The Default Lies Not in Our Stars, But in Ourselves

Further proof that This Shit Writes Itself. 

I am genuinely agnostic about the prospect of a default by the Treasury on its humongous debt obligations. I see the whole controversy as ranting and raving about the ultimate zero sum game.  What's the difference, when you come right down to it?  The worst that could happen is that all these incredibly annoying people in Congress would become unemployed, Chris Matthews could wipe the spittle from the corners of his mouth one last time, Bill O'Reilly could stop writing memos to himself, and that would be that.  All of the states have governments. They could take over.

And just because it's such a tantalizing and attractive idea, you know it will never happen.

Now, I should point out that the Treasury's position is out of control for self-inflicted reasons.  The budget could be brought into balance almost immediately by eliminating 75% of the military-industrial complex (reducing its drain from $1 trillion per year to $250 billion, and emphasizing the nuclear umbrella, which is all we really need to deter aggression against us), but the politicians in Washington, on both sides of the aisle, cannot do that without giving up their hobby of playing war all year long, year in, year out.  If they throw down their guns, American citizens will begin to notice that all Washington, D.C. really does is recycle money through two elaborate insurance schemes, Social Security and Medicare, and both of those functions could be outsourced to call centers in Bangalore, India.  Plus our Customer Representatives in India could, while we're on the line, reboot our internet connection and tell us how to program the DVR.  Try that with Ted Cruz.

Beyond the military, state governments would be perfectly competent to handle what little else the federal government does (for example, let the states run the wildernesses known as the national parks).   We don't need a federal government.

 Congress can't eliminate the military without losing a major source of baksheesh from defense contractors, not to mention their raison d'etre (attacking foreign countries), and if they try to eliminate Social Security they're up against this:

"For nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of elderly beneficiaries, Social Security provides the majority of their cash income. For more than one-third (36 percent), it provides more than 90 percent of their income. For one-quarter (24 percent) of elderly beneficiaries, Social Security is the sole source of retirement income.[21] (See figure below.)" Center on Budget  and Policy Priorities.

Crunch the math on the above sad situation for a moment.  If the average Social Security old age benefit is $1,200 per month, which it is, then in general for two-thirds of the elderly, $1,200 represents, on average, most of their income, meaning that total income is less than $2,400 per month. If the federal government suddenly removes more than half of this amount from a huge number of elderly retirees (about 40 million people), then Congress will plunge this cohort of habitual voters into deep poverty.  The following day, a Million Walker & Wheelchair March would descend on the Capitol Dome, and Republican chances in the fall of 2014 would go into the toilet.

So the Congressional clowns aren't really going to do anything like that.  The Republican morons have made a lot of noise about Obamacare, but that's for The Base.  They know Obama cannot back down on that, his only accomplishment as President.  But he will back down on something else, probably food stamps, and that will be the next trophy on John Boehner's wall, displayed proudly next to the Sequester and the repeal of the FICA tax break, all without mothballing a single aircraft carrier or cancelling a single war.

Nor can the Republicans allow a default.  Manufacturing dollar bills is this country's main industry and our chief export.  Congress cannot play games with this money machine (quite literally).  It's all over if we do, because we have nothing else other than bombs and Frankenstein food to sell. 

Relax and enjoy the circus.  Oh look!  Ted Cruz is going to run all the way across the ring and jump onto the back of that white horse with a chihuahua for a jockey!

Saturday Morning Essay: Welcome to the Free Fire Zone

I don't usually follow such stories attentively, but for one reason or another I stayed abreast of Thursday's news concerning Miriam Carey, the 34 year old dental hygienist from Connecticut who was shot dead by Washington, D.C. area police following a high-speed chase in the area near the Capitol and White House.  Here is how the New York Times cast its lede for the story:

 "WASHINGTON — A woman with a young child was shot to death after turning her vehicle into a weapon on Thursday afternoon, ramming her way through barriers outside the White House and on Capitol Hill."

Actual video and still photos of the incident "near the White House" (actually, quite a distance from the White House itself - more like "near the entrance to an access road to the White House") do not really support these dramatic claims.  While Ms. Carey's black Infiniti collided with a bollard blocking entrance to the White House access road, the video and photographs show no damage to her car.  When she was approached by cops, guns drawn, she backed away fast, struck a parked police cruiser, and a police officer in the way rolled over the hood of the Infiniti to avoid being struck (he sustained minor injuries). Still photos of another police cruiser with extensive damage were carried in the Times with the notation that the car "was damaged in the chase," leaving a reader with the impression that Ms. Carey collided with the police car.  In point of fact, the cruiser struck a "pop-up" road barricade that was raised by other police precisely at the wrong moment.

Ms. Carey met her end when her Infiniti got stuck on a grassy road median near the Senate Office Building.  Surrounded by police, she had apparently gotten out of her car, leaving her infant daughter in the vehicle, and was shot dead by a hail of bullets.  As the Times drily notes:

"What occurred next was not clear. Ms. Carey managed to get out of the car, and was shot by several officers. According to a law enforcement official, she was not armed, and it was not known whether she presented an immediate danger."

How odd that "clarity" broke down precisely at that decisive moment.  Since everything these days is on video, I'm sure that "what occurred next" could be cleared up in an instant.  Whatever, it seems fair to ask: if Miriam Carey was not armed, in what conceivable way could she have presented "an immediate danger" as she got out of her car?  What was the rationale for gunning her down at that point?  Also, in what sense had she ever turned her Infiniti "into a weapon," as the Times began its story?  

In microcosmic form, you have here all the elements of modern American myth-making.  The first instinct of Big Media is to protect the elites: to frame the story so that it reads as heroic defenders of American security "doing their job" to keep us safe from suspected....well, suspected what?  You can't help but wonder whether the automatic assumption was that Miriam Carey was a (black, as it happens) terrorist driving a car bomb, with her infant daughter along for the ride, trying to bust her way through security to detonate her "weapon" at the portico to the White House.

The Huffington Post ran a story yesterday about five previous attacks on the White House over the last thirty years or so, one of which involved a shooter firing a semi-automatic rifle at the White House and hitting his target.  In none of these previous episodes did the police find it necessary to kill the attacker.  A number of these attacks seemed to carry a much greater degree of threat than that posed by Miriam Carey.  All previous perpetrators were subdued using standard police work, or the assistance of passersby.

It's obvious that Miriam Carey could have been safely taken into custody by the Washington, D.C. police.  Her car had been immobilized by her own reckless driving. She had gotten out of her car, unarmed.  She could have been charged with assaulting a police officer (with her Infiniti), resisting arrest, driving recklessly, and endangering the public.  All of that would have been justified.  Her mental health problems would have been taken into consideration in sentencing her, as well as the needs of her infant daughter.  She would have spent a stretch (not too long) in jail.

Instead, she's dead.  Her daughter will grow up without a mother. I think she's dead because the legal ethos in America has gravitated toward a system where due process has been replaced by summary execution on the basis of suspicion.  The public is generally okay with it, the Mainstream Media, protective of their Elite Access and "contacts" within the power structure, praise and celebrate it, and the general lesson for all of us is pretty simple: don't have a nervous breakdown anywhere near one of our venerated leaders or Palaces of Power, or we'll gun you down in cold blood.

The Government Shutdown Looms

Matters in Washington, District of Columbia, capital of the United States of America, are getting increasingly serious.  So much so that Paul Krugman, mild-mannered economist for a great metropolitan newspaper, will appear on "This Week" with George Stephetcetera.

Paul will blame the Republicans.  This makes sense. 

As I understand matters, the impasse really has two parts.  The first, which triggers the shutdown, is that the Continuing Resolution (CR), which America now uses instead of its Constitutionally-mandated process of passing a budget, will expire as of October 1.  The CR allows the government to continue spending money in the absence of budgetary authorization.  Beyond this hurdle, however, looms the Debt Ceiling.  Jack Lew, the latest in a series of Treasurer-Three Card Monte experts, will run out of ways to conjure cash on or about October 17.  He's been cashing in federal employee retirement bonds and playing other games to keep the government afloat for some time, but he's hitting rock bottom now.  If we don't raise the debt ceiling, we cannot increase the national debt.

The Republicans are threatening the United States with default on its sacred obligation to sell more debt in order to pay debt service on existing debt.  As President Obama has said several times during this crisis, America has always paid its bills, and lately has always done so by borrowing money to pay interest payments on money we previously borrowed.  We will not walk away from this sacred commitment, not if President Obama, who's on the government payroll and thus receives about one-third of his salary from borrowed money, has anything to say about it.

The Republicans are messing with the full faith and credit of the United States.  We have never defaulted.  We have always gone out into the open market, sold our promises to pay back money to the highest bidder, which about half the time is part of a market-making cartel called the Primary Dealers, who promptly turn around and sell it back to the Permanent Open Market Operations Committee of the Federal Reserve, who raise the money by blowing it out of their assholes.

 This can go on forever, as Mr. Krugman will point out.  He will also point out that the Republicans hate Obamacare because it will work, and will sabotage the country because the American economy is recovering, and they don't want that because they hate Mr. Obama.

I will now take a break and actually watch George Stephetcetera and see what the esteemed panelists have to say about these latest developments in the nation's capital.

***************

They actually said nothing. More interesting was George's interview with the Iranian chief negotiator on nuclear issues. The Iranian spokesman denied that Iran is in pursuit of a nuclear weapon, and what about the way Israel treats the Palestinians?  The Iranian spokesman's position, of course, is the same as that of the American intelligence agencies who have looked into the issue pretty deeply, but this fact is not the airwave version of reality used by Big Media.  In Big Media Reality, Iran is actively seeking a nuclear weapon but lies about it.  Under the commutative principle, where A=B, B=C, therefore A=C, Big Media are, of course, accusing the 14 American intelligence agencies which reached a consensus opinion agreeing with the Iranian spokesman of also lying, but it is unnecessary in American Airwave Discourse to discuss real facts when the Memes work better for television.

The Iranian spokesman appeared to accuse the United States of hypocrisy concerning Syria's use of chemical weapons, insofar as the U.S. was aware of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, and not only said nothing but assisted the process.  George responded to this by accusing the Iranian regime of Holocaust denial.  The two then dissed each other's mother and called it a wrap.

The key question thus remains: will my Social Security check be mailed on the third Wednesday in October?

Saturday Morning Essay: The New IPCC Report

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

Here's your money shot from the new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

Quite elegant in its presentation.  About 800 scientists, actually trained to within an inch of their lives in relevant fields of climatology, atmospheric physics, meteorology, oceanography, and paleontology, have concluded to the 95% confidence level that the predominant cause of global warming since 1950 has been the influence of human beings.  The 95% confidence level is sort of the gold standard of statistical analysis; you can almost say, in a way, that if you don't believe this, you don't really believe anything at all except shit that you yourself make up.

Making shit up, of course, is the stock-in-trade of those legions of the Dark Force known as Right Wing Think Tanks.  All of our "controversies" in the United States are generated by Right Wing Think Tanks; we think we're engaging in some sort of two-sided "discourse" on issues, but we're not.  There is reality, and there is the world of disinformation promulgated by Right Wing Think Tanks.  It's really as simple as that.  The propaganda machines of Big Oil, the Koch Brothers, the Pete Petersen Foundation - they're all in on it.  Grinding out falsehoods 24/7 to promote a financial agenda.

You can see that somewhere around 2050, the future lines begin to diverge markedly.  The Report concludes, however, that if strong mitigation (mostly, reduction in CO2) were to begin, you know, soon - then global average temperature rise can be held below 2 deg. C in 2100.  Because of the lag time between emission of CO2 and its effect on climate, we cannot wait until 2050 to begin reducing emissions.  It takes about 30 years before the effects show up, and once the temperature rise is established, it's effectively permanent.

That's the good news within the Blue probability band.  Within the Red band, involving "business as usual," you can see that global average temperature might rise 6 deg. Centigrade by 2100.  Try to imagine that.  This is a consortium of climate scientists from about 125 countries, trying to limit themselves to the most scientifically verifiable results possible (being "conservative," in other words), and in the results of their report they are behooved to tell us that the average global temperature 87 years from now (the length of one long life) will be about 10 degrees F. warmer if we keep living the way we're living now.  Just for starters, this means that the entire ice sheet atop Greenland will melt, resulting in a 7 meter rise in sea level.  That's significant.  For example, I live near San Francisco Bay, but I'm not currently living in San Francisco Bay. 

Blue Pill or Red Pill?  The summary at Realclimate.org, available right here on the Pond's blogsite, is very clear and informative.  The blogmeisters at Realcimate, guys like Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley, who were pilloried by mouth-breathing petroleum whores like Joe Barton of Texas, have been thoroughly vindicated in their warnings many years ago.  I ask you whether the Red Band does not in fact show alarming signs of forming a parabolic curve?

As The Most Interesting Man in the World might be paraphrased:  Stay Blue, my friends.

This Shit Writes Itself

An old college buddy was in town over the weekend recently and so, as is our custom, we tooled across the San Rafael Bridge to the woebegone flatlands of the East Bay to visit the alma mater. We just walked around.  The Berkeley we attended in the late Sixties isn't there anymore, because nothing is where you left it.  That's the first lesson of four-dimensional Reality; the other spatial dimensions may keep their original shape, Sproul Plaza may look just as it did when Mario Savio warned everyone about the odious machine, but Time and History have moved on, and the present which inhabits Berkeley now is not the present we experienced.  Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but then it never was.  Going to the site of a bygone era never produces much in the way of immediacy; what is it that people expect to happen?

At a clothing store on Bancroft, across from the Telegraph Avenue entrance to the campus, I saw a stack of red tee-shirts with Will Shakespeare's likeness silkscreened on the front above the words in script, "This shit writes itself."  Years ago I read a Peter DeVries comic novel set in academia, as many of his books were, where that was the central conceit of the protagonist.  William Shakespeare was overrated and concealed banality behind belletristic, highly embellished phrasing which anyone could imitate.  His shit wrote itself.  I found the novel irritating and pretentious; there was nothing banal about Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan language he employed soared on wings of matchless beauty.  The faux-Shakespeare which DeVries attempted in an effort to prove his point only showed that the author's shit wrote itself but did not approach the Bard of Avon's work.

Cowell Hospital, where I worked to put myself through school, is gone now, replaced by the Haas School of Business.  I would describe the architectural style of the school as Chateau-Nouveau.  Big Business is definitely where the money is now, if ever it were anywhere else in American history.  Across Panoramic from the Haas is the newly-refurbished Memorial Stadium, with its inevitable "world class" training facility, built as a shrine to a departed, and highly overpaid, football coach. The clean, modern concourses at Memorial, the graceful apron of white concrete covering the old dirt approaches from the campus, put the stadium in the big time.  UC alums can hold their heads up high whenever they entertain friends from Norman, Oklahoma or Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  The football team is still mediocre, of course, but they now lose in a beautiful venue.

We drove back to the West Bay over the new Bay Bridge.  This is another structure of surpassing beauty, the old clunky "cantilever" section that once connected Yerba Buena Island to Oakland replaced by a graceful span suspended over the bay by a single spire, from which hang the suspension cables to either side of the roadway.  The effect is like driving under a pair of immense harps leaning against each other.  I was actually blown away by the ingenuity of the design and its gorgeous realization.

I've been in the Bay Area a long time.  New things keep replacing the old things of my youth here, of course.  So many things are different, yet in some basic way that's difficult to express, it all still looks much the same.  Most of the people I knew growing up here are now gone, one way or the other.  The old college buddy now lives on the South Coast of England, as a single example.  My favorite cousin, the writer who lived in Santa Cruz, left this life altogether four years ago, or at least that corporeal form which existed before his constituent parts were scattered in his beloved Northern California.

I suppose that will be my fate too, some day.  It sounds right.  For now, the Swimmer abides.

Saturday Morning Essay: Things to Know About Syria

I was, as a kid, an avid reader of the World Book Encyclopedia.  Our family had a nice set of volumes bound in white leather which my parents bought from Mr. Moses, who had been a PE teacher at one of the schools I attended.  It was strange to see Mr. Moses in our living room making his pitch, but, then as now, American society tends to denigrate primary teachers and pays them accordingly.  Mr. Moses was just going door-to-door to help make ends meet.

Anyway, I found you could learn a lot just by leafing through the World Book's colorful pages.  It was a good way to get oriented on a new subject: atomic energy, how an internal combustion engine works, types of wheat grown in Kansas.  In modern times, we can use the on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia; we can, as the kids say, Wikipedia that shit whenever a new topic comes up.

Such as Syria.  There is what I regard as a pretty good entry on Syria in Wikipedia.  It sets the stage for the question: should we bomb it?

I take as my point of departure that the "official discussion," the back and forth between our boring Secretary of State, John Kerry, whose heart bleeds Heinz Ketchup for the gassed Syrians (h/t: Linh Dinh, one of our most talented writers that you've never heard of) and Vladimir "The Gangster" Putin.  The public announcements which President Barack Obama has been asked to make by whoever it is that controls the United States are all by way of distraction and propaganda.  We're not going to bomb Syria "to teach Bashar al-Assad a lesson" about using Sarin gas on his fellow Syrians. We're not worried about "red lines" being crossed, because they're not being crossed here in the U. S. and A. (h/t: Borat).

Lacking an official rationale, or even an apparently cogent reason, for bombing Syria, should we nevertheless do it?  This is another way of asking: would it do any good?

This is where I think Wikipedia comes in.  What kind of country would we be bombing this time?  First of all, Syria is a dry, hot and crowded country with a burgeoning population and dwindling resources (sort of like Earth itself).  In 1960, when Syria was still a member of  Nasser's socialist United Arab Republic (mostly, Syria and Egypt), Syria had a population of about 4 million.  That was 50 years ago.  Today the population is 22 million.  Economically, Syria relies on agriculture and hydrocarbon production.  Its oil fields are contiguous to and part of the same geological formation as Iraq's northern fields in Mosul and Kirkuk.  However, Syria's oil production is in serious decline. As recently as 1995 its oil production was about 600,000 barrels per day; today the figure is around 140,000 barrels a day.  A country where the population increases by 500% while its cash cow dries up and yields no more milk is a country circling the drain, to mix a bunch of metaphors, such as a wizened cow circling your bathtub drain. I mean, who needs that?

Syria is about half the size of California in land area, with a population about two-thirds the size of the Golden State.  Syria's latitudes (between about 32 degrees N. and 35 degrees) place it on a level with the area from Tijuana to Los Angeles, if that helps.  It became Muslim, predominantly, in about 640 A.D, so that looks like a stable trend.  What we call Syria's international borders are the usual fabrication by imperial powers (the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France after World War I) enacted after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Whether the Alawite sect, the Sunni, the Shia, the Coptics, the Christians, the Jews, the Kurds and the usual mishmash of ethnic odds and ends can ever form any kind of coherent democracy is an open question.  Certainly, on a Wikipedia-based analysis, the prospects are far from certain.  Bashar al-Assad, the current potentate, inherited the presidency from his father Hafez, who participated in the military coup in 1963 that overthrew the UAR leadership and installed the current Ba'ath dynasty.  You'll recall "Ba'ath" from Saddam Hussein's peeps.  One must admit that it doesn't sound like a democracy when presidents inherit the position from their fathers; the Syrians should follow the American example and have a scion of a dynasty imposed upon the people by a Supreme Court.

Syria is riven by droughts, no doubt a harbinger of climate change dynamics that are not going to help its other main industry, agriculture.  Thus, lots of factions who hate each other, moiling poverty, poor prospects, a civil war (no doubt because of all the other factors), a de facto dictatorship.  Syria is a geographical pawn in an oil and natural gas pipeline game being played by Russia and the West, with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran playing walk-on parts.  Nothing has anything to do with poison gas, other than as an excuse to drop bombs into this chaotic maelstrom in the hope that Bashar decamps to Monte Carlo with Asma so the West can install an anti-Russian tough guy and build a natural gas pipeline from Qatar to the Mediterranean so that Europe can get out from under Putin's iron hand on the spigot.  So, Vladimir Putin, whose most recently developed persona is that of an Op-Ed writer for the New York Times, is trying to finesse the U.S. out of its excuse to bomb the holy bejesus out of Saul of Tarsus's old stomping grounds, and doing a pretty good job since the Chief Executive Officer of America, Inc. was forced to dispatch John Ketchup, with his magnificent head of steel gray hair (under which resides a much less impressive brain), to Geneva to go through the motions of "securing" Syria's chemical weapons.

Yeah, that's what we want.  Anyway, thought I'd share my deep research with you, having Wikipediaed dat shit.  I don't think Syria is on my travel destination list.  Not only are they not taking me to Marrakech, tell Aleppo to forget the whole thing.

President Obama's Moue

I'm pretty sure I know where President Obama got his moue:

I only wish I had been able to google an image of Bubba Bill moue-ing alone.  Here he's moue-ing with Hillary, probably about some unfair attack on his wife:

 Where Bill's moue is a little stronger is in the inversion of the smile; he pushes up more forcefully with the lower lip, which, to be fair, seems to be a little thicker than Barack's.  Well, F= ma, so Bill, pushing forcefully up with that lower lip, can contort more of his visage into a simulacrum of sincere regret.

"Moue" is one of those almost-untranslatable French words which lose a lot when the attempt is made to define them with English words.  It is a pouting look of resignation and sadness, an expression you might wear if you thought you were about to receive something you wanted and it was taken away at the last moment. Sort of like chagrin, another Froggish word, but a little different. 

The Obama image was actually taken from a French publication which captioned it, "La Moue du President."  I had just been guessing that Barack's inverted smile might be so called in French. I suppose the French are more attuned to this sort of nuance, another French borrowing.

I've been of the opinion for a long time that President Obama's real talents lie in the dramatic arts,  and especially impersonation.  This makes him an ideal candidate in the post-modern, media-defined reality of the American present.  I don't think I've ever heard Mr. Obama say anything, off the cuff, that sounded the least bit original, insightful or even particularly useful.  His campaign speeches in 2008 were often electrifying, but I noticed even then that they bore an eerie similarity, in cadence, volume dynamics, and timing, to the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  It was a little unsettling. From what I can tell, Barack was born in Honolulu, spent part of his early youth in Indonesia, then returned to Honolulu and went to high school at Punahou, then matriculated at Occidental in Southern California, then went to Columbia and Harvard, then worked in Chicago.

Where in any of that would a person pick up the soaring oratorical style of a preacher plying his trade at the Dexter Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama?  From the church he attended in Chicago?  That preacher proved to be more trouble to Barack than he was worth.

Nah, I think he studied the Lincoln Memorial speech of 1963 and essentially analyzed it, internalized it, and began delivering it.  I grew up in close proximity to chataqua-style preachers (a heavy burden of my youth) and saw some pretty good ones.  A lot of it is timing.  Dr. King had it down to a T.  Once he had the audience revved up, he would not slow down or pause when the cheering and "Amen" shouting began.  On the contrary, he would accelerate, raise his voice to higher volume and soar out over the cheers and calling. The effect that MLK produced was...well, there's no other word: electrifying.  In effect, he used the reaction of the crowd as part of his own rhetorical power.  It is a master's gift.

Barack got all of that and made it his own.  Keep in mind that I recognize that as a substantial gift in itself - the ability to discern what it was that MLK was doing, how it worked, and why it was so effective.

On the other hand, the essential problem with impersonation is that it allows the audience, or voting populace, to identify you with the original (probably in an unconscious way, unless you're a blogger with a little too much time on your hands) without actually imbuing you with the talents and gifts of the original. Frank Gorshin might have sounded exactly like Jimmy Cagney, but that doesn't mean that Frank Gorshin would have been any good in "White Heat."  Imitating MLK, Jr., or pulling a Clintonian moue, may get you through this press conference, or the next invasion in the Arab world, but it doesn't actually lead the American people anywhere good.  Martin Luther King's talents just began with public oratory.  He was also a brilliant writer and a keen political mind who seemed to know exactly which buttons to push and when.  As with most geniuses, he was far out in front of his camp followers, who often thought he was going too far, too soon. 

This is certainly not a problem with President Obama.  It seems to be 2003 all over again, as he agitates for a war just about everyone recognizes is stupid, using the same tired arguments as his predecessor, the same mobilization of "serious faces" (John Kerry this time instead of Colin Powell) to sell the war, even the same jingle:  "President (fill in the name) used poison gas on his own people!  So we must invade!"

With a long way to go in Obama's second term, I think this is what a lot of American people are waking up to realize, particularly self-identified liberals.  There doesn't seem to be a There there in our "Being There" president.  It seems more like a recycling of bits and gags from previous presidencies, with all the same people running things, all the same moves, all the same wars, all the same moues.  The Hologram nominally at the center of it all leaves a power vacuum in which the vested interests of the military-industrial complex, which abide from administration to administration, can do what they want, confident that the Mimic-In-Chief will let them have their way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Morning Essay: On the Futility of Modern Waldenism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grand Unified Theory of Unconscious Evolution, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Safe Side of The Line

David Gregory and Karl Rove get down.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noun

chazzer (plural chazzers)

1. (slang) pig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Morning Essay: Ordinary Pleasures

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitchens versus the Christers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Morning Essay: Notes to myself on coinage

Brought to you by Trader Joe's Dark Roast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few thoughts on the Zimmerman case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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