I spent St. Patrick's Day fighting off an infection and resting. Syfy had a marathon of Leprechaun movies, and although I'm observing Lent, I ate corned beef for dinner.
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Friday, March 17, 2017
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Goth Ms. Frizzle, a.k.a. Grand Mistress of Funny
By itself, this tweet in @msscheffer's feed is cryptic.
It's but one of a long string of tweets inspired by the photo below. Read the thread, and it makes sense:
She has serious competition from Ben Mankiewicz (who knew he had it in him?).
we're sorry to report that my guy is back in the hospital after his incredibly long balls got tangled in the wheels of his velocipede
— Goth Ms. Frizzle (@spookperson) March 15, 2017
It's but one of a long string of tweets inspired by the photo below. Read the thread, and it makes sense:
my dude looks like the babadook https://t.co/9d0C79q9Om
— Goth Ms. Frizzle (@spookperson) March 15, 2017
She has serious competition from Ben Mankiewicz (who knew he had it in him?).
.@stoneonstyle @realDonaldTrump @RogerJStoneJr Super excited they're finally producing an authentic remake of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari pic.twitter.com/4p59gG8I5C
— Ben Mankiewicz (@BenMank77) March 16, 2017
Top @realDonaldTrump advisor/confidante @RogerJStoneJr with wife Nydia at the Inauguration. #Dandy #Style pic.twitter.com/dULvingycv
— Stone On Style (@stoneonstyle) January 23, 2017
More Hullabaloo
#BoycottHawaii
— Philip Schuyler (@FiveRights) March 16, 2017
Hawaii, what do you know?
You were 5,000 miles from 9/11.
You run your little world and let the grownups run the mainland. pic.twitter.com/jDySlmxevp
For a small state that relies on tourism, it's a bold move to anger half of the mainland. Also not a very smart one. #BoycottHawaii
— Julia❤🇺🇸 (@DeplorableJulia) March 16, 2017
We should send all refugees directly to Hawaii...problem solved! #travelban #BoycottHawaii #NoRefugees #Hannity #MAGA pic.twitter.com/EuSrTNEzXd
— Deplorable Leonard (@LeonardOfArabia) March 16, 2017
------
when they wanna #BoycottHawaii 🤙🏽🤙🏽🤙🏽 shoots! @aka_kapono pic.twitter.com/M8lWFRkwzc
— kaheamea (@kaheamea) March 16, 2017
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Monday, March 13, 2017
Kunstler: The Pause That Refreshes.
Kunstler: The Pause That Refreshes.
Let’s take a breather from more consequential money matters at hand midweek to consider the tending moods of our time and place — while a blizzard howls outside the window, and nervous Federal Reserve officials pace the grim halls of the Eccles Building.
It is clear by now that we have four corners of American politics these days: the utterly lost and delusional Democratic party; the feckless Republicans; the permanent Deep State of bureaucratic foot-soldiers and errand boys; and Trump, the Golem-King of the Coming Greatness. Wherefore, and what the fuck, you might ask.
The Democrats reduced themselves to a gang of sadistic neo-Maoists seeking to eradicate anything that resembles free expression across the land in the name of social justice. Coercion has been their coin of the realm, and especially in the realm of ideas where “diversity” means stepping on your opponent’s neck until he pretends to agree with your Newspeak brand of grad school neologisms and “inclusion” means welcome if you’re just like us. I say Maoists because just like Mao’s “Red Guard” of rampaging students in 1966, their mission is to “correct” the thinking of those who might dare to oppose the established leader. Only in this case, that established leader happened to lose the sure-thing election and the party finds itself unbelievably out-of-power and suddenly purposeless, like a termite mound without a queen, the workers and soldiers fleeing the power center in an hysteria of lost identity.
They regrouped briefly after the election debacle to fight an imaginary adversary, Russia, the phantom ghost-bear, who supposedly stepped on their termite mound and killed the queen, but, strangely, no actual evidence was ever found of the ghost-bear’s paw-print. And ever since that fact was starkly revealed by former NSA chief James Clapper on NBC’s Meet the Press, the Russia hallucination has vanished from page one of the party’s media outlets — though, in an interesting last gasp of striving correctitude, Monday’s New York Times features a front page story detailing Georgetown University’s hateful traffic in the slave trade two centuries ago. That should suffice to shut the wicked place down for once and for all! [Kunstler's snark aside, you can read the article "A Glimpse Into the Life of a Slave Sold to Save Georgetown" here Update: I found out about this one from The Advocate--P.Z.] The Republican Party, to avoid going full-Whig and sliding down the laundry chute of history, made a bad deal for a new figurehead who is liable to make the party look way worse than it could ever accomplish on its own. This golden boy has dragged the party poobahs to the put-up-or-shut-up room of our nation’s capital — the place that Senator Rand Paul was searching high and low for last week — where they are charged with reforming the country’s health care racket. It looks for now like they will cook up a toxic farrago of new giveaways to their patrons in the hospital cartel, the insurance companies, and pharma. The voting public already detects the odor of 30-day-old carp in the first tastings of the dish. There’s a fair chance that the recipe will end up getting tossed in the capitol dumpster, and that in itself could finish the party because there’s little question that the current system known as ObamaCare or the Affordable Care Act (not) is something like a fatal tumor in the nation’s craw. If the effort to fix that fails, the Republicans complete their transformation from the Party of No to the Party of Just Go.
The Deep State seems eager to sever its connections to both putrifying parties and attempt to run the groaning colossus of government ad hoc if necessary. The military and intel chains of command remain intact, along with their “assets,” and one can easily imagine anxious meetings of scenario-running in the back rooms of the Pentagon and the Langley frat house. What if…? “What if we just smoke the fucker?” an old Agency warrior remarks offhand, and the roomful of colleagues pause in their cogitations to weigh the notion. Some of them nod and make a moue, and others just cough into their sleeves. One young striver in the back mentions “a little something” they’ve been working on that involves hairspray and a neurotoxin derived from the Gaboon viper….
And then there is our President himself: Donald J. Trump, in the awesome solitude of his Twitterverse dome. A strange destiny brought him to his place in history thus far, and many of us surveying the scene lo these many months kind of get it: the festering disgust with the other three corners of American power; the dismal fall of the middle class into a purgatory of repossession, idleness, opiates, and tattoos; the accelerating purposeless of the dwindling consumer economy; the matrix of racketeering that systematically drains everyone’s financial mojo while adding humiliation to the shoddy service it delivers; the pointless, costly wars in faraway places and their conversion into permanent shit-holes; the disgraceful disfigurement of a once grand national landscape into a wilderness of dying malls and freeway ramps.
So, onto the scene strides The Donald, a giant among the squalling midgets of our time, with his promise to bigly re-greatify this suffering land. I suppose he means well in his torturous way. So did a lot of other figures in history who found themselves at the top: Idi Amin, Uncle Joe Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, King Leopold of Belgium, Adolf You-Know-Who, Pol Pot. The list of the well-meaning is very long.
Let’s take a breather from more consequential money matters at hand midweek to consider the tending moods of our time and place — while a blizzard howls outside the window, and nervous Federal Reserve officials pace the grim halls of the Eccles Building.
It is clear by now that we have four corners of American politics these days: the utterly lost and delusional Democratic party; the feckless Republicans; the permanent Deep State of bureaucratic foot-soldiers and errand boys; and Trump, the Golem-King of the Coming Greatness. Wherefore, and what the fuck, you might ask.
The Democrats reduced themselves to a gang of sadistic neo-Maoists seeking to eradicate anything that resembles free expression across the land in the name of social justice. Coercion has been their coin of the realm, and especially in the realm of ideas where “diversity” means stepping on your opponent’s neck until he pretends to agree with your Newspeak brand of grad school neologisms and “inclusion” means welcome if you’re just like us. I say Maoists because just like Mao’s “Red Guard” of rampaging students in 1966, their mission is to “correct” the thinking of those who might dare to oppose the established leader. Only in this case, that established leader happened to lose the sure-thing election and the party finds itself unbelievably out-of-power and suddenly purposeless, like a termite mound without a queen, the workers and soldiers fleeing the power center in an hysteria of lost identity.
They regrouped briefly after the election debacle to fight an imaginary adversary, Russia, the phantom ghost-bear, who supposedly stepped on their termite mound and killed the queen, but, strangely, no actual evidence was ever found of the ghost-bear’s paw-print. And ever since that fact was starkly revealed by former NSA chief James Clapper on NBC’s Meet the Press, the Russia hallucination has vanished from page one of the party’s media outlets — though, in an interesting last gasp of striving correctitude, Monday’s New York Times features a front page story detailing Georgetown University’s hateful traffic in the slave trade two centuries ago. That should suffice to shut the wicked place down for once and for all! [Kunstler's snark aside, you can read the article "A Glimpse Into the Life of a Slave Sold to Save Georgetown" here Update: I found out about this one from The Advocate--P.Z.] The Republican Party, to avoid going full-Whig and sliding down the laundry chute of history, made a bad deal for a new figurehead who is liable to make the party look way worse than it could ever accomplish on its own. This golden boy has dragged the party poobahs to the put-up-or-shut-up room of our nation’s capital — the place that Senator Rand Paul was searching high and low for last week — where they are charged with reforming the country’s health care racket. It looks for now like they will cook up a toxic farrago of new giveaways to their patrons in the hospital cartel, the insurance companies, and pharma. The voting public already detects the odor of 30-day-old carp in the first tastings of the dish. There’s a fair chance that the recipe will end up getting tossed in the capitol dumpster, and that in itself could finish the party because there’s little question that the current system known as ObamaCare or the Affordable Care Act (not) is something like a fatal tumor in the nation’s craw. If the effort to fix that fails, the Republicans complete their transformation from the Party of No to the Party of Just Go.
The Deep State seems eager to sever its connections to both putrifying parties and attempt to run the groaning colossus of government ad hoc if necessary. The military and intel chains of command remain intact, along with their “assets,” and one can easily imagine anxious meetings of scenario-running in the back rooms of the Pentagon and the Langley frat house. What if…? “What if we just smoke the fucker?” an old Agency warrior remarks offhand, and the roomful of colleagues pause in their cogitations to weigh the notion. Some of them nod and make a moue, and others just cough into their sleeves. One young striver in the back mentions “a little something” they’ve been working on that involves hairspray and a neurotoxin derived from the Gaboon viper….
And then there is our President himself: Donald J. Trump, in the awesome solitude of his Twitterverse dome. A strange destiny brought him to his place in history thus far, and many of us surveying the scene lo these many months kind of get it: the festering disgust with the other three corners of American power; the dismal fall of the middle class into a purgatory of repossession, idleness, opiates, and tattoos; the accelerating purposeless of the dwindling consumer economy; the matrix of racketeering that systematically drains everyone’s financial mojo while adding humiliation to the shoddy service it delivers; the pointless, costly wars in faraway places and their conversion into permanent shit-holes; the disgraceful disfigurement of a once grand national landscape into a wilderness of dying malls and freeway ramps.
So, onto the scene strides The Donald, a giant among the squalling midgets of our time, with his promise to bigly re-greatify this suffering land. I suppose he means well in his torturous way. So did a lot of other figures in history who found themselves at the top: Idi Amin, Uncle Joe Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, King Leopold of Belgium, Adolf You-Know-Who, Pol Pot. The list of the well-meaning is very long.
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Paul Ryan, policy wonk pic.twitter.com/0j3fHnwXft
— Eric (@ericschroeck) March 11, 2017
See my post "Paul Ryan Stiles" from August 2012.
#haroldhill #lylelanley #berthealy
Friday, March 10, 2017
Kunstler: The Bag Holder and His Bag.
Kunstler: The Bag Holder and His Bag.
Can you see those swans coming in for a landing on Pond USA? They’re not exactly black swans, because you knew they were out there circling, but they’re dark enough against the twilight’s last gleaming to give you the heebie jeebies.
Troubles and portents of more trouble are stacking up as we approach the Ides of March zone of financial turmoil. You must surely surmise that a debt ceiling impact, a Federal Reserve interest rate hike, and the election of a Dutch anti-EU leader all scheduled for that one day are a good start on the greater unravel to follow. Glowering in the spotlight at center stage will be President Donald Trump, designated bag-holder of the Deep State and its myrmidons. And what’s in that bag he’s holding? Just a couple of shit sandwiches and a hair shirt for his journey down the lonely road to exile. But getting rid of Trump would only leave the Deep State with a bigger problem: itself. That is, an economy and a society that can’t be governed by any means.
I think many professional observers-of-the-scene are missing something in this unspooling story: the Deep State is actually becoming more impotent and ineffectual, not omnipotent. Case in point: RussiaGate — come on, let’s finally call it that — the popular idea that Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election. It’s popular because it’s such a convenient excuse for the failure of a corrupt, exhausted, and brain-dead Democratic establishment. But all the exertions of the Deep State to put over this story since last summer were negated this week by two events.
First, there was former NSA Director James Clapper’s appearance on NBC’s Sunday Meet the Press show with Chuck Todd featuring the following interchange:
Second matter: this week’s release of Wikileaks’ Vault-7 trove of purloined government documents. These seem to suggest that US Intel agencies have acquired the ability to spoof any activity on any sort of computer or program that makes it impossible to track the identity of any hacker and, what’s more, gives US Intel a tool to make any party appear culpable for any given case of hacking — meaning that if so called computer hacking “footprints” had been discovered linking Russia to the Hillary-DNC-Podesta emails, those footprints could have been engineered by US Intel itself… meaning further that any so-called “evidence” of Russian election hacking could not be proven one way or the other.
Now, this might be too fine a point for the RussiaGate partisans, but I don’t see how it fails to moot the issue. The partisans are still finding other ways to propagandize. On Thursday evening, NPR ran a story about Russia breaking a missile agreement with this wrap-up from correspondent David Welna:
That lapse of newsmanship is the kind of thing that makes me (a still-registered Democrat) want to support the defunding of NPR.
All this hugger-mugger may be further mooted by the financial disorders of Spring 2017. Don’t underestimate the Federal Reserve’s eagerness in sending Trump on the road to political perdition with his shit sandwiches and hair shirt. The Fed’s board of governors knows full well that their interest rate hike could sink even the carefully fabricated Potemkin appearance of a healthy economy. It would also create more dire debt-servicing problems for the US Treasury when and if the debt ceiling problem ever gets resolved. They’re holding a hand grenade in the old USA bunker and they’re getting ready to pull the pin. Just watch.
Can you see those swans coming in for a landing on Pond USA? They’re not exactly black swans, because you knew they were out there circling, but they’re dark enough against the twilight’s last gleaming to give you the heebie jeebies.
Troubles and portents of more trouble are stacking up as we approach the Ides of March zone of financial turmoil. You must surely surmise that a debt ceiling impact, a Federal Reserve interest rate hike, and the election of a Dutch anti-EU leader all scheduled for that one day are a good start on the greater unravel to follow. Glowering in the spotlight at center stage will be President Donald Trump, designated bag-holder of the Deep State and its myrmidons. And what’s in that bag he’s holding? Just a couple of shit sandwiches and a hair shirt for his journey down the lonely road to exile. But getting rid of Trump would only leave the Deep State with a bigger problem: itself. That is, an economy and a society that can’t be governed by any means.
I think many professional observers-of-the-scene are missing something in this unspooling story: the Deep State is actually becoming more impotent and ineffectual, not omnipotent. Case in point: RussiaGate — come on, let’s finally call it that — the popular idea that Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election. It’s popular because it’s such a convenient excuse for the failure of a corrupt, exhausted, and brain-dead Democratic establishment. But all the exertions of the Deep State to put over this story since last summer were negated this week by two events.
First, there was former NSA Director James Clapper’s appearance on NBC’s Sunday Meet the Press show with Chuck Todd featuring the following interchange:
CHUCK TODD:And so what to make of the RussiaGate histrionics served up by CNN, The New York Times, the WashPo, NPR, and sundry tools as Senator Chuck Schumer (D–NY)? What I make of it is a growing civil war in the government itself, and perhaps something arguably like sedition.
Does intelligence exist that can definitively answer the following question, whether there were improper contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials?
JAMES CLAPPER:
We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say, “our,” that’s N.S.A., F.B.I. and C.I.A., with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report.
CHUCK TODD:
I understand that. But does it exist?
JAMES CLAPPER:
Not to my knowledge.
Second matter: this week’s release of Wikileaks’ Vault-7 trove of purloined government documents. These seem to suggest that US Intel agencies have acquired the ability to spoof any activity on any sort of computer or program that makes it impossible to track the identity of any hacker and, what’s more, gives US Intel a tool to make any party appear culpable for any given case of hacking — meaning that if so called computer hacking “footprints” had been discovered linking Russia to the Hillary-DNC-Podesta emails, those footprints could have been engineered by US Intel itself… meaning further that any so-called “evidence” of Russian election hacking could not be proven one way or the other.
Now, this might be too fine a point for the RussiaGate partisans, but I don’t see how it fails to moot the issue. The partisans are still finding other ways to propagandize. On Thursday evening, NPR ran a story about Russia breaking a missile agreement with this wrap-up from correspondent David Welna:
WELNA: Still unclear is how President Trump, an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, might respond to Moscow’s defiance. David Welna, NPR News, Washington.
That lapse of newsmanship is the kind of thing that makes me (a still-registered Democrat) want to support the defunding of NPR.
All this hugger-mugger may be further mooted by the financial disorders of Spring 2017. Don’t underestimate the Federal Reserve’s eagerness in sending Trump on the road to political perdition with his shit sandwiches and hair shirt. The Fed’s board of governors knows full well that their interest rate hike could sink even the carefully fabricated Potemkin appearance of a healthy economy. It would also create more dire debt-servicing problems for the US Treasury when and if the debt ceiling problem ever gets resolved. They’re holding a hand grenade in the old USA bunker and they’re getting ready to pull the pin. Just watch.
Wednesday, March 08, 2017
Tanna
Yesterday, Louis Proyect posted a brief review of Tanna, Australia's nominee this year for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar. It was released that same day on video. One of the great things Proyect does is highlight not only indigenous cultures, but indigenous Pacific cultures. Very few American bloggers do. And it says something that The Salesman, which won, got all the hype, and I never heard of Tanna until Oscars night, when the Foreign-Language award was given. I asked Proyect if Tanna should have won. He replied that it should have been considered but his personal choice was Neruda the Chilean biography of the poet. (Neruda was submitted to the Academy for consideration but not chosen.)
RottenTomatoes page for Tanna
(Reviews counted: 24)
RottenTomatoes page for The Salesman, a.k.a. Forushande
(Reviews counted: 114)
Wikipedia's article on Tanna.
Wikipedia: List of submissions to the 89th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
RottenTomatoes page for Tanna
(Reviews counted: 24)
RottenTomatoes page for The Salesman, a.k.a. Forushande
(Reviews counted: 114)
Wikipedia's article on Tanna.
Wikipedia: List of submissions to the 89th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
Tuesday, March 07, 2017
Under the GOP health plan, a 60 year-old couple earning $30k would see their health premiums go up more than 8 foldhttps://t.co/YP6doxZvra
— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) March 7, 2017
"Camille Paglia Predicted 2017."
A new profile of Camille Paglia that I likely wouldn't have known about were it not for this tweet:
"[P]latonic ideal of anti-clickbait", indeed!
Is this the platonic ideal of anti-clickbait? I think so! pic.twitter.com/GVS00YYte3
— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) March 7, 2017
"[P]latonic ideal of anti-clickbait", indeed!
Monday, March 06, 2017
Kunstler: Great Expectations (Not).
Kunstler: Great Expectations (Not).
Halloween’s coming super-early this year and it will be a shocking surprise to those currently busy looking for Russians behind every potted plant in Washington DC. First, accept the premise that your country has lost its mind.
This is what happens when societies (and individuals) can’t face the true quandaries of a particular moment in their history. All of their attention gets channeled into fantasy: spooks, sexual freakery, conspiracies, persecution narratives, savior fairy tales. It’s been quite a cavalcade of unreality for the past six months, with great entertainment value for connoisseurs of the bizarre — until you’re reminded that the fate of the nation is at stake.
The questions Americans might more profitably ask ourselves: can we continue living the way we do? And by what means? These matters of home economics have been sequestered in some forgotten storage unit of the collective mind for at least a year while a clock ticks in the time-bomb that sits on the national welcome mat. That bomb is made of financial plutonium and it’s getting ready to blow. When it does, all the distracting spookery and freakery will vaporize and the shell-shocked citizens will have a clear view of the bleak, toxic, devastated landscape they actually inhabit.
March 15 is when the temporary suspension of the national debt ceiling — engineered in a 2015 deal between Barack Obama and then House Speaker John Boehner — finally expires, meaning the government loses its authority to continue borrowing money. The chance that congress can pass a bill raising the debt ceiling to enable further borrowing is about the same as the chance that Xi Jinping will send every American household a dim sum breakfast next Sunday morning by FedEx. The US treasury will then be left with around $200 billion in walking-around money, at a burn rate of about $90 billion a month — meaning that that around June sometime the country won’t be able to pay invoices, issue salaries, send out entitlement checks, or do anything, really. It means pure government paralysis. It means no infrastructure spending jamboree, no “great” wall, no military shopping spree, none of the Great Expectations sewn into the golden fleece of Trumptopia.
Meanwhile, over the next few weeks, Janet Yellen and her crew of economic astrologasters at the Federal Reserve will have to put up or shut up vis-à-vis raising the interest rate on the basic overnight lending rate. The Las Vegas odds of it being raised currently stand at around 95 percent. So, they will be running that play around the time that the debt ceiling issue materializes into a live-action event. Of course, the Fed could welsh on its carefully-scripted previous hints and utterances and do nothing. But that option would probably extinguish the last remaining shreds of the Fed’s credibility, since they’ve been jive-talking about raising rates since they began “tapering” the QE bond-buying spree in the spring of 2013, i.e., a long time ago. The Fed’s credibility is synonymous with the dollar’s credibility. Look out below.
If those 95 percent odds are correct, the end of all that lovely cheap money will be the death of the Trumphoria stock market zoom as all algo hell breaks loose in Wall Street’s server farms and the trend is no longer anyone’s friend. Enter, stage left, the unintended consequences and diminishing returns of computer technology ripping apart the financial expectations of every banking official from Shanghai to 20th Street and Constitution Avenue. The American public will be left out in the parking lot with its head spinning.
So, enjoy the last few weeks of artificial Russia hysteria and LBGTQ bathroom neurosis. You’ll have other things to think about as the daffodils come peeping through the garden loam — like what to use for money to buy stuff if, perchance, the ATM machines go to lockdown, and anyway, after three days of that there won’t even be anything to buy (or steal) at the local supermarket, given the fragility of our supply chains. I know this sounds a little extreme, like Zombie Apocalypse, but you won’t actually see any zombies around. They were just part of the perpetual freak show of the mind that is being shoved aside for the starker theatrics of reality.
Halloween’s coming super-early this year and it will be a shocking surprise to those currently busy looking for Russians behind every potted plant in Washington DC. First, accept the premise that your country has lost its mind.
This is what happens when societies (and individuals) can’t face the true quandaries of a particular moment in their history. All of their attention gets channeled into fantasy: spooks, sexual freakery, conspiracies, persecution narratives, savior fairy tales. It’s been quite a cavalcade of unreality for the past six months, with great entertainment value for connoisseurs of the bizarre — until you’re reminded that the fate of the nation is at stake.
The questions Americans might more profitably ask ourselves: can we continue living the way we do? And by what means? These matters of home economics have been sequestered in some forgotten storage unit of the collective mind for at least a year while a clock ticks in the time-bomb that sits on the national welcome mat. That bomb is made of financial plutonium and it’s getting ready to blow. When it does, all the distracting spookery and freakery will vaporize and the shell-shocked citizens will have a clear view of the bleak, toxic, devastated landscape they actually inhabit.
March 15 is when the temporary suspension of the national debt ceiling — engineered in a 2015 deal between Barack Obama and then House Speaker John Boehner — finally expires, meaning the government loses its authority to continue borrowing money. The chance that congress can pass a bill raising the debt ceiling to enable further borrowing is about the same as the chance that Xi Jinping will send every American household a dim sum breakfast next Sunday morning by FedEx. The US treasury will then be left with around $200 billion in walking-around money, at a burn rate of about $90 billion a month — meaning that that around June sometime the country won’t be able to pay invoices, issue salaries, send out entitlement checks, or do anything, really. It means pure government paralysis. It means no infrastructure spending jamboree, no “great” wall, no military shopping spree, none of the Great Expectations sewn into the golden fleece of Trumptopia.
Meanwhile, over the next few weeks, Janet Yellen and her crew of economic astrologasters at the Federal Reserve will have to put up or shut up vis-à-vis raising the interest rate on the basic overnight lending rate. The Las Vegas odds of it being raised currently stand at around 95 percent. So, they will be running that play around the time that the debt ceiling issue materializes into a live-action event. Of course, the Fed could welsh on its carefully-scripted previous hints and utterances and do nothing. But that option would probably extinguish the last remaining shreds of the Fed’s credibility, since they’ve been jive-talking about raising rates since they began “tapering” the QE bond-buying spree in the spring of 2013, i.e., a long time ago. The Fed’s credibility is synonymous with the dollar’s credibility. Look out below.
If those 95 percent odds are correct, the end of all that lovely cheap money will be the death of the Trumphoria stock market zoom as all algo hell breaks loose in Wall Street’s server farms and the trend is no longer anyone’s friend. Enter, stage left, the unintended consequences and diminishing returns of computer technology ripping apart the financial expectations of every banking official from Shanghai to 20th Street and Constitution Avenue. The American public will be left out in the parking lot with its head spinning.
So, enjoy the last few weeks of artificial Russia hysteria and LBGTQ bathroom neurosis. You’ll have other things to think about as the daffodils come peeping through the garden loam — like what to use for money to buy stuff if, perchance, the ATM machines go to lockdown, and anyway, after three days of that there won’t even be anything to buy (or steal) at the local supermarket, given the fragility of our supply chains. I know this sounds a little extreme, like Zombie Apocalypse, but you won’t actually see any zombies around. They were just part of the perpetual freak show of the mind that is being shoved aside for the starker theatrics of reality.
Saturday, March 04, 2017
Kunstler: POTUS at SOTUS [sic]
Kunstler's Friday column. (It's not abbreviated "SOTUS" but "SOTU" for State of the Union. And it wasn't formally a State of the Union address.)
Kunstler: POTUS at SOTUS"
President Trump garnered props from many quarters for not acting like a crazy person when he delivered his State of the Union address, but one part of the proceedings sure made my skin crawl: the two minutes of applause for Carryn Owens, widow of William “Ryan” Owens, the Navy SEAL recently killed in action in Yemen.
This culture is so screwed up that we have lost all sense of appropriate behavior and decorum. A situation like that customarily calls for a minute of silence, not a round of applause. Don’t we know that? This is not an award ceremony? Being widowed in such a way is a grave life event, not an accomplishment. Not only have we allowed ourselves to be carried away by emotion, but we don’t even know which emotion to attach to which event anymore. And the one appropriate behavior we seem incapable of is silent solemnity — not surprising in a society beset by the noise of incessant messaging.
Of course the politicos assembled were following the cue of President Trump who clapped the loudest — and right into the podium microphone, too — and wouldn’t let up, until everybody in the chamber appeared to be hostage to his idiotic cheerleading, all in all an interesting demonstration of the madness of crowds.
Speaking of comportment and messaging, what was with those Democratic congresswomen all gotten up in white costumes? The LA Times ventured that the this was the emblematic color for suffragettes back in the day. Maybe the congresswomen haven’t heard, but that battle is over. Many women actually voted in the recent election, some even for these female office-holders. The same paper also suggested they might be emulating the sacred white pants-suit that their fallen heroine, Hillary, wore for the occasion of her demi-apotheosis at the convention last summer. Isn’t dressing alike something generally reserved for junior high school or KKK rallies?
A few other notes on the substantive particulars of the SOTU evening:
The ObamaCare quandary. A fiasco for sure. Under it, not uncommonly, a family pays $12,000-a-year for a policy that carries a $5,000 deductible. That’s an interesting number in a land were most people don’t even have enough ready cash for routine car repairs. The cruel and idiotic injustice of such a set-up could only happen in a society that has normalized pervasive lying, universal accounting fraud, and corporate racketeering. I personally doubt the existing health care system can be reformed. Anyway, we’re starting in the wrong place with it.
The part that nobody talks about is the psychopathic pricing system that drives medicine. The average cost for a normal (non-surgical) hospital childbirth in America these days is $10,000. WTF? An appendectomy: between $9,000 and $20,000 depending on where. WTF? These days, a hip replacement runs about $38,000. Of course, you will never find out what a treatment or procedure costs before-the-fact. They simply won’t tell you. They’ll say something utterly ridiculous like, “we just don’t know.”
You’ll find out when the bills roll in. Last time I had a hip replacement, I received a single line-item hospital charge report from the insurance company that said: “Room and board, 36 hours… $23,000.” Say what? This was apart from the surgeon’s bill and the cost of the metal implant, just for occupying a bed for a day and a half pending discharge. They didn’t do a damn thing besides take my blood pressure and temperature a dozen times, and give me a few hydrocodone pills.
The ugly truth, readers, is that medicine in the USA is a hostage racket. They have you in a tight spot at a weak moment and they extract maximum payment to allow you to get on with your life, with no meaningful correlation to services rendered — just whatever they could get. Until these racketeers are compelled under law to post their prices openly and transparently, no amount of tweaking the role of insurers or government policy will make any difference. Note, too, that there is a direct connection between the outrageous salaries of hospital executives and their non-transparent, dishonest, and extortionist pricing machinations. The pharma industry is, of course, a subsidiary racket and needs to be subject to the kind of treatment the Department of Justice used to dispense to the likes of the Teamsters Union.
The healthcare system probably will not be reformed, but rather will collapse, and when it does, it will reorganize itself in a way that barely resembles current practice. For one thing, citizens will have to gain control over their own disastrous behavior, especially their eating, or else suffer the consequences, namely an early death. Second, the hospital system must be decentralized so that localities are once again served by small hospitals and clinics. The current system represents a mergers-and-acquisitions orgy that went berserk the past quarter century. The resulting administrative over-burden at every medical practice in the land is a perfectly designed fraud machine for enabling rackets. Preliminary verdict: congress will get nowhere in 2017 trying to fix this mess. Some things are too big to fail; some are too broken to fix. The coming debacle in finance, markets, and currencies will speed its demise.
Boos and catcalls rose from the Democratic side of the house chamber when Trump brought up the issue of immigration. Taking a position against the rule-of-law is an argument that the Democratic Party is not likely to win. It seems a cynical ploy to pander to a burgeoning Hispanic voter base, combined with a sentimental crypto-religious belief that any effort to regulate immigration is un-American. In any case, they act like people who are unable to think clearly. Trump can to some degree act independently of congress on the enforcement side of existing law, and apparently he intends to do that. Can his opponents find a position on the issue that is not cynical, sentimental, or hysterical? If not, it may be another factor in the death of the Democratic party.
Trump appears eager to continue the idiotic war on drugs that has the effect of making that traffic into an even more deadly and destructive criminal racket. It has already turned millions of small-timers into felon pariahs who can’t find any other employment when they get out of jail even if they want to try. The growing disparity between state and federal law on marijuana, for one thing, is a dangerous legal contradiction that could lead to other failures of federalism. Sanctuary cities is another one. Before long, federal law becomes meaningless and, voila, so does the United States of America. We better get our heads straight on this.
I also cringed when Trump trumpeted the supernatural rise in the stock markets since his election. Looks like a dangerous blow-off topping event to me, the ugly climax to the era of anything-goes-and-nothing-matters. Apparently, he’s unacquainted with the history of stock markets and their tell-tale behaviors. Beyond the markets, grave problems with currencies and banks await an epochal readjustment in the value and price of everything. The event could easily shut down the global banking system for a period of time, and it’s liable to be an interruption that advanced economies can’t recover from — but only re-start at a much lower level of activity and complexity than what we’re used to. Nobody can calculate the cost of that disorder and Trump is cruising into that implacable wall of woe at ramming speed. I don’t think he’ll survive it in office.
Kunstler: POTUS at SOTUS"
President Trump garnered props from many quarters for not acting like a crazy person when he delivered his State of the Union address, but one part of the proceedings sure made my skin crawl: the two minutes of applause for Carryn Owens, widow of William “Ryan” Owens, the Navy SEAL recently killed in action in Yemen.
This culture is so screwed up that we have lost all sense of appropriate behavior and decorum. A situation like that customarily calls for a minute of silence, not a round of applause. Don’t we know that? This is not an award ceremony? Being widowed in such a way is a grave life event, not an accomplishment. Not only have we allowed ourselves to be carried away by emotion, but we don’t even know which emotion to attach to which event anymore. And the one appropriate behavior we seem incapable of is silent solemnity — not surprising in a society beset by the noise of incessant messaging.
Of course the politicos assembled were following the cue of President Trump who clapped the loudest — and right into the podium microphone, too — and wouldn’t let up, until everybody in the chamber appeared to be hostage to his idiotic cheerleading, all in all an interesting demonstration of the madness of crowds.
Speaking of comportment and messaging, what was with those Democratic congresswomen all gotten up in white costumes? The LA Times ventured that the this was the emblematic color for suffragettes back in the day. Maybe the congresswomen haven’t heard, but that battle is over. Many women actually voted in the recent election, some even for these female office-holders. The same paper also suggested they might be emulating the sacred white pants-suit that their fallen heroine, Hillary, wore for the occasion of her demi-apotheosis at the convention last summer. Isn’t dressing alike something generally reserved for junior high school or KKK rallies?
A few other notes on the substantive particulars of the SOTU evening:
The ObamaCare quandary. A fiasco for sure. Under it, not uncommonly, a family pays $12,000-a-year for a policy that carries a $5,000 deductible. That’s an interesting number in a land were most people don’t even have enough ready cash for routine car repairs. The cruel and idiotic injustice of such a set-up could only happen in a society that has normalized pervasive lying, universal accounting fraud, and corporate racketeering. I personally doubt the existing health care system can be reformed. Anyway, we’re starting in the wrong place with it.
The part that nobody talks about is the psychopathic pricing system that drives medicine. The average cost for a normal (non-surgical) hospital childbirth in America these days is $10,000. WTF? An appendectomy: between $9,000 and $20,000 depending on where. WTF? These days, a hip replacement runs about $38,000. Of course, you will never find out what a treatment or procedure costs before-the-fact. They simply won’t tell you. They’ll say something utterly ridiculous like, “we just don’t know.”
You’ll find out when the bills roll in. Last time I had a hip replacement, I received a single line-item hospital charge report from the insurance company that said: “Room and board, 36 hours… $23,000.” Say what? This was apart from the surgeon’s bill and the cost of the metal implant, just for occupying a bed for a day and a half pending discharge. They didn’t do a damn thing besides take my blood pressure and temperature a dozen times, and give me a few hydrocodone pills.
The ugly truth, readers, is that medicine in the USA is a hostage racket. They have you in a tight spot at a weak moment and they extract maximum payment to allow you to get on with your life, with no meaningful correlation to services rendered — just whatever they could get. Until these racketeers are compelled under law to post their prices openly and transparently, no amount of tweaking the role of insurers or government policy will make any difference. Note, too, that there is a direct connection between the outrageous salaries of hospital executives and their non-transparent, dishonest, and extortionist pricing machinations. The pharma industry is, of course, a subsidiary racket and needs to be subject to the kind of treatment the Department of Justice used to dispense to the likes of the Teamsters Union.
The healthcare system probably will not be reformed, but rather will collapse, and when it does, it will reorganize itself in a way that barely resembles current practice. For one thing, citizens will have to gain control over their own disastrous behavior, especially their eating, or else suffer the consequences, namely an early death. Second, the hospital system must be decentralized so that localities are once again served by small hospitals and clinics. The current system represents a mergers-and-acquisitions orgy that went berserk the past quarter century. The resulting administrative over-burden at every medical practice in the land is a perfectly designed fraud machine for enabling rackets. Preliminary verdict: congress will get nowhere in 2017 trying to fix this mess. Some things are too big to fail; some are too broken to fix. The coming debacle in finance, markets, and currencies will speed its demise.
Boos and catcalls rose from the Democratic side of the house chamber when Trump brought up the issue of immigration. Taking a position against the rule-of-law is an argument that the Democratic Party is not likely to win. It seems a cynical ploy to pander to a burgeoning Hispanic voter base, combined with a sentimental crypto-religious belief that any effort to regulate immigration is un-American. In any case, they act like people who are unable to think clearly. Trump can to some degree act independently of congress on the enforcement side of existing law, and apparently he intends to do that. Can his opponents find a position on the issue that is not cynical, sentimental, or hysterical? If not, it may be another factor in the death of the Democratic party.
Trump appears eager to continue the idiotic war on drugs that has the effect of making that traffic into an even more deadly and destructive criminal racket. It has already turned millions of small-timers into felon pariahs who can’t find any other employment when they get out of jail even if they want to try. The growing disparity between state and federal law on marijuana, for one thing, is a dangerous legal contradiction that could lead to other failures of federalism. Sanctuary cities is another one. Before long, federal law becomes meaningless and, voila, so does the United States of America. We better get our heads straight on this.
I also cringed when Trump trumpeted the supernatural rise in the stock markets since his election. Looks like a dangerous blow-off topping event to me, the ugly climax to the era of anything-goes-and-nothing-matters. Apparently, he’s unacquainted with the history of stock markets and their tell-tale behaviors. Beyond the markets, grave problems with currencies and banks await an epochal readjustment in the value and price of everything. The event could easily shut down the global banking system for a period of time, and it’s liable to be an interruption that advanced economies can’t recover from — but only re-start at a much lower level of activity and complexity than what we’re used to. Nobody can calculate the cost of that disorder and Trump is cruising into that implacable wall of woe at ramming speed. I don’t think he’ll survive it in office.
Misspellings and Other Misdeeds
my irrational hatred for people who smugly mock Trump's typos is presently at a 10
— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) March 3, 2017
A few examples of said smug mockery.
1, 2, 3.
(BTW, the above-cited writer is not a perfect speller himself.)
The Brazilian media spent years mocking Lula's grammar errors & all it did was make citizenry hate media more & identify more closely w/Lula https://t.co/Ms3fxzUB96
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 3, 2017
Thursday, March 02, 2017
What Could Have Been
The Daily Beast: "Hard Pass: Inside Steve Bannon’s Failed Breitbart India Scheme: Before He Was the President’s Right-Hand Man, Steve Bannon Was Bent on World Domination of a Different Kind." By Asawin Suebsaeng.
Linked to in The Daily Beast article:
IndiaUncut.com: "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Libertarian." By Amit Varma.
Linked to in The Daily Beast article:
IndiaUncut.com: "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Libertarian." By Amit Varma.
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