This is the wildest campaign season I can remember. And though I have a sense of the infighting, the shifting alliances, etc. I have to take some time to sum it up. In the meantime,
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Maja Sidzinska on how libertarian municipalism may help modern political institutions to function more ethically. https://t.co/u5Hf99QdRp
— Telos Press (@TelosPress) January 28, 2016An American Slowdown https://t.co/RTaBG4bkSc An interview with the author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth
— Princeton Univ Press (@PrincetonUPress) January 29, 2016Wednesday, January 27, 2016
@Freedland @RyanLizza And we all know who is going to stop him in the end ;) pic.twitter.com/Ng1HbY4AAl
— Myles Dyer (@MylesDyer) January 23, 2016Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Dr. Jill Stein takes direct aim at the lesser evil lie with Joshua Scheer on KPFK! Share! https://t.co/0EEmom1LVY pic.twitter.com/1NtjG3fOQU
— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) January 16, 2016Monday, January 25, 2016
Kunstler: The Agonies of Sensible People.
Kunstler: The Agonies of Sensible People.
Much as many people-who-ought-to-know-better have been enjoying the disruptive antics of Donald Trump, surely other cohorts and coteries have endured dark nights of the soul as they witness the 2016 election spin into a perfect storm of rebellion, corruption, and idiocy. Imagine the scenes in Michael Bloomberg’s drawing room the past eight months, the agonies of sensible people! And so after the close of business Friday comes news that the former three-time mayor of New York City is laying concrete plans to run for president on a third-party ticket. Extreme times call for extreme moves by non-extremists.
The Trump phenomenon is pretty well-understood: a politically paralyzed nation hostage to malign forces, mired in racketeering, captive to PC witch-hunters, and pitching into bankruptcy, turns to a TV clown with no filter on his angry brain and he acts out all the discontents of our time. Does anybody doubt that the perfidies of the day beg to be opposed? But those shadowy figures in Bloomberg’s drawing room must be saying, “is this the best we can do?” And so an honorable man steps forward. Someone had to.
Couple of gigantic problems. First, what about Bloomberg being Wall Street’s pet politician? To many, I suppose, Bloomberg is exactly that. I’m not so sure. While he made his multi-billion dollar fortune building a computerized information service for Wall Street, with a news service and some other apps pinned on, he was not a bankster. He consorted with them all the livelong day, day in and day out, for decades. Maybe that was bad enough. Maybe it also puts him at a very special advantage, since other public figures can only pretend to understand the esoteric rackets lately engineered in lower Manhattan.
For instance, Bloomberg must know what a CDO is, and how outfits like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs used them to swindle the taxpayers. I’m not convinced that Donald Trump could explain that to an audience if given an hour of airtime. He rarely speaks in two consecutive coherent sentences, for all his entertainment value. The next president will be on duty during the gravest and most powerful financial unwind in history, and it might be a good thing if he understood how it worked. He will probably be blamed for it in any case, but at least he will be a true mariner in a storm, not just a bigmouth passenger on the ship. Anyway, the salient question is whether the voters could ever accept him as something besides a tool of the banks?
The public that Bloomberg would have to appeal to has become a weird amalgam of cultural mutants, zombies, and special pleaders — Duck Dynasty and Straight Out of Compton [sic] meet The House of Wax. Worse, they are inflamed, not exactly disposed to weigh political fine points. They’re just out for blood against a system that has been bleeding them badly. Did I leave out some big wad of voters between the extremes who retain a few shreds of critical thought? I’m not sure they exist anymore. We’re about to find out in the months ahead. The group in Bloomberg’s drawing room may be deluding itself that there is any thread of clear thinking on the street outside. It would be very sad, if so.
I think it is fair to say that Michael Bloomberg’s success as the three-term mayor of New York City (2002 – 2013) was due almost completely to the financialization of the economy. A Niagara of money flowed into the city as banking ballooned from 5 percent to 40 percent of the US economy. As all the formerly skeezy neighborhoods of New York — the Bowery, the Meatpacking District, etc —got buffed up, the desolation in places like Utica, Dayton, Gary, and Memphis got worse. You might say New York City benefited hugely from all the assets stripped out of the flyover states. All of which is to say that that recent revival of New York City was not necessarily due to Michael Bloomberg’s genius. He presided over a very special moment in history when money was flowing in a particular way, and he went with flow.
For all that, it seems likely that he was also an able administrator as this occurred. A lot of out-front elements of city life improved visibly while he was around. Crime went down, the subways ran better, public spaces were improved. What would he be able to do in the compressive deflationary depression that I call the long emergency? Could he restore faith in authority? Could he comfort a battered public on the airwaves? Could he begin the awful task of politically deconstructing the matrix of rackets that has made it impossible for this country to move where history is taking us (smaller, finer, more local)?
Finally, on top of his Wall Street connection, Bloomberg is Jewish. (As I am.) Is the country now crazed enough to see the emergence of a Jewish Wall Streeter as the incarnation of all their hobgoblin-infested nightmares? Very possibly so, since the old left wing Progressives have adopted the Palestinians as their new pet oppressed minority du jour and have been inveighing against Israel incessantly. Well, that would be a darn shame. But that’s what you might get in a shameless land where anything goes and nothing matters.
For now, anyway, the real disrupter is turning out to be Michael Bloomberg. Finally a serious man enters the stage.
Much as many people-who-ought-to-know-better have been enjoying the disruptive antics of Donald Trump, surely other cohorts and coteries have endured dark nights of the soul as they witness the 2016 election spin into a perfect storm of rebellion, corruption, and idiocy. Imagine the scenes in Michael Bloomberg’s drawing room the past eight months, the agonies of sensible people! And so after the close of business Friday comes news that the former three-time mayor of New York City is laying concrete plans to run for president on a third-party ticket. Extreme times call for extreme moves by non-extremists.
The Trump phenomenon is pretty well-understood: a politically paralyzed nation hostage to malign forces, mired in racketeering, captive to PC witch-hunters, and pitching into bankruptcy, turns to a TV clown with no filter on his angry brain and he acts out all the discontents of our time. Does anybody doubt that the perfidies of the day beg to be opposed? But those shadowy figures in Bloomberg’s drawing room must be saying, “is this the best we can do?” And so an honorable man steps forward. Someone had to.
Couple of gigantic problems. First, what about Bloomberg being Wall Street’s pet politician? To many, I suppose, Bloomberg is exactly that. I’m not so sure. While he made his multi-billion dollar fortune building a computerized information service for Wall Street, with a news service and some other apps pinned on, he was not a bankster. He consorted with them all the livelong day, day in and day out, for decades. Maybe that was bad enough. Maybe it also puts him at a very special advantage, since other public figures can only pretend to understand the esoteric rackets lately engineered in lower Manhattan.
For instance, Bloomberg must know what a CDO is, and how outfits like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs used them to swindle the taxpayers. I’m not convinced that Donald Trump could explain that to an audience if given an hour of airtime. He rarely speaks in two consecutive coherent sentences, for all his entertainment value. The next president will be on duty during the gravest and most powerful financial unwind in history, and it might be a good thing if he understood how it worked. He will probably be blamed for it in any case, but at least he will be a true mariner in a storm, not just a bigmouth passenger on the ship. Anyway, the salient question is whether the voters could ever accept him as something besides a tool of the banks?
The public that Bloomberg would have to appeal to has become a weird amalgam of cultural mutants, zombies, and special pleaders — Duck Dynasty and Straight Out of Compton [sic] meet The House of Wax. Worse, they are inflamed, not exactly disposed to weigh political fine points. They’re just out for blood against a system that has been bleeding them badly. Did I leave out some big wad of voters between the extremes who retain a few shreds of critical thought? I’m not sure they exist anymore. We’re about to find out in the months ahead. The group in Bloomberg’s drawing room may be deluding itself that there is any thread of clear thinking on the street outside. It would be very sad, if so.
I think it is fair to say that Michael Bloomberg’s success as the three-term mayor of New York City (2002 – 2013) was due almost completely to the financialization of the economy. A Niagara of money flowed into the city as banking ballooned from 5 percent to 40 percent of the US economy. As all the formerly skeezy neighborhoods of New York — the Bowery, the Meatpacking District, etc —got buffed up, the desolation in places like Utica, Dayton, Gary, and Memphis got worse. You might say New York City benefited hugely from all the assets stripped out of the flyover states. All of which is to say that that recent revival of New York City was not necessarily due to Michael Bloomberg’s genius. He presided over a very special moment in history when money was flowing in a particular way, and he went with flow.
For all that, it seems likely that he was also an able administrator as this occurred. A lot of out-front elements of city life improved visibly while he was around. Crime went down, the subways ran better, public spaces were improved. What would he be able to do in the compressive deflationary depression that I call the long emergency? Could he restore faith in authority? Could he comfort a battered public on the airwaves? Could he begin the awful task of politically deconstructing the matrix of rackets that has made it impossible for this country to move where history is taking us (smaller, finer, more local)?
Finally, on top of his Wall Street connection, Bloomberg is Jewish. (As I am.) Is the country now crazed enough to see the emergence of a Jewish Wall Streeter as the incarnation of all their hobgoblin-infested nightmares? Very possibly so, since the old left wing Progressives have adopted the Palestinians as their new pet oppressed minority du jour and have been inveighing against Israel incessantly. Well, that would be a darn shame. But that’s what you might get in a shameless land where anything goes and nothing matters.
For now, anyway, the real disrupter is turning out to be Michael Bloomberg. Finally a serious man enters the stage.
Saturday, January 23, 2016
National Review vs. Trump.
National Review vs. Trump.
"Here are the names of the conservative leaders trying to stop Trump:
•Thomas Sowell, economist.
•Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center.
•Glenn Beck, founder of The Blaze.
•Edwin Meese and Michael Mukasey, former U.S. attorney generals.
•Dana Loesch and Michael Medved, syndicated radio hosts.
•Cal Thomas and Mona Charen, syndicated columnists.
•William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.
•R. R. Reno, editor of First Things.
•John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary.
•Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs.
•Mark Helprin, novelist.
•Andrew C. McCarthy, contributing editor, National Review.
•Erick Erickson, founder of The Resurgent.
•David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth.
•Steven F. Hayward, author and presidential scholar.
•Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist.
•David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute.
•Katie Pavlich, editor of Townhall.com editor.
•Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention."
Update:
"Here are the names of the conservative leaders trying to stop Trump:
•Thomas Sowell, economist.
•Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center.
•Glenn Beck, founder of The Blaze.
•Edwin Meese and Michael Mukasey, former U.S. attorney generals.
•Dana Loesch and Michael Medved, syndicated radio hosts.
•Cal Thomas and Mona Charen, syndicated columnists.
•William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.
•R. R. Reno, editor of First Things.
•John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary.
•Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs.
•Mark Helprin, novelist.
•Andrew C. McCarthy, contributing editor, National Review.
•Erick Erickson, founder of The Resurgent.
•David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth.
•Steven F. Hayward, author and presidential scholar.
•Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist.
•David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute.
•Katie Pavlich, editor of Townhall.com editor.
•Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention."
Update:
Does it matter that National Review violated IRS nonprofit rules in urging voters to oppose Trump? https://t.co/3o3efRMf1B @KatrinaPierson
— Justin Raimondo (@JustinRaimondo) January 24, 2016
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Monday, January 18, 2016
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Various Links
At least 3 cable news startups are eyeing the cable channel spot @ajam is about to give up. https://t.co/ViOuauKKl2
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) January 14, 2016I never noticed them till I read this tweet and its comments.
"Here's something I'm not going to do. I'm not going to have reasonably-sized ears." -Rubio
— Gavin McInnes (@Gavin_McInnes) January 15, 2016BUSTED: Emails prove Carly Fiorina campaign has been illegally coordinating with super PAC https://t.co/9qBtN1GiVz pic.twitter.com/v2AajZXHLt
— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 15, 2016Thursday, January 14, 2016
No.
I endorse this pioneering work. Get with it, people. https://t.co/Agf0xVLRJH
— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) January 1, 2016Tuesday, January 12, 2016
"Subprime Oil Collapse."
Subprime oil collapse https://t.co/i3tvhiQjCK
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) January 12, 201613 January update: Oil Price Could Crash to $10 a Barrel.
Oil Could Become Cheaper Than Bottled Water.
$3.2 Trillion of Global Stock Value Wiped Out Since Year Began.
The sell-off this year, driven by renewed jitters over China's economy and a slump in energy prices, has pushed the S&P 500 index in correction territory, with the benchmark now down 11.29 percent from its May 21 closing high.
According to the veteran market commentator, U.S. stocks are now off $1.77 trillion, while overseas stocks are down $1.4 trillion.
Al Jazeera America (digital channel 123 in Hilo) will go off the air on 30 April. The network's demise is partly due to plummeting oil prices ($100+/barrel vs. $30/barrel).
Monday, January 11, 2016
The New Republic For Sale--Again
Chris Hughes explains why he's selling it.
A Vox article from 2014 when the magazine was first up for sale, with a 2016 update.
A Vox article from 2014 when the magazine was first up for sale, with a 2016 update.
Snark aside: TNR has some wonderful writers who I hope will be fine despite the idiocy of Chris Hughes and Guy Vidra.
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) January 11, 2016Imagine if Chris Hughes had spent the last few yrs handing out $20M in cash to people on the street & left TNR alone https://t.co/1jQzJoC9kN
— Elissa Goldstein (@Book_Moth) January 11, 2016TNR was bound to fail with its strident focus on identity. How many Vox like media outlets can a country support?
— EdAsante (@EdAsante77) January 11, 2016oh god we're going to get a whole new round of old white men giving us hot TNR takes, aren't we?
— Kevin Robillard (@PoliticoKevin) January 11, 2016Sunday, January 10, 2016
Silentó: "Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)"
I don’t wanna watch you whip.
Or nay nay, for that matter.
— Tim Hawkins (@timhawkinscomic) September 12, 2015I do. And it's spelled nae nae.
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