Saturday Morning Essay: Ordinary Pleasures

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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

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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

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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.

Where are the Snowdens of Yesteryear?

Yossarian keeps asking that question in Catch-22, as he tries to rid himself of a terrible vision. It's late in the book before you learn, in the novel's oddly-sequenced, time-vaulting way, what Yossarian was talking about.  In a book noted for its hilarity and black irony, the passage is unforgettable:

"I’m cold." Snowden whimpered, "I’m cold."

"There, there." Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be heard. "There, there."

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

"I’m cold," Snowden said. "I’m cold."

"There, there," said Yossarian. "There, there," He pulled the rip cord of Snowden’s parachute and covered his body with the white nylon sheets.

"I’m cold."

"There, there."

People have often asked me, especially when I was writing this blog during the Bush years, whether I felt any sense of personal risk or danger from expressing views contrary to the "policies" (such an imbecilic word) of whatever administration was in power.  I never really have.

I've been following the development of the Surveillance State for years and years, partly because I've been a regular reader of Glenn Greenwald since his earliest writings (in book form) on the Patriot Act, then his column for the Salon e-zine, and now his work for London's Guardian.  He's a meticulous writer, always careful with his facts, never given to speculation, and scrupulous in his constitutional analysis. He sounds "radical" at times only because the Bill of Rights itself has become something of a nuisance for the Washington power elite, and American citizens are now essentially clueless about the extent to which key civil liberties have been thrown away in our endless quest for "security."

So I've always worked on the assumption that the government can find out anything it wants about you anyway.  You don't have to write a blog.  There's nothing "dangerous" or "inflammatory" about what I write; I don't foment revolution, I don't advocate illegal acts, I don't give "material aid" of any kind to terrorist organizations.  And all of these things are true until and unless the federal government chooses to construe something you have said or written differently.  It can happen to me, it can happen to you.  I figure that at least my thoughts are written in essay form; they form (usually) a cogent whole, so the attempt to abstract something out of context at least offers that prima facie defense: read the whole thing, sir. 

The fact that we even entertain such ideas, the "paranoid" fantasy of government persecution, is a very sad commentary on the state of civil liberties in the United States.  I suppose this was Edward Snowden's point: if the government has everything you've ever said or written through digital means stored somewhere, they can pick and choose among your utterances to create a New You, the composite picture formed by the process of abstraction.  The trick is never to become a target; yet how do you control that?

Such a situation should not exist, of course.  In the grand scheme of things, terrorism is a miniscule threat.  In April, in Boston, three people were killed and many more seriously injured when two criminals exploded two homemade pressure-cooker bombs.  A few days ago, a killer went on a rampage with an assault rifle in Santa Monica and killed twice as many people (six) and wounded many more.  In the first instance, because the killers were foreign-connected (Chechnya) and used bombs, we deem it terrorism of the kind we're trying to interdict through a massive surveillance apparatus, recording just about everything that can be digitized and stored.  In the second case, it's run-of-the-mill mayhem, and the killer's weapon of choice is freely available on the open market, subject only (maybe) to a background check (we wouldn't want to be too invasive, right?).

The difference in approach is pretty easy to understand if you're cynical enough.  There's a lot of money to be made in the security business, and terrorism is the perfect rationale for the grand scale of the enterprise.  The National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency: these organizations don't exist in order to do background checks on assault rifles.  But wiring up the whole country, getting every Internet service provider and every telecom company on board, and employing vast legions of programmers, encryption experts, spooks of all shapes and sizes, all dedicated to getting it all recorded, data-mined, subjected to analytical algorithms, and stored away in a vast database in the Great Basin of Utah - there's your cash cow.  

In its current manifestation, I doubt that this Surveillance State is much of a threat to the personal liberty of ordinary Americans (whatever an "ordinary American" is).  When one political mouthpiece after another assures you that this is only for your own good, it's probably true for now, in the sense that it is not intended to entrap you or subject you to individual scrutiny.  On the other hand, it's not intended to protect you from random acts of terrorism either, not really.  Because it can't.  The Patriot's Day bombing in Boston is the ironic case in point.  All of this snooping was in place at the time of the massacre, although it would appear from Edward Snowden's disclosures that it was ramped up with another FISA order after the bombing.  If someone wants to pack a pressure cooker with ball bearings and gun powder and rig up a triggering device, there is no particular reason that the details of such a plan have to be broadcast over the internet or discussed by telephone.  The people at the NSA know this; if I can figure it out sitting here, and you agree with me, it's doubtful that we're the only two people in this fair land capable of routine deduction.  A random act of violence that we declare "terrorism" cannot be stopped by compiling massive databases of random information, no matter how sophisticated the "data-mining" or algorithmic scrutiny.  It didn't stop the Boston bombing, and it didn't stop the Santa Monica shooting spree (nor the increasingly common antecedents of the Santa Monica massacre).

Thus, the earnest national discourse of whether all this invasion and recording keep us "safer" is essentially stupid.  The systematic trashing of everyone's Fourth Amendment rights has been around for a decade, yet acts of routine, spectacular violence and bloodshed have increased dramatically during that period.  We pride ourselves on controlling one component of that mayhem that we call "terrorism" and justify the NSA's boondoggle on that basis; what it probably means is that genuine, foreign-based and (let's face it, this is what we're talking about) Islamic terrorism is a rare event, whereas drug-addled or just ordinarily crazy people grabbing a rapid-firing weapon and killing as many people as they can in a hurry is just another day in America.

Which is not to say that a tolerance for snooping on this scale cannot become a huge problem.  If it persists, it certainly will, although America will have much greater problems in the years ahead.  

What bothers me, at an idiosyncratic level, is that in my line of work, I am familiar with what "transcriptions" of ordinary speech look and sound like.  I read them all the time in depositions, in transcripts of recorded statements and court testimony.  It's incoherent garbage.  So the NSA is building a database built on an abstraction of ourselves that is all unguarded, spontaneous garbage: incoherent, halting, inarticulate, fumbling garbage.  It would be good to purge all of that, to get rid of it, to leave it all behind, because it doesn't really do any good anyway.  It's a way to employ people to do something pointless and expensive, and eventually dangerous nonetheless.  The words, the tweets, the texts, the emails, the emoticons, the nonsense - there is no human spirit in that.  Without the spirit that animated the words, we're all reduced to garbage.






 

Saturday Morning Essay: Mr. Krugman's Science Meets Liebig's Law of the Minimum

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Mind you, the "Mr. Krugman's Science" series is so entitled only as a reference to a certain type of dry-lab economist, of which Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Princeton University and talk shows everywhere is a leading exemplar.  It's nothing personal.  It is true, however, that his columns and blogs are excruciatingly dull and repetitive, and have virtually no relevance to the real world.  That being the point of this post, sort of.

Mr. Krugman, along with Neo-Classical, Neoliberal, Keynesian economists everywhere, believes that the American economy is in the doldrums because the "inadequate demand" from the consuming populace results in an "underutilization" of our economic potential.  Thus, high unemployment, slow or no growth, and the need for what economists call "policy" measures, fiscal and monetary.  The first being federal budget deficits, the second Quantitative Easing.

I suspect Economists must be tempted on a regular basis to start swinging hammers forcefully against their own skulls.  Simply the act of saying or writing such words as "demand," "policy," "inflation expectations," and "economic potential" over and over again could understandably undermine one's will to live.

Anyway, the economic models of the Neoclassicals apparently explain what is going on in the industrialized countries of the West and in Japan to their satisfaction.  An inadequate "policy response" (wham!) leaves these economies in a perpetual state of stagnation, whereas borrowing lots of money and printing even more would revive these juggernauts to their former robust performance. Our problems are the result of self-inflicted wounds.

If, as to me, this sounds a little fishy to you, you might be tempted to look elsewhere for an explanation.  The first place I would look is the real world.  See, my a priori assumption about my fellow humans is that if these problems were as simple as declaring ourselves rich by printing lots of money and writing lots of IOU's against the future, that's the very first thing we would do. Let us not forget, as Craig Dilworth told us in Too Smart for Our Own Good, that Homo sapiens is a species that avoided farming for 30,000 years after it knew how, simply because it was way too much work compared to killing animals and plucking wild plants. Mr. Krugman's smug disdain for political and banking leaders everywhere, that they allow this "depression" to go on because they lack the will to print and borrow enough (and this is what Mr. Krugman is saying) is, to put it mildly, a little grandiose.  (However, Mr. Krugman, in reality, is simply using this as a marketing shtick, and we should not take it so seriously.  It is his carnival barker routine.)

Back to the real world, and Liebig's Law of the Minimum, to which many more-comprehensive thinkers have directed their attention.  Liebig's Law was developed in the context of agriculture, and essentially holds that if a plant needs certain essential nutrients for optimal growth, its growth rate will be limited by the scarcest resource among these essential elements.  The image of the short-staved barrel above is used to illustrate the principle: it doesn't matter how long the other staves are; the barrel will begin to overflow (and to hold no more water) when the level reaches the height of the shortest stave.

An increasing number of "ecological economists" such as Herman Daly of the University of Maryland have pointed out that the Limits to Growth foretold by the Club of Rome in 1972 are now being reached, more or less along the lines predicted.  The resource or "nutrient" of economic growth most often cited (but not the only one) is the relative scarcity of petroleum.  As the price has remained persistently high (graph below), the use of gasoline (graph above) in the United States (and elsewhere) has flatlined to levels not very different from usage of about 15 to 20 years ago (source: Energy Information Agency of the U.S. Department of Energy).  Only about 12% of this constraint is the result of fuel efficiency.  Thus, despite the large growth in U.S. population in the intervening years, gasoline usage is way, way down.  Or, as Mr. Krugman would have it, is "inadequately demanded."

Petroleum (and its proxy marker, gasoline) represents a good reference point for Liebig's Law.  As noted by Gail Tverberg, Dmitry Orlov, Richard Heinberg, and many others, petroleum is a "master resource."  To move things in the global economy, you need oil.  You need it to power ships, to fly planes, to fertilize soil (and run the machinery of agri-business), to get people to work and to retail outlets, to go on vacation, to do practically anything requiring energy, which is to say - everything. A modern Western economy runs on the stuff, and nowhere is this truer than in the United States.

Mr. Krugman is left with the quandary: why do petroleum prices remain high in the face of "inadequate demand?"  The answer is: relative scarcity, in terms of the tight fit between worldwide usage and available supply.  (About 88 million barrels per day, in both cases.)

It's difficult for me to see how printing money or borrowing money from each other would change this fundamental problem.  Oil prices are likely to fall over the coming months as usage continues to sag, but if the economies are temporarily "revived" by the availability of cheaper energy, usage will increase to the point that prices will again soar and the economies will again sag.

As I've said before, Mr. Krugman and his fellow Scientists do not like this way of looking at things because it makes all of their model-driven, dry-lab quackery manifestly irrelevant.  Nevertheless, we remain limited by the short stave in the economic barrel.

Saturday Morning Essay: Attention Deficit Democracy

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Unfortunately, the line is not original with me, but I wish that it were so.  Someone came up with that little gem, and it's stuck in my brain.

Maybe it's just the natural evolution of a society living in the post-McLuhan age of electronic media.  We extol the wonders of "access," but the sheer volume of information available in digital format, such as the Internet and cable television networks, finally overwhelms the very limited capacity of the human brain to process multiple sources of information and differentiate the trivial from the vital.  With the end result being: everything is trivial.

I've often thought, and probably said here, that Watergate never would have gotten "traction" in our day and age.  Richard Nixon would have served out his full two, sleazy terms, just as George W. Bush did, and the nation would have survived, and the general process of degeneration of our political ethics, now much advanced, would have been accelerated just a little.  The Vietnam War would have ended at about the same time, probably with just one or two additional incursions into adjacent countries in violation of international law; that is, with just one or two other war crimes as defined by Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson at the Nuremburg Trials.

But these days: what's a war crime among friends?  It should not stop us from building a commemorative library with all living Presidents in attendance, should it?

Since it's the second term of a Democratic President, the Republicans are doing what they usually do: manufacturing scandals concerning the Obama Administration and hoping one of them goes viral. It doesn't seem to be working.  Benghazi, IRS/Tea Party, FBI spying on the press - we get the titles, but 99% of the populace would be unable to provide any detail whatsoever about the relevance or importance, if they have any, for any of these rubrics.  Somehow they're "bad" for Obama, but very good for MSNBC, Fox and CNN, who can take various sides in the "debate" and use the boring facts to stir up a controversy for a couple of weeks, and then parlay the spittle-flecked fulminations of various talking head experts into the sale of cars, dog food, and anti-depressants.

No one can care enough about the Obama "scandals" for them to matter, and the Republicans, having gotten the face time they were after (which helps with attracting lobbyist money for their next campaigns, and also reminds the voters back home in their districts who it is that represent them), they can let this faux-outrage die its natural death and wait for the next barely-understood "issue" to come along; and then they can work themselves into a lather again once more, with the grateful cheerleaders Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly leading the fight songs for the Donkeys and Elephants.

I think the current batch of Obama Scandals never had a chance because video-wise they stack up poorly against the Oklahoma tornadoes, with their mile-wide vortices Weed-Whacking entire towns into kindling.  Now that's TV!  Indeed, increasingly, as global weirding keeps advancing in its ominous, unnoticed way, the Weather Channel will be the go-to outlet for the American Monkey Mind.  We just love those reality shots of maniacs driving SUV's into funnel clouds!  How am I supposed to pay attention to Benghazi when that's on the next channel? Did you see that cow hit the windshield?!!

Paradoxically, Attention Deficit Democracy proceeds on the bizarre premise that the same video-stars in the District of Columbia who spend their time dreaming up controversies to justify more hearings (steroids in baseball, Benghazi, Bankers Behaving Badly, whatever), in order to garner that all-important Face Time, can be trusted to keep things running smoothly and government functioning. I think the government probably runs as well as it does because there are many hum-drum bureaucrats who just show up in one of the thousands of agencies at the federal, state and local levels, put in their time, update their pension calculations, and pay no attention to the Drama Queens yearning for national stardom.

The Power Elite, however, do use the inability of the national consciousness to focus on any one particular point of reference as a cover for: illegal wars, violations of the Bill of Rights, over-reach of government power (shutting down an entire town so they can find one terrorist suspect, for example), running torture black sites, maintaining concentration camps (Bagram and Guantanamo), spending way too much money on a bloated military; while, at the same time: doing nothing, or close to nothing, about the rather more urgent problem of the increasing uninhabitability of Planet Earth.  The voting populace, or at least those who vote, are bedazzled and confused by the quintillion digital bytes of disorganized and undifferentiated noise filling the very air at every moment, jerking their attention first this way for a nanosecond, then back that way for the next scintilla of focus, then to the tornado, then to someplace called Benghazi, then to whether Brad treated Jen badly, then - what, another bunch of tornadoes in Oklahoma?, and then finishing up, as always, with Kim Kardashian's butt implants.

Saturday Morning Essay: Mr. Krugman's Science and Jerry Mander's "The Capitalism Papers"

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Unexpected help from an old friend: Jerry Mander, who wrote the brilliant Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, is back with a new book entitled The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System.  The "fatal flaw" is that capitalism, by its very nature, by definition, requires growth:

"Either the system grows, with a constant stream of new income and investment, or it fails...Even liberal media economic gurus like Paul Krugman agonize over growth rates if they fall to a mere 1.5 percent, when they must become about 2.5 percent for adequate profit distribution, and 3.5 percent for new job creation. In capitalist economies, growth is what it's all about...To achieve constant growth in the real economy, capitalism requires constant expansion of three primary ingredients that are, alas, impossible to sustain."

These three ingredients are an expanding stock of cheap resources; expanding consumer or industrial markets ("and a generalized philosophy of life that equates constant consumption with happiness and success."); and cheap (or slave) labor, as in Asia. As Gail Tverberg writes in her simple, logical essays on her blog Our Finite World, you cannot sustain infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.  Herman Daly, the University of Maryland eco-economist, made these points long ago in Steady State Economics.  The economy, when all is said and done, is based on a derivation of livelihood from the natural world.  The complexity of modern life sometimes obscures this basic truth, and we get carried away with "virtual capitalism" (as Jerry Mander calls it) where "derivatives" such as stock options and credit default swaps and the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of modern day financial wheeling and dealing get counted as "wealth" in the calculation of gross domestic product (GDP) as if something real were happening.  When it's not. All of the costs associated with the war in Iraq contributed to the national tabulation: all of the bombs dropped, the Hummers blown up by roadside bombs, the prosthetics built for the traumatically-amputated, the downed helicopters, the coffins purchased for the war dead, the counseling for the bereaved, and all of the other elements of this trillion dollar folly: ka-ching!

Which is to say, the calculation of GDP is by its very nature sociopathic and amoral.  Yet "mainstream" economists, liberal and conservative alike, are slaves to the concept of growth in GDP, and one of the reasons that the liberal darling Paul Krugman spends so little time criticizing the trillion dollar yearly defense and "homeland security" budget is that, by and large, his Keynesian proclivities lead him to believe that every dollar spent by the federal government is a good dollar because it boosts "aggregate demand," that is, it feeds the insatiable desire of the American populace for more stuff.  And that keeps the economy going.

Which is also to say, Mr. Krugman uses his Science in the service of the status quo, but he is regarded as a force for Good by his liberal supporters because he wants Americans to have "jobs," and no one can criticize him for that.

In point of fact, job creation in a stagnant economy with a growing population is a real problem. I note these days that the mainstream economists are throwing a lot of rocks at each other, even more than usual.  The liberals blame the conservative fixation on "austerity," and the conservatives blame the debt-ridden condition of the modern industrial economies (e.g., Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff).  The liberals (chief among them, Mr. Krugman) believe that the way to ignite the economy into a new simulacrum of growth is to borrow more money and go more deeply into debt until the economy gains "traction" and operates once again at "full potential."  Just like the good old days when the Earth was home to three billion people (instead of seven), no one was worried about climate change (instead of wondering whether we have initiated runaway global warming), the "master resource" for energy, petroleum, was plentiful and cheap (instead of increasingly scarce and ruinously expensive), the oceans were thriving (instead of acidified, with the base of the food chain, phytoplankton, half-dead, and 90% of the large fish stocks gone), and the Green Revolution was easily feeding the world's billions (instead of straining now to meet demand, with famine spreading with climate change-induced droughts). 

As I've said before, I don't know how mainstream economists could fail to notice the real world around them.  I don't understand why they have pointless arguments about whether the Federal Reserve made a mistake in 1937, or whenever, as a means of explaining what is going on now.  I suppose it comes down to academic turf: Scientists such as Mr. Krugman have built a reputation (and an opulent lifestyle) on dry-labbing their analyses of what's going on, and once they open the Pandora's Box of considering the state of the environment, and humanity's 40% overshoot of sustainability, and of the urgent need to power down to avoid a climate catastrophe, then their models become instantaneously obsolete.  So they ignore the real world and focus instead on their abstract models of an abstract world where none of these messy details gets in the way.

Reality, of course, is that thing that doesn't go away even when you ignore it.  So rail on, Mr. Krugman & Co., against the dastardly proponents of Austerity, and argue for increased borrowing (from whom? from ourselves, from everyone, it doesn't matter), and keep contending that all could be well, right now, if we would just listen.  While you do so, I will try not to notice the flop sweat beginning to drip down your forehead and dampen your collar.

Saturday Morning Essay: Liberalism Lives on in Berkeley: Brad DeLong, the Krugman of the West

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Brad DeLong of the Berkeley economics faculty tends to mirror his Princetonian mentor, Paul Krugman, in a somewhat sycophantic way, as the following passage suggests:

I would say that six years ago something like 80% of economists and commentators, certainly including me, shared Niall Ferguson's belief that the debt capacity of the United States government was limited and that rising debt would produce rising interest rates and rising inflation rates, and that old-fashioned Keynesian expansionary fiscal policies were of very limited utility in achieving economic prosperity. Today the 20% minority six years ago are all saying "we told you so"; We 60% in the middle are trying to figure out whether we were always wrong or whether simply the world changed in 2008 in a major way; And there are 20% dead-enders--including Niall Ferguson--who from my perspective at least continue to fail to mark their beliefs to market, in part because they think that doing so would require them to declare some form of intellectual bankruptcy.

Mr. DeLong, on his "Grasping Reality With Both Invisible Hands" blog (this, which I didn't think possible, is actually worse than "The Conscience of a Liberal"), often spills a lot of cyber-ink defending Paul Krugman from his many detractors.  He's kind of Mr. Krugman's bulldog or palace guard.  They share other tendencies, such as a fascination with America's military history.  Krugman's obsession is Ulysses S. Grant and the Civil War, and Delong is mad about World War II.  Right away, this tends to make me sympathetic to the Berkeley guy, aside from the connection to my alma mater.

DeLong's defenses of Krugman are vociferous and tendentious, in general, although the above quoted passage from a couple of days ago, which I quite like, is a welcome exception.  Here Mr. DeLong is admitting, in an appealing way, that he used to base his economic analyses of fiscal and monetary policy on the "Weimar" principle that you can't simply finance the federal government with printed money without running the risk of runaway inflation, rising Treasury rates, and budgetary breakdown, so that the government should not attempt a full-tilt Keynesian recovery (increasing the budget deficits in an effort to stimulate "aggregate demand").

What I think Mr. DeLong is forgetting is that Mr. Krugman was himself more or less of this school in the days when George W. Bush was President. I quoted the relevant passage in my "Mr. Krugman's Science" series.  From March 11, 2003, in his column "A Fiscal Train Wreck":

My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt.  And as that temptation becomes obvious, interest rates will soar.

Well, in a "science" as flexible as economics, one can always dance away from such an analysis, if it later proves embarrassing, as it probably did, since Mr. Krugman based his decision to switch to a fixed rate mortgage at 2003 rates from whatever he had before.  I'm sure Mr. Krugman would point out that in 2003, America was not in a "liquidity trap," or something along those lines.  (I may take over the West Bay position of Mr. Krugman's Praetorian Guard, or Chief Eunuch at the Harem.)

But back to the estimable Mr. DeLong, who, in general, is a far more fluent and incisive writer than the economist he worships.  I suspect, given the clarity of his expositions, that Mr. DeLong is a very good teacher, with the only limitation on this accolade the recognition that the subject he teaches is complete and utter nonsense. He muses about an important point: did the "world change in some major way in 2008" ?

At first blush, that seems like a pretty dumb thing to say.  As in, what does it even mean?  What does "way" mean, for example?  Huh?  The world changed in a major way.  Did the Earth assume a cube shape, for example?  Did it begin revolving around the sun in the opposite direction?  Did it become 70% land and 30% ocean?  I would regard these changes as major. 

Mr. Krugman, going way back to 2009, defended his thesis by an instrumental argument; that is, he analyzed the way that quantitative easing actually worked and concluded that it could not be inflationary because the Federal Reserve's money creation simply plumped up the excess reserve accounts of the Primary Dealers. It did not find its way into the real economy (that's where you and I live). This was a very intelligent insight.  So what was the difference between Mr. Krugman's 2003 "banana republic" warning and his 2009 position, other than the fact that it was no longer Mr. Bush's ox he was goring?   I suspect the answer's simple: his Princeton colleague, Ben Bernanke, sat Mr. Krugman down and explained how quantitative easing actually worked.  It's good to have friends in high places.

This is not idle speculation, really.  Mr. Krugman is capable of missing the most obvious things in the world, such as the effect of modern automation (robots, etc.) on unemployment, and (the howler to top all howlers) that Americans used the fictional equity in their homes during the housing bubble to sustain the massive "aggregate demand" that Mr. Krugman now insists on using as a trend line for determining whether the economy is under performing.  Yes, Mr. Krugman missed that.

Quantitative easing is for the purpose of helping the federal government service its massive debt at manageable interest rates.  The Federal Reserve provides a giant secondary market for Treasuries and for junk debt such as mortgage-backed securities, so that Primary Dealers can buy this sketchy paper at very low rates knowing that the Fed will take it off their hands and submerge it into the enormous debt sink of the Fed's balance sheet if the paper promises begin to lose their face value.

Nothing "changed" in the world in 2008.  Something, instead, was revealed once again.  The great industrial economies of the Western world and in Japan have run out of steam because they're up against real world limitations brought on by the Limits to Growth.  The housing bubble game masked this reality for a while by allowing massive inflation in equities.  Now we're lumbering along in more or less the same fashion as a Disney brontosaurus stuck in a tar pit in "Fantasia," with similar prospects.  But party on, Garth & Wayne Paul & Brad, and keep writing like it really matters.