Mr. Krugman's Science: The Curious Silence About Syria

I'm at a loss to understand Paul Krugman's utter silence about President Obama's campaign to bomb Syria.  Mr. Krugman, as serious students of economics know (as oxymoronic a catergory as that might seem), won the Nobel Prize from a Swedish bank for his steadfast opposition to George W. Bush's "war of choice" in Iraq, a war which Bush placed on the "national credit card" while reducing the taxes necessary to pay for such folly.  Mr. Krugman was so exercised about Bush's misrepresentations that led us into an unnecessary war that he warned, quite uncharacteristically, that Bush would ultimately resort to "money printing," the way that all banana republics (as opposed to Banana Republics, which sell cotton shirts from Malaysia) eventually do when they run out of dough.

It turns out that a nation which pays debts in its own currency can't run out of dough.  Mr. Krugman assures us of this now.  I suppose this is the reason he has no problem with bombing Syria, or invading Syria with troops, or whatever.  We have the money after all, even if the national debt is much higher now, both absolutely and as a percentage of GDP.  Indeed, invading Syria, starting yet another war in the Middle East, might stand in for the "alien invasion" he also promotes as a way to galvanize federal spending and, thus, ensure economic recovery for the nation generally.

Cynics might observe that Krugman is a dyed-in-the-wool Democratic partisan, and that Mr. Obama's loose association with that party might explain everything.  They might go further and argue that Mr. Krugman recognizes that he's not likely to draw attention to his economic doodling on the same basis as before.  Would the Swedish bank reward him again with a Nobel Prize for challenging the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize?  Well, the Peace Prize comes out of Norway, so there's a shot.  I understand the Swedes tell Norwegian jokes.  Vociferous, consistent opposition to Obama's nonstop warmongering (which turns out to be about as flagrant as his predecessor's) might win Mr. Krugman the Nobel Peace Prize, however.  That award hutch is filling up! 

Mr. Krugman always has his eye on the prize, but I don't think he has more Nobels in mind.  He has to worry about the deficiencies in the analyses of almost all other economists, for one thing, and that's a lot right there.  In his column today Mr. Krugman explained why economic policy over the last five years has been so dismal, and why an output gap, the difference between what the American economy could have produced in goods and services over that period, about $2 trillion, was so predictable.

Well, I take that back.  It wasn't actually predictable, because the grand mavens of economics concede that you can't actually predict economic futures with their science.  The New York Times invited a colloquium on this very subject over the last weekend (after first publishing an article asserting that economics was not a science), and the outcome, which the Times appeared to endorse (probably at Mr. Krugman's insistence behind the scenes) was that although economics is not a science which can predict anything, it can explain things, so it's a science. 

An interesting distinction, as Woody Allen said in "Love & Death."  As to its usefulness in explaining things, we have Ben Bernanke's deathless pronouncement before a Congressional committee in October, 2005 :

U.S. house prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years, noted Bernanke, currently chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, in testimony to Congress's Joint Economic Committee. But these increases, he said, "largely reflect strong economic fundamentals," such as strong growth in jobs, incomes and the number of new households.

Okay, that's an explanation.  We might disagree now that the housing bubble simply reflected "strong economic fundamentals."  We might say that Mr. Bernanke was off his rocker.  Mr. Bernanke holds a PhD in Economics from MIT, however, as does his fellow scientist Paul Krugman.

The Times article, in defending economics as an "explanatory" science, compared it to meteorology, which has "similar" problems of prediction (so the article claimed), but is nevertheless socially useful.  Not to cavil, but Mr. Bernanke was so far off that it would be a little like sitting in the middle of a hurricane and wondering whether the atmospheric low pressure might have something to do with these strong winds we're experiencing. 

Mr. Krugman was able to figure out where the economy ought to be today "on the back of an envelope."  It's all a matter of "textbook macroeconomics," and it tells you that federal spending on a jobs program would have avoided all the pain.  You can explain the past, that is, by applying a theory to it after you already know the results, even if, knowing the preconditions as you did, you could not predict the future. Yeah, why the hell not?  Why look in a textbook, however?  Why not just fart out a theory?

As the Distinguished Research Scientist from a Great Southwestern University points out, how do we distinguish the accuracy of Mr. Krugman's analysis from a hundred other theories we could develop (or fart) and apply to the same factual history?  What about automation, or the continuing problem of losing high-paying jobs to overseas competitors, or the skyrocketing cost of the master resource, petroleum, or the ecological, environmental and overpopulation limits we are hitting with a vengeance?  Maybe the United States has been in a long, slow, but accelerating decline brought about by all these forces, and the housing bubble was just a palliative interruption of that process that fueled consumer spending.  Maybe the "trend lines" on which "potential output" is based are pure moonshine based on completely unrealistic assumptions.

I don't suppose any of these ideas cluttered up the back of the envelope.  The theories of Paul Krugman, Ace Scientist, cannot be falsified.  Like the Letters of Transit that Mr. Ugarte laid his hands on, they "cannot be rescinded, not even questioned."

We'll Get Around to Dealing With This Atrocity Just After the Holiday

Naturally, I was as surprised as the next American citizen by the President's volte-face concerning the attack on Syria.  Since my overall analytical model is that the United States is governed by a military-security junta, for which Mr. Obama is the spokesperson (sort of the way that Ronald Reagan was the spokesman for General Electric), the question then became: what was it the Pentagon brass saw that made it decide to punt the issue over to Congress?

We can leave aside the idea that President Obama takes seriously Article 1, Section 8 of the American Constitution, which assigns the war-declaring power to Congress.  When Leon Panetta served as Secretary of Defense, he actually stated overtly to a Congressional committee that the Obama Administration does not consider the Constitution or the War Powers Act of 1973 an impediment to Presidential action in the face of perceived threats.  Panetta, of course, is not a Constitutional scholar; formerly, he played the role of the pharmacist on the old "Dobie Gillis" series.  Still, I have no doubt that he was speaking for the Administration.  In some way that no one wants to take the time to explain, the express grant of power to declare war to Congress in Article 1 is a kind of superfluity; the Founding Fathers apparently didn't really mean it, or it is inconsistent with the role of the President as Commander in Chief and therefore should be disregarded.

I think the Junta's ultimate aim is a tactical nuclear strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, and these practice wars (Libya, Yemen and almost-Syria), all done without Congressional consultation, are simply to keep the military complex in fighting trim and to establish the precedent that the Junta can conduct any war it wants with or without Congress.

So why did the Junta tell Obama to back down?  I think they were concerned about the quality of the operational intelligence.  There is a great deal of uncertainty about whether it was actually the Assad "regime" that used Sarin, the neurotoxic gas in the suburbs of Damascus.  On the surface of things, it seems like an idiotic thing to do.  Assad is winning the Islamic food-fight known as the Syrian civil war.  Why would he do something so clearly counterproductive?  There were rumors swirling that Saudi Arabia had actually supplied the poison gas to anti-Assad forces (al-Qaeda affiliated rebels, just as Saudi Arabia supplied funding to the 9/11 hijackers, who were almost all Saudis - the House of Saud is sort of the Milo Minderbinder of world insurrection). 

One telling point is that the American position was being carried almost exclusively by noted chowderhead John Kerry, one of the stupider members of the U.S. Congress, a man so mediocre that it was revealed during the Bush-Kerry contest of 2004 that Kerry's military aptitude scores were, in fact, lower than those of George W. Bush.  Kerry played the role of Colin Powell in the run-up to the Iraq invasion - an expendable "cut-out" who is going nowhere politically and so it doesn't matter if he's dead wrong about everything he's saying.

Still, it would not help the Junta's ultimate cause if, after this 36-Hour War, or whatever, it became evident that all of this was premised on a false-flag operation.  We don't need to invade Syria just to establish a precedent that is in essence already made.  Obama bombs and invades at will and never seeks Congressional authorization (unlike his predecessor, who was careful to seek it twice, for Afghanistan and Iraq).  Congress never lifts a finger to protest, and I doubt seriously that they really want anything to do with this Syrian decision.

I don't think this Syrian thing is going to happen, which is just as well.  Helping Al-Qaeda destroy the Shia will have to await some other venue, or some other pretext.  It will be up to the military to decide, and then they'll let their Man in the Oval Office know.

I'm not sure this system of governance is actually so bad, when I think about it, and consider the alternatives. Congress is a kind of lunatic asylum for the otherwise unemployable, a congregation of corrupt, anti-intellectual blowhards.  The weenie-flashers and those paying New Orleans whores to diaper them and powder their bottoms are probably the least destructive, since they've found a passion that doesn't involve national security.  Maybe General Jack Ripper was right.  Maybe politicians just don't have the time, the training or the inclination for strategic thought. An interesting note: within an hour of making his epic decision, President Obama was on the first tee, in his khaki shorts and brown-and-white saddle shoes

Let's Get Chemical: Do We Have to Bomb Syria? Or: President Obama & the Jeopardy! Principle

Jumpin' Jack Bassar uses gas, gas, gas...

As I recall, I used to have certain "Canons of Construction" that I would use to interpret or predict George W. Bush's likely course of action based on things he said.  Blogspot gives me a search engine on this site that might turn them up if I get motivated enough to look.


With President Barack Obama, things are much easier.  You only need one Canon, what I call the "Jeopardy!" principle.  In the game show, the right answer is usually the most obvious or "Zeitgeist" answer, the fact or factoid that you would guess most people would guess.  So if the question is, what black athlete is credited with breaking the color barrier and ushering in the era of integrated professional sports? your answer will, of course, be "Jackie Robinson."  Maybe you could have a complicated rationale for answering, Jesse Owens, or Satchel Paige, or even Jack Johnson,  but you know that won't be right, because only one answer floats in the collective consciousness as the correct guess.  Baaaah!  Alex Trebek: Wally? Wally:  Jackie Robinson!  Alex Trebek:  That's right, for two hundred dollars!

President Obama is the same way.  What utterly boring, hyper-conservative, fossilized Beltway attitude can I adopt as my "policy" toward this latest hairball?  Some Beltway sage tells him what the "Obama Administration" ought to do, Obama gives a listless performance at a press conference where he tries to project the general feeling he cares, and then he heads out to the golf course.  Another day at the White House.

On any issue, this is a highly reliable Decoder Ring for guessing what the O Man will do.  A whistleblower informs the American people that every byte and pixel they utter in their daily lives is hoovered up illegally by a massive spy apparatus.  Obama: We will hunt this traitor to the ends of the Earth.  The general consensus is that marijuana use is certainly no more harmful than alcohol or tobacco, no doubt possessess genuinely positive applications, and numerous states have moved toward one form of legalization or another.  Obama:  It is the federal law of the land that marijuana use is a controlled substance, and we will crack down mercilessly on anyone caught rolling a doob.  The endless, pointless war in Afghanistan, which kills many people and doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything, is going badly, to the extent that a war with no point can go any other way.  Obama: We will surge the troop force and prevail, adjusting our position according to the facts on the ground.

It might save time if President Obama commissioned a creative person to come up with a Presidential Magic 8-Ball that would float such canards to the answer hole.

There now seems to be a strong possibility (a long way from proved) that President Bashar Assad dumped the poison gas Sarin on a town in Syria that no American has ever heard of.  Of course, many Americans have never heard of "Los Angeles," so this is not definitive.  So our fearless warriors must intervene on the side of ...who again?  Hamas?  The Muslim Brotherhood?  Al-Qaeda?  Well, not actually our fearless warriors.  More the X-Box and GameBoy Brigades joysticking cruise missiles and Predator drones down on the general areas where maybe people aligned with Assad are.  Boom!  Will that be enough to get rid of Assad?  Why do we want to get rid of Assad again?  Oh yeah: because he runs a "regime," whereas the Good Guys always have an "Administration," sort of like the Department of Motor Vehicles (h/t: Andrew Levine).  Bashar Assad is an evil dictator who uses poison gas on his own people.  Let me know if that has a familiar ring.

We can probably get rid of Bassar Assad after, that is, Tom Friedman is allowed a daring midnight raid to rescue Bassar's fetching wife Asma.  Then Syria, like Egypt, Libya and Iraq before it, can enter that wonderfully creative, anarchic state of complete chaos called Mass Mayhem, where everyone kills everyone else until the military, the last bureaucracy ("administration") with its shit usually in one bag, takes control.

Well, what can we say?  Congress doesn't declare war anymore.  Even the War Powers Act, that 1973 legislation designed to rein in war adventurism in the White House, has fallen into complete disuse under President O.  Starting a war now is about as controversial as the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn.  Anyway, Americans usually don't die in these kinds of remote-control wars, where we use cruise missiles, drones and high-altitude bombers, as in Kosovo.  Once ze rockets go up, who cares where zay come down?  Not our department.  Chemical weapons were used (white phosphorous, depleted uranium and napalm are all chemicals too, but those aren't what we're talking about here), so we must intervene.  The Beltway can't even understand why you don't understand.

Saturday Morning Essay: On the Futility of Modern Waldenism

Brought to you by Peet's Dark Roast...

This is actually the second installment of my Grand Unified Theory series, as I inch up to my thesis. As soon as I figure out what it is.  I have this sense that if I'm going to take my place among great social thinkers, such as Henry David Thoreau (Walden),  Joseph Tainter (Marginal Utility), Emile Durkheim (Organic Society, Anomie), Sigmund Freud (Civilization & Its Discontents),  and Craig Dilworth (Vicious Circle Principle) and I'm probably not...then I need to come up with a seminal idea.  And I think what I've been ruminating on all these years without really realizing it is the interesting question: why is it that human beings, as a species, are constitutionally incapable, as a group, of reacting rationally to existential threats to their own viability?

You gotta admit: it's a grabber.  When I say, "react rationally," what I mean is, why can't human beings simply assess a dire problem, such as global warming, and set about solving it in a systematic fashion?  I believe it could be done, with effective communication and leadership.  I realize that the bell curve of human intelligence will always be such that about 80% of the human populace cannot grasp, in a comprehensive way, the intricacies of the problem itself.  It remains for the remaining 20% or so to show the way forward.  One immediate paradox is that the same bell curve distribution, in a democracy, produces the "leadership" that is supposed to show the way forward.  As a result, we wind up with empty suits like Barack Obama, full of smiles and conciliatory gestures towards one and all, but with absolutely no effective leadership and no resolve.  A kind of one-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox, for you Douglas Adams fans out there.

It was probably such a paradox that convinced the ancient Greek philosophers, probably the smartest human beings who ever graced the surface of the Earth, that democracy (though they invented it - it's a Greek word, after all) had its severe limitations, and that human groups were probably best led by a well-intentioned Philosopher King. 

Asking a stupid entity such as a democracy to make intelligent decisions based on highly technical details is a contradiction in terms.  That may be the first plank of my thesis.

It leads to other conclusions, such as the utter futility of acts of self-martyrdom, such as I was writing about yesterday when commenting on Guy McPherson's assessment of his own huge "mistake" in leaving his academic life and taking up residence in the "mud hut" of the Sonoran Desert.  I think he's absolutely right: he made a huge mistake.  The eensy-weensy, tiny-tiny, virtually-invisible rounding-error contribution such a lifestyle makes to the overall problem of global warming or resource depletion is a joke.  Really, what such an act of self-abnegation amounts to is simply narcissism by another route.  Look at me!  I live consistently with my principles!

Good for you.  And yet all of these spokespeople for ultra-simplicity, Guy McPherson, Dmitry Orlov, James Kunstler, routinely board jumbo jets and fly all over the country, or the world, and deliver their dire warnings after paying for the jet exhaust that has just wreaked havoc on the ozone level and dumped vast amounts of CO2 right at the level of the troposphere where it can do the most harm.

Dmitry Orlov doesn't actually parade his decision to live on a boat as any sort of virtuous decision, in point of fact.  He just likes boats and sailing, and he doesn't like work.  He enjoys the "broad margin" to his life that such simplicity allows, along the lines extolled by another Massachusetts resident, Henry David Thoreau.  Thoreau, indeed, is a very useful example of the pointlessness of self-martyrdom.  Contrary to the (80%) view that Thoreau lived in a shack beside a pond his entire life, Thoreau lived in many places during his brief years, and devoted only 26 months to the cabin he built next to Walden Pond.  He then, as he said, became again "a sojourner among mankind."

A sojourner among mankind is what we all actually are, and we are all, to one degree or another, participants in modern civilization. 

Anyway, a plank for the thesis has been laid.  My deep gratitude to the makers of such fine coffee this blue and fleecy white morning, here among the trees.

Grand Unified Theory of Unconscious Evolution, Part 1

From another Deep Green Resistance writer published on Guy McPherson's blog, Nature Bats Last:

If you have read or seen Guy McPherson, Dmitry Orlov, John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson, James Hansen; seen the film “What A Way To Go: Life At the End Of Empire”, or spoken at length with anyone else who has brought up the issues of Peak Oil, environmental degradation, rising CO2 levels, the melting of the Arctic, release of methane from the tundra and clathrates, you know the score. We are in for one helluva ride, and it most likely will be unpleasant. 

As Maynard used to say on "Dobie Gillis:"  You rang?

By the way, Guy's blog is kind of fun.  The most heart-wrenching jeremiads are displayed there.  People write long, agonized posts in highly florid, ornate language, about coming to terms with near-term extinction, which even has an acronym now:  NTE. It's sort of like reading Silent Spring as Emily Dickinson might have written it.  Among these essays, Guy's are the most dire.  He's thinking about 2016, which I think is sort of cutting it close.  He's put his money down on Arctic methane release as the final hammer blow.  Other than a worldwide nuclear holocaust, Arctic methane release is probably the only horse in the pack that can finish us off by 2016.

When I first read about methane blooms, I have to admit it freaked me out, and I had the same disquieting feeling I had back in 1969 when I first read about rising CO2 levels; namely, we're not going to do anything signficant about this problem and it carries with it the possibility of mortal consequences.

Anyway, Guy presents that personal conundrum I have adverted to before: the mismatch between a perspective that takes into account the generations ahead versus the natural, and very human, narcissistic desire to have fun and do what you want in your one and only life.  Difficult tango steps to execute.  Guy's a tall, handsome guy with an enviable head of thick hair, and he frequently reminds us that he was a "tenured professor" at a world-class research university, by which he means he was a professor of geology natural resources at the University of Arizona.  Which is impressive, and everything, but you might think for a moment he must be talking about being head of CERN or director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.  His evident need to impress you suggests that he's a little uneasy about what he's done, "walking away from the apex of empire," and sure enough, lately I read where he admits that leaving his university sinecure was "the biggest mistake" of his life.  There's that tension again. It's what keeps us all playing the game of advanced civilization, despite the enormous, obvious damage to the ecosphere.  Meanwhile, we all hope that "they" will come up with something which allows us to keep nice things, like MRI machines and advanced hip replacement therapy, and high-speed Internet, while eliminating excessive CO2 emissions, water scarcity, oceanic death, topsoil depletion, overpopulation, and right-wing talk radio.

I think of Guy as sort of the Rod McKuen of doomsayers.  His essays seem more poetic than scientific.  The Realclimate.org blog, founded by Michael Mann and others involved in the "hockey stick" controversy, does not share his dire assessment of the Arctic methane problem, nor do more rigorous thinkers such as Dmitry Orlov.  I think Guy's intellectual gambit is that if he has to give up the glamorous academic life (or, I guess, now that's he given it up, whether he had to or not), then it's better to think that he only has to live his mistake three more years.  In a way, he's thinking in Millenialist terms, only with methane taking the role of Our Lord & Savior.

Not to make fun of Guy, who seems like a good...guy.  Rather, it introduces my thesis, which I guess I'll get to next time out.

The Safe Side of The Line

David Gregory and Karl Rove get down.


I confess that a small frisson of concern traveled up my somewhat anatomically compromised spinal column (degenerative disc problems, age- and otherwise-related) when I read about the United Kingdom's detention of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald's partner in life, at Heathrow Airport.  Unless you've been on a solo dogsled run to the South Pole in recent months, you know that Glenn Greenwald is the American blogger and journalist who has broken most of the big stories about Eric Snowden and the NSA's massive, pervasive and patently illegal electronic eavesdropping.

The United States and the UK are the two big anti-terrorist countries, of course, meaning that they are the two countries where it is most politically advantageous to keep their respective populaces whipped into a frenzy of paranoia about burnoosed malefactors plotting day and night to do something evil, thus behooving the spy agencies to collect every last pixel and bit transmitted between any two human beings on the face of the Earth to see whether it might have something to do with such a plot.

There has been a laudable pushback against the thuggish repression of the Cameron and Obama Administrations, which has leveled the playing field in favor of a free press.  Somewhat, at least, although the truth is that individuals never have any chance against the coordinated might of the Powers That Be, once they decide to go after someone.  This was the central message of George Orwell's 1984.  Glenn Greenwald has been defiant, so far, but in time I imagine he will get worn out by the intimidation and hassling and will revert to a role of "responsible" critic and observer rather than a "player."  Mr. Greenwald has been dancing a little too close to the fire: the actual conduit of information from a notorious whistleblower, Eric Snowden, which means he has put himself squarely in the crosshairs of the Establishment.  Sometimes I think Glenn Greenwald can be a little naive; he seems to believe that it's enough that he's "right" about what he's doing, but in America this has almost nothing to do with anything anymore, at least on the Big Stage. After his Fifteen Minutes of Fame, the American people will move on to their next diversion, but any legal complications will be Mr. Greenwald's alone.  Beltway toadies such as David Gregory felt obliged to ask Greenwald whether he (Greenwald) didn't think he ought to be prosecuted for "aiding and abetting" Eric Snowden in his illegal disclosures.  David Gregroy, after all, would never do something like that, meaning, commit an act of actual journalism.  David Gregory's got a nice life pretending to be hard-hitting and dancing the frug with Karl Rove at Washington Correspondents dinners, meanwhile raking in huge sums of money being on TV.

Greenwald's venture into playerism distinguishes him from other radical critics, such as Noam Chomsky.  Mr. Chomsky writes and says extremely critical things about the United States, and particularly its foreign policy, but I can't see Noam Chomsksy ever acting as a conduit for a whistleblower's illegal disclosures.  Noam knows where The Line is, and I think in time Glenn Greenwald will move back to the safe side of The Line, having elevated his visibility markedly through his participation in the Snowden disclosures.  That increase in visibility will be good for his blogs, his journalism, his books and his public appearances, but I doubt that he wants to become so "hot" that it becomes uncomfortable to sit around the table on a "Morning Joe" show and shoot the breeze, however tendentiously. 

There is a reason that actual whistleblowers, such as Eric Snowden, tend to be loners and iconoclasts, even emotionally unstable.  Being an outlaw is rough work, and most of us want nothing to do with it. Along a continuum in public debates regarding human freedom, you have those who revel in the role of being Insiders, those who occupy positions of "responsible dissent," and then you have the genuine outlaws.  The latter are very rare, and those who successfully traverse the dangers are rarer still.  Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps, but that was another time when the world seemed much younger.

Saturday Morning Essay: Mr. Krugman's Science and the Restoration of the Chazzer Economy

From Yiddish חזיר (khazer), from Hebrew חזיר (hazír).

Noun

chazzer (plural chazzers)

1. (slang) pig

I read Paul Krugman's columns and blogs on a regular basis.  They are dull and often insufferable stuff, of course, but I find them a needed distraction from reality.  While Mr. Krugman fancies himself a pessimist (often lamenting in print that he finds it necessary to be that way), I actually think his outlook is remarkably, even outrageously, sunny. I often have a feeling, reading his dissociative takes on America's economic malaise, similar to the weird sensation I would get reading the Dick & Jane primers of so many years ago.  Here were these generic people, living generic lives in a generic house, saying generic things with no reference to a broader world, with no problems or emotional messiness.  Dwelling too long in the pages of Dick & Jane could produce a slight psychosis, in fact.

To you it may be 2013, the CO2 count in the atmosphere may be 400 parts per million, the Arctic sea ice may disappear altogether during the summer months in the next couple of years, the Earth's population of 7 billion may be straining the outer limits of Earth's ability to feed and sustain such a massive horde of humanity; but to Mr. Krugman it is always 1964, America is in its unchallenged suzerainty, and this latest cyclical downturn is simply another setback of the kind you expect in an advanced industrial economy.  The last four, or five, or six, or whatever number of years it's been since we headed south this time, is a "normal aftermath" of whatever.  There's no mystery and it's nothing out of the ordinary.  It's not worth worrying about, really, except to the extent we have been foolish enough not to follow Mr. Krugman's nostrums.  Mr. Krugman said so again yesterday:

The truth is that we understand perfectly well why recovery has been slow, and confidence has nothing to do with it. What we’re looking at, instead, is the normal aftermath of a debt-fueled asset bubble; the sluggish U.S. recovery since 2009 is more or less in line with many historical examples, running all the way back to the Panic of 1893. Furthermore, the recovery has been hobbled by spending cuts — cuts that were motivated by what we now know was completely wrongheaded deficit panic.

What we have here is a failure to demand enough.  That's because my spending is your income and vice versa.  And the economy is not a morality play.  And those who predicted inflation, even hyperinflation, were wrong, wrong, wrong.  There - I've saved you the trouble of reading a couple of hundred blog posts.

Mr. Krugman wants to restore the chazzer economy, the American dynamic system whereby we powered our way to the top by buying stuff.  A primarily service and information economy, fueled to the 70% level by the American propensity to spend today and worry about tomorrow some other time.  Unemployment is not "structural" - there is no mismatch between the job openings and the available skills among the American working force.  Everyone could work (95% at least, you don't want more than that) if we would jump start the economy through government spending, that is, Keynesian stimulus.

Then there are those who insist that restoring the chazzer economy will lead to the near-term extinction of the human race.  Mr. Krugman does not deal with this issue; I think it is an "externality" in his economic modeling, and an exceedingly messy one.  Those who advance this dire view have not won Nobel prizes from a Swedish bank (and thus may not own, as Mr. Krugman does, a condo in St. Croix, an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Princeton, New Jersey), but they point out that the lag time between the emission of CO2 from an industrial economy and its temperature-raising effects is about 30 years, so that we are currently experiencing the climate effects of emissions of 1983.  Thus, restoring the chazzer economy is not really an option; we have to move entirely in the other direction toward localization, efficiency, alternative energy and an emphasis on material simplicity.

All of these elements are also externalities in Mr. Krugman's classical economics.  Our Man Krugman, in other words, is the apotheosis of the American liberal: in favor of environmentalism, in favor of doing anything possible to save us from ecological collapse, provided it does not entail changing anything about how we live.

Another New Yorker, Joshua Headley of Deep Green Resistance, sees less relevance in the Panic of 1893 and more in the current state of the biosphere:

We are in uncharted territory – we are facing challenges never before experienced in the history of the human species. This presents a grave problem: if the best science we have today cannot accurately offer any model predictions for the path that we are currently on, how can we effectively plan for the future?  The honest truth: we can’t. We cannot effectively plan for a future that is beyond all known human experience. The best that we can do now is stop exacerbating the problem – stop contributing to the rapidly accelerating decline and destruction of the Earth’s biosphere and ecosystems.
Quite literally: we have to completely dismantle the industrial economy, we have to do it soon, and really, we should have done it yesterday.

The problem that such doomsaying presents to Mr. Krugman is understandable.  He prefers the view that we should definitely get CO2 emissions under control by, say, mid-century, so that sea level rise in 2100 is not catastrophic.  This is a nice, comfortable viewpoint and timeline.  It sounds responsible, and it has the added advantage of not disrupting Mr. Krugman's carefully constructed standing in the economics profession or making everything he writes not only irrelevant, but alarmingly destructive.  What about the condo, the Manhattan apartment, the leafy neighborhood in New Jersey, the travel to all the conferences?  The dilemma is, as Mr. Headley notes, and as all the real climate scientists affirm,  that the trend lines in climate disruption keep overtaking our projections.  We don't know what's going to happen when, but the tendencies seem to result in errors on the downside.  So the American liberal, of which cohort Mr. Krugman is only a vociferous and salient example, chooses scenarios more or less at random, but with an eye toward preserving his own status quo.  Because it's all so damn nice.  

However you look at it, you could call this a stark divergence of views: restore the free-spending chazzer economy and let America lead the way to a new orgy of consumption and energy expenditure, come what may; or dismantle the industrial economy, right now, and never look back.  How comforting were those Dick & Jane pages of long ago.

Saturday Morning Essay: Ordinary Pleasures

Brought to you by Peet's Major Kong blend...

From across the pond that separates my Pond from the Old World:

As to your battles with the economic hierarchy, I've always been a little leery of Krugman's righteousness.  With my coffee, I get his column each Saturday morning, as he is syndicated in the International Herald Tribune, the newsprint that keeps me connected with "home."  I mean, the iPad is great, but you know, coffee and the newspaper on a Saturday morning.  I think these electrified kids of today are missing out on something.  So, Krugman, yeah - he just seems so exasperated with how stupid the rest of the world is.

Bingo on all points.  It's true, kids and vid-heads everywhere: there are few pleasures to match a genuine newspaper, on real newsprint, with a good cup of coffee on an open-ended Saturday morning.  This is remembering the Sabbath and keeping it righteously holy.  My correspondent, in days of yore, used to read of a Saturday morning the Los Angeles Times cover to cover while living on one South Coast, with the pleasant tang of Orange County fog in the air; and now reads the IHT on the south coast of another country, under skies of a more determined overcast,  no doubt with the same thoroughness.  Such feasts are moveable, as Papa told us.

As to the remarks about Paul Krugman: see what I mean?  See what I've been trying to tell you? Mr. Krugman, ace economic scientist, does not suffer the fools of the world gladly, and from his perspective there are so many to choose from.  Essentially, anyone who disagrees with the proposition that the world's economic ills could be quickly cured with a dose of standard "textbook" Keynesian ministrations. That is all that stands between us and Easy Street.  A failure to listen to Mr. Krugman.

The truth is otherwise, as we will find out as history rolls on.  Times change, and America is changing with it.  It's not going to be 1964 here again, although in 1964 the newspapers were much, much better. Sigh.  Jerry Mander, in his The Capitalist Papers, his magnum opus, his own version of Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up, calls himself a "neo-Luddite," and makes the salutary point that not all technological developments enhance human happiness.  So far, far from it.  A few inventions he wishes had never happened: television and cell phones.  We're determined to make life easy, indolent and "seamless" and in the process we're losing sight of how many genuine pleasures only come about through diligence and thorough practice.  All of the real arts, for example.  Anything worthwhile, for another example.  And the beauty of the world stands a much better chance of surviving if we leave the video caves and behold it directly, and see, in its physical immediacy, its wondrous glory.

Hitchens versus the Christers

As a diversion, and because political and economic analysis in the MSM is getting tiresome and repetitive, I watched a few Christopher Hitchens religious debates over the weekend on YouTube. These are a lot of fun.  The late Mr. Hitchens was a master polemicist, and like St. George, he slew one religious dragon after another.  I saw him lock horns with a British mathematician, an American biological scientist, a Scottish philosopher, Christers all.  They never laid a glove on ol' Chris, even when, as above, he was in the throes of chemotherapy.

Hitchens had written a book, god Is Not Great (How Religion Poisons Everything) several years before his death, and then took to the hustings to take on all his religious detractors.  I saw Christopher read from this book at a bookstore in Corte Madera a few years back, and I thought I had read it, but turns out I had not.  So I Kindled it and started in.  It's very good - by far the best thing I have read of his, and it managed to avoid a lot of the "Britishisms" that grated on my ears in other books; turns of phrase such as, "It is often the case that..." instead of just writing, "It is."  Maybe because this book was not written for Vanity Fair originally, and so he wasn't being paid by the word. 

Like a lot of the "New Atheists," Hitchens hated Islam.  Sometimes in reading writers such as Sam Harris you get the sense that it isn't so much religion, per se, that bothers them as it is Muslim extremism, and by lumping in all the monotheisms the New Atheists have cover for this more specific judgment.  But, on the other hand, Hitchens has plenty of things to say about Christianity and Judaism as well, although Christopher notes, interestingly (and probably on an informed basis, since his mother was Jewish as well as his second wife), that many Jews became entirely "secular" after the Holocaust on the theory that God, or god, was certainly not great if he allowed that kind of horror to go on.  As if to say: enough already.

Hitchens, in the debates, used the rhetorical rope-a-dope of being "anti-Theist."  This was devilishly (heh heh) clever of him.   Christopher allowed the "Deist" position (possibly that of Thomas Jefferson and other Enlightenment thinkers) a pass.  Hitchens isn't saying he adopts the Deist position as his own (he certainly doesn't), but he concedes that the "First Cause," for all we know, may have been some kind of intelligent agent who put things in motion or "created" reality.  Hitchens allows this because you cannot actually disprove it.  He is no different in this respect from Richard Feynman or Richard Dawkins, a couple of other fair-minded individuals who were similarly indifferent to the Deist position.

What makes this flourish so effective is that, of course, the Christians that Hitchens was debating do not want to win a "Deist" debate.  That gets them nowhere.  They have to win two points, that there is a God who created everything, and that God is also the supreme being who was incarnated, came to Earth, died for our sins and is the basis of Christianity.  That's a tall order, but the religious apologists have to win the second point or the "debate" comes down to a bull session where both sides, in effect, allow: "Yeah, either Reality sprang from Nothing or maybe there was some kind of 'intelligence' that put things into motion, and now here everything is."   Since his interlocutors cannot "win" even the first point, Hitchens just spends his time taking potshots at Christianity more or less for the Hell of it, noting all the inconsistencies in the Gospels, pointing out that Christianity has been around for about 2,000 years but Homo sapiens for at least (he graciously concedes the minimal estimate) 100,000 years; so what was God doing during the first 98,000 years?  Why does he spring into action 98,000 years into the human story and decide that in some remote part of the Middle East he will use a pretty tired myth form (virgin birth, common in many legends), a widespread form of capital punishment employed by the Romans, and other details (chaotically reported by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) to institute his kingdom on Earth?

Beyond all this, Christopher's grasp of cosmology and evolutionary science was quite impressive.  He also was conversant with (and ready to destroy) all the standard logical tricks of the apologetics crowd, such as their claim that if evolution is in any way questionable in any current detail, then the only conclusion left is that the Christian God is real and created everything, most especially life.  This is the "backing in" form of argument that Christians often use.  If evolution had never been worked out, it would make no difference.  The Christian argument still amounts only to conjecture and myth-making, albeit slightly more "plausible."  But since there is absolutely no doubt about the validity of evolution, the "sophisticated" Christians follow along with the argument that God put evolution into motion.  You know, as if they knew it all along.  It's probably in Ephesians somewhere.

I'll probably write something else when I finish the book, which is, as I say, a lot of fun.  I have had as much fun reading it as the late Mr. Hitchens appeared to have in these "debates."

Saturday Morning Essay: Notes to myself on coinage

Brought to you by Trader Joe's Dark Roast

The phrase "parallax of nostalgia" has served me well, if I do say so myself (being the author of the coinage in the first place) as a way to describe the error in perspective that my fellow Boomer peeps are likely to make in trying to understand the world around them through the lens of their own formative years, those halcyon American days of the 1950's and 1960's.  My avatar for this Boomer perspective, Paul Krugman, is so smitten with this era that he simply cannot believe that the world has moved on past American Exceptionalism and the era of infinite growth and prosperity.  (I've actually thought about a separate blog called "Mr. Krugman's Science" to address such things - but then thought better about it.)  This is why Mr. Krugman waits patiently for the American economy to resume its "trend line," to "gain traction" and for consumer demand to leap upward in a frenzied pursuit of the Planning (Parties) & Tanning activities of yesteryear.  Mr. Krugman makes his bones these days with merciless needling of the "austerity" crowd, who have simply gotten everything "all wrong."  If we had the courage to print and borrow more money, and shovel it into the economy, all would be well in no time.

It never seems to occur to Mr. Krugman to ask: where did the idea for all this austerity come from in the first place? Granted, there are gross disparities in the distribution of the available wealth; yet a deeper look into the "secular cycles" (such as those written about by the economist/historians Turchin and Nefedev in a book of the same name) of growth and collapse historically reveals that these disparities between "elites" and "commoners" are what one should expect when a civilization exceeds the carrying capacity relevant to the historical epoch.  We are now at that moment where, with the global economy inextricably intertwined, we have managed to put the entire Earth on the same perilous footing of overshoot. This is the Grandaddy of All Secular Cycles.  Historically, when overshoot occurs, a series of predictable stages unfolds - high unemployment, too little food, scarce energy resources and general misery, and it is then that the Elites tend to commandeer the lifeboats for themselves, the Commoners be damned.  We are seeing this now, with the rise of "The One Percent" and the demand that the "freeloading Commoners" get to work (doing something or other), coupled with a call for lower taxation (which falls most heavily on the Elites, since they have all the money) and an end to "social welfare."  The stupid among the Commoners (always, in the United States, a high percentage, particularly among the traditional White Trash) tend to identify with these viewpoints, although their economic interests are completely opposed.

Nevertheless, the actual origin of the call for "austerity" lies in a real problem.  The answers to such questions, if you ask me, lie in the real world, and in concepts such as the natural "carrying capacity" of Planet Earth.  That is the ultimate source of the austerity problem.  Things are becoming austere because we've overworked Gaia.  Ultimately, all the shenanigans with paper currency cannot overcome such problems.  Humans are dependent on actual physical resources derived from the planet for their sustenance and survival, not on the paper representations of the wealth inherent in these resources.  Confusing these two things causes one to miss everything that is actually going on these days, and makes the "liberal" economists as clueless as their conservative adversaries.  Their argument is between camps of dry-lab academics debating the irrelevant.

As I've come around to this way of looking at things, naturally I have become more immersed in the analysis of the Peak Oil theorists and the Collapsarians.  Here we have the obverse side of the coin from the "parallax of nostalgia:" these forward-looking analysts and deep thinkers are obsessed with the changes coming our way, and are impatient with what they regard as the completely corrupt, decadent, and hideous state of modern civilization.  They are also fearful of how the inevitable changes will come about, as well they should be.  If history teaches us anything, it is that humans don't behave very well in times of chaos and anarchy.  Often, the very worst kind of people wind up running the show.

Yet the Collapsarians have a different sort of "parallax."  Unless these changes they predict happen within a "relevant" time horizon (meaning: during the main part of their lives), it's difficult for them to bring the urgency to their writing which even they require to sustain their interest.  Plus they are saddled with the all-too-human desire to justify their anti-Establishment lifestyles, which often takes the form, "I could make more money than you, but I don't want to be part of a corrupt, Earth-destroying culture."  They then resume waiting (impatiently) for the world to collapse.

It may not happen like that, of course.  Indeed, the force behind the corporate-driven need for expanding growth and profits (which is all that Big Business is about) is such that it's quite possible that the world economy can be resurrected to its former "glory" and resume its task of finishing off the planet.  In other words, there might be a "secular" (time-limited) recovery where the available resources prove sufficient to restore at least the simulacrum of an (unsustainable) status quo ante. 

This would actually be a very bad development because it would perpetuate the illusion of infinite growth on a very finite planet.  It is instructive that CO2 emissions have decreased in the United States since the financial collapse of 2008, and now the two market indicators of world oil prices, West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude, are again sky-high and closely correlated (WTI is the price typically received by American-based oil companies, Brent the international measure).  At around $106 a barrel, the price is well above that which tends to produce "stall speed" in the economy, and when you strip out money-printing from the American economy, it seems obvious that "growth" in the American GDP is distinctly negative and has been for some time.  Such a state of affairs comports with the Commoner view of reality, but the mainstream media are, by and large, organs of the Elites, and so this reality is obfuscated.  Yet Reality is that which remains after you wish it would go away.

Sky-high oil prices during the height of the "driving season" will guarantee that America, against all its natural instincts, will continue its "green" ways, while the plutocracy feasts on its orgy of virtual money.  One can at least take comfort that the pastime of hallucinating money is a low carbon-intensive activity.

A few thoughts on the Zimmerman case

As an intellectual exercise, occasionally I like to delve into the controversies du jour to test my own cultural mental health; to wit, is it me or American culture that's completely nuts?

The Zimmerman case is the latest such cause célèbre.  The standard formulation is that an innocent African-American youth was gunned down by a vigilante who took refuge behind Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law and was thus acquitted by a redneck jury in a redneck state.  Is this what happened?

First, I have no problem with people becoming upset with what happened.  A young guy is dead, his death was unnecessary, it's a tragedy for his family; however, his death is part of a much broader critique, in my view, although I think the media-inflamed national conversation does not seek to acknowledge this.  The critique is really of violent American society.  If you look at it that way, however, the whole "narrative" goes away and you wind up with saccharine pronouncements of the kind President Obama offered in the wake of Zimmerman's acquittal (the President was, as always, careful not to offend anybody or to actually take a position).

I think the Zimmerman case is a poor vehicle for the purposes it's being put to.  In the first place, did the Zimmerman case even involve the "Stand Your Ground" law?  Answering this question, of course, would require someone, somewhere, to read the law.  So I did.  The SYG law is an extension of the "Castle" doctrine.  About half the states and federal law allow a person to use deadly force to defend against an intruder if the person using the force reasonably believes he/she is in imminent danger of deadly force or great bodily harm at the hands of the intruder while such person is on his/her premises.  That is, you don't have to retreat from your own "castle" even if it could be safely done.  This is not too different from standard self-defense, but it is different.  (Texas goes a little farther and requires you to shoot the intruder, or you will be denied admittance to your neighborhood bar the following Saturday night.)

SYG laws (in Flordia and a few other states, including Washington state, somewhat surprisingly) expand the doctrine to include anywhere you are, even in public areas.  If you can retreat safely rather than use deadly force, it doesn't matter.  That certainly is a questionable doctrine; it seems to encourage homicide where it isn't necessary, by definition.  I'm not sure what public purpose it serves - homicide is better than humiliation or even inconvenience? 

Yet here's my question: on the facts as tried in the Zimmerman matter, as I read and understand them, what does the Stand Your Ground Law have to do with the case?  If George Zimmerman had a right to self-defense, as the jury found, did it arise under circumstances where he could have "safely retreated" as an alternative to using his gun?  The jury concluded that Zimmerman was on the ground, that his head had been banged against concrete by Trayvon Martin at least once, that Zimmerman feared it would happen again, and that he was being beaten by Martin's fists.  An eyewitness corroborated this version of events.

One can disagree with this version of the case.  One can call the whole account a fabrication and argue a different set of facts.  So be it.  But that isn't the case that the jury tried.  The prosecuting attorney (the D.A.), in fact, called the chief corroborating witness (the eyewitness to the version in which Martin sat astride Zimmerman, beating him) as his own witness.

If the eyewitness account is wrong, if Zimmerman was actually standing, not under assault (or if under assault could nevertheless have safely retreated), then of course the SYG defense would have come into play.  But, as I said, that's not the case the jury tried.

I think the general public, egged on by uninformed or deliberately misleading media cheerleaders, have seized on Stand Your Ground as a handle for unfocused outrage, although it has nothing to do with anything.  Nothing much new there.  The real sadness, the real outrage, is that we live in a country where people walk around with concealed weapons, hassle other people knowing they're carrying the decisive edge if they provoke something (as Zimmerman no doubt did by stalking Martin unnecessarily and unfairly), and then blow the person they're hassling away with the full majesty of the law on their side.

But Zimmerman would have been acquitted under standard self-defense law.  What led up to that decisive, fatal moment, is the real problem - the problem you might call life in modern America.

Our Man Stockman: Aux Barricades!

David Stockman is back with another harangue, well worth reading in its entirety if only for the belletristic derision he pours upon the notion of economic "recovery" in the American job market, which, of course, is where most of us actually live.  Where I part company with Mr. Stockman is his ascription of the great descent of the American economy, where the commoners and their employability are concerned, solely to various financial choices made by the Federal Reserve and the plutocracy.  I think America's fate is the natural consequence of globalization of the world economy, which was inevitable, really.  American general prosperity, like water, is seeking its own level, and has been probably since at least the mid-1970's.  The home as ATM and the other features of the Debt Society, which were certainly enabled by cheap money, were reactions to this sinking feeling - an effort to sustain the illusion of American Exceptionalism at all costs.  It worked, in general, for the Elite Upper Crust who could profit by labor arbitrage and international monetary flows, but the vast majority of the people, competing now against the rising economies of Asia, took it in the shorts.  And as always in such rarefied discourse, Mr. Stockman makes no reference to that most relevant of geographical locations, Planet Earth, and its strained resource base and ravaged ecology.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-11/david-stockman-born-again-jobs-scam

Saturday Morning Essay: Mr. Krugman's Science, as the Tapir Comes Crashing Out of the Jungle

Brought to you by Trader Joe's Dark Roast...

There were tapirs at Fleishhacker Zoo when I was a kid, as my grandmother took me there during those long weekends to see the same animals I had seen in captivity a few weeks before.  A tapir looked like a Divine lab experiment gone 'orribly wrong, as if God wanted to make a pig, changed His mind, and tried to make it into an anteater.  Two such animals make a bad conjunction of genetics; it would have been better if the same indecision had happened, for example, while mixing an impala with a deer.  He probably did, in fact, and thus the antelope.

However, I think Ben Bernanke was not referring to the genus Tapirus, but to the idea of tapering Quantitative Easing, which is the chief American policy response to the ongoing problem of a slowly sinking economy.  Regular readers already are familiar with the Federal Reserve's program of asset "purchases," where the FOMC engages with its cabal of Primary Dealers in a swap of hallucinated money-like electronic pixels for similarly notional things such as Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities which are guaranteed by one of the big government-like housing agencies, which are in turn backstopped by the U.S. Treasury, which is in turn backstopped by the Fed's ability to hallucinate money.

We're all clear on that.  Ben Bernanke has been buying bonds and mortgages at a "pace" (his favorite word, along with "moderate," sometimes conjoining the words and coming up with "moderate pace") of about $1 trillion per year, or $85 billion a month, a number which I'm sure was chosen because 12 x 85 billion gives you just slightly more than $1 trillion a year.  It's neat and tidy that way.

According to the Federal Reserve, inflation has remained "subdued," Ben Bernanke's third favorite word.  All of this "money printing" has not created much inflation at all, let alone "runaway inflation," which was the prognosis of many conservative assholes such as Peter Schiff and Niall Ferguson, whom Paul Krugman skewers relentlessly in his columns and blogs.  When I say "relentlessly," I mean on virtually a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day.  It has, indeed, gotten a little unseemly.  Paul Krugman did not think that QE would cause runaway inflation, and said so in debates as early as 2009.  I think this was because Ben Bernanke, who had been the Chairman of the Economics Department at Princeton University before ascending to the Fed, took the time to explain to Mr. Krugman that the "exchange" of assets held by Primary Dealers for Treasury bonds and MBS would result in the hypertrophy of "reserve accounts" held by the PDs on the books of the Federal Reserve and nothing else, and this indeed is what has happened.  The Fed pays the PDs 1/4 of one percent interest on these gargantuan accounts, which have swelled to well over $2 trillion in the last four years, out of a total Fed balance sheet of $3.4 trillion.

These "excess reserves" (amounts which by definition are more than the PDs need to maintain in their accounts under solvency rules) could be the basis of lending activity, and under rules of "fractional reserve lending," these reserves could result in the unleashing of a ginormous tidal wave of lending, if, you see, the American economy was not such a sick puppy.  If such lending were to start up, then inflation would be the natural result of this vast increase in the money supply.  No one borrows the money because we're all broke-ass to begin with and don't want no more debt, thanks just the same.

Recently, Ben Bernanke made various throat-clearing and harrumphing noises before Congress which suggested that the Taper was at hand: the Fed might ease up on this monthly orgy of electronic account hypertrophy, that the Fed might moderate its pace of purchases to a more subdued level, so to speak.  The stock market reacted hysterically, interest rates shot up, and all Hell broke loose.  Mr. Krugman chastised Ben Bernanke for his premature "tightening," which must have been galling to Mr. Bernanke since it was he, no doubt, who had explained to Mr. Krugman how QE worked in the first place, and corrected Mr. Krugman's idiotic solecism of 2003.  However, I think Ben Bernanke is enough of a mensch to understand that Mr. Krugman needs such grandstanding in order to hold down the fort at the New York Times.  Whatever happened, various Fed officials began recanting almost immediately, assuring us that no one meant anything, that moolah conjuration would continue until the economy continues to fail to improve.

QE forever does seem to have the effect, for now, of holding down interest rates, both for mortgages and for federal financing through Treasury bonds.  It's phony, of course, but so is the American economy, which is based almost entirely on issuing the world's reserve currency.  So why would we ever "taper," when the American economy looks, really, kind of a like a tapir?  Former engineers are becoming bartenders, auto workers are taking jobs as janitors or Wal-Mart greeters, college graduates are moving back home with Mom 'n Dad, and there are vast uncounted millions who are living in tent cities, on the streets, in sewer systems, under bridges, in storage units and who have disappeared from official statistics altogether.  The American standard of living continues to sag, as average compensation drops and the "new jobs" created are always at a lower stratum than those that they replace.  We need the hallucinated money, Benji.  We should keep creating it and adding it to the vast unused stashes on the Fed's reserve accounts.  Which is to say, I agree completely with Mr. Krugman, and his insufferable criticisms.  I disagree only with the thinking that this actually leads anywhere.  It won't, it can't; America is not going to suddenly get "traction," it's not going to be 1964 all over again.  But this at least is something, a silly and a dumb thing, at least QE is something, or we won't have anything at all.  Save the tapir, but let the Taper become an endangered species.

We're No. 1

Brad Pitt's Pointless Life

I'm perplexed by reading Brad Pitt's admission that his life was pointless while he was married to Jennifer Anniston.  Apparently, Brad has said similar things before and it has led to a firestorm of tabloid controversy, in which he has been pressed mercilessly on The View or Good Morning, America and other intellectual fora as to the deeper import of his complaint: is Brad saying that Jen, or Jenn - Gin, whatever - is boring? This is, of course, what he was saying.  He was bored by Jinn in ways he has never been bored by Angelina Jolie.

When Brad says his life was "pointless" before, but now isn't, I conclude (naturally) that, post hoc ergo propter hoc, he is claiming his life now has meaning.  This isn't altogether fair. See, the way I look at it, all Brad Pitt has to do in the morning, in order to be completely assured of outrageous wealth and stature in our society, is to wake up and resume another day of looking the way he does.  That's it.  American society makes no further demands on Brad Pitt.  We just want him to keep looking like Brad Pitt for as long as he can. 

I think his PR people, in order to earn their salaries, nevertheless take a more activist position. If they told Brad the truth, that all he has to do is walk around in the world looking like Brad Pitt, sign an occasional movie deal, go to an awards ceremony, fly over to Cannes for the festival, etc., even Brad Pitt would figure out that he doesn't really need them.  So I think the PR flacks occasionally put a bug in his ear: it's time to diss Jen again.  Brad has dissed her a lot, which, of course, has been materially to Jen's advantage.  Whenever Brad disses Jen, Jen, holding back tears, appears on the cover of a tabloid in your checkout line, wondering out loud when the pain will ever stop, and if you read the story (which you won't, because a reader of Waldenswimmer is not likely to), you'll see where she is admired for her plucky response to this latest verbal assault from Brad's PR people, which has been carefully calibrated and choreographed, of course, by Jennifer Anniston's PR people working with Brad's PR people.

I don't have any people, which places me at a disadvantage.  Also, my life remains pointless, another way in which Brad Pitt has left me in the dust.  To console myself, I remind myself that in the sense that Fyodor Dostoevsky used "pointlessness" in his masterful Notes From the Underground (the greatest philosophical essay masquerading as a novel ever written, quite a bit deeper than Camus's L'Etranger, which was not too shabby), Brad Pitt's life in fact remains pointless too, Angelina be damned. What he sees as the meaning in his life, now that the life form Brangelina has sprung into existence, is an illusion, pure and simple.  He hasn't found something that I can't find, no matter what he says.  He invests way too much importance into his inane utterances and disses just because he has People and, of course, those looks.  I concede the looks.  There's nothing I can do about those.

The double whammy humans engineered is that not only do they find themselves philosophically adrift in a universe which silently rebukes their pleas for meaning (something which is not our fault, after all), but they have now succeeded in destroying the Earth as a habitat for living out that pointless life.  I have often wondered whether there is not a strong nexus between those two phenomena, those two ideas, those two inevitable conclusions.  In our mindless confusion and rage, we have engaged in a war of wanton spoliation of our natural legacy, as if to say, if our lives must be as pointless as Brad's with Jen, then we shall take it all with us when we go. 

A Restatement of My Unorthodox Views on Marriage Equality

My good friend can consider this a kind of response to his question posed by email.

To restate my position (to revise and extend my previous comments, as the pompous Solons of the Potomac would say), I think the problem that we have with "marriage equality" is that we insist on investing an emotional "bond" (often quite temporary, as we know) with legal ramifications.  That is the essence of the confusion.  We have perpetuated the faulty assumption that there must be some sort of "married state," sanctioned and adorned by the majesty of the law, or society as we know it will simply come crashing down.

Where did such a crazy idea come from?  Now, mind you, I am not saying that two people, of whatever combination of sexes, cannot make some sort of permanent commitment to one another. But what do Social Security rights, hospital visits, alimony, divorce lawyers, and all the rest necessarily have to do with that? (Just putting the entire divorce lawyer bar out of business would be a major victory all on its own.)

So to answer my friend, who views things from a religious perspective: the origin of the problem is that we took an essentially religious concept, the "sanctity" of marriage, and we connected it to legal complications.  This is the essence of the the First Amendment problem.  We have institutionalized a religious practice in civil law.  This is why a devout Catholic like Antonin Scalia goes into paroxysms of outrage at the prospect that "sodomites" can now marry, just like his beloved Opus Dei friends.

Critics of gay marriage often attempt various reductio ad absurdum arguments to illustrate their argument that gay marriage "undermines" traditional marriage.  Rick Santorum was famous for this.  People would want to marry their gerbils or parakeets next, he would warn. 

That's stupid.  There are abuses that are more practical and closer to home. For example, once you say that any two people, hetero, gay, whatever, can marry, then in order to respect their rights of privacy which are already established, you cannot inquire too deeply into their sexual proclivities.  It's none of your business why they choose to get married.

Maybe you already see where I'm going with this.  In the same way that we unconsciously associate marriage with religion, we unconsciously associate marriage with sex.  Yet there is nothing in the recent Supreme Court decisions which compels this.  Thus, why shouldn't two straight people get married, especially if they have no actual interest in marriage in a conventional sense?  It's more or less like the "Seinfeld" episode where Jerry's dentist, a Gentile, converts to Judaism and begins telling Jewish jokes all the time.  Jerry goes to the dentist's priest and complains that Dr. Whatley has converted "just for the jokes."  ("Priest: And this offends you as a Jewish person? Jerry:  No, it offends me as a comedian.")

I think I can almost guarantee that this will become a fairly routine practice as society's thinking about such things becomes looser and more liberated. As it evolves.  If any two people can say they are "married" and succeed to a whole series of legal benefits; and they don't want to get married to a member of the opposite sex anyway; and society doesn't give a damn anymore about gender or sexual issues (we're rapidly approaching that point), then what's the difference?  Two straight people of the same sex can certainly carry on a sexless marriage as well as two straight people of opposite sexes who have been married too long, and without the bitterness and resentment that the latter situation so often engenders.  And while preserving their heterosexual options in the outside world, and taking advantage of the full $500,000 exemption on sale of a principal residence.  Win/win, I believe this is called.

So, in a sense, the religious argument that gay marriage poses a "threat" to traditional marriage is correct, but not quite for the reason that is usually advanced. Throwing the doors wide open will have the unintended effect of exposing marriage as a travesty, as a mockery of a sham, of two mockeries of a sham.  The concept of the "sanctity" of marriage has always been a joke, albeit a subtle one.  It can't really be "holy matrimony" if you can file a document in court for no reason, wait six months, and escape the "sanctity."  So society came that far: it recognized that the idea of "till death do us part" usually only applied if one of the spouses died unexpectedly.  Disposable marriage made a virtue out of inevitability. 

Allowing marriage for any reason, between any two kinds of people, will now toll the death knell for the whole religious-legal nexus represented by the marital convention.  Humans are masters at abusing privileges, and this will be no exception.

Saturday Evening Post: 13 Minutes With Paul Beckwith

This is the single best climate change talk I've found so far, and Paul Beckwith, of the University of Ottawa, delivers this mini-seminar in the open air, with no notes, and nary a sip from that styrofoam cup he holds in his left hand.  He has a nice, relaxed, unpretentious and friendly way of talking about the end of life as we've known it.

It's 97 degrees here in Marin County this afternoon, as it was yesterday, and the forecast indicates that's about where the temperature will be until next Wednesday.  That's a long hot spell for the Bay Area.  I'm curious whether the jet stream phenomenon to which Paul refers, the "waviness" of its meridional movement instead of the straighter path from west to east to which modern civilization had become accustomed until, you know, recently...might have something to do with this "stuck" pattern.  We had what amounted to a winter storm about 5 days ago - cold, blowy rain.  Makes you wonder - what could be on the other side of the next sinusoidal wave to move through!

Just a guess, but I would surmise that the loss of the northern hemisphere's "air conditioner," the Arctic sea ice during the summer months, will usher in a more or less permanent era of such weirdness and unpredictability. 

The Partitioned National Brain

If you read the kooks that I read on a regular basis, such writers as Dmitry Orlov, James Howard Kunstler, Gail Tverberg, Richard Heinberg, Craig Dilworth, Herman Daly, Glenn Greenwald and the whack-jobs at Zerohedge, you may have noticed an odd convergence.  To wit, the "Libertarian" sites, such as Zerohedge (where the Comment Cowboys [h/t: Dan D]) include a posse of anti-Semitic ravers) are now beginning to quote freely from the liberal "environmentalists" in the list above.

This is very interesting to me, but then it would be, wouldn't it?  This is an indication that we are now moving beyond the old Left-Right dichotomies, where a conservative viewpoint automatically needed to reject any argument from a tree-hugger as wooly-headed nonsense.  I suspect this is because the Doom & Gloom sites, such as the dissidents at Zerohedge and numerous other places, are beginning to see that it isn't just "environmentalism" that is the problem, but the far more serious issue of energy paucity and energy unaffordability which has crushed the American economy and the economies of the Western industrial world.

So now Zerohedge is beginning to publish essays by James Howard Kunstler, the Clusterfuck Man himself, and the coiner of the phrase "the psychology of previous investment," by which Kunstler explains the otherwise inexplicable obsession of the American economy in continuing to invest in the doomed suburban world which cannot be sustained as Peak Oil exacts its terrible price of unrelenting high energy costs.  Pretty soon I expect Zerohedge will discover Dmitry Orlov and Gail Tverberg, who are quantitative in ways that Kunstler is not; Monsieur Clusterfook is a master at the snarky, Mencken-esque turn of phrase he uses to skewer the fat, dumb, video-addicts of the American Booboisie, but he is not a real numbers man.

I can add a new stylist to the committee:  John Michael Greer, with whom I was not previously familiar until I began reading Not the Future We Ordered, which is about the end times for the great "Myth of Progress" made possible by the one-time legacy of abundant fossil fuels on which modern societies engorged themselves for the last three hundred years.  Greer writes from the viewpoint of social psychology.  It is only natural that human beings are having a very hard time coming to terms with the modern maladies of overpopulation, resource scarcity, food insecurity and climate change, all of which are interrelated in diabolical ways.  We all grew up believing that things "would always get better," and now, suddenly so it seems, that fantasy has been destroyed, and there's nothing to put in its place.

That's a very difficult transition for the "Collective Unconscious."  Greer, in very simple terms, asks a question which I've alluded to numerous times in my "Mr. Krugman's Science" posts.  I liked it so much I figured out how to "bookmark" the pixels I want to save on my Kindle.  Here it is:

"The question that has rarely been asked since 2008, and needs to be asked, is why events of a kind that normally produce ordinary recessions [ref: dishonest banking, a housing bubble] have spawned something so much more serious, protracted, and resistant to solutions this time around.  A glance at the business pages of any newspaper of record will show conditions that are nearly unparalleled in living memory.  Several European nations have plunged in a few years from prosperity to a level of economic crisis in which a third or more of the labour force has no jobs and the national government is struggling to avoid defaulting on its debt.  In the United States, cities are declaring bankruptcy and laying off their firefighters and police forces, while state governments are tearing up thousands of miles of paved roads and replacing the paving with gravel, because they can no longer afford the cost of annual maintenance.  These are not the signs of an ordinary downturn in the business cycle. Bring peak oil into the picture and the severity of the crisis is easily explained."

Greer goes on to point out that oil production plateaued in 2004, and prices of petroleum began their inexorable rise.  I used Mr. Krugman's Science as simply a counterpoint to this much deeper insight into the nature of our malaise.  Paul Krugman himself is a boring and very conventional thinker with nothing to offer in terms of the relevant discourse, but he stands in for the Establishment viewpoint: it's a "bump in the road" which is amenable to Keynesian tinkering; we could be living the life of Riley again if we would just get off this "savage austerity" jag.

Probably not.  So the Great Partition in the National Brain: our alienation from nature, brought about by our habit of mediating our existences through electronic imagery, has made us, as a society, incapable of seeing that we remain dependent on the physical world for our survival and prosperity. We overworked Mother Nature; she's plumb wore out, and we don't want to face that, so we engage in delusions of money-printing and "policy arguments," and distract ourselves with temporary crises like NSA spying or gay marriage or "immigration reform."  President Obama now wants to make climate change the "signature issue" of his second term.  No, he doesn't.  He doesn't really want to get into what that would really mean for the way we actually live, but it will make for some nice "legacy" sound bites.

All of these issues have a sell-by date stamped prominently on their covers.  The real issue is the Economy and its plight in an age of resource scarcity.  That problem is not going away.  It's going to change everything.  Thoreau made Economy chapter one in his book, and he meant it in the broadest possible sense: the means by which humans engage with the world in order to survive.

Dmitry Orlov's "The Five Stages of Collapse"

One of the things I like best about Dmitry Orlov's writing is the almost complete lack of qualifiers or "hedging" phrases.  He makes his pronouncements without weasel words or syntactical escape hatches he might use later if one of his predictions fails to materialize.  Although, I have to say, he never makes a prediction definite enough to expose himself to such a criticism, at least in terms of time.  America is going to go through several stages of collapse, of that Dmitry is quite certain, and maybe a couple of them have already happened. For the big ones, however, all we are told is that they are on the way.  Maybe we'll get lucky and arrest the devolution before complete political collapse happens, but don't ask him when such widespread failure will materialize.

The Five Stages are suggested, Mr. Orlov tells us, by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of the grieving process.  For the American nation-state (and for advanced industrial countries generally), the five cognates of grief are: 1. Financial. 2. Economic. 3. Political. 4. Social. 5. Cultural.  The suggestion is that financial collapse, in the form of the Great Recession of 2008, has already happened.  Economic collapse is well under way.  The political system is wobbling, and there are certainly large pockets in the country where social collapse is evident, for example, Detroit, which has lost over half of its former 1.8 million residents over the last 20 years or so, and where about half of its 143 square miles are now simply vacant land. 

It occurred to me while I was reading Dmitry that the writer he most reminds me of is Leon Trotsky.  Not so much the content, because Orlov is certainly no Marxist, although he's originally from the Soviet Union.  It's the uncompromising, lapidary style that harks back to the great Communist polemicist.  I can recall reading an essay written by Trotsky in defense of President Cardenas's nationalization of Mexican oil in 1938.  Dripping with irony, informed by peerless logic, written in powerful, compelling prose.  Dmitry is sort of like that.  He is so little compromised himself (living, as he does, on a boat in Boston Harbor) that he doesn't suffer from the cognitive dissonance of most American "liberals," who are every bit as much ensnared in the country's business rackets as those they presume to criticize.  An American liberal icon is someone like Bill Clinton, who makes a couple of hundred grand each time he gives a speech to fat cats about the plight of the little guy.

Maybe the most interesting and resonant insight I've read so far in Dmitry's book concerns his ideas on why representative democracy in a country as large as the U.S. simply doesn't work anymore. That's a subject that occurs to me on a pretty regular basis.  Orlov contrasts the U.S. Congress and Administration apparatus with such local institutions as the Pashtun jirga in Afghanistan, which is simply a group of tribal elders sitting in a circle and deciding matters for the village.   In such a system, there is direct accountability and a connection between who's deciding and the effects of the decision.  By contrast, an American is "represented" by Senators and Representatives he doesn't know personally, who are largely media and public relations creations, and who make their decisions primarily, it would seem, out of a sense of solidarity with a party apparatus in Washington, D.C. which arranges their cash infusions (campaign donations) to ensure their perpetual incumbency.  And beyond mere party adherence, the Solons of the Potomac become part of a Media-Political-Military Complex which responds primarily to the cultivation of their own power base.

I was thinking about this problem in just these terms recently when considering the perplexing hyper-conservatism of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is probably the most hawkish, anti-civil liberties Congressperson working under the Capitol Dome.  There is simply no intrusion into American privacy, no outrage by the National Security Agency, that can ruffle her serene determination that, the Constitution be damned, America is going to remain "safe" even if it means that she personally will read every American's email.  Dianne Feinstein is from San Francisco, one of two "liberal" women Senators from California.  She never utters a peep about the Fourth Amendment.  There is no war of choice she won't vote for, enthusiastically. She is reelected because she's already there.  She sponsors no signature legislation, there is nothing about her representation that is especially "Californian," and yet there she sits, year after year after year.  In a way, she's a California version of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, except that Lindsey at least occasionally comes up with a colorful turn of phrase.

Anyway, collapse.  Yeah, I suppose so, some day.  Everything changes, right?  All empires erode, disintegrate, become victims of their own excesses, right?  I get it.  Dmitry seems tired of writing about it, to tell the truth.  It's an interesting diversion, but whatever comes about will happen because of its own inevitable dynamics.  Dianne Feinstein isn't going to do anything about it.  She and husband Richard Blum, the mega-billionaire business tycoon, will just chill at their Presidio Heights mansion, maybe tool on up to Nancy Pelosi's Napa Valley spread in September and taste the early pressings of this year's pinot noir, then kick around the latest nonsense from Tom Friedman's dispatches from the Swiss Alps and Davos.

Come to think of it - collapse: hell yeah.

Saturday Morning Essay: Mr. Krugman's Science: The Marxist Solution

Brought to you by Peet's Fair Trade Organic Blend...

Actually, this is quite an interesting development in the intellectual evolution of Our Most Celebrated Economist, the esteemed Paul Krugman of the New York Times.  Since I have written a number of posts based on Mr. Krugman's Scientific inquiries, I thought it was only fitting that I mark this occasion, for it represents a "pivot" (as the big-time journos say) for the wily Mr. K.

What am I talking about? Well, as I have noted before numerous times, Mr. Krugman belongs to the conceptual wing of economics known as New Keynesian, which is a shape-shifting sort of amalgam of...well, complete nonsense, but what these people are all about is "demand."  This is what ails the modern American economy: American citizens just are not buying enough stuff, or services, or whatever it is that the modern American economy offers to its increasingly confused citizens. Or "consumers," as they are more relevantly called.  Thus, the American economy is "underperforming," it's not using all of its "productive capacity."  The American economy is Oskar Schindler lamenting, "I could have done so much more!"

The answer, according to the acolytes of John Maynard Keynes, is for the government to take up the demand "slack" and flood the economy with money until the juggernaut of American production roars back to life.  While to the casual observer, this may sound moronic and hopelessly out of date, it is an article of faith in Mr. Krugman's scientific approach, and he dwells in an echo chamber of like-minded liberal thinkers who all say the same thing.

Yet I had noted, in my careful appreciation of the protean and wily Mr. Krugman, that a new strain of thinking had entered his learned discourse, that discourse which he displays with frightening freequency in his columns and blogs (his columns are simply longer, and more boring, versions of the blog posts, which in turn are sort of the rough drafts for the twice-weekly column).  To wit, Mr. Krugman became aware, within the last few months, of automation, and of the ways that modern "capital" (Big Business) was using it to maintain a high level of "productivity" and profitability.  And that this development might have an awful lot to do, at this point, with the phenomenon of income and wealth inequality.

Well, that's what Science is all about: integrating new discoveries into the old paradigms, as our understanding of the world evolves, forcing us either to modify those paradigms or, on rare occasions, to re-conceptualize Reality itself.  Plus, Mr. Krugman needed an escape hatch, because it was becoming apparent that the Old Normal was simply not coming back, and six full years after the economy began its final roll-over, his take on the American economy was beginning to look a little out-of-date, based as it was on things that happened in 1929.

So yesterday we got this from Mr. Krugman:

So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income.

I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.” But what, exactly, would they propose instead?

Seemingly, just more of the same, you might think.  But no: this is a major departure.  This is Mr. Krugman recognizing that the jobs are not coming back.  He's still a little confused: he talks about the middle class "working hard" and "playing by the rules" (that tired political cliche - what rules?), without remembering that the absence of meaningful employment is the whole problem.  But he's moved away from his old insistence that the "potential jobs" are there now (unemployment is not "structural"), it's just that the federal government is not stimulating "demand" enough.  No, he's on to something else altogether.  He's singing the same tune I heard James McMurtry sing at the Freight & Salvage: We Can't Make It Here Anymore.  

Now Mr. Krugman does not want to go so far as to admit that offshoring of jobs, and allowing Big Capital to "leverage" the cheap labor of the Third World, is the other half of this story.  He's still not ready for that, ardent international trade proponent that he is.  But he's halfway there; he now sees that Big Capital increasingly doesn't need human beings in order to make money.  This has been one of my points: what is it, exactly, that we lack on a day-to-day basis as the result of this high "unemployment?"  Food on the shelves? Gasoline? Natural gas for the furnace? Cheap electronic toys? Books? These things are all available in fantastic abundance.  And if you're sentimental about the Planning & Tanning Economy, you can still hire a wedding planner or go to a tanning salon.  It's just that business is down at such places because we're a broke-ass society.

Once you put automation and offshoring together, you're there.  You see reality.  Well, almost.  Mr. Krugman still does not see that resource scarcity dooms the Western industrialized economies to perpetual stagnation anyway, and that even this twilight period of lurching adaptation is not going to last. But in the interim, Mr. Krugman advocates Marxism: support the great mass of the American Booboisie with heavy taxes on robot-employing, offshoring Big Business.

Yes, it's utterly ridiculous as a solution.  Since Big Business owns the government which imposes taxation, why would Big Business undertake the care and feeding of the hoi polloi, those very same proles it is shitcanning from jobs on an ongoing basis?  To appreciate that, Mr. Krugman would need to think about two variables at once, and unfortunately, his Science is not sufficiently advanced at this point to allow that.