Kunstler: Do You, Mr. Jones...?
In case you wonder how our politics fell into such a slough of despond, the answer is pretty simple. Neither main political party, or their trains of experts, specialists, and mouthpieces, can construct a coherent story about what is happening in this country — and the result is a roaring wave of recursive objurgation and wrath that loops purposelessly towards gathering darkness.
What’s happening is a slow-motion collapse of the economy. Neither Democrats or Republicans know why it is so remorselessly underway. A tiny number of well-positioned scavengers thrive on the debris cast off by the process of disintegration, but they don’t really understand the process either — the lobbyists, lawyers, bankers, contractors, feeders at the troughs of government could not be more cynical or clueless.
The nation suffers desperately from an absence of leadership and perhaps even more from the loss of faith that leadership is even possible after years without it. Perhaps that’s why so much hostility is aimed at Mr. Putin of Russia, a person who appears to know where his country stands in history, and who enjoys ample support among his countrymen. How that must gall the empty vessels like Lindsey Graham, Rubio, Schumer, Feinstein, Ryan, et. al.
So along came the dazzling, zany Trump, who was able to communicate a vague sense-memory of what had been lost in our time of American life, whose sheer bluster resembled something like conviction as projected via the cartoonizing medium of television, and who entered a paralysis of intention the moment he stepped into the oval office, where he proved to be even less authentic than the Wizard of Oz. Turned out he didn’t really understand the economic collapse underway either; he just remembered an America of 1962 and though somehow the national clock might be turned back.
The industrial triumph of America in the 19th and 20th century was really something to behold. But like all stories, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and we’re closer to the end of that story than the middle. It doesn’t mean the end of civilization but it means we have to start a new story that provides some outline of a life worth living on a planet worth caring about.
For the moment the fragmentary stories of redemption revolve around technological rescue remedies, chiefly the idea that electric cars will save the nation. This dumb narrative alone ought to inform you just how lost we are, because the story assumes that our prime objective is to remain car-dependent at all costs — when one of the main features in the story of our future is the absolute end of car dependency and all its furnishings and accessories. We can’t imagine going there. (How would you, without a car?)
More here.
Monday, May 22, 2017
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Kunstler: A Monster Eating the Nation
Is there any question now that the Deep State is preparing to expel President Donald Trump from the body politic like a necrotic organ? The Golden Golem of Greatness has floundered pretty badly on the job, it’s true, but his mighty adversaries in the highly politicized federal agencies want him to fail spectacularly, and fast, and they have a lot of help from the NY Times/WashPo/CNN axis of hysteria, as well as such slippery swamp creatures as Lindsey Graham.
More here.
Friday, May 19, 2017
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Various Tweets
Hi. That's not the Kremlin. It's St. Basil's. Maybe learn more about the country you blame everything on. Thanks. https://t.co/TMGAwliOy2
— Alan Smithee (@ActualFlatticus) May 18, 2017
In Paris from 9/28-10/6 for launch of French transl of The #BenedictOption. Will be camping on street outside here: https://t.co/6DwJKsPoRZ
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) May 18, 2017
Louisiana university libraries are, generally, a disgrace. Grambling U had to abandon its library. https://t.co/6sgwRkFcyy
— Robert Mann (@RTMannJr) May 18, 2017
I raised my kids on The Book Of Virtues. This breaks my heart. And it also chaps my ass. https://t.co/8OeNR1Xp84
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) May 16, 2017
Guys please read another book https://t.co/KsW5u4STke
— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) May 16, 2017
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Post-Brexit Britain (a post in progress)
UK Agriculture After Brexit https://t.co/yOcNH0kEhu (@buildresilience)
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) May 12, 2017
Monday, May 15, 2017
Kunstler: My New Book: A Safe and Happy Place.
Kunstler: My New Book: A Safe and Happy Place.
As you might imagine, I often hear from wannabe professional writers who have finished a book-length project and are horrified to discover that getting it published is harder than writing the damn thing. (They think I can help them — ha!) I offer them the sagest bit of wisdom I possess, which is that perseverance counts more than talent. A harsh message perhaps, but essential to incorporate in your world-view if you want to take up the vocation.
I came by this knowledge the hard way, having been fucked around by morons in the publishing industry my whole career — not to put too fine a point on it. If you can’t suck up endless adversity and carry on with the task at hand, then culinary school is probably a better career path for you {The culinary world can be tough, and often is much tougher than the publishing world. And some are in both worlds--P.Z.]. It’s especially troublesome if you produce something original, something that doesn’t fit into a tried-and-true marketing template. There is surely an inverse relationship between originality and success in mainstream publishing. Go ask Herman Melville.
The truth is, you are producing work that nobody asked for and that no one especially cares about. You have to grind away at this lonely business day-after-day to get the job done. The only thing that avails to keep you going is your own conviction that it is worth doing. Thus, the second morsel of wisdom I offer wannabes is to give up seeking validation from friends and relatives. I never ask friends to read my works-in-progress. If nothing else, reading loose manuscript pages is a pain in the ass. And most of the people I know spend so much time working in front of a video screen that the last thing they want to do is read your novel on a computer at home. As for mom and dad, they are understandably terrified that they will turn up as odious characters in the pages of your book, and in my case they often did. So I actually hoped they wouldn’t even crack one of my books open in the aisle of Brentanos. Happily, I have no evidence they ever read my published works.
Now that the book industry is whirling around the drain, like the music business before it, managing a career in letters is harder than ever. Publishers grow desperate and therefore only interested in works that seem like absolutely sure things — preferably books by celebrities with a TV-based following. They are, least of all, serious about literature these days (if such a quaint term is still comprehensible). For them, it’s down to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it’ll stick. There must be another way… and I was forced to find it.
I finished my latest “book” project last year around Halloween. In late December, my publisher turned it down. I’d been with The Atlantic Monthly Press, part of the Grove-Atlantic group, for seven books, starting with The Long Emergency. There was a story in my landing there. In 2004, my then-agent didn’t want to even bother trying to sell The Long Emergency. It was “too dark,” he said. This left me no choice but to drop the guy. On my own I tried to interest a half-dozen other experienced agents. They wrinkled their noses. So, I sent the manuscript out to two editors who had expressed some interest in my work over the years. The first guy, Daniel Menaker at Harper Collins, had a snit when he learned I’d made a multiple submission — a no-no for authors in those days — and told me to get lost. The second guy, the editor-in-chief at Grove Atlantic, Morgan Entrekin, offered me a contract. The Long Emergency turned out to be my best-selling book.
They eventually published my four-book World Made By Hand series of novels about life in a small New England town after the sort of economic collapse I described in The Long Emergency, a natural progression for me. I sensed they were none too happy about the project, but perhaps the chance that the series might be picked up by a cable network kept them on the line. My advances sank with each book. In any case, they never offered a kind word (e.g. “Hey, nice job… I enjoyed it….”). They did absolutely nothing in the way of marketing the books. So, when I handed in A Safe and Happy Place last year, they dumped me just in time for Christmas. My current agent didn’t want to try to sell it elsewhere, either. He said it was “off my brand” of hard-hitting polemical non-fiction and no other publisher would want it.
So I decided to publish it myself on Amazon, the arch-enemy of the mainstream publishers and booksellers. I enjoy writing fiction and believe that I do it pretty well, and I intend to persevere at it. I’m not convinced that the long-form work of fiction packaged as a novel will continue to exist as a literary artifact a whole lot longer — it is mainly a product of the past two centuries, which featured great advances in printing and the arrival of a middle-class with leisure time that could be filled with literature — but the novel is not quite dead yet. Anyway, human beings do like stories, whether printed and bound, played upon a stage or screen, or told around the campfire. We like to hear how the rest of the human race is doing.
And so here is A Safe and Happy Place, my story about a hippie commune in Vermont in the 1960s, an era which, all of a sudden, is now a half century ago — meaning the misty, distant past. Why did I decide to write the story of the Sunrise Village commune from a young woman’s point-of-view? Because I hadn’t done anything like it before. It was an interesting challenge, and with all the attention these days on the grievances of women, I wanted to create a plausible heroine who was not a complainer or a sap or a doormat or a designated victim, but a fully imagined capable person without an annoying ideological agenda.
I knew that a lot of people would bristle at the attempt — as if I lacked the credentials to try such a stunt. And, who knows, it may be a reason that my publisher dumped it and me in this idiotically hyper-politicized moment in history. Anyway, I feel that I successfully channeled my narrator, Erica “Pooh” Bollinger from the first sentence, and she lived in my head vividly until the job was done. And now I rather miss communing with her every day. In case you’re wondering, I did not suffer any personal gender confusion in the process.
I liked Pooh more and more the deeper I got into the story — her pluck, her common sense, her humor, her skepticism, her moral compass. The things that came out of her mouth often surprised me. I enjoyed imagining the male-female dynamics of young love from a point-of-view different from my own cis-het-white-privilege bunker. Forgive me for saying it wasn’t that difficult. Sure, men and women are different, but they operate in the same universe and are programmed for a similar menu of emotions. Mostly, I was rooting for Pooh to come through her adventure safely and happily, and in the course of 368 pages she is transformed from a troubled teen to a confident and autonomous adult.
In real life, that journey for me was rather difficult, and that liminal period of development — what we simply call “growing up” — is one of the themes I find myself returning to in my fiction. It also happened that I was there, I was in college through the heart of the hippie era, I saw a great deal of the action — though I skipped Woodstock, thank you very much (crowds were not my thing). I never lived on a commune, but I visited several of them and saw how they operated. I was susceptible to the military draft, but I enjoyed a student deferment from 1966 to 1970, when they instituted the draft lottery, and then I drew nearly the highest number, 353 — nobody above 100 was drafted in the last five years of the Vietnam War.
Like Pooh, I was not entirely on-board with everything about hippie culture. A lot of it was just plain creepy to me. The radical politics of the day seemed nascently despotic to me. I was not into group gropes or spookish oriental mysticism. I went pretty light on the drugs. My “trip” was mostly being an observer of my times. I was interested in trying to understand it all. As it happens, Pooh’s story ends in 1968, before events like the Charlie Manson murders and the fiasco at the Altamont Music Festival drove the Age of Aquarius into darkness. A few years after that, I was working as a professional journalist.
The differences in generational behavior then and now — 1967 to 2017 — seem much less marked than the differences between 1967 and what went before. College kids today can still recite the lyrics to Beatles songs, and quite a few of them affect hippie-ish garb and long hair. When I was a sophomore in 1967, I couldn’t have told you the title of a single pop song hit of the 1920s, and we sure didn’t wear raccoon coats. We didn’t have computers, iPhones, Facebook or even answering machines in 1967, but we managed to find other ways to network, spread the “underground” news, and goof off with friends and lovers. The radical politics of the 1960s had the basic aim of ending a stupid war; today’s campus politics seem bent on starting one. Both styles of youthful idealism had and have their shortcomings, I suppose, and beyond the narrow realm of politics lies the greater magic of emerging into adulthood in this complicated world, with all its joys and sorrows. The 1960s was the time of my coming into personhood, and I wanted a fresh way of presenting the experience in fiction. Hence: Pooh Bollinger.
Authors don’t usually tell you this much about how they came to write a book, but I thought you’d be interested in how and why I decided to self-publish A Safe and Happy Place on Amazon. It’s my way of saying that I intend to persevere. I believe readers will enjoy the journey. If you do happen to like it, write a review on Amazon — it actually helps a lot. And a very big thanks to my Patreon contributors who made it possible to write this book in the absence of a publisher’s advance
As you might imagine, I often hear from wannabe professional writers who have finished a book-length project and are horrified to discover that getting it published is harder than writing the damn thing. (They think I can help them — ha!) I offer them the sagest bit of wisdom I possess, which is that perseverance counts more than talent. A harsh message perhaps, but essential to incorporate in your world-view if you want to take up the vocation.
I came by this knowledge the hard way, having been fucked around by morons in the publishing industry my whole career — not to put too fine a point on it. If you can’t suck up endless adversity and carry on with the task at hand, then culinary school is probably a better career path for you {The culinary world can be tough, and often is much tougher than the publishing world. And some are in both worlds--P.Z.]. It’s especially troublesome if you produce something original, something that doesn’t fit into a tried-and-true marketing template. There is surely an inverse relationship between originality and success in mainstream publishing. Go ask Herman Melville.
The truth is, you are producing work that nobody asked for and that no one especially cares about. You have to grind away at this lonely business day-after-day to get the job done. The only thing that avails to keep you going is your own conviction that it is worth doing. Thus, the second morsel of wisdom I offer wannabes is to give up seeking validation from friends and relatives. I never ask friends to read my works-in-progress. If nothing else, reading loose manuscript pages is a pain in the ass. And most of the people I know spend so much time working in front of a video screen that the last thing they want to do is read your novel on a computer at home. As for mom and dad, they are understandably terrified that they will turn up as odious characters in the pages of your book, and in my case they often did. So I actually hoped they wouldn’t even crack one of my books open in the aisle of Brentanos. Happily, I have no evidence they ever read my published works.
Now that the book industry is whirling around the drain, like the music business before it, managing a career in letters is harder than ever. Publishers grow desperate and therefore only interested in works that seem like absolutely sure things — preferably books by celebrities with a TV-based following. They are, least of all, serious about literature these days (if such a quaint term is still comprehensible). For them, it’s down to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it’ll stick. There must be another way… and I was forced to find it.
I finished my latest “book” project last year around Halloween. In late December, my publisher turned it down. I’d been with The Atlantic Monthly Press, part of the Grove-Atlantic group, for seven books, starting with The Long Emergency. There was a story in my landing there. In 2004, my then-agent didn’t want to even bother trying to sell The Long Emergency. It was “too dark,” he said. This left me no choice but to drop the guy. On my own I tried to interest a half-dozen other experienced agents. They wrinkled their noses. So, I sent the manuscript out to two editors who had expressed some interest in my work over the years. The first guy, Daniel Menaker at Harper Collins, had a snit when he learned I’d made a multiple submission — a no-no for authors in those days — and told me to get lost. The second guy, the editor-in-chief at Grove Atlantic, Morgan Entrekin, offered me a contract. The Long Emergency turned out to be my best-selling book.
They eventually published my four-book World Made By Hand series of novels about life in a small New England town after the sort of economic collapse I described in The Long Emergency, a natural progression for me. I sensed they were none too happy about the project, but perhaps the chance that the series might be picked up by a cable network kept them on the line. My advances sank with each book. In any case, they never offered a kind word (e.g. “Hey, nice job… I enjoyed it….”). They did absolutely nothing in the way of marketing the books. So, when I handed in A Safe and Happy Place last year, they dumped me just in time for Christmas. My current agent didn’t want to try to sell it elsewhere, either. He said it was “off my brand” of hard-hitting polemical non-fiction and no other publisher would want it.
So I decided to publish it myself on Amazon, the arch-enemy of the mainstream publishers and booksellers. I enjoy writing fiction and believe that I do it pretty well, and I intend to persevere at it. I’m not convinced that the long-form work of fiction packaged as a novel will continue to exist as a literary artifact a whole lot longer — it is mainly a product of the past two centuries, which featured great advances in printing and the arrival of a middle-class with leisure time that could be filled with literature — but the novel is not quite dead yet. Anyway, human beings do like stories, whether printed and bound, played upon a stage or screen, or told around the campfire. We like to hear how the rest of the human race is doing.
And so here is A Safe and Happy Place, my story about a hippie commune in Vermont in the 1960s, an era which, all of a sudden, is now a half century ago — meaning the misty, distant past. Why did I decide to write the story of the Sunrise Village commune from a young woman’s point-of-view? Because I hadn’t done anything like it before. It was an interesting challenge, and with all the attention these days on the grievances of women, I wanted to create a plausible heroine who was not a complainer or a sap or a doormat or a designated victim, but a fully imagined capable person without an annoying ideological agenda.
I knew that a lot of people would bristle at the attempt — as if I lacked the credentials to try such a stunt. And, who knows, it may be a reason that my publisher dumped it and me in this idiotically hyper-politicized moment in history. Anyway, I feel that I successfully channeled my narrator, Erica “Pooh” Bollinger from the first sentence, and she lived in my head vividly until the job was done. And now I rather miss communing with her every day. In case you’re wondering, I did not suffer any personal gender confusion in the process.
I liked Pooh more and more the deeper I got into the story — her pluck, her common sense, her humor, her skepticism, her moral compass. The things that came out of her mouth often surprised me. I enjoyed imagining the male-female dynamics of young love from a point-of-view different from my own cis-het-white-privilege bunker. Forgive me for saying it wasn’t that difficult. Sure, men and women are different, but they operate in the same universe and are programmed for a similar menu of emotions. Mostly, I was rooting for Pooh to come through her adventure safely and happily, and in the course of 368 pages she is transformed from a troubled teen to a confident and autonomous adult.
In real life, that journey for me was rather difficult, and that liminal period of development — what we simply call “growing up” — is one of the themes I find myself returning to in my fiction. It also happened that I was there, I was in college through the heart of the hippie era, I saw a great deal of the action — though I skipped Woodstock, thank you very much (crowds were not my thing). I never lived on a commune, but I visited several of them and saw how they operated. I was susceptible to the military draft, but I enjoyed a student deferment from 1966 to 1970, when they instituted the draft lottery, and then I drew nearly the highest number, 353 — nobody above 100 was drafted in the last five years of the Vietnam War.
Like Pooh, I was not entirely on-board with everything about hippie culture. A lot of it was just plain creepy to me. The radical politics of the day seemed nascently despotic to me. I was not into group gropes or spookish oriental mysticism. I went pretty light on the drugs. My “trip” was mostly being an observer of my times. I was interested in trying to understand it all. As it happens, Pooh’s story ends in 1968, before events like the Charlie Manson murders and the fiasco at the Altamont Music Festival drove the Age of Aquarius into darkness. A few years after that, I was working as a professional journalist.
The differences in generational behavior then and now — 1967 to 2017 — seem much less marked than the differences between 1967 and what went before. College kids today can still recite the lyrics to Beatles songs, and quite a few of them affect hippie-ish garb and long hair. When I was a sophomore in 1967, I couldn’t have told you the title of a single pop song hit of the 1920s, and we sure didn’t wear raccoon coats. We didn’t have computers, iPhones, Facebook or even answering machines in 1967, but we managed to find other ways to network, spread the “underground” news, and goof off with friends and lovers. The radical politics of the 1960s had the basic aim of ending a stupid war; today’s campus politics seem bent on starting one. Both styles of youthful idealism had and have their shortcomings, I suppose, and beyond the narrow realm of politics lies the greater magic of emerging into adulthood in this complicated world, with all its joys and sorrows. The 1960s was the time of my coming into personhood, and I wanted a fresh way of presenting the experience in fiction. Hence: Pooh Bollinger.
Authors don’t usually tell you this much about how they came to write a book, but I thought you’d be interested in how and why I decided to self-publish A Safe and Happy Place on Amazon. It’s my way of saying that I intend to persevere. I believe readers will enjoy the journey. If you do happen to like it, write a review on Amazon — it actually helps a lot. And a very big thanks to my Patreon contributors who made it possible to write this book in the absence of a publisher’s advance
Sunday, May 14, 2017
What Ignorance of History Brings
The alt-right shows up in Charlottesville, Va., chanting “Russia is our friend” near statue of Robert E. Lee. https://t.co/o00TYIvupj
— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) May 14, 2017
Yes, but...
During the American Civil War, Russian-American relations were very generally cooperative. Alone among European powers, Russia offered oratorical support for the Union, largely due to the view that the U.S. served as a counterbalance to the British Empire.[16]
16. Norman A. Graebner, "Northern Diplomacy and European Neutrality," Why the North Won the Civil War, ed. David Donald (New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1960), pp. 57-8.
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Kunstler: Blood Sports
Kunstler: Blood Sports
What you’re seeing in the political miasma of “RussiaGate” is an exercise in nostalgia. Apart from the symbolic feat of getting a “black” president freely elected in 2008 (remember, Mr. Obama is also half-white) [Note: I might address this in another post, about the continuing denial of Obama's blackness. In the meantime, here's an article about Obama and blackness.--P.Z.], the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed a political triumph in half a century to match the Watergate extravaganza of 1972-74, which ended in the departure of Mr. Nixon, the designated Prince of Darkness of those dear dead days. Watergate had had a more satisfying finale than The Brides of Dracula.
So, in its current sad state, devoid of useful political ideas, mired in the mostly manufactured conflicts of race and gender, psychologically crippled by the election loss of a miserable candidate to the Golden Golem of Greatness, the Democratic Party is returning full steam to a gambit that worked so well years ago: beating the devil by congressional inquiry.
In President Trump (uccchhh, the concept!), they’ve got a target much juicier even than Old Nixie. It wasn’t for nothing that they called him “Tricky Dick.” He came back from political near-death twice in his career. The first time, running as Dwight Eisenhower’s veep, he was accused of accepting the gift of a vicuna coat for his wife, Pat, and other secret cash emoluments. He overcame that with one of the first epic performances of the TV age, the “Checkers Speech” — Checkers being the family’s cocker spaniel, who Nixon invoked as a proxy for his own guileless innocence. It worked bigly.
The second near-death was his defeat in the California governor’s race of 1962, following his 1960 squeaker presidential election loss to John F. Kennedy. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore…” he told the press. But he rose from the grave in 1968 — after fortifying his bank account in a Wall Street law practice — when the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart (and wrecking the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey).
It is not unrecognized that in his first term Nixon functioned as a very capable executive, presiding over social and environmental legislation that would be considered progressive today — though he remained mired in the tarbaby of Vietnam. But then, in the reelection campaign of ’72, he got a little too cute — or, at least, his campaign show-runners did, hiring a klatch of bumbling ex-CIA errand boys to burgle the DNC offices, who were then caught red-handed at the scene, which was the basement of the Watergate apartment complex… and the rest is history.
What a fabulous inquisition Watergate was! What a colorful cast characters: the wily old “country lawyer” Senator Sam Ervin, the dashing chief staff inquisitor Professor Sam Dash, the fallen Republican knights, Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox, the lonely and heroic bean-spiller, John Dean! And many more. The Watergate hearings on TV were more thrilling than Downtown Abby [sic--P.Z.]. Once Old Nixie went down the path of stonewalling and evasion — covering up an escapade he might not have even known about at the time — he was dead meat.
I remember that sweaty August day that he threw in the towel. (I was a young newspaper reporter when newspapers still mattered.) It was pretty much a national orgasm. “NIXON RESIGNS!” the headlines screamed. A moment later he was on the gangway into the helicopter for the last time. Enter, stage right, the genial Gerald Ford….
Forgive me for getting caught up in the very nostalgia I castigate. And now here we are in the mere early months of Trumptopia about to hit the replay button on a televised inquisition. In my humble opinion, Donald Trump is a far more troubling personality than Tricky Dick ever was, infantile, narcissistic, at times verging on psychotic, but the RussiaGate story looks pretty flimsy. At this point, after about ten months of NSA-FBI investigation, nothing conclusive has turned up about Trump’s people “colluding” with Russia to gain unfair advantage in the election against You-Know-Who. Former NSA chief James Clapper has publicly stated twice in no uncertain terms that there’s no evidence to support the allegations (so far).
And there remains the specter of the actual content of the “collusion” — conveniently ignored by the so-called “Resistance” and its water-carriers at The New York Times — the hacked emails that evince all kinds of actual misbehavior by Secretary of State HRC and the DNC. The General Mike Flynn episode seems especially squishy, since it is the routine duty of incoming foreign affairs officials to check in with the ambassador corps in Washington. Why do you think nations send ambassadors to other countries?
The upshot of all this will be a political circus for the rest of the year and the abandonment of any real business in government, at a moment in history when some very weighty black swans circle above the clouds waiting to crash land. Enjoy the histrionics if you dare, and pay no attention to collapsing economy as it all plays out.
What you’re seeing in the political miasma of “RussiaGate” is an exercise in nostalgia. Apart from the symbolic feat of getting a “black” president freely elected in 2008 (remember, Mr. Obama is also half-white) [Note: I might address this in another post, about the continuing denial of Obama's blackness. In the meantime, here's an article about Obama and blackness.--P.Z.], the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed a political triumph in half a century to match the Watergate extravaganza of 1972-74, which ended in the departure of Mr. Nixon, the designated Prince of Darkness of those dear dead days. Watergate had had a more satisfying finale than The Brides of Dracula.
So, in its current sad state, devoid of useful political ideas, mired in the mostly manufactured conflicts of race and gender, psychologically crippled by the election loss of a miserable candidate to the Golden Golem of Greatness, the Democratic Party is returning full steam to a gambit that worked so well years ago: beating the devil by congressional inquiry.
In President Trump (uccchhh, the concept!), they’ve got a target much juicier even than Old Nixie. It wasn’t for nothing that they called him “Tricky Dick.” He came back from political near-death twice in his career. The first time, running as Dwight Eisenhower’s veep, he was accused of accepting the gift of a vicuna coat for his wife, Pat, and other secret cash emoluments. He overcame that with one of the first epic performances of the TV age, the “Checkers Speech” — Checkers being the family’s cocker spaniel, who Nixon invoked as a proxy for his own guileless innocence. It worked bigly.
The second near-death was his defeat in the California governor’s race of 1962, following his 1960 squeaker presidential election loss to John F. Kennedy. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore…” he told the press. But he rose from the grave in 1968 — after fortifying his bank account in a Wall Street law practice — when the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart (and wrecking the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey).
It is not unrecognized that in his first term Nixon functioned as a very capable executive, presiding over social and environmental legislation that would be considered progressive today — though he remained mired in the tarbaby of Vietnam. But then, in the reelection campaign of ’72, he got a little too cute — or, at least, his campaign show-runners did, hiring a klatch of bumbling ex-CIA errand boys to burgle the DNC offices, who were then caught red-handed at the scene, which was the basement of the Watergate apartment complex… and the rest is history.
What a fabulous inquisition Watergate was! What a colorful cast characters: the wily old “country lawyer” Senator Sam Ervin, the dashing chief staff inquisitor Professor Sam Dash, the fallen Republican knights, Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox, the lonely and heroic bean-spiller, John Dean! And many more. The Watergate hearings on TV were more thrilling than Downtown Abby [sic--P.Z.]. Once Old Nixie went down the path of stonewalling and evasion — covering up an escapade he might not have even known about at the time — he was dead meat.
I remember that sweaty August day that he threw in the towel. (I was a young newspaper reporter when newspapers still mattered.) It was pretty much a national orgasm. “NIXON RESIGNS!” the headlines screamed. A moment later he was on the gangway into the helicopter for the last time. Enter, stage right, the genial Gerald Ford….
Forgive me for getting caught up in the very nostalgia I castigate. And now here we are in the mere early months of Trumptopia about to hit the replay button on a televised inquisition. In my humble opinion, Donald Trump is a far more troubling personality than Tricky Dick ever was, infantile, narcissistic, at times verging on psychotic, but the RussiaGate story looks pretty flimsy. At this point, after about ten months of NSA-FBI investigation, nothing conclusive has turned up about Trump’s people “colluding” with Russia to gain unfair advantage in the election against You-Know-Who. Former NSA chief James Clapper has publicly stated twice in no uncertain terms that there’s no evidence to support the allegations (so far).
And there remains the specter of the actual content of the “collusion” — conveniently ignored by the so-called “Resistance” and its water-carriers at The New York Times — the hacked emails that evince all kinds of actual misbehavior by Secretary of State HRC and the DNC. The General Mike Flynn episode seems especially squishy, since it is the routine duty of incoming foreign affairs officials to check in with the ambassador corps in Washington. Why do you think nations send ambassadors to other countries?
The upshot of all this will be a political circus for the rest of the year and the abandonment of any real business in government, at a moment in history when some very weighty black swans circle above the clouds waiting to crash land. Enjoy the histrionics if you dare, and pay no attention to collapsing economy as it all plays out.
Thursday, May 11, 2017
Laura Ingraham mistakenly says George Washington lived at Monticello https://t.co/YeG7RNA150 pic.twitter.com/H1Kxoc6JRK
— The Hill (@thehill) May 11, 2017
@lachlan This is so weird. Ingraham went to UVA & should know Monticello is Jefferson's home, not Washington's... This is a new level of dense 4 her.
— The Jurista (@tornado_loves_u) May 11, 2017
Apologize for tweet error--obv meant Washington's Mt Vernon (not Jefferson's Monticello, altho PC radicals will want that razed too!)
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) May 11, 2017
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Comey
Comey was hapless. Both sides wanted him fired, at one time or another.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 10, 2017
Monday, May 08, 2017
This is big media news. Local TV news is already conservative, Sinclair particularly so. https://t.co/rJWQlByJDs
— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) May 8, 2017
Maybe Sinclair is "particularly so" but the Hawaii local news is middle-of-the-road. KHON leans a little rightward, if anything.
Kunstler: Paris Afterparty.
Kunstler: Paris Afterparty.
First mistake: Emmanuel Macron’s handlers played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” instead of the French national anthem at the winner’s election rally. Well, at least they didn’t play “Deutschland Ãœber Alles.” The tensions in the Euroland situation remain: the 20 percent-plus youth unemployment, the papered-over insolvency of the European banks, and the implacable contraction of economic activity, especially at the southern rim of the EU.
The clash of civilizations brought on by the EU’s self-induced refugee glut still hangs over the continent like a hijab. That there was no Islamic terror violence around the election should not be reassuring. The interests of the jihadists probably lie in the continued squishiness of the status quo, with its sentimental multiculture fantasies — can’t we all just get along? — so En Marche was their best bet. LePen might have pushed back hard. Macron looks to bathe France’s Islamic antagonists in a nutrient-medium of Hollandaise lite.
The sclerosis of Europe is assured for now. But events are in charge, not elected officials so much, and Europe’s economic fate may be determined by forces far away and beyond its power to control, namely in China, where the phony-baloney banking system is likely to be the first to implode in a global daisy-chain of financial uncontrolled demolition. Much of that depends on the continuing stability of currencies.
The trouble is they are all pegged to fatally unrealistic expectations of economic expansion. Without it, the repayment of interest on monumental outstanding debt becomes an impossibility. And the game of issuing more new debt to pay the interest on the old debt completely falls apart. Once again, the dynamic relationship between real capital creation and the quandaries of the oil industry lurks behind these failures of economy. In a crisis of debt repayment, governments will not know what else to do except “print” more money, and this time they are liable to destroy faith in the value of “money” the world over.
I put “money” in quotation marks because the dollars, euros, yuan, and yen are only worth what people believe them to be, subject to measurement against increasingly fictional indexes of value, such as interest rates, stock and bond markets, government-issued employment and GDP stats, and other benchmarks so egregiously gamed by the issuing authorities that Ole Karl Marx’s hoary warning finally comes to pass and everything solid melts into air.
For the record, I’m not in favor of political chaos and economic anarchy, but that seems to be the only route that Deep Staters ‘round the world want to go down. The convenient protocols of finance in the industrial era which allowed routine borrowing from the future to get today’s enterprise up and running have lost their mojo. The short and practical theory of history applies to this: things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time.
Revolving credit seemed like a good idea through the 20th century, and it sure worked to build an economic matrix based on cheap energy, which is, alas, no more. What remains is the wishful pretense that the old familiar protocols can still work their magic. The disappointment will be epic, and the result next time may be political figures even worse than LePen and Trump. Consider, though, that what you take for the drumbeat of nationalism is actually just a stair-step down on a much-longer journey out of the globally financialized economy. Because the ultimate destination down this stairway is a form of local autarky that the current mandarins of the status quo can’t even imagine.
That journey has already begun, though neither the public nor its elected leaders, have begun to apprehend it. The first spark of recognition will come in the months ahead when the current cover story on markets, “money,” and growth falls away and political leaders can only stand by in wonder and nausea that the world has the impertinence to change without their permission.
First mistake: Emmanuel Macron’s handlers played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” instead of the French national anthem at the winner’s election rally. Well, at least they didn’t play “Deutschland Ãœber Alles.” The tensions in the Euroland situation remain: the 20 percent-plus youth unemployment, the papered-over insolvency of the European banks, and the implacable contraction of economic activity, especially at the southern rim of the EU.
The clash of civilizations brought on by the EU’s self-induced refugee glut still hangs over the continent like a hijab. That there was no Islamic terror violence around the election should not be reassuring. The interests of the jihadists probably lie in the continued squishiness of the status quo, with its sentimental multiculture fantasies — can’t we all just get along? — so En Marche was their best bet. LePen might have pushed back hard. Macron looks to bathe France’s Islamic antagonists in a nutrient-medium of Hollandaise lite.
The sclerosis of Europe is assured for now. But events are in charge, not elected officials so much, and Europe’s economic fate may be determined by forces far away and beyond its power to control, namely in China, where the phony-baloney banking system is likely to be the first to implode in a global daisy-chain of financial uncontrolled demolition. Much of that depends on the continuing stability of currencies.
The trouble is they are all pegged to fatally unrealistic expectations of economic expansion. Without it, the repayment of interest on monumental outstanding debt becomes an impossibility. And the game of issuing more new debt to pay the interest on the old debt completely falls apart. Once again, the dynamic relationship between real capital creation and the quandaries of the oil industry lurks behind these failures of economy. In a crisis of debt repayment, governments will not know what else to do except “print” more money, and this time they are liable to destroy faith in the value of “money” the world over.
I put “money” in quotation marks because the dollars, euros, yuan, and yen are only worth what people believe them to be, subject to measurement against increasingly fictional indexes of value, such as interest rates, stock and bond markets, government-issued employment and GDP stats, and other benchmarks so egregiously gamed by the issuing authorities that Ole Karl Marx’s hoary warning finally comes to pass and everything solid melts into air.
For the record, I’m not in favor of political chaos and economic anarchy, but that seems to be the only route that Deep Staters ‘round the world want to go down. The convenient protocols of finance in the industrial era which allowed routine borrowing from the future to get today’s enterprise up and running have lost their mojo. The short and practical theory of history applies to this: things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time.
Revolving credit seemed like a good idea through the 20th century, and it sure worked to build an economic matrix based on cheap energy, which is, alas, no more. What remains is the wishful pretense that the old familiar protocols can still work their magic. The disappointment will be epic, and the result next time may be political figures even worse than LePen and Trump. Consider, though, that what you take for the drumbeat of nationalism is actually just a stair-step down on a much-longer journey out of the globally financialized economy. Because the ultimate destination down this stairway is a form of local autarky that the current mandarins of the status quo can’t even imagine.
That journey has already begun, though neither the public nor its elected leaders, have begun to apprehend it. The first spark of recognition will come in the months ahead when the current cover story on markets, “money,” and growth falls away and political leaders can only stand by in wonder and nausea that the world has the impertinence to change without their permission.
Sunday, May 07, 2017
Who would donate such a thing, and why?
"Liberty U President Jerry Falwell Jr & his son Trey unwrap portrait of President Trump, a gift from donor." (WaPo) pic.twitter.com/G7IrvZE069
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) May 7, 2017
Friday, May 05, 2017
Stinko
Comedians and would-be comedians can be:
*funny and not offensive
*funny and offensive
*not funny and not offensive
*not funny and offensive
Guess into which category falls former governor of Arkansas and purveyor of uncle jokes Mike Huckabee:
*funny and not offensive
*funny and offensive
*not funny and not offensive
*not funny and offensive
Guess into which category falls former governor of Arkansas and purveyor of uncle jokes Mike Huckabee:
For Cinco de Mayo I will drink an entire jar of hot salsa and watch old Speedy Gonzales cartoons and speak Spanish all day. Happy CdMayo!
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) May 5, 2017
Thursday, May 04, 2017
Scoot, Scoot
Chaffetz is all smiles as he scoots back from a fully-insured surgery to repeal health coverage for millions. pic.twitter.com/XrM8DSQXO2
— Ben Marter (@BenMarter) May 4, 2017
-----
8 May update: Chaffetz was set to give the keynote address at the Hawaii GOP Lincoln Day Dinner tonight. Because of his foot surgery, he was unable to attend and the event has been postponed to 7 July.
HawaiiFreePress.com: Hawaii Republicans Postpone Lincoln Day Dinner.
News Release from Hawaii Republican Party, May 1, 2017
Last week, Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) was advised by his doctors to undergo surgery on his ankle, which he had injured years earlier. The Congressman entered the hospital last Thursday and is expected to be released, with limited mobility, this week. He has informed us that he is unable to travel to Hawaii to be our Keynote Speaker at the 2017 Lincoln Dinner.
Due to these circumstances and with the cooperation of the Hawaii Convention Center and our donors, we are working to establish a new date for the event. As soon as the new date and time are confirmed we will advise the membership immediately.
Jack James
Hawaii Republican Party
Executive Director
The Hill April 27: "Chaffetz resting after 'successful' foot surgery"
* * * * *
HAWAII REPUBLICAN PARTY ANNOUNCES 2017 LINCOLN DINNER AND KEYNOTE SPEAKER
From www.GOPHawaii.com
Aloha Hawaii Republicans,
We are pleased to announce that Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah will be the keynote speaker for our 2017 Lincoln Dinner, which will be held on Monday, May 8, 2017 at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu. The proceeds from this event will help us recruit, train, and support candidates for the upcoming 2018 election cycle as well as pay our operating expenses.
Representative Chaffetz became the Chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee in January 2015. He is currently serving his fourth term in the US House of Representatives. In the 114th Congress, he also serves on the House Judiciary Committee.
The values Congressman Chaffetz embraces are reflected in the issues he has prioritized during the course of his service. He ran for office on the promise of returning to the core conservative principles of accountability, strong national defense, limited government and fiscal discipline.
Accountability has been a hallmark of his work. Prior to being named Chairman of the Oversight Committee, he played a prominent role in numerous substantive investigations, including the Benghazi terrorist attack, the Fast & Furious gun running operation, the IRS targeting scandal and the Secret Service investigation. He is deeply engaged in exposing waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government.
Foreign policy and national security are a key focus of his work on both the Oversight and previously on the Homeland Security Committee. He has made numerous trips overseas to investigate issues ranging from embassy overspending to foreign aid waste. His trip to Libya in the weeks following the September 11, 2012 attack became the impetus for a broader investigation and the appointment of a Select Committee.
To learn more about Rep. Chaffetz, please click on this link.
To reserve and buy your table or tickets on Eventbrite, please click here.
To get a full size printable flyer, go to this web page.
Please contact Jack James, our Executive Director, at 808-593-8180 for additional details.
For more information and to stay connected, please like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/HawaiiRepublicanParty, follow us on Twitter @gophawaii, and visit our website at www.gophawaii.com.
Sincerely,
Fritz Rohlfing
State Chair
http://gophawaii.com/?page_id=1864
Wednesday, May 03, 2017
Deborah at NancyNall.com comments:
"Today on the south side of Chicago Pres Obama and Michelle will unveil a 3d model of the proposed Obama Library. It’s being designed by the architecture couple Billie Tsien and Todd Williams. I can’t wait to see photos of the model."
Here you are.
"Today on the south side of Chicago Pres Obama and Michelle will unveil a 3d model of the proposed Obama Library. It’s being designed by the architecture couple Billie Tsien and Todd Williams. I can’t wait to see photos of the model."
Here you are.
Monday, May 01, 2017
Kunstler: The Sound of One Wing Flapping.
And suddenly the storms of early Trumptopia subside, or seem to. The surface of things turns eerily placid as the sweets of May sweep away the toils of an elongated mud season. Somebody stuffed Kim Jong Un back in his bunker with a carton of Kools and the Vin Diesel video library. France appears resigned to Hollandaise Lite in the refreshing form of boy wonder Macron. It’s been weeks since The New York Times complained about the Russians stealing Hillary’s turn as leader of the free world. We’re given to understand that Congress managed overnight to cook up a spending bill that will avert a Government shut-down until September. Rest easy America… oh, and buy every dip.
A calm surface is exactly what Black Swans like to land on, though by definition we will not know they’re out there until our reveries are broken by the sound of wings flapping. Some kind of dirty bird showed up on Canada’s thawing pond last week when that country’s biggest home loan lender suffered a 60 percent pukage of shareholder equity and had to be bailed out — not by the Canadian government directly, but by the Ontario Province’s Health Care Workers Pension Fund, a neat bit of hocus pocus that amounts to a one-year emergency loan at ten percent interest.
If that’s a way for insolvent public employee pension plans to find enough “yield” to meet their obligations, then maybe that could be the magic bullet for the USA’s foundering pension funds. The next time Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and friends get a case of the Vapors, let them be bailed out by the Detroit School Bus Drivers’ Pension Fund at ten percent interest. That ought to work. And let Calpers take care of Wells Fargo.
The situation across Western Civilization is as follows: virtually every major financial institution has become a check-kiting operation or a Ponzi scheme, and we’ve reached the point where they can only pretend to be rescued. Bailout or not, the Toronto-based Home Capital Group is still stuck with shit-loads of non-performing sub-prime mortgage loans — its specialty — and Canada’s spectacular real estate bubble has hardly begun to pop. The collateral is starting to turn, like dead meat in the May sunshine, and the odium will waft across the border.
It doesn’t take much to blow things up, as the world discovered in several other historically recent episodes. The 1998 banking contagion started with the collapse of Thailand’s currency, called the baht. I doubt you could count on one hand the number of people in Wall Street or the Federal Reserve (with its 300-plus PhD economists) who gave a flying fuck about the Thai baht. Before you knew it, South Korea and Indonesia started whirling around the drain. And then Russia felt the suck. And then the Nobel Prize winning economists at a Connecticut hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management found out the hard way that their “secret sauce” investment formula which “could not fail in the life of this universe or several like it,” fatally poisoned its balance sheet on a repast of Russian sovereign bonds after only about eighteen months. And it took all the poobahs of American banking to paper over the firm’s death about five minutes before the global banking system would shut down via the greatest daisy chain of cross-collateralized financial booby-traps ever assembled.
And ten years later, there was the fiasco of 2008, starring Lehman Brothers and a demonic host of grifters trafficking in worthless bonded debt around the sub-prime mortgage racket tied into a toxic web of “derivative financial products” — i.e. bad bets between insolvent counter-parties masquerading as “insurance” against unsound investment. Trillions of bailout monies conjured out of thin air fixed that, oh yes it did!
So enjoy the festivities around the Maypole today, and the suddenly calm waters of global affairs, and keep your ears pricked for the sound of wings flapping.
And suddenly the storms of early Trumptopia subside, or seem to. The surface of things turns eerily placid as the sweets of May sweep away the toils of an elongated mud season. Somebody stuffed Kim Jong Un back in his bunker with a carton of Kools and the Vin Diesel video library. France appears resigned to Hollandaise Lite in the refreshing form of boy wonder Macron. It’s been weeks since The New York Times complained about the Russians stealing Hillary’s turn as leader of the free world. We’re given to understand that Congress managed overnight to cook up a spending bill that will avert a Government shut-down until September. Rest easy America… oh, and buy every dip.
A calm surface is exactly what Black Swans like to land on, though by definition we will not know they’re out there until our reveries are broken by the sound of wings flapping. Some kind of dirty bird showed up on Canada’s thawing pond last week when that country’s biggest home loan lender suffered a 60 percent pukage of shareholder equity and had to be bailed out — not by the Canadian government directly, but by the Ontario Province’s Health Care Workers Pension Fund, a neat bit of hocus pocus that amounts to a one-year emergency loan at ten percent interest.
If that’s a way for insolvent public employee pension plans to find enough “yield” to meet their obligations, then maybe that could be the magic bullet for the USA’s foundering pension funds. The next time Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and friends get a case of the Vapors, let them be bailed out by the Detroit School Bus Drivers’ Pension Fund at ten percent interest. That ought to work. And let Calpers take care of Wells Fargo.
The situation across Western Civilization is as follows: virtually every major financial institution has become a check-kiting operation or a Ponzi scheme, and we’ve reached the point where they can only pretend to be rescued. Bailout or not, the Toronto-based Home Capital Group is still stuck with shit-loads of non-performing sub-prime mortgage loans — its specialty — and Canada’s spectacular real estate bubble has hardly begun to pop. The collateral is starting to turn, like dead meat in the May sunshine, and the odium will waft across the border.
It doesn’t take much to blow things up, as the world discovered in several other historically recent episodes. The 1998 banking contagion started with the collapse of Thailand’s currency, called the baht. I doubt you could count on one hand the number of people in Wall Street or the Federal Reserve (with its 300-plus PhD economists) who gave a flying fuck about the Thai baht. Before you knew it, South Korea and Indonesia started whirling around the drain. And then Russia felt the suck. And then the Nobel Prize winning economists at a Connecticut hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management found out the hard way that their “secret sauce” investment formula which “could not fail in the life of this universe or several like it,” fatally poisoned its balance sheet on a repast of Russian sovereign bonds after only about eighteen months. And it took all the poobahs of American banking to paper over the firm’s death about five minutes before the global banking system would shut down via the greatest daisy chain of cross-collateralized financial booby-traps ever assembled.
And ten years later, there was the fiasco of 2008, starring Lehman Brothers and a demonic host of grifters trafficking in worthless bonded debt around the sub-prime mortgage racket tied into a toxic web of “derivative financial products” — i.e. bad bets between insolvent counter-parties masquerading as “insurance” against unsound investment. Trillions of bailout monies conjured out of thin air fixed that, oh yes it did!
So enjoy the festivities around the Maypole today, and the suddenly calm waters of global affairs, and keep your ears pricked for the sound of wings flapping.
Sunday, April 30, 2017
"Mammoth Release" of Baahubali 2.
Weekend Box Office Results.
BoxOfficeMojo: 'Furious 8' Tops $1 Billion, 'Latin Lover' and 'Baahubali 2' Open Big & 'Guardians 2' Debuts.
BoxOfficeMojo: 'Furious 8' Tops $1 Billion, 'Latin Lover' and 'Baahubali 2' Open Big & 'Guardians 2' Debuts.
In third is the mammoth release of the Tollywood sensation, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion distributed by Great India Films in North America. Playing in a mere 425 theaters the film brought in an estimated $10.1 million, a whopping $23,855 per theater average and nearly three times as much as the opening for the 2015 original. This is the largest opening for an Indian film domestically [Emphasis mine.--P.Z.] and we are still hoping to get a full report regarding its performance outside North America.
How this son of migrant farm workers became an astronauthttps://t.co/DfMfR0uapL pic.twitter.com/eFxyKCjVNj
— CNN (@CNN) May 1, 2017
Saturday, April 29, 2017
If I Kickstarted a faithful reproduction of this McDonaldland Specification Manual…… would anyone back it? Note: this is not a joke question pic.twitter.com/A8ZSGoDblj
— Cabel Sasser (@cabel) April 27, 2017
"New York's Never Been Better Than It Is Today"
Maybe I'll visit there someday.
NYC has never been better than it is today, as a fine new book celebrates: https://t.co/IRu3o1t5C0 via @nypost
— Steve Cuozzo (@stevecuozzo) April 29, 2017
Various Tweets: From @postcarbon
How to Do a Food Rescue https://t.co/aLvKLWD5cd (@buildresilience)
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 28, 2017
Shot: @bradplumer on science/gov't interactions
— D. Ray Long (@RayLongDC) April 26, 2017
Chaser: @HardcoreHistory's history of the early nuclear age https://t.co/HzumOaf7jA https://t.co/Pql6RPnImQ
Juggling Live Hand Grenades: @richardheinberg reviews some important (and worrying) recent articles. https://t.co/vRgjhTdM7C pic.twitter.com/8b3LmBnagM
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 26, 2017
Many California Sierra Club chapters are now firm opponents of actual urban sustainability and housing justice. https://t.co/QZygXsKGSJ
— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) April 25, 2017
Peak Oil Review – 24 April 2017 https://t.co/h1HFwO7smh (@buildresilience)
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 24, 2017
Review: Botanical Treasures by Joshua Smith https://t.co/Sb5A2HK5wu (@buildresilience)
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 24, 2017
"For the most part, renewables don't work on individual or industrial level. Village-level use does" https://t.co/vyiJBFOAcm via @postcarbon
— Craig Morris (@PPchef) April 22, 2017
Friday, April 28, 2017
Kunstler: The National Blues
Kunstler is right, but he overstates the extent of the problem. There's still richness and soul in American life.
Kunstler: The National Blues.
Kunstler: The National Blues.
Thursday, April 27, 2017
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Monday, April 24, 2017
Kunstler: Ready, Set, Splat.
Kunstler: Ready, Set, Splat.
As I write, the French stock market (the CAC 40), is doing a grand jeté (up 4.5 percent!) in celebration of Emmanuel Macron’s assumed slaying of the dragon Le Pen. But that was just the first round under the interesting French election system. Consider that two other candidates who were eliminated, Monsieurs Fillon and Mélenchon, got nearly 40 percent of the vote. Are we so sure about where their voters go in the second and final round two weeks from now?
I suspect that most Americans — even the ones who follow Rachel Maddow — are about as interested in French politics as differential calculus. Macron, 36, is a blank slate. He was finance minister under current president François Hollande, of the Socialist Party, but declared during the election campaign that he’s not a socialist, he only wanted to be of service to his country, and this time he ran under his own party, En Marche! He appears to represent the continuation of business-as-usual with the European Union, which seems to put him on the wrong side of history at this crucial moment — if you suppose, as I do, that the EU is so riddled with hopeless financial contradictions and centrifugal political tensions that it is unlikely to persist.
Yet, understandably, people are reluctant to change the system they’re living under. Le Pen wants to blow the EU up, especially the bureaucracy lodged in Brussels that has become a self-serving and self perpetuating monster. Blowing up the EU would necessarily, it seems, mean the end of the European Central Bank, and with it the scams and Ponzi schemes that have provided an appearance of normality, despite an official 10.5 percent unemployment rate in France and a constant chain of public massacres by resident Jihadistas of one sort or another, some of them perpetrated by radical refugees allowed in under EU policy.
Macron might serve the interests of the American Deep State, which is determined to drive a wedge between Europe and the Chinese-Russian-Iranian “silk road” economic bloc that would consolidate trade in the Eastern Hemisphere. The US wants “the West” to remain what it had been for seventy years: the dominant posse. Even if the underlying conditions remained the same, this might not be possible.
But those underlying conditions are changing, and in ways that much of the political maneuvering across the West cannot alter, or even comprehend, for instance, the inability of these mature industrial economies to grow anymore. That is largely a function of the end of affordable energy. Unfortunately, the absence of growth portends not stagnation but collapse as society fails to generate enough new wealth to pay its debts.
Now, we’ve seen a pretty impressive demonstration of advanced nations playing financial games to cover up this corrosive condition. But the dishonesty at work is pretty obvious, and the problem with dishonesty in financial affairs is that it represents unreality. The accrued momentum in colossal sums of money flowing this way and that way has allowed unreality to reign in international finance for a while. But that is now flying apart. The ultimate reality, politicians and economists will soon discover, is that you can’t create your own reality.
So whatever you think now about the French election, or the fate of the EU, is liable to change as the great debt crack-up our time finally gets underway and suddenly every nation has to scramble desperately to keep its shit together. That magic moment may be at hand this week as the US congress returns from Easter recess to face its budget and debt ceiling dilemmas. If the credit-worthiness of this country takes a wrong turn, it will upset the global currency system. In fact, it will rip a hole in financial time-and-space into which the presumed value of all sorts of things represented on paper and computer drives will disappear, never to be seen again.
As I write, the French stock market (the CAC 40), is doing a grand jeté (up 4.5 percent!) in celebration of Emmanuel Macron’s assumed slaying of the dragon Le Pen. But that was just the first round under the interesting French election system. Consider that two other candidates who were eliminated, Monsieurs Fillon and Mélenchon, got nearly 40 percent of the vote. Are we so sure about where their voters go in the second and final round two weeks from now?
I suspect that most Americans — even the ones who follow Rachel Maddow — are about as interested in French politics as differential calculus. Macron, 36, is a blank slate. He was finance minister under current president François Hollande, of the Socialist Party, but declared during the election campaign that he’s not a socialist, he only wanted to be of service to his country, and this time he ran under his own party, En Marche! He appears to represent the continuation of business-as-usual with the European Union, which seems to put him on the wrong side of history at this crucial moment — if you suppose, as I do, that the EU is so riddled with hopeless financial contradictions and centrifugal political tensions that it is unlikely to persist.
Yet, understandably, people are reluctant to change the system they’re living under. Le Pen wants to blow the EU up, especially the bureaucracy lodged in Brussels that has become a self-serving and self perpetuating monster. Blowing up the EU would necessarily, it seems, mean the end of the European Central Bank, and with it the scams and Ponzi schemes that have provided an appearance of normality, despite an official 10.5 percent unemployment rate in France and a constant chain of public massacres by resident Jihadistas of one sort or another, some of them perpetrated by radical refugees allowed in under EU policy.
Macron might serve the interests of the American Deep State, which is determined to drive a wedge between Europe and the Chinese-Russian-Iranian “silk road” economic bloc that would consolidate trade in the Eastern Hemisphere. The US wants “the West” to remain what it had been for seventy years: the dominant posse. Even if the underlying conditions remained the same, this might not be possible.
But those underlying conditions are changing, and in ways that much of the political maneuvering across the West cannot alter, or even comprehend, for instance, the inability of these mature industrial economies to grow anymore. That is largely a function of the end of affordable energy. Unfortunately, the absence of growth portends not stagnation but collapse as society fails to generate enough new wealth to pay its debts.
Now, we’ve seen a pretty impressive demonstration of advanced nations playing financial games to cover up this corrosive condition. But the dishonesty at work is pretty obvious, and the problem with dishonesty in financial affairs is that it represents unreality. The accrued momentum in colossal sums of money flowing this way and that way has allowed unreality to reign in international finance for a while. But that is now flying apart. The ultimate reality, politicians and economists will soon discover, is that you can’t create your own reality.
So whatever you think now about the French election, or the fate of the EU, is liable to change as the great debt crack-up our time finally gets underway and suddenly every nation has to scramble desperately to keep its shit together. That magic moment may be at hand this week as the US congress returns from Easter recess to face its budget and debt ceiling dilemmas. If the credit-worthiness of this country takes a wrong turn, it will upset the global currency system. In fact, it will rip a hole in financial time-and-space into which the presumed value of all sorts of things represented on paper and computer drives will disappear, never to be seen again.
Sunday, April 23, 2017
What Ever Happened to The New York Observer?
That's what I wondered this morning. I subscribed to it from 1999 till the mid-2000s, and every week or so, a pink broadsheet would come in the mail. And it was one of the most delightful and informative periodicals to which I've subscribed. I stopped subscribing well before Jared Kushner bought it. Searching online, I found
this.
----
The Wikipedia article provides a good overview.
It's just as well I stopped subscribing when I did.
The famous illustrator Drew Friedman remembers working at The Observer and dishes some dirt.
this.
DANA SCHWARTZ, ENTERTAINMENT WRITIER, THE NEW YORK OBSERVER: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
CAMEROTA: So Jared Kushner is a pivotal player. He was during the campaign, he is during the transition, and he may be in the White House. He's basically your boss.
SCHWARTZ: Yes.
CAMEROTA: So from how he has run "The New York Observer", what do you think he brings to the table?
SCHWARTZ: It's interesting to sort of see what's happened to "The New York Observer" over the past few years. Definitely it's leaned more conservative than it has in the past. After the election it was announced that the paper edition of "The Observer" would be shutting down.
CAMEROTA: So the paper would be shutting down but it would still exist online. And was that just modernizing or was that because of some mismanagement? What reason was given?
SCHWARTZ: I think paper media, print media is suffering across the board. So I have to just imagine that it's moving forward.
----
The Wikipedia article provides a good overview.
It's just as well I stopped subscribing when I did.
The famous illustrator Drew Friedman remembers working at The Observer and dishes some dirt.
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Thread listing/debunking Maddow's odd Trump/Russia theories: https://t.co/xL78brWm2C
— Anya Parampil (@anyaparampil) April 20, 2017
@AngryBlackLady The ability of people to bring any criticism of Bernie back to the Clinton's is pretty impressive.
— Celia (@_celia_bedelia_) April 23, 2017
And vice versa.
O'Reilly: Looking Back...and Forward (a post in progress)
26 April update: Leaked E-Mail Shows O'Reilly Tried to Save His Job.
23 April update: An Associated Press article on the options O'Reilly has after Fox News.
Quoted in the article is Michael Harrison, publisher of the radio trade magazine Talkers: “He’s made for TV, this guy, as opposed to radio. He talks with his face.”
Meanwhile, O'Reilly returns Monday (but with no opportunity to talk with his face)with his "No Spin News" podcast, available only to premium subscribers to his website.
----
National Review: The G-File: Bill O'Reilly's Nostalgia Factor, by Jonah Goldberg.
I always thought O'Reilly (a former teacher, incidentally) was a real-life Asst. Principal Vernon.
VladTV: Cam'Ron's Famous You Mad Interview Resurfaces....
Excerpt from a book on O'Reilly.
O'Reilly's interview with Terry Gross here and here.
23 April update: An Associated Press article on the options O'Reilly has after Fox News.
Quoted in the article is Michael Harrison, publisher of the radio trade magazine Talkers: “He’s made for TV, this guy, as opposed to radio. He talks with his face.”
Meanwhile, O'Reilly returns Monday (but with no opportunity to talk with his face)with his "No Spin News" podcast, available only to premium subscribers to his website.
----
National Review: The G-File: Bill O'Reilly's Nostalgia Factor, by Jonah Goldberg.
I always thought O'Reilly (a former teacher, incidentally) was a real-life Asst. Principal Vernon.
Among many lowlights, O'Reilly's ambush of Jeremy Glick, the anti-war son of a 9/11 victim, was one of his lowest: https://t.co/3QlqHUKUxi
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 20, 2017
VladTV: Cam'Ron's Famous You Mad Interview Resurfaces....
Excerpt from a book on O'Reilly.
O'Reilly's interview with Terry Gross here and here.
Daily Digest 4/20 - Democracy to Pathocracy, The Detroit Of Tomorrow? https://t.co/wqLtznqL2d pic.twitter.com/EG2xQVFzXp
— PeakProsperity.com (@chrismartenson) April 20, 2017
Daily Digest 4/13 - Expect The Unexpected, Do People Really Care About The Environment? https://t.co/h4QUleG0g9 pic.twitter.com/R2DfSwzAGY
— PeakProsperity.com (@chrismartenson) April 13, 2017
Daily Digest 4/10 - The Problem With Freedom, What's Causing The Retail Meltdown Of 2017? https://t.co/2l7ZBoZsFg pic.twitter.com/9BdSSr8GQH
— PeakProsperity.com (@chrismartenson) April 10, 2017
Friday, April 21, 2017
Frexit
Will ‘Frexit’ supporters decide the outcome of the French presidential election? https://t.co/fSeRvcHZW7 pic.twitter.com/sWNtGfz409
— FRANCE 24 (@FRANCE24) April 21, 2017
If you thought Brexit had a complicated plot line, check out the screenplay for Frexit https://t.co/gP1OtwKbyj
— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 20, 2017
Worst nightmare for EU as French election could be between TWO candidates wanting Frexit https://t.co/lO2ftmnKaq
— Voice of Europe (@V_of_Europe) April 15, 2017
More later.
Kunstler: A Matter of Mercy
The metaphor of a dementia-addled patient is strained, but Kunstler is right that stuff happens and is quickly forgotten.--P.Z.
Kunstler: A Matter of Mercy.
Paging Doctor Oz! A patient calling itself The United States wandered into the emergency room disoriented, wearing a filthy warm-up suit, claiming it was “the greatest” this and that… but was unable to complete the nine-page admission protocol or present valid insurance ID. Patient is growing increasingly violent, threatening staff and other patients….
Nations do develop something like Alzheimers. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that for some time now nothing sticks in the national brain-pan — if that’s what we can call the news media and its analogs on the Web waves. For months, an obsession about “Russian interference in the election” raged through the left lobe of the national consciousness. Then, about a week ago, it vanished utterly. Grandpa suffered similar delusions about the Russians meddling with “our precious bodily fluids.” (Paging Doctor Strangelove.)
Not so far back as last summer, a candidate named Trump un-ironically called for “an end to endless war in the Middle East.” The oft-applied policy of “regime change,” he said, was not working out in the various US-engineered failed states such as Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine. About two weeks ago, I seem to recall, the State Department even declared explicitly that we had no brief for regime change in the case of one Bashar al-Assad over in Syria.
Then there was something in the wifi waves about a poison gas attack. The evidence as to exactly who perpetrated it looked, how-you-say, not altogether convincing. This evidence amounted to the US Intel services, in their aggregate omniscience, asserting that, “yes, it was so that this weasel Assad bombed his people with Sarin.” Wolf Blitzer and Rachel Maddow ran so hard with the story that they vanished over the horizon.
The patient had a dream after that: a dream of cruise missiles reigning down hellfire judgment upon a Syrian air base. Quite a few of them went astray and blew up some prickly pears in the desert and a pod of migrating sea turtles out in the Mediterranean. (Thank you Microsoft Windows.) Then the Secretary of State, Mr. Tillerson declared that “Assad must go.” The patient now was completely confused about who was coming or going. Then the patient forgot about the dream and we’ve heard no more about this fairytale land of Syria since then. Oh well….
It seemed like only yesterday that head honcho over North Korea — a character straight out of the James Bond fantasies with the weirdest haircut in recorded history — was threatening to blow up the United States. A US aircraft carrier fleet was soon steaming around his half of the Korean peninsula. A rocket lifted off somewhere… and promptly blew up. Well, at least something blew up. I forgot what, exactly….
And now I see on the morning wire that ISIS has gone and pulled off another terror incident in Paris — one cop dead, one injured in a street shooting. Weren’t there other incidents before this one, possibly even worse ones? I forget. Anyway, in this case, it was easy to figure out the man’s identity (one Karim Cheurfi) because the fucker had spent 15 years in prison after being convicted of three attempted murders, two against police officers, and was released on parole in 2015. There was some additional chatter in the wire story about the incident having an effect on an upcoming French election. But I forget who’s running. And when the darn thing is over, I’ll probably forget who won, and why.
That’s how we roll in the national Alzheimers ward. Shit happens and then is promptly forgotten. Sometimes the shit that happens is forgotten so completely that it’s like living in universe where nothing happens. The auditors who once reported to work in your brain have left their stations — with no duties left after the smart-phone came on the scene. They are among the millions “no longer looking for work” in those BLS reports.
Maybe this is a manifestation of what used to be called “God’s mercy.” Now that we’ve almost succeeded in making the planet uninhabitable, we don’t have to remember how it got that way, or what will happen to us in the meantime, while we’re still here.
Kunstler: A Matter of Mercy.
Paging Doctor Oz! A patient calling itself The United States wandered into the emergency room disoriented, wearing a filthy warm-up suit, claiming it was “the greatest” this and that… but was unable to complete the nine-page admission protocol or present valid insurance ID. Patient is growing increasingly violent, threatening staff and other patients….
Nations do develop something like Alzheimers. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that for some time now nothing sticks in the national brain-pan — if that’s what we can call the news media and its analogs on the Web waves. For months, an obsession about “Russian interference in the election” raged through the left lobe of the national consciousness. Then, about a week ago, it vanished utterly. Grandpa suffered similar delusions about the Russians meddling with “our precious bodily fluids.” (Paging Doctor Strangelove.)
Not so far back as last summer, a candidate named Trump un-ironically called for “an end to endless war in the Middle East.” The oft-applied policy of “regime change,” he said, was not working out in the various US-engineered failed states such as Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine. About two weeks ago, I seem to recall, the State Department even declared explicitly that we had no brief for regime change in the case of one Bashar al-Assad over in Syria.
Then there was something in the wifi waves about a poison gas attack. The evidence as to exactly who perpetrated it looked, how-you-say, not altogether convincing. This evidence amounted to the US Intel services, in their aggregate omniscience, asserting that, “yes, it was so that this weasel Assad bombed his people with Sarin.” Wolf Blitzer and Rachel Maddow ran so hard with the story that they vanished over the horizon.
The patient had a dream after that: a dream of cruise missiles reigning down hellfire judgment upon a Syrian air base. Quite a few of them went astray and blew up some prickly pears in the desert and a pod of migrating sea turtles out in the Mediterranean. (Thank you Microsoft Windows.) Then the Secretary of State, Mr. Tillerson declared that “Assad must go.” The patient now was completely confused about who was coming or going. Then the patient forgot about the dream and we’ve heard no more about this fairytale land of Syria since then. Oh well….
It seemed like only yesterday that head honcho over North Korea — a character straight out of the James Bond fantasies with the weirdest haircut in recorded history — was threatening to blow up the United States. A US aircraft carrier fleet was soon steaming around his half of the Korean peninsula. A rocket lifted off somewhere… and promptly blew up. Well, at least something blew up. I forgot what, exactly….
And now I see on the morning wire that ISIS has gone and pulled off another terror incident in Paris — one cop dead, one injured in a street shooting. Weren’t there other incidents before this one, possibly even worse ones? I forget. Anyway, in this case, it was easy to figure out the man’s identity (one Karim Cheurfi) because the fucker had spent 15 years in prison after being convicted of three attempted murders, two against police officers, and was released on parole in 2015. There was some additional chatter in the wire story about the incident having an effect on an upcoming French election. But I forget who’s running. And when the darn thing is over, I’ll probably forget who won, and why.
That’s how we roll in the national Alzheimers ward. Shit happens and then is promptly forgotten. Sometimes the shit that happens is forgotten so completely that it’s like living in universe where nothing happens. The auditors who once reported to work in your brain have left their stations — with no duties left after the smart-phone came on the scene. They are among the millions “no longer looking for work” in those BLS reports.
Maybe this is a manifestation of what used to be called “God’s mercy.” Now that we’ve almost succeeded in making the planet uninhabitable, we don’t have to remember how it got that way, or what will happen to us in the meantime, while we’re still here.
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
A Hard Fall From the Top
Bill O'Reilly Is Out At Fox News https://t.co/ygPX34ZkET
— NPR (@NPR) April 19, 2017
The 5 most ironic times Bill O'Reilly accused a rapper of moral failings. https://t.co/YPdVbMVmDy pic.twitter.com/ahjD82OtLQ
— The FADER (@thefader) April 19, 2017
Dear @RupertMurdoch,
— Italians For Trump (@Italians4Trump) April 19, 2017
You are a SO WEAK AND YOU CAVED TO THE LIBERAL MEDIA!
The People are with @OReillyFactor and you go against US!
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Peak Oil Review – 17 April 2017 https://t.co/CXizKVPgYv (@buildresilience)
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 17, 2017
Monday, April 17, 2017
Obama or Clinton would have done this as well, but without scrutiny https://t.co/JgxmPRr7AI
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 18, 2017
Kunstler: Buy the Dip?
Kunstler: Buy the Dip?
The military frolics of spring have distracted the nation’s attention from the economic and financial dynamics that pose the ultimate mortal threat to business as usual. Note the distinction between economic and financial. The first represents real activity in this Land of the Deal: people doing and making. The second, finance, used to be a minor branch — only about five percent — of all the doing in the days of America’s putative bigliest greatitude. The task of finance then was limited and straightforward: to manage the allocation of capital for more doing and making. The profit in that enabled bankers to drive Cadillacs instead of Chevrolets, but not much more.
These days, finance is closer to 40 percent of all the doing in America, and it is not about making anything, but getting more than its share of “money” — whatever that is now — and what “money” mostly is is whatever the people engaged in finance say it is, for instance, Fannie Mae bonds representing millions of sketchy loans for houses of vinyl and strand-board built in places with no future… or stock issued by the Tesla corporation… or the sovereign IOUs of the US Treasury.
The list of things that pretend to be “money” these days would be long and shocking and the sheer churn of these instruments among the banks and markets “produces” the fabled “revenue streams” beloved of The Wall Street Journal. What happens when the world discovers that these instruments (securities and their derivatives) represent falsely? Why, bigly trouble.
And this is the season we’re moving into as the dogwoods blaze: the season of the re-discovery of actual value. For those of you gloating over last week’s demonstrations of US Big Stick-ism, be warned that our military shenanigans have given China and Russia every reason to discipline this country by undermining the international standing of the dollar. They’ve been preparing for this very deliberately for years: constructing an alternative to the US-sponsored SWIFT international payment system, stockpiling thousands of tons of gold, building trade partnerships to circumvent US dominated syndicates. Before the month of April is out, they’ll “pull the trigger” on new voting arrangements in the International Monetary Fund that will reduce the financial power of the US and the Eurozone, especially in the oil trade.
Around the same moment, America will wake up to the awful reality of the debt ceiling. This petard has been ticking the whole time that the political bureaucracy of Washington has wasted its mojo on the quixotic crusade to blame Russia for the 2016 election outcome. Congress will return from the Easter recess to discover that they have a few mere days to debate and resolve the debt ceiling problem — that is, to raise it so the country can borrow more “money” — or else they’ll be faced with a shut-down of government operations, including their own generous emoluments. It’s a good thing (for them) that they have plenty of walking-around money from the mysterious perqs of government service, but the rest of America doesn’t have $500 to pay for a new set of tires or the extraction of an abscessed molar.
Some readers may have long wondered what might happen in this country if the SNAP card refills and social security checks stopped coming. Perhaps we’re about to find out. Congress might find itself in a painfully tight spot. The Democrats would like nothing better than to let this drag on for a while in order to humiliate, and perhaps finish off, their arch-nemesis, the Golden Golem of Greatness. Many Republicans have a religious-strength ideological aversion to increasing the already appalling US debt load. The prospects are not bright for a quick-and-easy resolution to this quandary.
The IMF voting re-set and the debt ceiling quagmire have the power to disrupt many of the arrangements that allow the banks and markets to continue pretending that their stuff has value. When that consensus trance snaps, President Trump may find himself in the unhappy position of having to declare a bank holiday. Unlike the usual holidays in America, there will no Easter Bunny, no Jack-o-lanterns, no Santa Claus. Just empty supermarket shelves and pissed-off people marshaling in the WalMart parking lots with flaming brands and espontoons.
The military frolics of spring have distracted the nation’s attention from the economic and financial dynamics that pose the ultimate mortal threat to business as usual. Note the distinction between economic and financial. The first represents real activity in this Land of the Deal: people doing and making. The second, finance, used to be a minor branch — only about five percent — of all the doing in the days of America’s putative bigliest greatitude. The task of finance then was limited and straightforward: to manage the allocation of capital for more doing and making. The profit in that enabled bankers to drive Cadillacs instead of Chevrolets, but not much more.
These days, finance is closer to 40 percent of all the doing in America, and it is not about making anything, but getting more than its share of “money” — whatever that is now — and what “money” mostly is is whatever the people engaged in finance say it is, for instance, Fannie Mae bonds representing millions of sketchy loans for houses of vinyl and strand-board built in places with no future… or stock issued by the Tesla corporation… or the sovereign IOUs of the US Treasury.
The list of things that pretend to be “money” these days would be long and shocking and the sheer churn of these instruments among the banks and markets “produces” the fabled “revenue streams” beloved of The Wall Street Journal. What happens when the world discovers that these instruments (securities and their derivatives) represent falsely? Why, bigly trouble.
And this is the season we’re moving into as the dogwoods blaze: the season of the re-discovery of actual value. For those of you gloating over last week’s demonstrations of US Big Stick-ism, be warned that our military shenanigans have given China and Russia every reason to discipline this country by undermining the international standing of the dollar. They’ve been preparing for this very deliberately for years: constructing an alternative to the US-sponsored SWIFT international payment system, stockpiling thousands of tons of gold, building trade partnerships to circumvent US dominated syndicates. Before the month of April is out, they’ll “pull the trigger” on new voting arrangements in the International Monetary Fund that will reduce the financial power of the US and the Eurozone, especially in the oil trade.
Around the same moment, America will wake up to the awful reality of the debt ceiling. This petard has been ticking the whole time that the political bureaucracy of Washington has wasted its mojo on the quixotic crusade to blame Russia for the 2016 election outcome. Congress will return from the Easter recess to discover that they have a few mere days to debate and resolve the debt ceiling problem — that is, to raise it so the country can borrow more “money” — or else they’ll be faced with a shut-down of government operations, including their own generous emoluments. It’s a good thing (for them) that they have plenty of walking-around money from the mysterious perqs of government service, but the rest of America doesn’t have $500 to pay for a new set of tires or the extraction of an abscessed molar.
Some readers may have long wondered what might happen in this country if the SNAP card refills and social security checks stopped coming. Perhaps we’re about to find out. Congress might find itself in a painfully tight spot. The Democrats would like nothing better than to let this drag on for a while in order to humiliate, and perhaps finish off, their arch-nemesis, the Golden Golem of Greatness. Many Republicans have a religious-strength ideological aversion to increasing the already appalling US debt load. The prospects are not bright for a quick-and-easy resolution to this quandary.
The IMF voting re-set and the debt ceiling quagmire have the power to disrupt many of the arrangements that allow the banks and markets to continue pretending that their stuff has value. When that consensus trance snaps, President Trump may find himself in the unhappy position of having to declare a bank holiday. Unlike the usual holidays in America, there will no Easter Bunny, no Jack-o-lanterns, no Santa Claus. Just empty supermarket shelves and pissed-off people marshaling in the WalMart parking lots with flaming brands and espontoons.
Saturday, April 15, 2017
Friday, April 14, 2017
Kunstler: What Could Go Wrong?
Kunstler: What Could Go Wrong?
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Yeats wrote. The funny thing is, we didn’t seem to miss the center all that much after it was gone. America is perfectly satisfied hunkering down at the margins these days. Especially the margins of thinking.
One thing that used to occupy the center was public discussion, debate, and argumentation. Now and again, it featured a coherent exchange of ideas. These days, the main political factions are sunk in hysteria of one kind or another. Their primitive promptings hardly add up to ideas but rather limbic spasms of fear and rage. And then there is the shadow partner of the two parties called the Deep State, led by the quaintly dubbed “Intelligence Community.” These birds, many of them lifers, are dedicated to making the public discussion of anything as incoherent as possible so as to prevent any change in policy that might curtail the growth of the Deep State, a sort of cancer of the body politic.
Case in point, the recent Syrian aerial gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun. Elected officials were all over the cable networks selling the NSA’s story that Syrian president Bashar Assad bombed women and children with Sarin gas three days after State Department declared that it had a new policy of letting Assad remain in power after decades of sedulously scheming to shove him out. That might have led to the end of the six-year-long Syrian civil war, which Assad seemed to be winning, finally — with Russian assistance.
But instead the incident has led to new official calls to shove Assad out… to be replaced by what…? Nobody knows. Because the US Deep State thrives when chaos reigns in foreign lands. So much the better for their looting operations, such as the theft of Libya’s 141 ton gold reserves in 2011. And if not looting hard assets directly, the Deep State benefits when its many black box vendors — the private security armies, materials suppliers, arms sellers — are raking in the accounts receivable.
The fascinating part of the Syrian gas bombing story is how easily the public swallowed it. Those elected congressmen and senators infesting the cable stations told the public that the Intelligence Community “issued a consensus report” that the Syrian air force has dropped Sarin gas bombs on the hapless civilians. Nobody offered any actual evidence that this was so. These days, mere assertions rule.
That’s how we roll now. I’m still waiting to see some evidence that Trump’s campaign “colluded with Russia” to spin the election toward him. Those claims, too, were put out as “a consensus analysis” by the Intelligence Community. And then in March, months after the disputed election, just-retired NSA director James Clapper told NBC’s Meet the Press that his agency had no evidence of “Russian collusion” with the Trump forces. That was only a few weeks ago.
For the moment, it may benefit casual observers to adopt the most cynical attitude possible about the “consensus reports” that emanate from these myriad agencies. What it all finally seems to represent is the snowballing incompetence, venality, mendacity, and impotence of the US government in general, in all its layers and branches.
Hence, the idiotic PR stunt the other day of dropping the so-called “Mother of All Bombs (MOAB)” on some backwater of the once-and-future Mother of All Backwaters, Afghanistan. Did you happen to see a photo of that Mother Bomb? It looked bigger than any airplane that might be assigned to carry it, a cartoon of a bomb, more ridiculous than anything you might see in a Vin Diesel movie. It even had the acronym “MOAB” plastered on its fuselage in case anyone might confuse it with a canister of Round-up. I wonder what it cost. Got to be more than the $1 million-plus for a Tomahawk missile. You could probably run the whole Medicaid system of Alabama on what one MOAB invoice comes in at.
Meanwhile, the Navy’s Aircraft Carrier Strike Force 1 steams off the waters of North Korea and we lately have word that the US might just try to preemptively take out Kim Jong-un’s nuclear bomb assembly site. There’s a tang of excitement in the air (and on the cable channels). America’s back in the game, proving that when all else fails we can be depended on at least to blow some shit up. What could wrong?
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Yeats wrote. The funny thing is, we didn’t seem to miss the center all that much after it was gone. America is perfectly satisfied hunkering down at the margins these days. Especially the margins of thinking.
One thing that used to occupy the center was public discussion, debate, and argumentation. Now and again, it featured a coherent exchange of ideas. These days, the main political factions are sunk in hysteria of one kind or another. Their primitive promptings hardly add up to ideas but rather limbic spasms of fear and rage. And then there is the shadow partner of the two parties called the Deep State, led by the quaintly dubbed “Intelligence Community.” These birds, many of them lifers, are dedicated to making the public discussion of anything as incoherent as possible so as to prevent any change in policy that might curtail the growth of the Deep State, a sort of cancer of the body politic.
Case in point, the recent Syrian aerial gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun. Elected officials were all over the cable networks selling the NSA’s story that Syrian president Bashar Assad bombed women and children with Sarin gas three days after State Department declared that it had a new policy of letting Assad remain in power after decades of sedulously scheming to shove him out. That might have led to the end of the six-year-long Syrian civil war, which Assad seemed to be winning, finally — with Russian assistance.
But instead the incident has led to new official calls to shove Assad out… to be replaced by what…? Nobody knows. Because the US Deep State thrives when chaos reigns in foreign lands. So much the better for their looting operations, such as the theft of Libya’s 141 ton gold reserves in 2011. And if not looting hard assets directly, the Deep State benefits when its many black box vendors — the private security armies, materials suppliers, arms sellers — are raking in the accounts receivable.
The fascinating part of the Syrian gas bombing story is how easily the public swallowed it. Those elected congressmen and senators infesting the cable stations told the public that the Intelligence Community “issued a consensus report” that the Syrian air force has dropped Sarin gas bombs on the hapless civilians. Nobody offered any actual evidence that this was so. These days, mere assertions rule.
That’s how we roll now. I’m still waiting to see some evidence that Trump’s campaign “colluded with Russia” to spin the election toward him. Those claims, too, were put out as “a consensus analysis” by the Intelligence Community. And then in March, months after the disputed election, just-retired NSA director James Clapper told NBC’s Meet the Press that his agency had no evidence of “Russian collusion” with the Trump forces. That was only a few weeks ago.
For the moment, it may benefit casual observers to adopt the most cynical attitude possible about the “consensus reports” that emanate from these myriad agencies. What it all finally seems to represent is the snowballing incompetence, venality, mendacity, and impotence of the US government in general, in all its layers and branches.
Hence, the idiotic PR stunt the other day of dropping the so-called “Mother of All Bombs (MOAB)” on some backwater of the once-and-future Mother of All Backwaters, Afghanistan. Did you happen to see a photo of that Mother Bomb? It looked bigger than any airplane that might be assigned to carry it, a cartoon of a bomb, more ridiculous than anything you might see in a Vin Diesel movie. It even had the acronym “MOAB” plastered on its fuselage in case anyone might confuse it with a canister of Round-up. I wonder what it cost. Got to be more than the $1 million-plus for a Tomahawk missile. You could probably run the whole Medicaid system of Alabama on what one MOAB invoice comes in at.
Meanwhile, the Navy’s Aircraft Carrier Strike Force 1 steams off the waters of North Korea and we lately have word that the US might just try to preemptively take out Kim Jong-un’s nuclear bomb assembly site. There’s a tang of excitement in the air (and on the cable channels). America’s back in the game, proving that when all else fails we can be depended on at least to blow some shit up. What could wrong?
One Thing Leads to Another
Reading Hattie's Twitter, I saw she retweeted this from Angry Black Lady, which links to Keith Boykin's tweet.
How the President descends the stairs of Air Force One is unremarkable to me. But I remembered how Obama would canter down (or up) the stairs. And I searched online for "Obama descending stairs."
Read for yourself.
Trump drops #MOAB then flies to Palm Beach on a Thursday afternoon for an extended golf weekend trip to Mar-a-Lago. pic.twitter.com/yyp25YKiYg
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) April 14, 2017
How the President descends the stairs of Air Force One is unremarkable to me. But I remembered how Obama would canter down (or up) the stairs. And I searched online for "Obama descending stairs."
Read for yourself.
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Cosmo
Bill O'Reilly laughs at 'bizarre' incident.
Cosmo updated their story and deleted that tweet because apparently framing cancer as a hot new weight loss trend was *NOT* a great idea pic.twitter.com/pho3pePZO6
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) April 11, 2017
Cosmo updated their story and deleted that tweet because apparently framing cancer as a hot new weight loss trend was *NOT* a great idea pic.twitter.com/pho3pePZO6
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) April 11, 2017
Bill O'Reilly laughs at 'bizarre' incident.
Monday, April 10, 2017
Kunstler: "Wonderland."
Kunstler: Wonderland.
There are times in the course of events when a society cannot tell what the fuck is going on, or what to do about it, and this is one of those moments in history here in the USA. The quandaries of life on the home front — how to make a living, how to care for ourselves and loved ones — get shoved aside by misadventures in foreign lands with their own quandaries. One delusion leads to another until you enter a zero gravity of the mind. Case in point du jour: Syria.
The persistent hyperRussomania of the US Dem-Prog alliance and its sob-sisters in the media seeks to make a bad situation worse in Syria and probably for the worst reasons. How many Americans have even the dimmest idea what’s going on in Syria, who the cast of characters there represent, and where the USA fits into all of it?
There is the head of government, one Bashar al Assad (son of the previous president, Hafez al Assad). The Assads had run Syria as a mostly secular Arab state until the civil war within Islam, Sunni against Shia, spilled out of Iraq. The Assads belonged to the tiny Alawite sect of the Shia. They comprise only 13 percent of the Syrian population, which has a Sunni majority. Under the Assads, Syria has tilted toward Iran, the Shia home state, and away from the Sunni Arabs elsewhere in the neighborhood. Russia has cultivated Iran and support its “friends,” the Assads.
A mash-up of Sunni jihad armies fights the Assad government in Syria’s civil war. These are Isis, al Qaeda, and Jabhat al Nusra. The US government had made official noise about supporting the more “moderate rebels” in the Syrian conflict. Who are they exactly? Do you have a clue? Which army among those three rebel groups are “moderates?” And what is their moderate goal under jihad? To topple Assad. And then what? To set up a new theocratic government perhaps? How is it in America’s interests to promote Islamic jihadi theocracy?
One hypothesis is that the struggle is over who gets to run gas and oil pipelines through Syria to get easier access to the Mediterranean Sea and the European energy market. Iran would very badly like to do that. But they are in competition with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the little giant emirate of natural gas. So, you have the Iran/Shia gang on one side and the KSA/Qatar/Sunni on the other side. Anybody who had scanned the news since 1979 can probably tell whose side the US is on. By the way, this hypothesis has had no airing among the mainstream media triumvirate: The New York Times, CNN, and The WashPo. These news orgs won’t even entertain that angle of the story… but as I said, it’s only a hypothesis.
It was not so many weeks ago that President Trump met with the crown prince of KSA at the White House to give assurances of American friendship and support. KSA is supposedly America’s chief ally against Isis in Syria. Yet, KSA and the USA are dedicated to getting rid of the Assad government as well as Isis. That is, we are against both sides in the Syrian civil war. Still wondering why the American public is confused by all this? Do you know who our choice is to replace Assad? Can you name an opposition figure? Of course you can’t. There is nobody. What the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the NSA seem to have in mind is the familiar failed state policy that has worked so well in the past (not).
Which brings us to the curious case of Bashar Assad’s recent supposed poison gas bombing of civilians in Khan Sheikhoun. The media triumvirate was avid to play along with the story. I don’t know about you, but I have to ask myself: what would Assad’s strategic goal be in gas bombing women and children? To gin up worldwide positive PR? To get the Syrian people on his side against Isis and other jihadis? What advantage could Assad possibly gain? In warfare generally, the tacticians strike against military targets. There’s a hypothesis that Assad’s air force sought to strike a rebel arms depot in Idlib province — a military target. The hypothesis goes further, saying that the depot contained phosgene and chlorine gas, but not Sarin. The wind carried these released gases among civilian homes and streets in Khan Sheikhoun. People suffered and died. Evidence for the absence of Sarin gas is that the gassing victims were handled manually by doctors and aid workers in street clothes. Sarin can kill on skin contact and doctors have to treat it in protective gear. So, maybe the gas wasn’t Sarin and maybe it wasn’t dropped in bombs from Assad’s planes. But, like the pipeline angle of the story, this hypothesis is missing in the media triumvirate’s pages.
President Trump was lauded mostly for the missile strike against the Syrian air force base that followed. The Dem/Progs and The New York Times gave him brownie points, if only for it being a swipe against Russia. It seemed so clever, what with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Mar-a-Lago dinner table where, presumably, the subject of the maniac in North Korea came up. Days later, a US aircraft carrier group steamed to the waters off Kim Jong Un’s fortress state. Which brings forth another hypothesis: that the Syria missile strike was solely a demonstration of US military will vis-a-vis the more ominous threat over in Asia — an attempt to get Xi to do something about the Kim Jong Un before we do.
It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. The big fear is that in the event of a rumble, Kim will turn Seoul into an ashtray. The South Korean capital is only a few miles from the DMZ between the two states. The US couldn’t find a jucier enemy than Kim Jong Un, a character so improbable he might have been dreamed up in a Batman comic. [Or a Dick Tracy one.--P.Z.] Hence, he’s comprehensible to an American public that more and more looks like the ever-present crowd of perplexed bystanders in a Batman movie.
*
I was quite surprised to hear that a podcast called “S-Town,” about the dark doings in an Alabama backwater, had become a huge hit on the Web-waves. Back around 2012-2013, I had some email correspondence from John B. McLemore, the tragic figure at the center of the series. He was a real person, referred to by various people in the series as “brilliant,” “a genius,” “a real character,” and he was for sure.
Apparently, he was also a fan of my books. He got my phone number off my website and took to calling me on the phone. I probably had a dozen long phone conversations with him. Hours. It is well-known now that he called his home of Woodstock, Alabama, “Shit-town.” He regaled me with many a sordid tale of the home-folk, and even of himself. The place sounded like Hieronymus Bosch meets Dogpatch. Since John B seemed so unhappy under his mask of hilarity and mirth, I tried to encourage him to think about moving. He always had an excuse for not doing that, but clearly John B and the neighbors he disdained, fought with, looked for love with, had a synergistic thing going. They needed each other to play out their never-ending crazy scripts of cracker mischief, vengeance, and failure. After a while, John B went dark. I thought he’d just gotten tired of me telling him to move.
I was startled to hear in the second episode of the “S-Town” podcast that John B had made good on his constant intimations of suicide. Startled, but not especially surprised. He was more than a fish out of water. He was like a Martian suffocating in an atmosphere too heavy for him. I suspect the truth is there are thousands of places like “S-Town” all over America, places devastated by the poor choices of the last several generations — most particularly the way they threw away their livelihoods and surrendered to one vice after another in boredom, defeat, and self-loathing. It’s a very sad story and it’s not over yet by a long shot. [On that note, I worry about "Coozledad" of Roxbury, NC. Not that he would turn the violence inward, but outward, in a quixotic spree against the rednecks of that town.--P.Z.]
There are times in the course of events when a society cannot tell what the fuck is going on, or what to do about it, and this is one of those moments in history here in the USA. The quandaries of life on the home front — how to make a living, how to care for ourselves and loved ones — get shoved aside by misadventures in foreign lands with their own quandaries. One delusion leads to another until you enter a zero gravity of the mind. Case in point du jour: Syria.
The persistent hyperRussomania of the US Dem-Prog alliance and its sob-sisters in the media seeks to make a bad situation worse in Syria and probably for the worst reasons. How many Americans have even the dimmest idea what’s going on in Syria, who the cast of characters there represent, and where the USA fits into all of it?
There is the head of government, one Bashar al Assad (son of the previous president, Hafez al Assad). The Assads had run Syria as a mostly secular Arab state until the civil war within Islam, Sunni against Shia, spilled out of Iraq. The Assads belonged to the tiny Alawite sect of the Shia. They comprise only 13 percent of the Syrian population, which has a Sunni majority. Under the Assads, Syria has tilted toward Iran, the Shia home state, and away from the Sunni Arabs elsewhere in the neighborhood. Russia has cultivated Iran and support its “friends,” the Assads.
A mash-up of Sunni jihad armies fights the Assad government in Syria’s civil war. These are Isis, al Qaeda, and Jabhat al Nusra. The US government had made official noise about supporting the more “moderate rebels” in the Syrian conflict. Who are they exactly? Do you have a clue? Which army among those three rebel groups are “moderates?” And what is their moderate goal under jihad? To topple Assad. And then what? To set up a new theocratic government perhaps? How is it in America’s interests to promote Islamic jihadi theocracy?
One hypothesis is that the struggle is over who gets to run gas and oil pipelines through Syria to get easier access to the Mediterranean Sea and the European energy market. Iran would very badly like to do that. But they are in competition with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the little giant emirate of natural gas. So, you have the Iran/Shia gang on one side and the KSA/Qatar/Sunni on the other side. Anybody who had scanned the news since 1979 can probably tell whose side the US is on. By the way, this hypothesis has had no airing among the mainstream media triumvirate: The New York Times, CNN, and The WashPo. These news orgs won’t even entertain that angle of the story… but as I said, it’s only a hypothesis.
It was not so many weeks ago that President Trump met with the crown prince of KSA at the White House to give assurances of American friendship and support. KSA is supposedly America’s chief ally against Isis in Syria. Yet, KSA and the USA are dedicated to getting rid of the Assad government as well as Isis. That is, we are against both sides in the Syrian civil war. Still wondering why the American public is confused by all this? Do you know who our choice is to replace Assad? Can you name an opposition figure? Of course you can’t. There is nobody. What the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the NSA seem to have in mind is the familiar failed state policy that has worked so well in the past (not).
Which brings us to the curious case of Bashar Assad’s recent supposed poison gas bombing of civilians in Khan Sheikhoun. The media triumvirate was avid to play along with the story. I don’t know about you, but I have to ask myself: what would Assad’s strategic goal be in gas bombing women and children? To gin up worldwide positive PR? To get the Syrian people on his side against Isis and other jihadis? What advantage could Assad possibly gain? In warfare generally, the tacticians strike against military targets. There’s a hypothesis that Assad’s air force sought to strike a rebel arms depot in Idlib province — a military target. The hypothesis goes further, saying that the depot contained phosgene and chlorine gas, but not Sarin. The wind carried these released gases among civilian homes and streets in Khan Sheikhoun. People suffered and died. Evidence for the absence of Sarin gas is that the gassing victims were handled manually by doctors and aid workers in street clothes. Sarin can kill on skin contact and doctors have to treat it in protective gear. So, maybe the gas wasn’t Sarin and maybe it wasn’t dropped in bombs from Assad’s planes. But, like the pipeline angle of the story, this hypothesis is missing in the media triumvirate’s pages.
President Trump was lauded mostly for the missile strike against the Syrian air force base that followed. The Dem/Progs and The New York Times gave him brownie points, if only for it being a swipe against Russia. It seemed so clever, what with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Mar-a-Lago dinner table where, presumably, the subject of the maniac in North Korea came up. Days later, a US aircraft carrier group steamed to the waters off Kim Jong Un’s fortress state. Which brings forth another hypothesis: that the Syria missile strike was solely a demonstration of US military will vis-a-vis the more ominous threat over in Asia — an attempt to get Xi to do something about the Kim Jong Un before we do.
It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. The big fear is that in the event of a rumble, Kim will turn Seoul into an ashtray. The South Korean capital is only a few miles from the DMZ between the two states. The US couldn’t find a jucier enemy than Kim Jong Un, a character so improbable he might have been dreamed up in a Batman comic. [Or a Dick Tracy one.--P.Z.] Hence, he’s comprehensible to an American public that more and more looks like the ever-present crowd of perplexed bystanders in a Batman movie.
*
I was quite surprised to hear that a podcast called “S-Town,” about the dark doings in an Alabama backwater, had become a huge hit on the Web-waves. Back around 2012-2013, I had some email correspondence from John B. McLemore, the tragic figure at the center of the series. He was a real person, referred to by various people in the series as “brilliant,” “a genius,” “a real character,” and he was for sure.
Apparently, he was also a fan of my books. He got my phone number off my website and took to calling me on the phone. I probably had a dozen long phone conversations with him. Hours. It is well-known now that he called his home of Woodstock, Alabama, “Shit-town.” He regaled me with many a sordid tale of the home-folk, and even of himself. The place sounded like Hieronymus Bosch meets Dogpatch. Since John B seemed so unhappy under his mask of hilarity and mirth, I tried to encourage him to think about moving. He always had an excuse for not doing that, but clearly John B and the neighbors he disdained, fought with, looked for love with, had a synergistic thing going. They needed each other to play out their never-ending crazy scripts of cracker mischief, vengeance, and failure. After a while, John B went dark. I thought he’d just gotten tired of me telling him to move.
I was startled to hear in the second episode of the “S-Town” podcast that John B had made good on his constant intimations of suicide. Startled, but not especially surprised. He was more than a fish out of water. He was like a Martian suffocating in an atmosphere too heavy for him. I suspect the truth is there are thousands of places like “S-Town” all over America, places devastated by the poor choices of the last several generations — most particularly the way they threw away their livelihoods and surrendered to one vice after another in boredom, defeat, and self-loathing. It’s a very sad story and it’s not over yet by a long shot. [On that note, I worry about "Coozledad" of Roxbury, NC. Not that he would turn the violence inward, but outward, in a quixotic spree against the rednecks of that town.--P.Z.]
Friday, April 07, 2017
Oil spikes as US strikes Syria https://t.co/W6BRHlD9nf pic.twitter.com/M4z3TVbuq6
— Business Insider (@businessinsider) April 7, 2017
Wednesday, April 05, 2017
Negativland, "Dispepsi."
As good a time as any to post this video.
This would have made for a far better commercial.
This would have made for a far better commercial.
Peak Oil Review – April 3 2017 https://t.co/m5IXKJAbO2 (@buildresilience)
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 3, 2017
📷 dirtyriver: Life with Archie #99, July 1970 I always identified with Reggie. Not because I’m vain or... https://t.co/92NEzQAOwe
— Roy Edroso (@edroso) April 5, 2017
You sure don't look like Reggie. He was vain, definitely, but he had ample reason to be.
Tuesday, April 04, 2017
Auwe
And anyone who asked her to consider it deserves a beatdown. https://t.co/jLIgMFma6C
— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) April 4, 2017
Why would Chelsea Clinton's advisor "deserve a beatdown"? There's far too much violence in the world.
Monday, April 03, 2017
Kunstler: Musktopia Here We Come!
Kunstler doesn't mention Musk's most farfetched and hideous plan of all.--P.Z.
‘Who will control merged human-AI digital space?’ Slavoj Zizek on Musk’s brain implant venture.
Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age.
Kunstler: Musktopia Here We Come!
It ought to be sign of just how delusional the nation is these days that Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X is taken seriously. Musk continues to dangle his fantasy of travel to Mars before a country that can barely get its shit together on Planet Earth, and the Tesla car represents one of the main reasons for it — namely, that we’ll do anything to preserve, maintain, and defend our addiction to incessant and pointless motoring (and nothing to devise a saner living arrangement).
Even people with Ivy League educations believe that the electric car is a “solution” to our basic economic quandary, which is to keep all the accessories and furnishings of suburbia running at all costs in the face of problems with fossil fuels, especially climate change. First, understand how the Tesla car and electric motoring are bound up in our culture of virtue signaling, the main motivational feature of political correctness. Virtue signaling is a status acquisition racket. In this case, you get social brownie points for indicating that you’re on-board with “clean energy,” you’re “green,” “an environmentalist,” “Earth –friendly.” Ordinary schmoes can drive a Prius for their brownie points. But the Tesla driver gets all that and much more: the envy of the Prius drivers!
This is all horse shit, of course, because there’s nothing green or Earth-friendly about Tesla cars, or electric cars in general. Evidently, many Americans think these cars run on batteries. No they don’t. Not really. The battery is just a storage unit for electricity that comes from power plants that burn something, or from hydroelectric installations like Hoover Dam, with its problems of declining reservoir levels and aging re-bar concrete construction. A lot of what gets burned for electric power is coal. Connect the dots. Also consider the embedded energy that it takes to just manufacture the cars. That had to come from somewhere, too.
The Silicon Valley executive who drives a Tesla gets to feel good about him/her/zheself without doing anything to change him/her/zhe’s way of life. All it requires is the $101,500 entry price for the cheapest model. For many Silicon Valley execs, this might be walking-around money. For the masses of Flyover Deplorables that’s just another impossible dream in a growing list of dissolving comforts and conveniences.
In fact, the mass motoring paradigm in the USA is already failing not on the basis of what kind of fuel the car runs on but on the financing end. Americans are used to buying cars on installment loans and, as the middle class implosion continues, there are fewer and fewer Americans who qualify to borrow. The regular car industry (gasoline branch) has been trying to work around this reality for years by enabling sketchier loans for ever-sketchier customers — like, seven years for a used car. The borrower in such a deal is sure to be “underwater” with collateral (the car) that is close to worthless well before the loan can be extinguished. We’re beginning to see the fruits of this racket just now, as these longer-termed loans start to age out. On top of that, a lot of these janky loans were bundled into tradable securities just like the janky mortgage loans that set off the banking fiasco of 2008. Wait for that to blow.
What much of America refuses to consider in the face of all this is that there’s another way to inhabit the landscape: walkable neighborhoods, towns, and cities with some kind of public transit. Some Millennials gravitate to places designed along these lines because they grew up in the ‘burbs and they know full well the social nullity induced there. But the rest of America is still committed to the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world: suburban living. And tragically, of course, we’re kind of stuck with all that “infrastructure” for daily life. It’s already built out! Part of Donald Trump’s appeal was his promise to keep its furnishings in working order.
All of this remains to be sorted out. The political disorder currently roiling America is there because the contradictions in our national life have become so starkly obvious, and the first thing to crack is the political consensus that allows business-as-usual to keep chugging along. The political turmoil will only accelerate the accompanying economic turmoil that drives it in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. That dynamic has a long way to go before any of these issues resolved satisfactorily.
---------
[Added by me--P.Z.]
Parody commercial for the Prius:
‘Who will control merged human-AI digital space?’ Slavoj Zizek on Musk’s brain implant venture.
Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age.
Kunstler: Musktopia Here We Come!
It ought to be sign of just how delusional the nation is these days that Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X is taken seriously. Musk continues to dangle his fantasy of travel to Mars before a country that can barely get its shit together on Planet Earth, and the Tesla car represents one of the main reasons for it — namely, that we’ll do anything to preserve, maintain, and defend our addiction to incessant and pointless motoring (and nothing to devise a saner living arrangement).
Even people with Ivy League educations believe that the electric car is a “solution” to our basic economic quandary, which is to keep all the accessories and furnishings of suburbia running at all costs in the face of problems with fossil fuels, especially climate change. First, understand how the Tesla car and electric motoring are bound up in our culture of virtue signaling, the main motivational feature of political correctness. Virtue signaling is a status acquisition racket. In this case, you get social brownie points for indicating that you’re on-board with “clean energy,” you’re “green,” “an environmentalist,” “Earth –friendly.” Ordinary schmoes can drive a Prius for their brownie points. But the Tesla driver gets all that and much more: the envy of the Prius drivers!
This is all horse shit, of course, because there’s nothing green or Earth-friendly about Tesla cars, or electric cars in general. Evidently, many Americans think these cars run on batteries. No they don’t. Not really. The battery is just a storage unit for electricity that comes from power plants that burn something, or from hydroelectric installations like Hoover Dam, with its problems of declining reservoir levels and aging re-bar concrete construction. A lot of what gets burned for electric power is coal. Connect the dots. Also consider the embedded energy that it takes to just manufacture the cars. That had to come from somewhere, too.
The Silicon Valley executive who drives a Tesla gets to feel good about him/her/zheself without doing anything to change him/her/zhe’s way of life. All it requires is the $101,500 entry price for the cheapest model. For many Silicon Valley execs, this might be walking-around money. For the masses of Flyover Deplorables that’s just another impossible dream in a growing list of dissolving comforts and conveniences.
In fact, the mass motoring paradigm in the USA is already failing not on the basis of what kind of fuel the car runs on but on the financing end. Americans are used to buying cars on installment loans and, as the middle class implosion continues, there are fewer and fewer Americans who qualify to borrow. The regular car industry (gasoline branch) has been trying to work around this reality for years by enabling sketchier loans for ever-sketchier customers — like, seven years for a used car. The borrower in such a deal is sure to be “underwater” with collateral (the car) that is close to worthless well before the loan can be extinguished. We’re beginning to see the fruits of this racket just now, as these longer-termed loans start to age out. On top of that, a lot of these janky loans were bundled into tradable securities just like the janky mortgage loans that set off the banking fiasco of 2008. Wait for that to blow.
What much of America refuses to consider in the face of all this is that there’s another way to inhabit the landscape: walkable neighborhoods, towns, and cities with some kind of public transit. Some Millennials gravitate to places designed along these lines because they grew up in the ‘burbs and they know full well the social nullity induced there. But the rest of America is still committed to the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world: suburban living. And tragically, of course, we’re kind of stuck with all that “infrastructure” for daily life. It’s already built out! Part of Donald Trump’s appeal was his promise to keep its furnishings in working order.
All of this remains to be sorted out. The political disorder currently roiling America is there because the contradictions in our national life have become so starkly obvious, and the first thing to crack is the political consensus that allows business-as-usual to keep chugging along. The political turmoil will only accelerate the accompanying economic turmoil that drives it in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. That dynamic has a long way to go before any of these issues resolved satisfactorily.
---------
[Added by me--P.Z.]
Parody commercial for the Prius:
Sunday, April 02, 2017
Deals are Made on the Golf Course
Thank you to @realDonaldTrump for working with @RandPaul!https://t.co/lIDwwd5gkJ#Healthcare #SundayFunday #OpeningDay
— Scott Presler (@ScottPresler) April 2, 2017
Rand Paul says he had a "great time" golfing with Trump: We are "getting closer" to healthcare deal https://t.co/2JFfTIv1Ih pic.twitter.com/fvcJeS7Bj9
— The Hill (@thehill) April 2, 2017
Trump plays golf with Rand Paul, budget chief at Trump Golf Club in Virginia https://t.co/Ozd5ely2cx pic.twitter.com/6nYJwg5kk8
— The Hill (@thehill) April 2, 2017
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