Bye Bye American Pie

I do not want to sound like the kid with the Magic Decoder Ring in overusing the insights from Craig Dilworth's Too Smart For Our Own Good, tempting as that might be. Nevertheless, there is something uniquely useful about employing basic, evolutionary principles when trying to understand something as complicated as the species Homo sapiens, of which I (and presumably you, since you're reading this) are members.

Thus, in trying to understand the long slide into degeneracy of the United States, the fading of its empire, and the eclipse of its Middle Class (that bastion of Good Living that thrived, for a time, in the 1950's and 1960's, the decades of my own consciousness-formation), I have been intrigued, and highly amused, by Dilworth's recapitulation of certain anthropological evidence that strongly suggests that human beings resisted the use of horticultural technology (farming, cultivation of the land for food) for quite some time after the basic techniques were known, preferring to remain in the hunter-gatherer mode even as this approach to living was straining against the ecological limits. To wit, for about thirty thousand years.

Now in truth, some anthropologists have noted that, quite in line with what Gary Taubes has written in Good Calories, Bad Calories (about the benefits of the Paleolithic Diet), that as soon as humans embarked on a grain and vegetable based diet, dental caries and other disease markers began showing up. Still, it was getting obvious that hunting and gathering, even at a point when there were only about 5 million humans worldwide, could not go on for everybody. As a general principle, once Homo sapiens is on the scene, the other species begin disappearing. (I can just hear the mammals who survive our 200,000 year Reign of Terror talking among themselves after we're gone: "Oh God, you mean you were alive during the humans!") Granted also that hunting and gathering are just intrinsically more fun, and much closer to the uses for which we actually evolved. This second point is closer to the truth, because the real reason that farming was resisted for so long was because it's just too much damn work, and humans prefer doing nothing whenever possible. Early humans finally capitulated to the sedentary, agrarian life style because they had no choice; it was the only way to feed the burgeoning population, to create a surplus that would get the swelling tribes through good years and bad and to substitute for all the plentiful game that humans had already succeeded in driving to extinction. (Sure, Rick Santorum: we're terrific Stewards.)

Bringing things up to date and applying this "insight" to modern America: it all depends on where you want to start the analysis, I think. Pretty convincing economic evidence suggests that American males topped out in their earning ability, in constant dollars, by the end of the 1960's. What has contributed since to the increase in household income (a misleading stat used interchangeably by economists who wish to confuse the issue of which of our two utterly useless political parties, the Dems or Repubs, are "better" for the economy) is that women have had to go to work, much as the species as a whole had to settle down into the utter drudgery of earning a living by the sweat of their brow, tilling the fields and harvesting the grain. In our highly-specialized, monotonous, Weberian organic society, we are apt to romanticize the agrarian life, a self-indulgence which my Southern farming forebears would no doubt find highly amusing. It's just a lot of hard, back-breaking work when it's done at the small scale which is actually sustainable. Not a whole lot different from mill work, which James Taylor wrote about:

Mill work ain't easy, mill work ain't hard,
Mill work it ain't nothin' but an awful boring job...

Given these insights, it is somewhat instructive to reconsider the disappearance of the American "manufacturing" base in favor of what was breathlessly described, in such glowing terms, as the "service" or even "information" economy as those fads took root in the 1980's and 1990's. While we have now settled into a national narrative where there are Bad Guys (the 1%) versus the newly-crowned Good Guys (99%), a narrative in which all the Commoners were simply hoodwinked, and sold out, and forced to the economic margin....et cetera, I wonder if the truth is somewhat less convenient and self-laudatory. Namely: who the hell really wanted all those awful boring jobs on the assembly line? Did we really want to be workers like those at the weirdly-named Foxconn in China who assemble all those Apple and other hi-tech gizmos, the workers who are restrained by suicide nets on the top floor of the building because their work drives them stark staring mad?

Admittedly, I have framed the question in a somewhat manipulative way. The point still remains that it is in fact possible to maintain a reasonably high standard of living in a globalized economy, one where energy use per capita is about one-half that of the United States, where engrained habits of thrift and use of public amenities such as trains, bicycles and walking predominate, where the great superfluities of sprawling suburban "countryside-imitating" housing tracts are not mindlessly indulged, where the personal automobile running on gasoline is not the only way to move from Point A to Point B to keep the economy moving. And for proof of this assertion I give you modern-day Germany. Germany does all these things and has a reasonably solid economy, with a higher GDP per capita, a higher standard of living, and a much higher availability of basic public amenities than the United States. It does all these things while still maintaining a manufacturing base (because it maintains a manufacturing base). Its exports create the surplus necessary to keep the internals going, and the Euro crisis is first and foremost about Germany's loss of its captive export market within the European Zone that is at the root of the hysteria over there. (I would bring up Denmark, but I don't want to rub it in.)

So we could have done it another way, but it would have required a different outlook on life, one that is not based on the self-destructive notion of "American Exceptionalism." Germans have maintained a work ethic which is more realistic than the American self-image, which is that we ought to be able to afford everything, live like royalty, while essentially mailing the economy in. When it became apparent that this approach was not going to work, that we as a nation were broke except for a handful of schemers and fraudsters (whom we tolerated, of course, and even idolized so long as the rest of us could enjoy la dolce vita too), we decided to switch the national narrative to a Manichean framework; to wit, we wuz robbed!

Oh please. We were completely complicit in our own destruction. Face it, if your house could make you rich, why the hell go to work? Work is awful. Let the house do it, let it finance everything, let it ka-ching! like an ATM for all those fancy SUVs and flat screen gizmos that fill to overflowing the American crapscape.

Americans, always ahead of whatever Zeitgeist curve is bending, are simply all too human. We're lazy about everything, lazy about how we eat, about our political civics (if Congress is filled to the brim with clowns, how did that happen?), about taking charge, about assuming leadership, about everything. And this is what happens when God kicks you in the butt and tells you you are being evicted from the Garden of Eden. See ya, and don't let the apple branch swat you in the ass on the way out.

Saturday Morning Essay: Timing the end of the human race for maximum electoral effectiveness

I recently attended a lecture by Avner Cohen, a senior fellow in nonproliferation studies at the Monterey Institute, who was visiting San Francisco to discuss his book, The Worst Kept Secret (about Israel's nuclear bomb arsenal) at the Jewish Library on Ellis Street. Cohen, an Israeli, was refreshingly realistic about the mega-hyped Iran-Israel-U.S. standoff. His essential point: everyone is bluffing: the Iranians about developing a nuclear weapon, the Israelis about launching a preemptive attack, the U.S. about virtually anything it says or does on the subject.

In the heat and noise about Iran & the Bomb, we often lose sight of the data point that it is the official, consensus opinion of America's spy agenices; the Iranians themselves; the IAEA (the watchdog agency in charge of compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty); many Israeli experts (including Avner Cohen, who is immersed in this stuff all the time), and generally anyone without a specific agenda to push, that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran is actually trying to build a nuclear bomb. They are enriching uranium, as they are permitted to do under the terms of the Nonproliferation Treaty, but not to the 90%+ level (U-235 or fissile component) necessary to go kablooey.

At the same time, Avner Cohen hardly thinks that there is any kind of solution at hand, because there isn't one. If Israel launches a bombing attack against Iran's enrichment facilities, Cohen estimates that at the very outside such an attack might set back the Iranian program two years, and probably less than that. If Iran is permitted to proceed with enrichment unmolested, then it is probable they will, over time, acquire the means to enrich uranium to the 90% level, and enough Iranian nuclear scientists might survive the current spate of "mysterious deaths" (such as riding in cars which are approached by motorcyclists who attach magnetic bombs near the gas filler tube; hey, it could be a coincidence) to design and build an atomic bomb. It's neither particularly easy nor particularly difficult; you can Google the basic ideas for the two ways of bringing two subcritical masses of fissile material together (U-235 or plutonium) (implosion: Fat Man; gun-type: Little Boy).

Sadly, at this point in history, it's just a little too accessible to anyone, regardless of intentions. Thus, Stephen Hawking's idea that we ought to figure out a way to transport some human DNA to another planet, because he can't see us lasting another one thousand years on this one. Although my go-to comprehensive polymath thinker, Professor Craig Dilworth of Uppsala University in Sweden, author of Too Smart For Own Good, might find such an idea a self-defeating contradiction in terms. Writing about our ancient ancestors in the Upper Palaeozoic, living the good life (if they had only known it) with plentiful game, an unpolluted environment, lots of polymorphous, pre-Santorum sex, leisurely lifestyle, with only an occasional raid by cannibalistic fellow humans to harsh their dolce vita, he notes:

"As intimated in Chapter 4, you could say that we were from the beginning not biologically equipped as a species to handle developing technology, which our eradicating a huge proportion of the genera of the world's large animals when we were still in our hunter-gatherer stage makes clear. If technological development were truly an aid to the survival of the human species, it would not have led to the elimination of a significant part of the population's resource base...Something is wrong with technological development in the hands of humans - but then, you could say, something would be wrong with technological development in the 'hands' of any organism."

If this is true about clubs, stone-tipped javelins and lances, bows and arrows, which were sufficient in the hands of the early Sapiens to bring about the "overkill" of the mammoths and other Big Meat food sources, what do you say about 10-megaton hydrogen bombs? Are humans "biologically equipped" to handle those? I'm going to guess: No. I think it is such considerations which lead to the dour, tentative, perplexed way that people who know the facts about nuclear stand-offs, such as Avner Cohen, wind up talking about the problem. Cohen says, well, maybe there will be a successful revolution in Iran. Maybe negotiation could still bring about a solution. Maybe we can rely on the good sense of the leadership in Iran, who have no desire to see Tehran reduced to a large crater of fused glass. Maybe we can rely on President Obama to lead us out of the wilderness:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama warned that he is not bluffing about attacking Iran if it builds a nuclear weapon, but in an interview published Friday, Obama also warned U.S. ally Israel that a premature attack on Iran would do more harm than good.

A "premature attack." "More harm than good." And if we wait, it will do more good than harm? (I used to think that Obama's pronouncements made sense at least on the superficial level, but did not stand up to logical scrutiny; now I think he's abandoned even the patina of rationality.) Cohen thought the danger point, this year, was the period in the two months just before the American elections. With the American media pounding the drums for some more bombing, demanding some sort of payback for this dastardly plot in which Iranian agents worked with a Texas used car salesman who contracted with an FBI agent posing as a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the ambassador from Saudi Arabia a trusted ally which two former United States Senators have sworn in recent affidavits was probably involved in an operational way with the attacks of 9-11...hold on a minute, I need a breather here.

The point is, we need to bomb Iran. Avner Cohen may say it's futile, but that's not the key point. In September and October, the calls for bombing Iran are going to reach a crescendo, Avner said, and if the Israelis attack then, then Republican pressure on Obama to support the bombing raids is going to become overpowering. If the O Man wimps out, the booboisie of America are going to have their answer to the question: can Obama keep us safe? Or does he have the courage and good sense to throw American military might behind an action which could easily spiral out of control, involving the Chinese, Russians and Indians, who support Iran (and its oil supply), all nuclear-armed countries, in the valiant attempt to buy us that less-then-24-months of not having to think that maybe Iran is working on an atomic bomb?

So you can see what Obama means by "premature." He's telling Netanyahu not to bomb just before the November elections, thus forcing Obama's decision in a way which could foul up his reelection chances.

We've come a along way since the Cro-Magnons.

America's Desperate Struggle to Remain Obscenely Wealthy

I'm still working my way through Craig Dilworth's Too Smart For Our Own Good, a highly informative compendium of the world's ailments and their human causes. I particularly appreciate Prof. Dilworth's explanation of the evolutionary instincts which explain the intransigence of Homo sapiens when faced with what is obviously not working anymore.

One recurring concept is the idea of territoriality, which exists in both an individual form (where it plays out mainly in the sexual sphere) and the social mode, which in modern times takes the form of patriotism (scaling up the aboriginal idea of tribalism). These are extremely powerful, determinative influences on our thinking and behavior.

Dilworth's book made me rethink the rationale for the first Gulf War, for example, "Desert Storm." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thus posing a threat to our oil and, by extension, our "nonnegotiable" (in Dick Cheney's immortal description) lifestyle. It's not easy to convince several hundred thousand young men and women to lay their lives on the line to keep gasoline cheap at the pump. It doesn't have quite the nationalistic zing of stopping Hitler's conquest of the modern world, for example. This is where the concept of territoriality, in the disguise of "patriotism," fills in so admirably as a motivating force. If one tinpot dictator decided to overrun a neighboring kingdom operated by another set of burnoosed crooks and rule both sand piles, what is really the difference to us other than the economic consequences? And aren't the economic consequences solely and only the result of the elevation of the personal auto running on gasoline to a sort of God-given right in this country? Thus, it was necessary to invent myths about premature babies snatched from their incubators by Iraqi's heartless thugs and other tall tales as a cover story (or at least an accompanying narrative, since President George the First was actually pretty candid about what we were doing) in order to sell the war and play to the territorial instinct.

Dilworth cites some very interesting statistics. For example, of the Earth's 7 billion human beings, about half (3.5 billion) try to get by on less than two dollars a day, or $730 a year. The Third World exists primarily as a kind of plantation for the developed countries of the First World; the developed countries extract necessary minerals (oil, bauxite, iron ore, copper and many other things) from Africa, and poor Asian countries, "investing" in such countries in order to perform such extraction, and as a result the 25% of the total population living in the First World uses about 17 times as much energy per capita as the wretched of the Earth, and vastly more of the minerals extracted than do the countries where the stuff is found. This "investment" has inflated the economies of the poor countries and disrupted ancient tribal life, so that to get by millions and millions have moved to urban cities (such as Lagos, Nigeria) and taken up residence in shanty towns where they live out their brief life spans (life expectancy measured from birth is about 40 years in sub-Saharan Africa), dealing with epidemic malaria and HIV infections.

Back here at home, we compete on the "liberal-conservative" continuum by one-upping each other on symbolic gestures. For example, you drive a Prius while I drive a less efficient Ford, or you put your iMac in sleep mode while I, in my wastrel way, just leave the thing humming away. Because of the intensity of the territorial instinct, this sort of lunatic meaninglessness largely passes unnoticed in our conversations: we take our futile gestures seriously, and "liberal guilt" is largely about whether our personal lifestyle choices seem ethical enough, even if they are totally, completely irrelevant, measured on a real scale of effectiveness (the competition arising from the other form of personal territoriality, based on sexual instincts).

It is gratifying to see Dilworth praise the work of the "early" environmental thinkers and writers, such as Barry Commoner (The Closing Circle), E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful), the Club of Rome (Limits to Growth) and Paul Erlich (The Population Bomb). When the Earth's population was about 3.5 billion, Erlich predicted, a little over 37.5 years ago, that humans would double in number in about...37.5 years. Similarly, Commoner was writing in 1971 when carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were up about 6-7% higher than pre-Industrial Revolution levels (270 parts per million). Such CO2 levels now hover at 380 ppm, or an increase of about 41%. It isn't much comfort now to realize they told us so, and anyway, in this country (incredibly enough) we deal with our massive cognitive dissonance by simply denying that the greenhouse effect is real. Well, denial got us where we are today; why mess up a good thing?

It's not a point that Dilworth makes in exactly these terms, but one trend that I have noticed, in reflecting on America's "environmental movement," is that we have definitely accomplished some laudable things, such as (in particular) the Clean Air and Water Acts and the Endangered Species Act, all in the early 1970's. Such developments as the catalytic converter and improved fleet mileage have arisen from these movements, and Lake Erie is now less likely to catch fire spontaneously. However, when you think about it, one thing an honest observer might have to admit is that we never actually change anything which would...actually change anything. Not in real lifestyle terms, not in terms of the real "transactional business" (as Thoreau called it in Walden) betwen a human being and the planet which supports him. This is the key to seeing the effect of territoriality on our thinking. Many among us (the Christians foremost) pay lip service to the idea that "all men are brothers" et cetera, but no one gets hysterically excited enough about this laudable slogan to begin suggesting that maybe Americans should not use 17 times as much energy per capita as the poor use in Lagos or Mexico City or Manila. That would be really inconvenient, you know?

It is estimated that the grinding debt service performed by Third World governments to pay back the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as the result of corporate "investment" in Africa and other poor areas of the Third World (which allow Western corporations to cart away the mineral wealth while employing a fraction of the locals), subtract so much of the national wealth from such Third World countries that about 500,000 children die each year from lack of health care or sanitary water supplies. Oops: our bad. But you're obviously a Commie if you think this means that Chevron or Citibank shouldn't get paid.

Having hit a resource wall, with oil now over $100 a barrel, and the massive debts used to prolong a privileged lifestyle weighing on our prerogatives, we're getting pretty pissed off. How are we going to get the economy "growing" again, so it can resume that upward-sloping trend line to which Nature's God and the Laws of Nature entitle us? We don't want to wind up like a garbage scavenger in Lagos or a rag picker in Manila, do we? We're paying nearly five bucks a gallon for gasoline (about 2-1/2 times the daily subsistence of half the world's human beings). Is there someone we can go to war with and get this straightened out?

We are, indeed, a unique species. Brilliant, stupid, self-defeating, oblivious and suicidal all at the same time. I'm not sure, however, that the honeybees and cockroaches are going to miss us.

Vicious Circle Principle

I came across this gem from Rick Santorum recently while trying to mind my own business. In general, I try not to think about Rick Santorum; I don't see how anything good can come about by thinking about Santorum. He's clearly running for the wrong office; rather than president, he should compete in Vatican City for the job of Pope on a Pre-Vatican II platform. Anyway, here's Rick:

“What they have done? And I referred to it the other day and I got criticized by some of our, well, less-than-erudite members of the national press corps who have a difficulty understanding when you refer to someone’s ideology to the point where they elevate Earth, and they say that, well, men and humanity is just of a variety of different species on the Earth and should be treated no differently.”

He continued: “Whereas, we all know that man has a responsibility of stewards of the Earth, that we are good stewards and we have a responsibility to be good stewards. Why? Because unlike the Earth, we’re intelligent and we can actually manage things.”

Yes, I realize it's mostly gibberish; it's hard to follow what he means by referring to "men and humanity is just a variety of different species on the Earth," but perhaps this is no less articulate than the mean level of political discourse. I think Santorum is advancing a Dominionist view of the relationship between one primate, Homo Sapiens, with its complicated central nervous system, and the planet on which that species, for now, is forced to dwell.

It so happens I've been making my way through a very long book by Craig Dilworth, a polymath professor at Uppsala University in Sweden (I think Dilworth is from Canada, originally), who published Too Smart For Our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind in late 2009. Mr. Dilworth does not agree with the thesis that humans "can actually manage things," and that it is this techno-grandiosity which will lead to our inevitable extinction, and in the not too distant future. (Yes, the possibility occurred to me that Prof. Dilworth might want to spend a lot more time in a Southern latitude and soak up some rays.)

Dilworth concedes that we are smart, of course, as mammals go. This is the root of our problem, as follows: Other species cannot really exceed the carrying capacity of their habitat, at least not for long. They die off when this happens, and fall back to a level which is sustainable, given the available resources and territory.

Humans, however, have created conditions which Dilworth calls the Vicious Circle Principle (VCP). This is actually the story of our "uniqueness." It's fairly easy to understand. When human populations surge, mankind solves the problem with technology. These technological fixes work (we're smart, after all), and not only allow the support of the existing population, but create a surplus which allows additional growth. For a while, a period of stasis is maintained until burgeoning population once again strains against the carrying capacity of human habitat. We then develop another technology fix, and the process is repeated.

As the technological fixes accumulate, they begin to interact with each other in unpredictable, and often dangerous, ways which are not appreciated by humans until problems begin to show up. For example, prior to the Green Revolution in agriculture, humans were straining to feed the world's population, leading to such books as Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb (widely attacked by Catholics of Santorum's Pre-Vatican II persuasion, for obvious reasons, since the godless Erlich was proposing birth control, of all things). The Green Revolution, involving the massive use of nitrogen inputs and fertilizers derived from petroleum, powered increased yields in basic crops, creating a surplus which allowed the Earth's population to increase from an inadvisable 3 billion in 1966 to a preposterously over-the-line 7 billion today. The Green Revolution also had the effect of draining the Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains through overuse, halving the original topsoil from 6 feet to 3 in America's breadbasket, and also of creating massive dead zones at the mouths of all major rivers (because of nitrogen and pesticide run-off from agriculture), thus heavily impacting another food source, marine life.

The Green Revolution permitted sustained population growth and encouraged the exploration for, and use of, unprecedented levels of fossil fuels. Burning such fuels released CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and, at the interface of the world's oceans and the air, enabled the formation of carbonic acid, which has had the effect of acidifying the oceans, destroying the lowest end of the marine food chain (phytoplankton and other creatures). Rising ocean temperature (an effect of global warming) has bleached out and destroyed much of the world's oceanic reefs, depriving marine life of habitat and food sources.

The physical layout of modern Western life (and increasingly in Asia and Latin America) has become heavily dependent on the private automobile, a technical fix which originally helped with the mechanization of agriculture and then enabled the swelling populations to live far from city centers and commute to specialized occupations, burning more fossil fuels, increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere and disrupting the climate on which the Green Revolution also depends. All these people, spread out over such vast areas, required, long, inefficient transmission lines for electrical power, massive burning of coal to generate electricity, and the rest of the interactive infrastructure of modern life, all of which were devised in response to previous needs to cope with population growth and improve the "standard of life," and which all act in concert under the rules of the VCP.

The Earth's 7 billion people now find themselves up against what Dilworth considers an end point. Previous technical fixes, at lower levels of population, at least had the advantages of a functioning ecology and plentiful resources. Now, however, we have messed everything up so badly in such complicated, intertwined, inextricable ways (with so many complicated feedback loops involving so many poorly-understood physical processes), and we are now so short of such basic essentials as fresh water and high-density energy sources, and arable land, and reliable climate, and...well, you read the newspaper.

The idea being: we're really up against it. Rick Santorum actually looks like a guy who might have been a Steward on the "Love Boat" or maybe on an old Pan Am flight, but I don't think it's the national press which is "less than erudite." It's this dumb cluck Santorum and people who think as he does who present the clear and present danger to survival. Although that's essentially just a "bootless cry to mute Heaven," as the Bard says in the sonnet, an attempt to blame another idiot now, when the damage was done so long ago. We overshot the mark in the distant past, and if Santorum wants an education system which portrays the Flintstones as historical fiction, it won't make too much difference for present purposes. I think Dilworth is gloomy because he's right, and it appears we're going to be the first species that ever thought itself right out of existence.

The Obama Gambit

First of all, to state the obvious, if Barack Obama were the ordinary type of American President, that is, a white guy from a somewhat privileged background with a room temperature IQ and a sketchy resume (the apotheosis of such specimens being George W. Bush), we would never hear a word about "Birthers" or Kenyan ancestors or the rest of this racist nonsense. We all know this to be true; the rage, the intemperate screaming from people like Orly Taitz, the Queen of Birther Nation, would just never happen. Look at the old pictures (such as that above) of the intolerant Southerners who made the lives of African-Americans a living hell in the Jim Crow days; look at those faces, those masks of hatred and bigotry, that irrational madness that was Southern racism. That's what "Birtherism" is, all dressed up in its Neo-Fascist finery. The pretense of "protecting the Constitution" is a lot of happy horseshit; sadly these days, nobody really cares about the Constitution anymore, except for a few diehards like Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Turley and even, on my better days -- me.

Unfortunately, the list of those who don't care much about our Constitutional framework must also include Barack Obama himself. I have come around gradually to the idea that Mr. O, that preternaturally gifted political chameleon, has grokked in his pitch-perfect way that the current political consensus is that the Constitution can be safely bargained away, that the Bill of Rights is just a negotiable, political "issue," and that the Beltway doesn't have time in its mad scramble to raise campaign cash and line up lobbying jobs to worry about the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Amendments, to name just the most important and most serially-abused of the original charter.

Obama knows that he can get away with this approach. I imagine, in our debased civics culture, that the average Man on the Street is unaware of the content of the Bill of Rights; indeed, some studies have suggested that the majority of those interviewed, when not told of the origin of the rights being described, have found the first Ten Amendments vaguely "radical" or maybe even "Communist," and that there is little chance, starting from scratch, that we would enact the same set of basic civil liberties again.

I find that passing strange, but then - it's probably just me. So anyway, to return to the theme, the text for this Sunday morning sermon: I don't know exactly what I expected, but I was sort of hoping that Obama would not treat Constitutional rights, or the whole question of the impartial application of the rule of law to everyone, as just another politicized "issue" to be bargained away when convenient to do so, that he would not immediately succumb to this Look Forward, Not Backward mantra that he used to evade all difficult questions about looking into the obvious war crimes committed by the previous Administration, and all his other sell-outs.

But he did. He's got a big job, the biggest in the country, and with that job comes the responsibility to make tough decisions, decisions that might make it extremely uncomfortable, for example, to stand in group photos with "all the living Presidents" in the Oval Office on account of your Attorney General is busting your predecessor for multiple-count violations of the international Convention Against Torture and the War Crimes Act. Naturally, such a scenario is unthinkable when we reflect on the true nature of the ever-accommodating, always-compromising, go along to get along President, who is guided by one thing and one thing only, the effect of a given decision on his reelection chances. And then in his second term, the effect on his golf schedule.

Thus, Obama has taken his place in the gradual evolution of the American Presidency from the days when we had strong and resolute leaders, such as Teddy Roosevelt, FDR or Harry Truman, people who were willing to make hard decisions when the circumstances demanded them, to the modern version, where the office is really more a part of the Public Relations industry. The whole idea is to be vaguely inoffensive, to be lenient and to let everything slide, to never make a member of your powerful Peer Group in the least bit uncomfortable or inconvenienced. If we are offensive and violent, it's always at the expense of some completely overmatched Muslim country over there someplace that we bomb into the Stone Age while here at home we worry and fret primarily about whether Americans are exhibiting sufficient "demand" for consumer goods and services, in order to "get the economy moving again."

I don't think that's really unfair at all, as a characterization, as a description of Mr. Obama's modus decidendi. Thus, the question: how do you get excited about the reelection of Obama for a second term if you look at things that way? I'm continually amazed at the way liberal commentators in the media have gotten on the Obama bandwagon, people such as Randi Rhodes or Andrew Sullivan, who used to positively excoriate George W. Bush for doing things such as escalating the war in Iraq, or running a due process-free concentration camp on Cuba, and yet simply overlook the exact same offenses when committed by Mr. Obama, as he escalates the war in Afghanistan by a factor of three or refuses to shut down Guantanamo, for fear of looking "soft on terror." Or the easygoing acceptance by the same liberal pundits of assassination of American citizens on Presidential whim with no objective standards and no explanations.

The point being, if you continually adopt practices for the sake of looking "tough" and "realistic" that undercut basic American civil liberties, and establish the atmosphere of a police state, all in the proclaimed effort to "save" the American way of life from the evils of terrorism or whatever it is that we say we're doing, don't you eventually arrive at the point where there's nothing much left to protect? And shouldn't Obama be talking about that?

Thus, that is the central mystery to me of the Obama Gambit. Not the Kenyan grandfather. I don't care about the Kenyan grandfather, I am perfectly content to believe that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in August, 1961, an American citizen, as American as I am, as or more American than his Birther antagonists. That's all a ridiculous sideshow, a disguised form of saying that a black man should not hold what the Birthers regard as a white man's job. I just wish we had an American citizen, born in any state of the Union, of any color or mix of "races" (as mythical as the whole concept of "race" actually is in light of our common African Mother), who would stand up for American citizenship.

Gasoline Alley

Never content with only a superficial grasp of the superficial, I have continued to delve into this fascinating question presented by the New America, namely, whether Americans are continuing to have fun fun fun now that Daddy took your T-Bird away.

I presume that we are. I found the discussion of daily gasoline usage (assuming that gasoline deliveries to gas stations are a close proxy for actual usage, which I assume they are, given the "just in time" nature of gasoline deliveries, as with most inventory in Consumer America) on the Depressoblogs a little confusing. Since the arguments found in such places as "Of Two Minds" and Mish's site tend to goal seek in their explications (most Depressoblogs fall all over themselves to make sure that things are portrayed as badly as humanly possible), you have to go to original sources to double check. You know, if you want credibility, always my watchword. Which takes one to the site maintained by the Energy Information Administration, and although this is a federal government site, I trust it because the Department of Energy is headed up by Steven Chu, a brilliant man with great ideas who unfortunately works for the Obama Administration, one of the dullest and least innovative presidencies in the history of the Republic. One of my very first blogs talked about Dr. Chu's overview lecture of the way forward in alternative energy, delivered at a China-America symposium at Wheeler Hall on the Berkeley campus in 2006. Switch grass, not corn, should be the basis of the ethanol fuel industry, and he laid it all out, taking into account all of the usual arguments about energy invested versus energy returned, etc., and pointing out that switch grass has the huge advantages of being a kind of hardy weed which replenishes the soil as it dies back and requiring far less in the way of (petroleum based) inputs. Plus, unlike corn, it does not divert the food supply, and it grows in places where you probably would not think to grow anything else.

So of course with the Obama Administration we have never heard anything much about switch grass or cellulosic production of ethanol. Steven Chu is a kind of Nobel prop to stand in the background while Obama thunders on about an "energy independent" America, presumably by fracking the hell out of Pennsylvania and drawing up all that natural gas trapped in shale rock.

A slight digression. What I have found in looking at the gasoline usage figures (http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mgfupus2&f=m) is that gasoline usage, indeed, is declining. Rather than cherry pick data as the Depressos do, it's probably more reasonable to use a high point in a high-driving month (I'm looking at August, 2006, the height of the bubble years) and compare it to August, 2011. Converting the barrel figures to gallons (42 gallons per barrel), what I see is that usage has declined over these five years from about 40 million gallons per day to about 37 million gallons per day, or about an 8% drop. The usage has continued to fall since August, 2011, but this definitely supports the idea that there is a trend toward lower gasoline consumption, if not as dramatic as that produced by cherry-picking starting and ending points. I'm not sure at all how the Depressos came up with 40%, unless you started with the highest use ever and compared it to a current reading from the dead of winter, which is not a realistic way to compute the difference, and it also suggests that fuel efficiency is playing a much bigger role than that portrayed by the Gloom & Doom Industry.

The Depressos (this would include Zerohedge and numerous other websites which rejoice in America's imminent collapse) are mainly interested in using these trendlines to counter any argument that America is making any progress whatsoever toward emerging from the current depression. While I tend to agree with these sites that America has not really gotten anywhere (in a real sense, as opposed to papering over a busted nation with various money-conjuration tricks), I do think that this tendency toward accelerating conservation, deliberate or not, is a damn good development in the larger scheme of things.

And the news that makes it all even better is that apparently the decline in gasoline usage is matched by similar declines in electricity, natural gas and fuel oil consumption. The electricity drop-off is no doubt partly attributable to decisions by Americans across the country, under heavy financial pressure, to discontinue cable TV and high-speed internet and various other electricity-sucking gizmos. Also, to turn off the lights when you're not in the room. Whatever, it's worth remembering that Americans have been wanton, unconscionable, egregious (I need one more adjective)...unconscionable (it was so good the first time) wasters of energy, at levels much higher than actually necessary to maintain our standard of living, such as it now is. We tend to use about twice as much energy per capita as a country such as Germany, and if you've spent any time there, I trust you would agree that the American standard of living is not twice as high. Maybe half as good, would be more accurate.

It's all a move in the right direction, if you ask me. Maybe the next step would involve a cessation of the endless purchasing of unnecessary junk, which I surmise has to do with an attempt to distract ourselves from the environmental wasteland we've created around us. The world looks so pretty in those glowing, hi-def pictures on your iPad, but it would be better yet if the world actually looked that way in an unmediated way. You know, in Reality.

Why have Americans stopped driving?

It's not really a complaint, mind you; if people want to get off the road, it's okay with me. It does raise two questions, however: (1) What the hell's going on?; and (2) Why is it that the lamestream media never so much as mention the phenomenon?

First, the facts. The chart at right was crunched together by Mike Shedlock at his "Mish" econoblog, and graphically describes gasoline usage over three-month periods (Nov-Dec-Jan) over a historical period, which provides some useful context. The same data have been discussed at length by Charles Hugh Smith at his "Of Two Minds" blog. Both arrive at essentially the same conclusion: American gasoline use has fallen off a table in recent months.

If you had no idea this was going on, you shouldn't blame yourself. As HUGE a data point as this represents, it does not fit well into the current, election-year-driven happy talk about the economy, nor does it comport with the massively-falsified labor statistics promulgated each month by the Illusionist-in-Chief herself, Hilda Solis of the Department of Labor. Propaganda sites such as the New York Times do not want to touch this, because it raises disturbing questions such as, how are Americans actually getting to all these new jobs the economy is creating? So if American gasoline usage has fallen over 40% in a very brief period, well, it must have something to do with the (very mild) weather that has plagued the United States of late.

The chart demonstrates that Americans are currently purchasing about 33 million gallons of gasoline per day (the chart, to smooth the data, provides a moving average for three-month totals of daily usage; thus, 110 million divided by 3). At the height of the housing bubble, daily gasoline usage was closer to 56 million gallons per day; thus, current usage is about 58% of the zenith of happy motoring, or at about the same level as ten years ago. This is yet another symbol of our Back to the Future Reality: most economic data points, such as the total number of jobs in the economy, or the inflation-adjusted level of average income, or the inflation-adjusted value of the major American stock markets, all seem to confirm the same picture. Absolutely nothing has happened in the last decade other than a growth in population and a continuing decline in our standard of living.

Why are Americans keeping their 254 million cars and trucks parked? One surmise, I suppose, is that Americans might simply be living in them but lack the bucks to actually operate them. It is not, by the way, a matter of fuel efficiency. Hybrid technology and a move toward more fuel -efficient cars account for about 6% of the decline over the last 10 years. So the data really do point toward a dramatic diminution in actual gasoline used.

The good news is that America probably has brought itself into compliance with the Kyoto Protocols on global warming, bringing to mind the old tri-partite saying about greatness, updated here for environmentalism: Some societies are born environmentalist, some achieve environmentalism, and some have environmentalism thrust upon them. The United States would appear to belong in this third category.

Realistically speaking, the sharp drop in usage must reflect an abandonment of a great deal of discretionary driving. The price of gasoline (and note its extreme inflexibility - where's the old "law of supply and demand?") creeps into the unconscious mind of a cash-strapped society and people just quit driving. I think about the cost of driving now in ways I did not before. Take, for example, a staple experience of my distant youth, the round-trip drive to L.A. One would drive to L.A. instead of flying because it was seen as a practically "free" way to travel. Now those 900 miles, calculated at 30 miles per gallon and $4.00 for each gallon (out here on the Best Coast), set you back 120 big ones. Or, simply a drive into San Francisco for the day. Our local governmental districts do not want to share in the general economic downtrend, and since they hold monopoly power over all the "infrastructure," they have jacked bridge tolls and municipal parking to the moon and beyond. It costs six bucks to cross the Golden Gate Bridge (discussions are underway to raise it to probably ten bucks) and it's difficult to find a downtown parking garage where you can leave your car for two or three hours for less than ten dollars more. So a simple drive to SF (about 1.3 gallons of gas for me) costs in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty bucks, if I use a car (the costs of buses and ferries, of course, are better than that, but those fares have also been ratcheted up in recent years - another example of a "non-shared" sacrifice enjoyed only by the civilian populace). And all of that is before the cost of whatever I had in mind as an activity in San Francisco. If I'm going out to dinner, obviously I'm over the hundred dollar mark at this point.

The bottom line is that it costs a lot to move around. If one is among the 47 million or so Americans on food stamps, or among the millions and millions of long-term unemployed, blowing a couple of hundred bucks on a long drive, or simply on a jaunt into the Big City for the day, can become an unaffordable luxury. I think this is what is really going on. An expense you can do without, you do without.

I also think this is part of a more general phenomenon in this country, the development of a kind of Human Dark Matter, an unseen cohort of people who have fallen off the grid and into an Underworld where they are not countable, where their economic activity cannot be measured because it doesn't show up in government numbers, or tax revenue figures, or in the official labor statistics. What you might call, increasingly, Real America. I'm working on a post called "Five Fractals In Search of A Macro-Iteration," a delightfully unpretentious title, don't you think? And the gasoline usage figures are part of that picture.

Updated: The graph, with its two-sided scale, is not altogether clear, so here are similar data in haec verba from the Of Two Minds blog:

"Deliveries steadily rose to a peak of 67.1 MGD [million gallons/day] in July 1998, declined marginally in the 2001-2 recession and then surged to 66.8 MGD in August 2003. If we just look at one month--say November--then we see that deliveries remained in a remarkably consistent channel from 1994 to 2008, between 54 MGD and 63 MGD, with the higher numbers occuring in the "peak bubble years" of 1998 and 2003.

"In 2010, gasoline deliveries declined to the low 40s--literally falling off the charts. In November 1983, deliveries were 51.1 MGD; in November 2010, they were 42.8 MGD, and in November 2011 they were 30.9 MGD."

Louis C.K. & the Pointlessness of Civilization

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hzbV4YzH0R0

Tip o' the Hat to Guy McPherson and his Nature Bats Last blog for posting the hysterically funny Louis C.K. rant on civilization linked above. My daughter acquainted me with Louis and his "sitcom" series, which is a sort of postmodern update on existential themes featured in Seinfeld, in the sense that both series concern Absurdity, the alienation of modern life and the elaboration of the pointless dramas we create in order to distract ourselves from the fact of our mortality (and all such modern cinematic themes, in America at least, originate with the great Woody Allen).

Louis is discussing, from another angle, the concept of the "organic society" mentioned here a few posts back; civilization is built on specialization and the creation of a societal machine comprised of interrelated parts (called "jobs," including call centers which focus on making sure you're deriving maximum enjoyment from your World At War video game, as Louis suggests) which provides a "living" for modern human beings. We forget, almost always, that this way of approaching human life is not an inevitable choice (there is nothing in human evolution which compels the organization of human life along these lines), but is simply the outcome of cognitive decisions, enforced now by modern industrial culture. In many ways, as Henry David Thoreau pointed out, and as Louis C.K. in a very funny way describes, this specialization leads to a preposterously constricted, dull and unsatisfying life for the vast majority of its human participants. And it has led, among its other drawbacks, to environmental disaster and the prospect of near-term extinction through either global warming or nuclear holocaust.

I think I can answer the question Louis poses concerning the very real hostility of Evangelical Christianity to environmentalism in general and to climate change arguments in particular. In the superstitious world of Apocalyptic religion, extinction events are the exclusive province of the supreme beings. No matter how large a trash pile we create on what the Christians call "God's Creation," it's okay because this life doesn't really count anyway. Thus, it is presumptuous and probably sacrilegious to contemplate puny Man's ability to bring about his own extinction; the Christians are wrong, of course, because species become extinct all the time (the average life being about 200,000 years, accelerating now because of the cesspool humans have made of the world), and homo sapiens will prove no different. Our assumption is that the "lesser mammals" lack a sufficiently complex central nervous system for misuse in the creation of religious mythologies; that would appear to be the only distinction.

I think Louis presents a genuine insight into the nature of human cities. They are themselves concentrated areas of pollution and litter, and it is counterproductive to insist on their "cleanliness" since this simply potentiates the externalization of their trash into the broader civilization. We are talking only of a certain fussy "aesthetics," and yet, as Louis points out (very subtly), cities are already very alien, inhuman places, with their smoothed (paved) surfaces and rectilinear construction of tall buildings and streets laid out on a grid. These features are what give cities such a nightmarish, alienating feeling, an "inhuman" feeling, captured best, perhaps, by the German Expressionist painters and the American artists they influenced, such as Edward Hopper (I'm thinking particularly of "Night Hawks" .)

One takes one's Sunday morning sermons where one finds them, I suppose, and a Big Up to Reverend Louis.

Saturday Morning Essay: Michael Hastings & "The Operators"

Brought to you by Peet's Coffee, as always.

I'm finishing up a very good read, The Operators, by Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone writer who achieved quite a media buzz a couple of years ago when his disclosures of "off the cuff" remarks by General Stanley McChrystal, who was then the commanding officer in Afghanistan, caused the sacking of McChrystal by an embarrassed White House. Hastings is a good, lively writer in the Hunter S. Thompson/Matt Taiibi mode, and had the courage to exercise the license he was apparently given by McChrystal's entourage to write his story any way he saw fit. The way he saw fit was simply to reproduce the scenes in Afghanistan, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere in which McChrystal and his "Team America," a rowdy, hard-drinking, profane staff of somewhat iconoclastic career Army guys spoke at length about what they thought about Obama, Hamid Karzai (the President of Afghanistan, elected under very dubious conditions), Gen. James Jones, the National Security head (called a "clown" by Team America), the various ambassadors and envoys to Afghanistan, such as Holbrooke and Eikenberry, and the counterproductive nature of the war in general. Indeed, some commentators thought this was the real reason McChrystal had to go, his "counterinsurgency math," by which he calculated that every innocent civilian killed in Afghanistan produced ten more insurgents against America and Karzai. Obviously, President Obama can't have that kind of logical deduction, coming from his own theater commander, on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

Hastings probably seemed like a tame mascot and Boswell to McChrystal's Dr. Johnson, but in fact Hastings has a keen mind and deep powers of observation and analysis, which proved McChrystal's undoing. McChrystal himself is an interesting subject, a liberal Democrat by inclination who is nevertheless a supremely ambitious careerist; it's just that his career is in the Special Ops section of the Army, and counterinsurgency in particular. Tall, gaunt, ascetic when he's in the combat theater, and a two-fisted drinker when he hits the bars in France and Berlin, McChrystal is a hard guy to pin down. He inspired intense loyalty among his Team America entourage, was considered enlightened and innovative in his approach to Afghanistan, yet he was involved in both the Pat Tillman and Abu Ghraib scandals

One scene stuck with me. In Berlin in 2009, McChrystal gave a lecture on Afghanistan to a group of German media figures. In the account given by Hastings, the lecture was a tour de force, an historical exposition of Afghanistan's thirty years of constant war, and in a country where about two-thirds of the population is younger than 25 (life expectancy in Afghanistan is 44), this fact alone means that the vast majority of Afghans have never experienced peace during their lifetimes. McChrystal described the tribalism, the drug trade, the corruption in the central government, the nature of the insurgency, the Taliban, everything. At the end of the lecture, one German reporter asked McChrystal a question that stunned Hastings; the reporter pointed out that McChrystal had mentioned Al-Qaeda only once.

This is a question, as Hastings notes, that an American reporter would never ask, nor probably even think to ask. Yet this is the putative reason we invaded in 2001, over ten years ago. What is somewhat reassuring to one's sanity (and to the reliability of one's own perceptions) is that Hastings, who had the privilege of an insider's perspective on the top command in Afghanistan (and was allowed to write about it), winds up asking the same common sense questions that occur to everyday Americans. Such as: why do terrorists, Al-Qaeda or otherwise, actually need a "safe haven" from which to plan attacks on America? Especially when one considers, as confirmed by the Report of the 9-11 Commission (which, I repeat, apparently no one has read, in or out of government), that the 9-11 plot was actually put together in Hamburg, Germany, Cairo, South Florida and Phoenix? Why is Afghanistan, the sixth poorest country in the world with a population of 30 million, with no real military capability and no nuclear weapons, actually any sort of threat to the United States?

The answers to these questions are obvious, and Hastings provides a valuable public service in lifting the veil on all the nonsensical propaganda which Obama and others use to justify this "necessary war." It isn't necessary at all, it's counter-productive, and it is carried on for two principal reasons:

1. As a money-making venture for the military-industrial complex, and for all the lobbyists the MIC supports (who in turn support their employees in the Congress and White House).

2. As a theater of operations where Army commanders can advance their career ambitions by participating in an actual war, sort of. It's a war in the sense that lots of people, Americans and especially Afghans, die violent deaths.

One could add that Afghanistan is also a political meme. By being for this war (again, sort of), President Obama can be Presidential and tough on terror. The war has no connection to American security, in reality, or even to the "war on terror" (whatever that is), as even Team America would probably concede; indeed, the book cites official studies by the Rand Corporation (best read with one's Dr. Strangelove voice) and by the CIA which demonstrate convincingly that combating terrorism with the ordinary criminal justice system is more effective than launching wars against countries that supposedly "harbor" terrorists. But the meta-reality of Media Discourse, a stupid and dumb beast, in which the Afghanistan war has a totemic or emblematic essence connected to America's righteous revenge for the outrage of 9-11, is the one that is debated on the campaign trail and among the regular toadies of the press (excluding guys like Hastings and Taiibi).

Why did we invade Afghanistan? That's a question that first occurred to me in the fall of 2001. Now Hastings has written a book which sheds a lot of light on that question. The impulse to invade (as an act of misplaced or impotent revenge) is probably distinct from the institutional reasons that have kept the war going for a period nearly three times as long as America's involvement in World War II (3 years, 8 months, versus 10 years, 3 months), but it still adds up to complete nonsense. I suspect that the answer, at bottom, is that we fight many wars because we have a huge military establishment that wants something to do and wants to justify its existence and all the careers attendant to it. You can't give those answers as the official rationale, so we torture logic to create propaganda that sustains these misbegotten adventures.

My Favorite Economic Factoid

I apologize in advance for bringing this topic up so often, but I just really can't get enough of it. I think it's because it absolutely encapsulates and epitomizes the fundamentally fake nature of the modern American economy.

To wit: the Federal Reserve has just reported that it has remitted $76 billion to the Treasury Department of the Fed's earnings on its $2.9 trillion portfolio of Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities, and other trash. Relative to this number, the Fed maintains a very low overhead (on the order of 1/2 billion), so the Fed's gross earnings essentially equal its net. The Fed is a lean, mean, phony-money-generating machine.

I think what I love more than anything is the learned discourse about this topic among all the major economic thinkers: Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Brian Sack of the New York Federal Reserve, as they ponder this awesome contribution to American solvency. They honestly take all this shit seriously, the "money" the Fed is paying into the Treasury, the money the Fed uses to "purchase" Treasuries on the "open market" from the In Crowd Primary Dealers, the "Quantitative Easing" programs that enabled the Fed to take all that dodgy mortgage paper off the hands of its troublesome children in the banking community in the first place. They consult graphs and charts, talk about the "expectations for inflation," note with satisfaction that the U.S. Treasury market remains saturated with offers for the Treasury's promises to pay money in the future on the paper it sells today, and at such a low cost! The Treasury barely pays anything for the privilege of accepting over a trillion dollars a year in new issuance.

Of course, the Federal Reserve is itself the largest holder in the world of Treasury bonds, which it purchased on the open market, as noted above. The Primary Dealers participated in auctions, bought Treasury bonds, then held most of this paper for a few weeks before flipping it to the Fed. The Fed thus avoided violating the rule which prohibits the Fed from simply buying the bonds directly from the Treasury at the original auction. You see, if the Fed did that, it would be directly "monetizing the debt," and the Fed would never do that. Instead, the Fed waits until someone else, a big bank or broker-dealer, first purchases the Treasury bonds; then the Fed conjures money out of thin air with a few keystrokes on its computer, takes possession of the bonds, and credits the reserve account of the Primary Dealer with a few billion, on which the PD earns a quarter of a percent in interest.

The Fed isn't really operating a Quantitative Easing ruse right now; it's running "Operation Twist," whereby as bonds in its portfolio mature, they are exchanged for bonds with longer duration. Thus, 2-year bonds become 5-year bonds, 5-year bonds become 10-year bonds, and so forth. Bernanke wants to lock in the super-low rates on which the Treasury is "obligated" to the Fed for as long as possible, because the Fed's big stash of Treasuries achieves a dampening effect on bond rates in general.

It's quite a high-wire act, the business of running a phony economy. Bernanke knows that he is engaged in a titration problem, analogous to the swimming pool metaphor I used a few posts back. I mean after all, if the Fed can really support the Treasury not only by purchasing bonds with conjured money, but can push the issue by then reporting "earnings" on these bonds and remitting them back to the Treasury to the tune of $76 billion per annum, then why not a reductio ad absurdum whereby the Fed simply buys all of the Treasury's issuance? And why not eliminate all taxation and support the Federal government entirely with Treasury issuance, all of which is purchased by the Fed with conjured money? But no need to stop there. Why not simply put the entire Gross Domestic Product on the government's payroll, all $15 trillion of it, and finance it all with keystrokes from the Fed's corner office computer?

Well, of course now I'm simply being ridiculous. However, in my ironic defense I would say this: if the logic of a proposition can be extended to encompass the absurd conclusion of the reduction in question, then the logic of the actual reality is also absurd. It is only a question of degree. Bernanke has gotten away with it so far because he tries to keep it down to a roar. He asks himself, when considering yet more "quantitative easing:" will this be the pillar, when I yank it out, that finally brings the entire temple down on my head?

I note with grim amusement that Russia, China, Iran and other countries are now actively seeking ways to work around the dollar-dominated system for settling oil deals and other commodity purchases. It's not hard to see why this would happen. Russia is selling real stuff, oil and natural gas, in exchange for paper originating on the computer in Bernanke's corner office. When China and Russia reinvest the dollars they receive from commodities, they must "repatriate" this money in America in exchange for Treasury promises that pay virtually nothing, with a negative return, in fact, when inflation is factored in. And the paper they buy is with actual money earned from selling real stuff, whereas Bernanke can buy his Treasury paper, with precisely the same value and return, simply by tapping in numbers.

Thus, at some point the foreign buyers will be gone. They won't need dollars anymore because they will find another way to settle their accounts. Not this year perhaps, not next, but soon, and for the rest of America's life. The American government will continue to run its massive deficits, of course, and with our savings rate effectively locked in at zero, it will be up to the Primary Dealers to buy it all, every piece of dubious paper emitted by the Treasury. To attract the foreign buyers, the recipients of all that money we use to buy all the stuff we used to make, or can't produce ourselves (such as most of the oil we use), we would have to pay them a real rate of return. But as the national debt hits $20 trillion and beyond, a rise in interest rates will be disastrous, and it's doubtful that the world's remaining producers of essential commodities (oil, most specifically) are going to be interested in American funny money anyway.

It is all very much like the myth of Narcissus. American leaders feel trapped by the expectations of the electorate; despite all evidence to the contrary, no one who values his favored position in American politics can afford to admit the awful truth, that this whole system is phony, made up out of thin air, fumes if you will, and we are running on those fumes and nothing more. We are transfixed by our own image, by our beauty and self-regard, and we cannot tear ourselves away from the reflecting pool. And one day we will take a header.

Through A Glass Darkly: The Republican Debate

I think Diane Sawyer is cute, always have thought so, and to think she's got the neurons to hang in there with an intellectual/creative guy like Mike Nichols. She's even cuter than George Stepho-etc. thinks he is, and that's very cute indeed. Looking at Diane was the only mitigating factor in the hour of life otherwise wasted watching the Republican "debate" last night. Sometimes, when I have subjected myself to a heinous experience like watching Republicans compete for Luddite of the Year Award, I get an inkling about Barack Obama's actual strategy, and it starts to look pretty clever. If you don't vote for him, then this is what you're looking at.

There are five pasty-white boring guys left now on the Republican side: Huntsman, Paul, Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Perry. I guess that's six; somehow it doesn't matter. Ron Paul, increasingly, seems like a set of attitudes, borrowed from sources as diverse as Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky, about how the world ought to work. He thought the Supreme Court decision of Griswold v. Connecticut, which was a 9th Amendment case about privacy rights, and specifically the constitutional right of a couple to use contraception in defiance of Connecticut's "blue law" to the contrary, was a Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure case. Then building on his error, Ron restated that that's one of the reasons he's against the Patriot Act. Here's the alarming part: Rick Santorum, who won some sort of distinction as the stupidest man in Congress when he represented Pennsylvania as a Senator, analyzed the case correctly. Of course, Rick Santorum believes that the states ought to be free to ban contraception if they feel like it, because the "right to privacy" is not in the Constitution.

Mitt Romney, sitting on his razor-thin lead and enjoying no real base of support in the modern Republican Party (a contradiction in terms, I realize), declined to answer the question directly from Cutesie George: does Mitt support the right of states to ban contraception? Well, gee, Mitt said. No state wants to ban contraception, so why talk about it?

That's how weird the Republicans have become. Their leading candidate cannot answer definitively that contraception is a good idea and ought to be available to people. What on Earth is the objection to contraception? Are the Republicans at the point where they think that the biological destiny of each and every ovum to become a (full-grown Christian) human must not be interrupted on pain of a murder charge? Does even God think that every spermatozoa has a soul?

Okay, to be fair, what these antiquarians are squirming to avoid is the recognition of any right to privacy under the 9th Amendment in the first place, because that's the foundation for Roe v. Wade, and that's the real quarry they're gunning for. They all want (Huntsman may be the exception) the unfettered right to a first-trimester abortion overturned, and they know they're only about one vote on the Supreme Court away from the prize. If Huntsman can figure out a way to relate the abortion issue to his years as an Ambassador to China, we'll get a clearer picture of his position.

Romney's the kind of Republican mannequin who would have been a shoo-in for the party's nomination even four years ago, but the ideological miasma of present-day Republicanism is getting in his way. He doesn't actually have any opinions or principles. You can tell he doesn't care if gays get married, if women get abortions, if people copulate with aardvarks on the street. They're all stupid issues, the government should let people do what they want sexually and socially, and he knows it (although now I think we need an Aardvark Rescue movement). He just wants the fricking nomination. He's a Republican like his father before him, and apparently you have to make a lot of dumb statements now with feigned passion in order to get this band of lunatics to let you sail under their banner. Thus, he's unable to attract more than 25% of their support, which must represent the magnitude of the vestigial sanity in the Republican Party.

Rick Perry continues to impress me as perhaps the dumbest person ever to vie for national public office. I don't know why he keeps showing up. It's over, Rick. Mitt Romney misses him most of all, because when Rick was considered tenable, it kept the attention away from the truly awful Rick Santorum and the quirky insurgence of Ron Paul. If Mitt could have maneuvered the race into a final match-up with Rick Perry, so that just the two of them would have been debating, the idiocy of Rick Perry would have become so patent and painfully obvious that Mitt would have won by acclamation. As it is he has to stagger through these debates with the idiosyncratic Ron Paul and the sanctimonious Rick Santorum offering stark contrasts to the empty-suit nothingness that is Romney's position on everything.

The debates do accomplish some things. In the first place, I'm beginning to see that Ron Paul is essentially a Human Bullet Point Announcer. His ideas are civil libertarian, highly idealistic (unrealistically so, in some cases), jarringly impractical (Medicare, access to health care in general), regressive (private ownership rights as superior to civil rights for minorities), and enlightened (the closing down of the American empire and its ruinous cost). The man behind all these ideas seems a little sketchy when you watch him in action, and as I've said, I don't know how he would function as an actual chief executive. The world could very well end on his watch.

I think Obama, of course, will just keep doing what he's doing, tuning in occasionally to watch, and relish, the Republican Circular Firing Squad as it moves from state to state, like the freak circus it is.