic_lights_for_deadly_profit
Kunstler: Truthinesslessness
(Any links therein added by me.--P.Z.)
Kunstler: Truthinesslessness
Nothing is stable, nothing is straightforward, everything is fixed, and nothing is fixed. O nation of busboys and WalMart greeters, awake and sing!
Can an empire founder on sheer credulousness? After last Friday’s jobs report, I think so. For a culture that luxuriates in statistical analysis (and the false idea that if you measure enough things, you can control them), it is rather amazing that we absolutely don’t care whether the measurements are truthful or not. Hence, an economist (sic) such as Paul Krugman of The New York Times might ask himself how it is that Zero Interest Rate Policy only trickles down to places where hamburgers are sold. PK was at it again in his Monday column, yammering about “rapid job growth,” “partying like it was 1995.” Wise men like him are pounding this country down a rat hole faster than you can say Romulus Augustulus.
Apparently the US Bureau of Labor Statistics missed the job bloodbath in the oil industry, especially over in Frackville where the latest western phenomenon is the ghost man-camp (along with ghost pole dancing parlors). It’s a veritable hemorrhagic fever of job layoff announcements: 9,000 here, 7,000, there, thousands of thousands everywhere — Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes — like an Ebola ward in the oil services sector. Not to mention the cliff-drop of capital expenditure, meaning even steeper job losses ahead, Casey Jones. But nobody notices, I guess because they’re out at Ruby Tuesdays eating things bigger than their heads. Are the portions getting smaller, or are their heads shrinking?
Finance is complicated, but not as complex as the wizards employed in it would have you believe. They would have you think it is an order of magnitude more abstruse and recondite than particle physics, when, in fact, it is often not much more than a Three Card Monte switcheroo. The whole ZIRP and QE game, for instance, can be boiled down to a basic wish to get something for nothing, that is, prosperity where nothing of value created. Now, that’s not so hard to understand, is it? Until the economics wardrobe team comes in and dresses it up in martingales and bumrolls of metaphysics and you end up in a contango of mystification.
More galling and worrisome, though, is the failure of anyone even remotely in authority to stand up and publically object to the tidal wave of lies washing over this dying polity, actually killing it softly with truthinesslessness. The code of anything goes and nothing matters is turning lethal and the more it is kept swaddled in lies, the more perverse, surprising, and destructive the damage will be. The more our leaders lie about misbehavior in banking — including especially the actions of the Federal Reserve — the worse will be the instability in currencies. The more central bankers intervene in price discovery mechanisms, the more unable to reflect reality all markets will become. The more that the US BLS lies about the employment picture in America, the worse will be the eventual wrath of citizens who can’t get paid enough to heat their houses and feed their children.
An economist (sic) named Richard Duncan last week proposed the interesting theory that Quantitative Easing can go on virtually forever in an endless chain of self-canceling debt. Government spends money it doesn’t have and cannot raise, issues bonds to “investors,” buys its own bonds and stashes them in a storage vault so deep that the sun will not shine on them until it becomes a blue dwarf — long after the cockroaches have taken charge of Earthly affairs. Duncan forgets one detail: consequences. The consequence of this behavior will not be eternal virtual prosperity, but rather a wrecked accounting system for the operations of civilized human life. We’ve stepped across the event horizon of that consequence, but we just don’t know it yet. My bet is that we start feeling the effects sooner rather than later and when it is finally felt, all the Kardashian videos in this universe and a trillion universes like it will not avail to distract us from the flow of our own blood.
Kunstler: Truthinesslessness
Nothing is stable, nothing is straightforward, everything is fixed, and nothing is fixed. O nation of busboys and WalMart greeters, awake and sing!
Can an empire founder on sheer credulousness? After last Friday’s jobs report, I think so. For a culture that luxuriates in statistical analysis (and the false idea that if you measure enough things, you can control them), it is rather amazing that we absolutely don’t care whether the measurements are truthful or not. Hence, an economist (sic) such as Paul Krugman of The New York Times might ask himself how it is that Zero Interest Rate Policy only trickles down to places where hamburgers are sold. PK was at it again in his Monday column, yammering about “rapid job growth,” “partying like it was 1995.” Wise men like him are pounding this country down a rat hole faster than you can say Romulus Augustulus.
Apparently the US Bureau of Labor Statistics missed the job bloodbath in the oil industry, especially over in Frackville where the latest western phenomenon is the ghost man-camp (along with ghost pole dancing parlors). It’s a veritable hemorrhagic fever of job layoff announcements: 9,000 here, 7,000, there, thousands of thousands everywhere — Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes — like an Ebola ward in the oil services sector. Not to mention the cliff-drop of capital expenditure, meaning even steeper job losses ahead, Casey Jones. But nobody notices, I guess because they’re out at Ruby Tuesdays eating things bigger than their heads. Are the portions getting smaller, or are their heads shrinking?
Finance is complicated, but not as complex as the wizards employed in it would have you believe. They would have you think it is an order of magnitude more abstruse and recondite than particle physics, when, in fact, it is often not much more than a Three Card Monte switcheroo. The whole ZIRP and QE game, for instance, can be boiled down to a basic wish to get something for nothing, that is, prosperity where nothing of value created. Now, that’s not so hard to understand, is it? Until the economics wardrobe team comes in and dresses it up in martingales and bumrolls of metaphysics and you end up in a contango of mystification.
More galling and worrisome, though, is the failure of anyone even remotely in authority to stand up and publically object to the tidal wave of lies washing over this dying polity, actually killing it softly with truthinesslessness. The code of anything goes and nothing matters is turning lethal and the more it is kept swaddled in lies, the more perverse, surprising, and destructive the damage will be. The more our leaders lie about misbehavior in banking — including especially the actions of the Federal Reserve — the worse will be the instability in currencies. The more central bankers intervene in price discovery mechanisms, the more unable to reflect reality all markets will become. The more that the US BLS lies about the employment picture in America, the worse will be the eventual wrath of citizens who can’t get paid enough to heat their houses and feed their children.
An economist (sic) named Richard Duncan last week proposed the interesting theory that Quantitative Easing can go on virtually forever in an endless chain of self-canceling debt. Government spends money it doesn’t have and cannot raise, issues bonds to “investors,” buys its own bonds and stashes them in a storage vault so deep that the sun will not shine on them until it becomes a blue dwarf — long after the cockroaches have taken charge of Earthly affairs. Duncan forgets one detail: consequences. The consequence of this behavior will not be eternal virtual prosperity, but rather a wrecked accounting system for the operations of civilized human life. We’ve stepped across the event horizon of that consequence, but we just don’t know it yet. My bet is that we start feeling the effects sooner rather than later and when it is finally felt, all the Kardashian videos in this universe and a trillion universes like it will not avail to distract us from the flow of our own blood.
Sunday, March 08, 2015
Omidyar on Kauai
Interesting. But what do Joan Conrow ("Kauai Eclectic") and Andy Parx ("Got Windmills?") have to say?
http://m.thegardenisland.com/news/local/doubling-down-on-the-dairy/article_46edb0de-c234-11e4-bfd6-338a4f6e7d7e.html?mode=jqm
http://hpr2.org/post/proposed-kauai-dairy-fiddler-roof-ecotourism-cellular-transformation
http://kauaieclectic.blogspot.com/2014/02/details-on-new-dairy.html
http://www.civilbeat.com/2014/11/kauai-oks-building-permits-for-dairy-farm-backed-by-ebay-founder-omidyar/
Kauai locals try to stop Omidyar from destroying environment to feed his prepper pandemic paranoia http://t.co/TTjfizCDF2
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 5, 2015http://m.thegardenisland.com/news/local/doubling-down-on-the-dairy/article_46edb0de-c234-11e4-bfd6-338a4f6e7d7e.html?mode=jqm
http://hpr2.org/post/proposed-kauai-dairy-fiddler-roof-ecotourism-cellular-transformation
http://kauaieclectic.blogspot.com/2014/02/details-on-new-dairy.html
http://www.civilbeat.com/2014/11/kauai-oks-building-permits-for-dairy-farm-backed-by-ebay-founder-omidyar/
Friday, March 06, 2015
Seedy Rahm
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/05/rahm-goes-nuts-at-a-mental-health-clinic-you-re-gonna-respect-me.html#
Monday, March 02, 2015
Ethel Stansfield Peck: Zero-Waste Pioneer; Kunstler: Heroes and Villains
Kunstler discusses heroes and villains. I maintain a list of scoundrels on this blog; they range from the ordinarily cloddish to the truly malicious. And though I don't have a list of them, I occasionally mention people who do commendable things. On that note, may I present the late Ethel Stansfield Peck. Although she died in 2000 at age 91, Mrs. Peck is and should be remembered for her zero-waste way of life, which she led just because she believed in it.
Kunstler: Heroes and Villains.
Kunstler: Heroes and Villains.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Beyond the Lights: Future Cult Classic?
Missed this: BEYOND THE LIGHTS (2014; Gina Prince-Bythewood). A savvy pop fantasy, quietly compelling and touching. pic.twitter.com/rluLQDJJ68
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) February 26, 2015I missed this movie in the theater too. I'd probably have seen it at the Kress (missed). The box office was lackluster but it looks as if it will find a bigger audience on video.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Fifty Shades Box Office Plummets
Fifty Shades of Grey Box Office Plummets. Presumably as word gets around that the movie was lousy.
All In With Chris Hayes may be cancelled. But MSNBC denies it.
All In With Chris Hayes may be cancelled. But MSNBC denies it.
Monday, February 16, 2015
Happy President's Day, from Baberaham Lincoln!!!!! #SAMandCAT pic.twitter.com/QSqZH59wCa
— Dan Schneider (@DanWarp) February 16, 2015Billy Ocean
"There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)" (1986)
His first single, "On the Run" (1974: Lark Records), released under the name Scorched Earth.
"Suddenly" (1984)
His first single, "On the Run" (1974: Lark Records), released under the name Scorched Earth.
"Suddenly" (1984)
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
@nytimes was asked about the strongest MoC. Ask @aaronschock & @TulsiPress who their trainer is.
— Markwayne Mullin (@RepMullin) January 9, 2015Monday, February 09, 2015
MSNBC Ratings Low
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/danieldoherty/2015/02/07/grim-milestone-msnbc-suffers-worst-day-of-ratings-since-2005-n1953312#!
Al Jazeera America is having ratings problems too, but its foreign coverage beats Fox, MSNBC, and CNN.
http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/al-jazeera-america-schedule-in-flux-after-network-cancels-programs-1201400856/#
Al Jazeera America is having ratings problems too, but its foreign coverage beats Fox, MSNBC, and CNN.
http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/al-jazeera-america-schedule-in-flux-after-network-cancels-programs-1201400856/#
Considering the Grammys
I watched the Grammys but switched between it and Family Guy then Bob's Burgers, so I missed the moments when Beck won the Album of the Year award for Morning Phase (which also got Best Rock Album). Sam Smith won Song and Record of the Year for "Stay With Me." He was also named Best New Artist and won Best Pop Vocal Album for In the Lonely Hour. Well-deserved, I say. What was undeserved was Beyoncé's Best R&B Performance award for "Drunk in Love." Jennifer Hudson's "It's Your World" (which should have won) and Ledisi's "Like This" were much worthier.
These were the Best R&B Performance nominees:
Drunk In Love
Beyoncé Featuring Jay Z
Track from: Beyoncé
Label: Columbia Records
New Flame
Chris Brown Featuring Usher & Rick Ross
Track from: X
Label: RCA Records
It's Your World
Jennifer Hudson Featuring R. Kelly
Track from: JHUD
Label: RCA Records
Like This
Ledisi
Track from: The Truth
Label: Verve
Good Kisser
Usher
Label: RCA Records
More later.
These were the Best R&B Performance nominees:
Drunk In Love
Beyoncé Featuring Jay Z
Track from: Beyoncé
Label: Columbia Records
New Flame
Chris Brown Featuring Usher & Rick Ross
Track from: X
Label: RCA Records
It's Your World
Jennifer Hudson Featuring R. Kelly
Track from: JHUD
Label: RCA Records
Like This
Ledisi
Track from: The Truth
Label: Verve
Good Kisser
Usher
Label: RCA Records
More later.
Sunday, February 08, 2015
A review of The World After Cheap Oil
Here. One of the authors responds in the article's comments thread.
Friday, February 06, 2015
Russia Library Fire
Awful. Russian library fire destroys a million historic documents dating back to 16th century http://t.co/8xi5BOItAA pic.twitter.com/TZ6j36p791
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) February 1, 2015Wednesday, February 04, 2015
Monday, February 02, 2015
Kunstler: Apocalypse Now and Forever
Kunstler on possible U.S. military aid to the Ukraine. I guess we're in the second Cold War.
Apocalypse Now and Forever
As a political psychoanalyst I find the Super-bowl halftime show the best concise index of how psychotic American culture is becoming from year to year, and the 2015 version signaled a complete break from reality, a nightmare of twerking robots in a hall of mirrors, as if America had utterly surrendered its tattered soul to some rogue motherboard pulsing deep within Dr. Evil’s subterranean palace of sin. Hence it is the perfect analog for understanding otherwise incomprehensible happenings such as the USA’s role in fomenting further chaos and mayhem in Ukraine.
How otherwise to explain things like this morning’s New York Times report that the USA “now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position….”
Earth calling New York Times readers: I regret to inform you that this decision was already reached a year ago when we paid for the coup d’état against the elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, after the poor sap decided to not sign up with EU but rather the Russian-backed Eurasian Customs Union. Whoops! You’re so out of here, Bub, State Department Under Secretary Victoria Nuland burbled in a clandestinely recorded phone call to the American ambassador. Will somebody please find Yats! Yes Yats! [UKR politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk] and plug the Bluetooth earpiece of power into his skull!
And so it went this past year with a cabal of the USA, the EU, and the IMF shoveling financial support (billions!), armaments, and surely boots-on-the ground into the Ukrainian morass. Last week, a reporter in eastern Ukraine approached a soldier in UKR army battle garb only to be told, in pitch perfect American English, to “get out of my face.” Say what??? The You-tube clip was seen all over the world and to this minute no agent of the US government has been called to account over it. Like I said, a hall of mirrors.
But anyway, we get a little ahead of ourselves because all this really begs the question: what business do we have in Ukraine in the first place and why should it matter to us that they align with Russia? And more to the point: why is it not transparently obvious that Ukraine is solidly within Russia’s sphere of influence, and has been, really, for more than 500 years, and for an excellent reason that has been demonstrated most recently in Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 and then Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of 1941.
In both cases, Russia owed it survival to the vast expanse of flat geography represented by Ukraine where “General Winter” was able to carry out his own defensive operations of relentless howling wind, snow, sub-zero temperatures, and frostbite that eventually vanquished the invaders. Through most of modern times Ukraine has been under the explicit “protection” of the Russian Czars or has been an outright province under the former USSR. Hundreds of years before that, Kievan Rus was the center of an emerging Russian culture and kingdom that only later picked up and moved to Moscow.
You get the picture: Ukraine has a long association with Russia, a principal association, not always happy, sometimes tragic, but a fact of life and history that the US and its foolish stooges in the EU bureaucracy now wish to challenge for absolutely no good reason. Does anybody who is not whacked out of his/her head on crack, or focused like a laser beam on the gender schism within the Kardashian Klan, remember when the US ever challenged the Soviets over Ukraine? No. And for the excellent reason that we accepted the relationship for reasons stated above. So, whose idea is it now that we should start World War Three over this remote region where so many other reckless adventurers came to grief? And what, by the way, do our people mean by “defensive weapons?” Are not most modern weapons designed to work both ways? Anyway, I see the list includes “anti-armor missiles” (i.e. tank-killers) and “drones,” the latter presumably guided by comfortable American military gamers effortlessly targeting pixelated “bad guys” between Slurpee gulps and taco bites, not exactly American Sniper style.
Apocalypse Now and Forever
As a political psychoanalyst I find the Super-bowl halftime show the best concise index of how psychotic American culture is becoming from year to year, and the 2015 version signaled a complete break from reality, a nightmare of twerking robots in a hall of mirrors, as if America had utterly surrendered its tattered soul to some rogue motherboard pulsing deep within Dr. Evil’s subterranean palace of sin. Hence it is the perfect analog for understanding otherwise incomprehensible happenings such as the USA’s role in fomenting further chaos and mayhem in Ukraine.
How otherwise to explain things like this morning’s New York Times report that the USA “now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position….”
Earth calling New York Times readers: I regret to inform you that this decision was already reached a year ago when we paid for the coup d’état against the elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, after the poor sap decided to not sign up with EU but rather the Russian-backed Eurasian Customs Union. Whoops! You’re so out of here, Bub, State Department Under Secretary Victoria Nuland burbled in a clandestinely recorded phone call to the American ambassador. Will somebody please find Yats! Yes Yats! [UKR politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk] and plug the Bluetooth earpiece of power into his skull!
And so it went this past year with a cabal of the USA, the EU, and the IMF shoveling financial support (billions!), armaments, and surely boots-on-the ground into the Ukrainian morass. Last week, a reporter in eastern Ukraine approached a soldier in UKR army battle garb only to be told, in pitch perfect American English, to “get out of my face.” Say what??? The You-tube clip was seen all over the world and to this minute no agent of the US government has been called to account over it. Like I said, a hall of mirrors.
But anyway, we get a little ahead of ourselves because all this really begs the question: what business do we have in Ukraine in the first place and why should it matter to us that they align with Russia? And more to the point: why is it not transparently obvious that Ukraine is solidly within Russia’s sphere of influence, and has been, really, for more than 500 years, and for an excellent reason that has been demonstrated most recently in Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 and then Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of 1941.
In both cases, Russia owed it survival to the vast expanse of flat geography represented by Ukraine where “General Winter” was able to carry out his own defensive operations of relentless howling wind, snow, sub-zero temperatures, and frostbite that eventually vanquished the invaders. Through most of modern times Ukraine has been under the explicit “protection” of the Russian Czars or has been an outright province under the former USSR. Hundreds of years before that, Kievan Rus was the center of an emerging Russian culture and kingdom that only later picked up and moved to Moscow.
You get the picture: Ukraine has a long association with Russia, a principal association, not always happy, sometimes tragic, but a fact of life and history that the US and its foolish stooges in the EU bureaucracy now wish to challenge for absolutely no good reason. Does anybody who is not whacked out of his/her head on crack, or focused like a laser beam on the gender schism within the Kardashian Klan, remember when the US ever challenged the Soviets over Ukraine? No. And for the excellent reason that we accepted the relationship for reasons stated above. So, whose idea is it now that we should start World War Three over this remote region where so many other reckless adventurers came to grief? And what, by the way, do our people mean by “defensive weapons?” Are not most modern weapons designed to work both ways? Anyway, I see the list includes “anti-armor missiles” (i.e. tank-killers) and “drones,” the latter presumably guided by comfortable American military gamers effortlessly targeting pixelated “bad guys” between Slurpee gulps and taco bites, not exactly American Sniper style.
Sunday, February 01, 2015
Keynesianism vs. Degrowth?
Krugman writes off @postcarbon for backing #degrowth ... @richardheinberg responds in a great convo with @Kayemmo >> http://t.co/CMRju5G43I
— slow ottawa (@slowottawa) November 1, 2014Saturday, January 31, 2015
"What Will 2015 Do for Peak Oil?"
With low oil prices and record production, oil cornucopians are smugly proclaiming peak oil has been disproved forever. But Ron Patterson writes in
"What Will 2015 Do for Peak Oil?" that "[A]n oil glut is exactly what we would expect at the very peak. After all, that is what peak oil is, that is the point in time when the world produces more oil than ever in history… and the most it ever will produce."
"What Will 2015 Do for Peak Oil?" that "[A]n oil glut is exactly what we would expect at the very peak. After all, that is what peak oil is, that is the point in time when the world produces more oil than ever in history… and the most it ever will produce."
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
"Raw Power"
Some day I'm going to write my thinkpiece, Good Etiquette Is Good But Politics Is Historically The Raw Exercise of Coercive Power
— Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) January 27, 2015Tuesday, January 27, 2015
#blizzardof2015 prob won't be a top 10 snowfall in NYC, but Cuomo closes subways for 1st time ever. Welcome to grandstanding nanny state.
— Arun Gupta (@arunindy) January 27, 2015Monday, January 26, 2015
Kunstler: The Broken Template
Kunstler: The Broken Template.
T he more detached from reality American culture becomes the more strictly ceremonial leadership gets, as illustrated by the raft of bromides Barack Obama floated past the assembled vassalage of government last week in another grand effort to avoid the necessities of the moment.
Those necessities include freeing a hostage public from the tyrannical clutches of corporate despotism — the evil empire of big boxes, big burgers, big pharma, Big Brother — and the atrocious rackets fostered by them that masquerade as an economy. The template of the life we have known is broken and the pieces within are flying apart, and no amount of wishing or promising can keep them going. If this society is even going to survive, the people have to smash their way out of this template prison, probably against the efforts of the people and organizations now running it merely for their own benefit.
The future is telling us very clearly: get smaller, get finer, get more local, get less complex, get less grandiose, do it now. Do you want to eat food in the years ahead? Better make sure you live in a part of the country where small-scale farming and backyard gardening is possible because the General Mills Agri-Biz GMO Cheerios model will be folding its big tent along with its financing agents in the debt Ponzi banking system.
Do you want to have a personal economic future? Think about what you can do to make yourself useful in a local economy made up of your neighbors. And if you live in one of the thousands of soulless, neighborless suburban wastelands that amount to nothing but big box and big burger plantations, you better get out and find a real town in some other part of the country.
Do you believe that computers and robot factories will define the years to come? Maybe you have failed to notice that the US electric grid is decrepit and in need of at least a $1 trillion upgrade-and-rebuild, which, by the way, is not going to happen. What is all that crap going to run on? America’s disappointment with the broken promises of technology will be so epic that we’ll be lucky not to slide back into a world ruled by superstition and ghosts.
Do you think that $50 oil is going to make the world safe for WalMart, Walt Disney World, and Happy Motoring? In fact, $50 oil is going to crush what is left of the US Oil industry, especially fracking for shale oil and deep water drilling. And guess what — everything else is depleting at about 5 percent a year. The frackers will never again get access to the sort of junk bond financing that allowed them to ramp up their Ponzi demonstration projects in the Bakken and Eagle Ford. And they will never again regain their current level of production — which is the net result of past Ponzi financing, now ending in tears. So, forget “Saudi America” and “energy independence,” unless you mean living in a walkable community near a navigable waterway.
Do you want to be an educated person, that is, someone capable of comprehending reality and functioning within its demands? In the USA, that means you must learn how to speak and write English correctly, especially if you are in a “low performing” ethnic minority group. If you can’t conjugate verbs, you will have a hard time distinguishing the past, the present, and the future in your daily activities. Among other things, you’ll be incapable of showing up on time. And that, of course, is only the beginning. It’s that simple. These abilities used to be the result of an eighth-grade education in the United States. We would be lucky to get back to that high standard, and our knucklehead fantasies about universal access to community college be damned. It’s only a new layer in the current racket that pretends to be education.
That is the current state of the union and a glimpse of the trajectory it’s on, which the inept leaders of our country do not comprehend and cannot communicate.
T he more detached from reality American culture becomes the more strictly ceremonial leadership gets, as illustrated by the raft of bromides Barack Obama floated past the assembled vassalage of government last week in another grand effort to avoid the necessities of the moment.
Those necessities include freeing a hostage public from the tyrannical clutches of corporate despotism — the evil empire of big boxes, big burgers, big pharma, Big Brother — and the atrocious rackets fostered by them that masquerade as an economy. The template of the life we have known is broken and the pieces within are flying apart, and no amount of wishing or promising can keep them going. If this society is even going to survive, the people have to smash their way out of this template prison, probably against the efforts of the people and organizations now running it merely for their own benefit.
The future is telling us very clearly: get smaller, get finer, get more local, get less complex, get less grandiose, do it now. Do you want to eat food in the years ahead? Better make sure you live in a part of the country where small-scale farming and backyard gardening is possible because the General Mills Agri-Biz GMO Cheerios model will be folding its big tent along with its financing agents in the debt Ponzi banking system.
Do you want to have a personal economic future? Think about what you can do to make yourself useful in a local economy made up of your neighbors. And if you live in one of the thousands of soulless, neighborless suburban wastelands that amount to nothing but big box and big burger plantations, you better get out and find a real town in some other part of the country.
Do you believe that computers and robot factories will define the years to come? Maybe you have failed to notice that the US electric grid is decrepit and in need of at least a $1 trillion upgrade-and-rebuild, which, by the way, is not going to happen. What is all that crap going to run on? America’s disappointment with the broken promises of technology will be so epic that we’ll be lucky not to slide back into a world ruled by superstition and ghosts.
Do you think that $50 oil is going to make the world safe for WalMart, Walt Disney World, and Happy Motoring? In fact, $50 oil is going to crush what is left of the US Oil industry, especially fracking for shale oil and deep water drilling. And guess what — everything else is depleting at about 5 percent a year. The frackers will never again get access to the sort of junk bond financing that allowed them to ramp up their Ponzi demonstration projects in the Bakken and Eagle Ford. And they will never again regain their current level of production — which is the net result of past Ponzi financing, now ending in tears. So, forget “Saudi America” and “energy independence,” unless you mean living in a walkable community near a navigable waterway.
Do you want to be an educated person, that is, someone capable of comprehending reality and functioning within its demands? In the USA, that means you must learn how to speak and write English correctly, especially if you are in a “low performing” ethnic minority group. If you can’t conjugate verbs, you will have a hard time distinguishing the past, the present, and the future in your daily activities. Among other things, you’ll be incapable of showing up on time. And that, of course, is only the beginning. It’s that simple. These abilities used to be the result of an eighth-grade education in the United States. We would be lucky to get back to that high standard, and our knucklehead fantasies about universal access to community college be damned. It’s only a new layer in the current racket that pretends to be education.
That is the current state of the union and a glimpse of the trajectory it’s on, which the inept leaders of our country do not comprehend and cannot communicate.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Growing Food From Scraps
I'm growing plants from scraps too.
@Gail_Boddy @michaelpollan @IFHE_HomeEc Teach families to regrow food from scraps, to reduce food waste! pic.twitter.com/xXcFvqkGRd
— KitchenTakeovers (@KTakeovers) January 13, 2015Saturday, January 24, 2015
That feels icky RT @crampell: In three states—Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi—MLK Day is also Robert E. Lee Day http://t.co/QhM9uF3PaU
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) January 19, 2015Friday, January 23, 2015
Blumenthal & White At the Movies
If Max Blumenthal and Armond White ever have a debate about American Sniper, I'd watch it. Then I hope they'd make like Siskel and Ebert and get a show.
-----
The box office forecast for this weekend:
Forecast (Jan. 23-25)
1. American Sniper - $56 million (-37%)
2. The Boy Next Door - $18 million
3. Paddington - $13.1 million (-31%)
4. The Wedding Ringer - $10.7 million (-48%)
5. Mortdecai - $7.5 million
6. Strange Magic - $6 million
Go #AmericanSniper! Sergeant York for Millennials. http://t.co/JObWMiQ4Fe
— armond white (@3xchair) January 20, 2015On @oreillyfactor, @iptuttle calls me "the worst offender" against American Sniper: http://t.co/nOY7gnWTkl I graciously accept this honor.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 22, 2015-----
The box office forecast for this weekend:
Forecast (Jan. 23-25)
1. American Sniper - $56 million (-37%)
2. The Boy Next Door - $18 million
3. Paddington - $13.1 million (-31%)
4. The Wedding Ringer - $10.7 million (-48%)
5. Mortdecai - $7.5 million
6. Strange Magic - $6 million
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Monday, January 19, 2015
Kunstler: A Solemn Pause
January 19, 2015
A Solemn Pause
Events are moving faster than brains now. Isn’t it marvelous that gasoline at the pump is a buck cheaper than it was a year ago? A lot of short-sighted idiots are celebrating, unaware that the low oil price is destroying the capacity to deliver future oil at any price. The shale oil wells in North Dakota and Texas, the Tar Sand operations of Alberta, and the deep-water rigs here and abroad just don’t pencil-out economically at $45-a-barrel. So the shale oil wells that are up-and-running will produce for a year and there will be no new ones drilled when they peter out — which is at least 50 percent the first year and all gone after four years.
Anyway, the financial structure of the shale play was suicidal from the get-go. You finance the drilling and fracking with high-yield “junk bonds,” that is, money borrowed from “investors.” You drill like mad and you produce a lot of oil, but even at $105-a-barrel you can’t make profit, meaning you can’t really pay back the investors who loaned you all that money, a lot of it obtained via Too Big To Fail bank carry-trades, levered-up on ”margin,” which allowed said investors to pretend they were risking more money than they had. And then all those levered-up investments — i.e. bets — get hedged in a ghostly underworld of unregulated derivatives contracts that pretend to act as insurance against bad bets with funny money, but in reality can never pay out because the money is not there (and never was.) And then come the margin calls. Uh Oh….
In short, enjoy the $2.50-a-gallon fill-ups while you can, grasshoppers, because when the current crop of fast-depleting shale oil wells dries up, that will be all she wrote. When all those bonds held up on their skyhook derivative hedges go south, there will be no more financing available for the entire shale oil project. No more high-yield bonds will be issued because the previous issues defaulted. Very few new wells (if any) will be drilled. American oil production will not return to its secondary highs (after the 1970 all-time high) of 2014-15. The wish of American energy independence will be steaming over the horizon on the garbage barge of broken promises. And all, that, of course, is only one part of the story, because there is the social and political fallout to follow.
The table is set for the banquet of consequences. The next chapter in the oil story is more likely to be scarcity rather than just a boomerang back to higher prices. The tipping point for that will come with the inevitable destabilizing of Saudi Arabia, which I believe will happen this year when King Abdullah ibn Abdilaziz, 91, son of Ibn Saud, departs his intensive care throne for the glorious Jannah of virgins and feasts. Speaking of feasts, just imagine how the Islamic State (or ISIS) must be licking its chops at the prospect of sweeping over an Arabia no longer defined as Saudi! The Saudis are so spooked that they announced plans last week for a kind of super Berlin-type wall to be constructed along the northern border with Iraq. But that brings to mind a laughable Maginot Line scenario in which the masked invaders just make an end run around the darn thing. In any case, Saudi Arabia will already be disintegrating internally as competing clans and princes vie for control. And then, what will the US do? Rush in there shock-and-awe style? Bust up the joint? That’ll make things better, won’t it? (See American Sniper.) [Or don't. Paddington or The Wedding Ringer are better worth your time.--P.Z.]
Meanwhile, there will be plenty to contend with state-side. The next time there is a pratfall in the stock and bond markets and the TBTF banks — and there is sure to be — the rescue tricks are liable to be a whole lot more severe than the TARP, ZIRP, and QE hijinks of 2008-2015. Next time around, the federals are going to have to confiscate stuff, break promises, take away things, and rough some people up. The question is how much of this abuse will the public take? I take a certain comfort knowing how heavily armed America is. And not just the lunatic fringe. The thought of Hillary and Jeb out there beating the bushes for big money makes me laugh. They are so not going to happen. Just wait. For now, take this MLK holiday break to reflect on the fragility of our own country, and gird your loins for the week to come.
A Solemn Pause
Events are moving faster than brains now. Isn’t it marvelous that gasoline at the pump is a buck cheaper than it was a year ago? A lot of short-sighted idiots are celebrating, unaware that the low oil price is destroying the capacity to deliver future oil at any price. The shale oil wells in North Dakota and Texas, the Tar Sand operations of Alberta, and the deep-water rigs here and abroad just don’t pencil-out economically at $45-a-barrel. So the shale oil wells that are up-and-running will produce for a year and there will be no new ones drilled when they peter out — which is at least 50 percent the first year and all gone after four years.
Anyway, the financial structure of the shale play was suicidal from the get-go. You finance the drilling and fracking with high-yield “junk bonds,” that is, money borrowed from “investors.” You drill like mad and you produce a lot of oil, but even at $105-a-barrel you can’t make profit, meaning you can’t really pay back the investors who loaned you all that money, a lot of it obtained via Too Big To Fail bank carry-trades, levered-up on ”margin,” which allowed said investors to pretend they were risking more money than they had. And then all those levered-up investments — i.e. bets — get hedged in a ghostly underworld of unregulated derivatives contracts that pretend to act as insurance against bad bets with funny money, but in reality can never pay out because the money is not there (and never was.) And then come the margin calls. Uh Oh….
In short, enjoy the $2.50-a-gallon fill-ups while you can, grasshoppers, because when the current crop of fast-depleting shale oil wells dries up, that will be all she wrote. When all those bonds held up on their skyhook derivative hedges go south, there will be no more financing available for the entire shale oil project. No more high-yield bonds will be issued because the previous issues defaulted. Very few new wells (if any) will be drilled. American oil production will not return to its secondary highs (after the 1970 all-time high) of 2014-15. The wish of American energy independence will be steaming over the horizon on the garbage barge of broken promises. And all, that, of course, is only one part of the story, because there is the social and political fallout to follow.
The table is set for the banquet of consequences. The next chapter in the oil story is more likely to be scarcity rather than just a boomerang back to higher prices. The tipping point for that will come with the inevitable destabilizing of Saudi Arabia, which I believe will happen this year when King Abdullah ibn Abdilaziz, 91, son of Ibn Saud, departs his intensive care throne for the glorious Jannah of virgins and feasts. Speaking of feasts, just imagine how the Islamic State (or ISIS) must be licking its chops at the prospect of sweeping over an Arabia no longer defined as Saudi! The Saudis are so spooked that they announced plans last week for a kind of super Berlin-type wall to be constructed along the northern border with Iraq. But that brings to mind a laughable Maginot Line scenario in which the masked invaders just make an end run around the darn thing. In any case, Saudi Arabia will already be disintegrating internally as competing clans and princes vie for control. And then, what will the US do? Rush in there shock-and-awe style? Bust up the joint? That’ll make things better, won’t it? (See American Sniper.) [Or don't. Paddington or The Wedding Ringer are better worth your time.--P.Z.]
Meanwhile, there will be plenty to contend with state-side. The next time there is a pratfall in the stock and bond markets and the TBTF banks — and there is sure to be — the rescue tricks are liable to be a whole lot more severe than the TARP, ZIRP, and QE hijinks of 2008-2015. Next time around, the federals are going to have to confiscate stuff, break promises, take away things, and rough some people up. The question is how much of this abuse will the public take? I take a certain comfort knowing how heavily armed America is. And not just the lunatic fringe. The thought of Hillary and Jeb out there beating the bushes for big money makes me laugh. They are so not going to happen. Just wait. For now, take this MLK holiday break to reflect on the fragility of our own country, and gird your loins for the week to come.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
When fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. With an Israeli flag close by. pic.twitter.com/XxFuVpMDqt
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 18, 2015He's never seen Lincoln Park.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Any social science professor who claims total neutrality is probably delusional. http://t.co/30GoogCaHL via @carolmswain
— Prof. Carol M. Swain (@carolmswain) January 15, 2015"The idea of journalistic objectivity is completely false—@MaxBlumenthal on the Perils of Being an Anti-Zionist http://t.co/WcD93UbA5o @VICE
— Verso Books (@VersoBooks) January 15, 2015Friday, January 16, 2015
What's the Matter With Florida?
Police chief defends use of photos of real people for target practice. @NBC6 investigation #humantargets pic.twitter.com/ORdRa0wq1U
— NBC 6 South Florida (@nbc6) January 15, 2015Monday, January 12, 2015
"Nous Sommes Hypocrites!"
https://twitter.com/Emran_Feroz/status/554678344437219328/photo/1
https://storify.com/tometty/staunch-defenders-of-free-press-attend-solidarity
--
For what it's worth, read British GQ's editorial, "We Should Not Blame the Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo For This Attack". Then read how it scrubbed mentions of Russell Brand from its website when Brand dared to point out that fashion label Hugo Boss (a major advertiser) once supplied uniforms to the SS.
https://storify.com/tometty/staunch-defenders-of-free-press-attend-solidarity
--
For what it's worth, read British GQ's editorial, "We Should Not Blame the Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo For This Attack". Then read how it scrubbed mentions of Russell Brand from its website when Brand dared to point out that fashion label Hugo Boss (a major advertiser) once supplied uniforms to the SS.
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
Monday, January 05, 2015
Friday, January 02, 2015
Blog Maintenance in the New Year
Hawaii TimeHattie, of Hattie's Web, plans to clean up her sidebar, removing links to inactive blogs. I might go through my own List of Links and see which blogs are inactive. As I commented at Hattie's Web, 2014 was for me a very busy, even hectic year, particularly the latter half. I haven't posted as much as I wanted to. This year I plan to devote more time to my writing, both on-line and off-, and that means more posts here, including accounts of my trips to Sacramento and Honolulu. Many anniversaries are coming up this year, and I want to feature more local history (e.g., this summer is the twentieth anniversary of the collapse and demolition of the Mamo Theater).
Thursday, January 01, 2015
The New Year
Four-ten p.m. as I write this. Very quiet. Not many firecrackers today here.
2 January update: IFC had a Portlandia marathon yesterday. I've heard of but never saw the show before. It has a Kids in the Hall quality to it.
2 January update: IFC had a Portlandia marathon yesterday. I've heard of but never saw the show before. It has a Kids in the Hall quality to it.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Happy New Year
A headline and lead of an article I saw online, with the names redacted:
[Young female celebrity] Rocks Skimpy Bikini in Dubai with [another young female celebrity] and [another yfc or socialite I've never heard of]
Oh, to be on this A-list New Year's vacation! [YFC] is currently in Dubai, where's she set to ring in the New Year ...
No thanks. I'm at home watching the free preview of NGN (Nippon Golden Network), which our cable company offers every New Year's. I had some maki sushi and tempura from Kawamoto's. Later, I'll watch more NGN, and maybe the New Year's celebration from Times Square.
[Young female celebrity] Rocks Skimpy Bikini in Dubai with [another young female celebrity] and [another yfc or socialite I've never heard of]
Oh, to be on this A-list New Year's vacation! [YFC] is currently in Dubai, where's she set to ring in the New Year ...
No thanks. I'm at home watching the free preview of NGN (Nippon Golden Network), which our cable company offers every New Year's. I had some maki sushi and tempura from Kawamoto's. Later, I'll watch more NGN, and maybe the New Year's celebration from Times Square.
Monday, December 29, 2014
Kunstler: The Trigger
Last week's column was a sub-par rant about finance. Today's is a return to form.
Kunstler: The Trigger
The futility of politics in America these days has driven the public into exactly the dream-state of zombie blood-lust depicted in so many popular video fantasies, a nightmare of decay, powerlessness, and degeneracy matching the actual condition of a disintegrating polity that has lost collective consciousness and seeks only to infect the dwindling numbers of the still-sentient. Almost nobody in this country believes we can manage our affairs anymore.
Well, can we? One of the hallmarks of an imploding culture is that people lose a sense of consequence. Things just seem to happen and unhappen, and nobody really cares about chains of decision and event. Anything goes and nothing matters.
One reason this is happening to us is that we allowed reality to be divorced from truth. Karl Rove wasn’t kidding back in the Bush-2 days when he quipped that “we create our own reality.” The part old Karl left out is that there’s a price for doing that. In the short run, it allows you to pretend that you have superpowers and can act in defiance of the way things really are. In the longer run, your view of the world comports so poorly with the facts of the world that things stop working.
The tragedy of Barack Obama is that he continued the basic Karl Rove doctrine only without bragging about it. I don’t know whether Mr. Obama was a hostage, an empty suit, or a fool, but he broadened and deepened the acquiescence to lying about just about everything. Did criminal misconduct run rampant in banking for years? Oh, nevermind. Is the US economy actually contracting instead of recovering? We’ll just make up better numbers. Did US officials act like Nazi war criminals in torturing prisoners? Well, yeah, but so what? Did the State Department and the CIA scuttle the elected Ukrainian government in order to start an unnecessary new conflict with Russia? Maybe so, but who cares? Was the Affordable Care Act a swindle in the service of insurance and pharmaceutical racketeering? Oh, we’ll read the bill after we pass it. Shale oil will make us “energy independent.” (Not.)
Has anyone noticed the way these incongruities percolate into the public attention and then get dismissed, like daydreams, with no resolution. I’ve harped on this one before because it was, to my mind, Obama’s greatest failure: When the Supreme Court decided in the Citizens United case that corporations were entitled to express their political convictions by buying off politicians, why didn’t the President join with his then-Democratic majority congress to propose legislation, or a constitutional amendment, more clearly redefining the difference between corporate “personhood” and the condition of citizenship? How could this constitutional lawyer miss the reality that corporations legally and explicitly do not have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the public interest but only to their shareholders? How was this not obvious? And why was there not a rush to correct it?
Of course, this only begs the question: where are the opponents to the ethos that anything goes and nothing matters? Where are the political figures who can sustain a complaint long enough, and loudly enough, to keep it in the public consciousness clearly enough to make a difference? The more conspiracy-minded might say that the security apparatus (the NSA and its servelings) or Wall Street actually run the country and somehow suppress opposition. I don’t believe that. I do believe that cultures go through tragic periods when they lose their bearings and the will to be truthful to themselves.
The latest news is that Mr. Jeb Bush is way ahead among his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination, leading to a beautiful setup for the battle of the dynasties: Bush versus Clinton in 2016. I believe that insulting prospect would be the wake-up call that will hit the American people upside the head and wake them out of their zombie rapture. A third party will arise. It may be a good one or a bad one, but it will blow the existing order of things apart, as it should.
Kunstler: The Trigger
The futility of politics in America these days has driven the public into exactly the dream-state of zombie blood-lust depicted in so many popular video fantasies, a nightmare of decay, powerlessness, and degeneracy matching the actual condition of a disintegrating polity that has lost collective consciousness and seeks only to infect the dwindling numbers of the still-sentient. Almost nobody in this country believes we can manage our affairs anymore.
Well, can we? One of the hallmarks of an imploding culture is that people lose a sense of consequence. Things just seem to happen and unhappen, and nobody really cares about chains of decision and event. Anything goes and nothing matters.
One reason this is happening to us is that we allowed reality to be divorced from truth. Karl Rove wasn’t kidding back in the Bush-2 days when he quipped that “we create our own reality.” The part old Karl left out is that there’s a price for doing that. In the short run, it allows you to pretend that you have superpowers and can act in defiance of the way things really are. In the longer run, your view of the world comports so poorly with the facts of the world that things stop working.
The tragedy of Barack Obama is that he continued the basic Karl Rove doctrine only without bragging about it. I don’t know whether Mr. Obama was a hostage, an empty suit, or a fool, but he broadened and deepened the acquiescence to lying about just about everything. Did criminal misconduct run rampant in banking for years? Oh, nevermind. Is the US economy actually contracting instead of recovering? We’ll just make up better numbers. Did US officials act like Nazi war criminals in torturing prisoners? Well, yeah, but so what? Did the State Department and the CIA scuttle the elected Ukrainian government in order to start an unnecessary new conflict with Russia? Maybe so, but who cares? Was the Affordable Care Act a swindle in the service of insurance and pharmaceutical racketeering? Oh, we’ll read the bill after we pass it. Shale oil will make us “energy independent.” (Not.)
Has anyone noticed the way these incongruities percolate into the public attention and then get dismissed, like daydreams, with no resolution. I’ve harped on this one before because it was, to my mind, Obama’s greatest failure: When the Supreme Court decided in the Citizens United case that corporations were entitled to express their political convictions by buying off politicians, why didn’t the President join with his then-Democratic majority congress to propose legislation, or a constitutional amendment, more clearly redefining the difference between corporate “personhood” and the condition of citizenship? How could this constitutional lawyer miss the reality that corporations legally and explicitly do not have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the public interest but only to their shareholders? How was this not obvious? And why was there not a rush to correct it?
Of course, this only begs the question: where are the opponents to the ethos that anything goes and nothing matters? Where are the political figures who can sustain a complaint long enough, and loudly enough, to keep it in the public consciousness clearly enough to make a difference? The more conspiracy-minded might say that the security apparatus (the NSA and its servelings) or Wall Street actually run the country and somehow suppress opposition. I don’t believe that. I do believe that cultures go through tragic periods when they lose their bearings and the will to be truthful to themselves.
The latest news is that Mr. Jeb Bush is way ahead among his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination, leading to a beautiful setup for the battle of the dynasties: Bush versus Clinton in 2016. I believe that insulting prospect would be the wake-up call that will hit the American people upside the head and wake them out of their zombie rapture. A third party will arise. It may be a good one or a bad one, but it will blow the existing order of things apart, as it should.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Monday, December 15, 2014
Saturday, December 06, 2014
Football Game Over?
As I noted late last year, a small Dallas-based college, Paul Quinn College, ended its football program because it was a drain on its finances. The remarkable thing about this story was that Paul Quinn converted the football field into an organic farm. Paul Quinn would not be the last college to disestablish its football team. The University of Alabama at Birmingham Blazers football team has played its last season. Boosters may kick in enough money to keep the team kicking, but this may be a sign of the slow ebb of college football.
------
The Paul Quinn farm, called the WE over Me Farm, has a Twitter account.
------
The Paul Quinn farm, called the WE over Me Farm, has a Twitter account.
Forget College Football—This School Turned Its Gridiron Into an Organic Farm http://t.co/DuUQAPSuzI via @TakePart
— WE over Me Farm (@PaulQuinnFarm) December 5, 2014Friday, December 05, 2014
Defecting from The New Republic
Slate, "The Slatest: Your News Companion," "Mass Resignations at TNR Follow Departures of Foer, Wieseltier" by Ben Mathis-Lilley.
Gawker: "White Men Upset Wrong White Man Placed in Charge...", by Leah Finnegan.
National Catholic Reporter, "Distinctly Catholic" blog, "RIP: The New Republic", by Michael Sean Winters (5 Dec. 2014)
What will John MacArthur make of this?
----
12 December 2014 update: A USA Today article on the future of newsweeklies.
----
14 December update: I just found Ilind.net: "Hawaiian Electric Deal Begging for Deeper Reporting."
What will ILSR make of this?
More later.
Gawker: "White Men Upset Wrong White Man Placed in Charge...", by Leah Finnegan.
National Catholic Reporter, "Distinctly Catholic" blog, "RIP: The New Republic", by Michael Sean Winters (5 Dec. 2014)
What will John MacArthur make of this?
----
12 December 2014 update: A USA Today article on the future of newsweeklies.
----
14 December update: I just found Ilind.net: "Hawaiian Electric Deal Begging for Deeper Reporting."
What will ILSR make of this?
More later.
Tuesday, December 02, 2014
Monday, December 01, 2014
Twenty Years Ago Today
The paper published my first opinion letter, about the lack of "quality films" playing in Hilo theaters.
Sometime soon, I'll look at how things have changed, movie-wise, in Hilo.
On another note, Kunstler goes into full head-spinning mode about Ferguson. I'll post a link soon.
Sometime soon, I'll look at how things have changed, movie-wise, in Hilo.
On another note, Kunstler goes into full head-spinning mode about Ferguson. I'll post a link soon.
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