Sorry, Mr. Krugman. It Wasn't Me.

Walden swimmer's body found

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CONCORD — Authorities say they have found a body in Walden Pond that may be that of a 63-year-old Lincoln man missing since he went swimming there on Sunday.

Mr. Krugman's Science As Not Even Wrong

The phrase "not even wrong" bears a peculiar relevance to the work (which takes the form of disseminated confusion) of Paul Krugman, Ace Economics Columnist for a Great Metropolitan Newspaper.  "Not even wrong" is usually attributed to the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, that brilliant, acerbic nuclear researcher noted for his marked inability to suffer fools gladly.

The phrase apparently originates with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who used the phrase (in the form "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!" — "That is not only not right, it is not even wrong!") to describe an unclear research paper. Pauli was known for his detestation of sloppy writing and arguments, and for his somewhat "colourful" objections to such things.

"Not even wrong" might be further defined to refer to work that is so far off the mark, or so conceptually unfounded, that it does not even eliminate a possible direction for further research or analysis.

In the case of Mr. Krugman's Science, the field of macroeconomics (a category in the more general field of economics to which Mr. Krugman came lately, when it was obvious that only The Big Picture concerning the American malaise was going to hold the public's attention), I have generally felt that the effort to summarize, or diagnose, the problems with all modern economies within a framework of diagrams, sketches and occasional forays into pretentious mathematics (all heavily jargon-laden though they may be) is somewhat less than useless. This is particularly true of Mr. Krugman's brand of New Keynesian balderdash.

Sometimes Mr. Krugman will write this kind of thing on his blog, "The Conscience of a Liberal:"

The case of the euro is a bit different: I was very pessimistic about the strategy of austerity and internal devaluation, which I thought would have a terrible cost — and I was completely right about that. I also guessed that this cost would prove politically unsustainable, leading to a crisis for the euro itself; so far, at least, I have been wrong.

My economic model worked fine, my implicit political model didn’t; OK, so it goes.
Now, learning from your mistakes can cause trouble, especially on TV, where people use “In 1996 you said A, and now in 2013 you say B. Gotcha!” as a substitute for substantive discussion. But it’s what you’re supposed to do.

So, have any of the signatories to that 2010 letter admitted being wrong and explained why they were wrong? I mean *any* of them. Not as far as I know.
And at that point this becomes more than an intellectual issue. It becomes a test of character.

Mr. Krugman does this sort of thing a lot.  He seems to suffer from a clinical case of self-righteousness. Usually self-righteousness, the arrant tendency to brag about one's character or integrity, is a sign of underlying pathological deviousness. As the kids might say, "Who does that?"  The funny part of the euro volte-face which Mr. Krugman describes above is that it only came about after Niall Ferguson, in his three-part takedown of the Great One, pointed out the error of Mr. Krugman's arguments about the imminent demise of the euro.  This is really something to behold as far as Mr. Krugman's uneasy relationship with honesty is concerned.  He is now bragging about his candor and forthrightness in admitting an error which he only admitted because he was called out on it.

Who does that?

Well, I admit that Mr. Krugman plays the role of Dr. Moriarty to my Sherlock Holmes at times, and in his favor, I concede that if I were to choose between the Two Great Ichthyological Schools in the Great Economics Schism (Freshwater [Univ. of Chicago, primarily]) and Saltwater (Ivy League, Berkeley), I would side with Mr. Krugman and his fellow Keynesian disciples.  At least they're sort of realistic, unlike the "efficient market" maniacs of the Freshwater crowd, who posit all sorts of nonsense about the rationality of people, and perfect information, and the rest of it.

Although as Nasim Taleb, the Black Swan fellow, has noted, it is macroeconomics in general which is the big problem.  Macroeconomics has no more scientific validity than sociology or fourth-grade social studies, but it has been elevated to a guiding discipline in the conduct of national affairs, with disastrous results, because these people really have no idea what they're doing, and the values they champion, almost to a person, are the values of the Chazzer Economy - the unsustainable growth paradigm from 50 years ago. It is more of a cult than a science, and the academics who rant and rave at each other about who's right and who's wrong are engaging in a polemical food fight with non-rigorous arguments which have about as much chance of producing a clear winner as a faculty lounge debate about whether Hemingway or Faulkner was the better writer.

To give you an idea of the vaporous nature of Mr. Krugman's positions, for example, consider now his most recent column on Monday, November 18, where Mr. Krugman, dazzled by a presentation by Larry Summers at the IMF conference, opines that the current slump may be "permanent."  Very interesting. Yet Mr. Krugman just wrote a book, which he hustled all over the country, called "End This Depression Now." I don't think it made much of an impression, and anyway it's just a compilation of the daily drivel from the blog and columns, but it raises an interesting question: if Mr. Krugman has had the answer all along to the stagnation of Western world economies (which he often brags that he does), then how can this slump be "permanent?"

Mr. Krugman's case is especially egregious, because the prominence of his position and influence, and his self-proclaimed "liberalism" (which consists primarily of being a staunch supporter of the big entitlement programs, just like AARP) probably does allow him to influence national policy, even if not to the extent of his own fevered imagination.  And where Mr. Krugman wants the country to go is in the direction of Big Time Consumerism once again, to pump up "demand" so that everyone is employed doing something or other and spending lots of money on this and that.  Anyone who complains about this mindless approach and its disregard of such minor details as the possibility of near term extinction of human life from climate change, or overpopulation, or overuse of arable soils, or running out of freshwater (and not the academic kind) is rebuked by Mr. Krugman as indulging in an analysis of the economy "as a morality play," one of his most frequent (and boring and trite) ripostes.  Money for Social Security, for Detroit bail-outs, for Wall Street banks, for Predator drones or new aircraft carriers, for new highways, it doesn't matter.  The spending is the thing because we've got to get this (stagnant) economy moving again.

In this way Mr. Krugman is the perfect mouthpiece for the status quo and for the Summers/Clinton/Rubin style of Democratic "liberalism."  He's an Insider, who is careful never to tarnish his credentials as a DLC-style moderate.  He might praise Occupy Wall Street, but you won't find him down there on the street itself, the way that Steve Keen (an Australian economist) has done.  Maybe it's true, as demonstrated by numerous careful analyses, that Quantitative Easing is simply a wealth transfer mechanism to banks already bulging with liquidity force-fed to them by their main enabler, the Federal Reserve.  Nevertheless, Mr. Krugman remains an ardent champion of QE, even if it has no ameliorative effect on unemployment, even if it does nothing for the American commoner.  (I've often thought that Mr. Krugman should disclose his stock portfolio; with that, and preexisting knowledge of his three houses, we might draw a finer bead on some of his undisclosed motivations about bubble-blowing).

So I've been looking for ways to bring about a more thorough-going criticism of Mr. Krugman's Science, and in reading Lee Smolin's excellent Time Re-Born, I thought I might have found an analytical lens.  Mr. Smolin is a physicist at the University of Toronto, an egaging writer, who has set himself the task of proving that Time is real, and not an "illusion" or hypothesized dimension.  And in his description of "physics in a box," I thought I saw a way through to a broadside against the unscientific.  Which I will get to.

Mr. Krugman's Science: Ace Economist Discovers America

Brought to you by Peet's French Roast, pressed in a French press in a thoroughly French way...

If I were Paul Krugman, I would immediately offer a profuse apology for the hiatus in blogging.  So luxurious is Mr. Krugman's sense of self that he warns his vast herd of gullible lemmings when he knows that his busy schedule will compel him to be away.  He advises us to "be patient."  We will all have to stagger around in a confused state until he returns to his Conscientious Liberal post, slaps up a couple of graphs, and makes everything clear again.

Although yesterday...yesterday, Mr. Krugman did something rather strange. In commenting at length on a presentation Larry Summers made to the International Monetary Fund, that organ of imperialistic Neoliberalism which used to be very successful in transferring the material resources of the Third World to Wall Street and other Western capitals, Krugman let slip that the American economy is permanently fried.  As in:

"So how can you reconcile repeated bubbles with an economy showing no sign of inflationary pressures? Summers’s answer is that we may be an economy that needs bubbles just to achieve something near full employment – that in the absence of bubbles the economy has a negative natural rate of interest. And this hasn’t just been true since the 2008 financial crisis; it has arguably been true, although perhaps with increasing severity, since the 1980s."

For Mr. Krugman, Ace Economic Reporter for a Great Metropolitan Newspaper, this insight is stunning.  He needed Larry Summers, a genuine Big Thinker, to point it all out for him, and then Krugman, of course, had to muddle the picture with his usual jargon and obfuscation - the stuff about "negative interest rates" and, elsewhere in his fumbling analysis of the Summers take, his usual "liquidity trap" ....claptrap.   Mr. Krugman lives in constant terror that his readers are going to see just how obvious it is that the American economy is stuck in what Summers calls a permanent "secular stagnation."  If people begin to see that, then Mr. Krugman's shamanistic incantations about "Keynesian stimulus" and deficit spending and the rest are going to be seen for the futile, dangerous acts of lunacy which they are.  If the American economy isn't going to recover to its robust, humming 1964 essence (which is Mr. Krugman's apparent vision), then Mr. Krugman and the other mainstays on the New York Times Op-Ed pages (the Council of Morons consisting of David Brooks, Bill Keller, Tom Friedman and Mr. Krugman himself) have become completely irrelevant. Worse than irrelevant, because the "globalization" cheerleading of guys like Mr. Krugman and Mr. Friedman have assured America that it now has nothing left to fall back on.  Without the housing bubble, for example, the Planning (parties & weddings) & Tanning (one's own skin, not cowhide) Economy cannot reemerge, because the discretionary income to propel it is all gone.  American Commoners are just scraping by, saving their money to pay for relentlessly high gasoline and food prices, with only 62% of the working age population actually employed in some kind of job.

You have to work at places like the New York Times and Princeton to miss all of that. If you're an unemployed auto worker living in Detroit, you figured it all out a long time ago, and the wonders of the Flat Earth have been lost on you throughout this "secular stagnation."  Indeed, my reaction to Mr. Krugman's epiphany is identical to the young Alvey Singer's to the perennially-worng Ivan Ackerman. Forehead slap!

It is gratifying to see that others are coming around to the truth about Mr. Krugman.  For example, in a long piece on Counterpunch, Paul Craig Roberts muses about the possibility that Mr. Krugman might be a "voodoo economist." 

"Krugman has a social conscience for which I respect him. I am confident that he would agree with me that economists who lack a social conscience do more harm than good.  In my opinion, for what it is worth, Krugman does not understand or realize the way in which jobs offshoring has changed the US economy, the position of US workers and employees, and the efficacy of economic policy.

As I have often explained, when US corporations pursue higher profits at the expense of US labor by offshoring the jobs that produce the goods and services that they sell to Americans, they separate the US labor force from the incomes associated with the production of the goods and services that they consume.  Eventually, this destroys the consumer market.  According to the Census Bureau, American median family income is 9% less than a dozen years ago. This means that what once was spending power of American consumers is now the paper wealth of the mega-rich.

Keynesian stimulus policy works when the jobs from which people have been laid off still exist. By boosting aggregate demand for goods and services, the stimulus puts people back to work.  But if the jobs have been moved offshore and the factories closed, the jobs no longer exist.  No stimulus policy can put the unemployed into jobs that no longer exist.

Krugman has not come to terms with this basic fact.  Nor have the majority of economists. Economists assumed that new and better jobs would take the place of the offshored ones. However, as I am forever pointing out, there is no sign of these jobs in the employment data.

Most economists believe that jobs offshoring is free trade and that free trade is beneficial, which simply demonstrates their confusion.  Jobs offshoring is based on the pursuit of absolute advantage, the antithesis of comparative advantage that is the basis of free trade."

Well, Paul Craig Roberts is maybe new at this game, and there is a tendency at the outset to pull one's punches when dealing with Mr. Krugman, who, after all, is a Liberal and must therefore be a force for good.  In time Mr. Roberts will get over this misconception and will not bother with the obeisance and flattery.  He will see that the American Commoner is the very least of Mr. Krugman's concerns, and in time Mr. Roberts may even begin to appreciate the effect of the finite nature of Planet Earth's resources, and the unsustainable ecological path we are on, and how this "factor" precludes the "recovery" of any Western economy, now and forever. 

One cannot hope for everything at once.

Saturday Morning Essay: The Big Duh

Gail Tverberg begins her latest essay on the "Our Finite World" blog as follows:

 "A few years ago, I had an ah-hah moment when it comes to what we as humans would need to do to live in a sustainable manner. It is very easy. All we have to do is leave our homes, take off all of our clothes, and learn to live on the raw food we are able to gather with our own hands. We have a built-in transportation system, so that is not a problem."

Such a viewpoint has a lot of implications, of course.  On a casual reading, without studying other essays she has written on Peak Oil, energy and resource scarcity, and overpopulation (and the impotence of alternative energy to overcome all of these problems), her ah-hah seems like the somewhat dotty raving of a cranky Luddite.  But Gail's not like that at all.  Mrs. Tverberg is an actuary and trained in the careful use of mathematics and probability.  She's run the numbers.  Modern industrial civilization is unsustainable, and switching to alternative energy sources to maintain 7 billion people at anything like the lifestyle of modern Western countries is not possible.

A lot of people are edging up to this conclusion.  Take Russell Brand, for example, in this funny interview which has gone viral:

When you get a feel for such things, you realize it is the interviewer who is being preposterous.  You begin to ask yourself a question (you begin sounding, in your own head, like David Byrne in "Once In A Lifetime"):  Where does the interviewer get his serene confidence in the status quo?  What is he talking about?

You may ask yourself:  How did we get here?  I would not presume to assess Mr. Brand's depth of understanding.  He seems like an extraordinarily intelligent person who has thought about the plight of the modern world, and his generation, at great length.

There are many points on the circumference of the circle with radial vectors toward the same center.  Jerry Mander's The Capitalist Papers, Clive Hamilton's Growth Fetish and Requiem for A Species, Craig Dilworth's Too Smart For Our Own Good (which Gail cites numerous times in her latest essay): The Big Duh is coming into focus now. The threat to our existence comes from the way we live.

It was pretty easy, even 40 years ago, to laugh off the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth and Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb, along with Herman Daly's Steady State Economics and the thermodynamic analysis of Barry Commoner.  Guess what, Fat Cat Capitalists, all you real-life Scrooge McDucks:  the joke's on you (and thus on us, too).  They were all right, and you were all wrong.  Dead wrong.

Naomi Klein (not to be confused with Naomi Wolff, the subject of a different interview, this one by Da Ali G), has turned her attention to global warming (tip o' the hat:  Dan).  It's a great essay, and I look forward to her book and movie to follow.  I am fascinated by such topics in the same way I would be fascinated to know, standing on a railroad track and feeling the first tremors in the rails,  whether the engine bearing down on me is a steam locomotive, an electro-diesel, or a TGV powered by good honest French nuclear power.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/naomi-klein-why-science-telling-all-us-revolt-and-change-our-lives-we-destroy-planet

Revolution. Revolt.  Take off all of your clothes and live like a root-grubbing primate.   I suppose that's an approach that will make all human beings part of the One Hundred Percent.

Saturday Morning Essay: Mr. Krugman's Science; or, You Wanna Get Nuts? Let's Get Nuts!

 

Megalomania is an occupational hazard in blogging, and I have witnessed any number of prominent blogmeisters succumb to the siren song of intellectual grandiosity.  Karl Denninger at Market Watch is a prime example.  He has gotten completely carried away with his Nostradamus Complex and with his "mathematical" certainties about the economic future.  Plus, he now knows everything, as indeed everyone does in this age of Wikipedia.  Karl was among the first to downplay the dangers of Fukushima, a call he made early in the ongoing disaster at the Daiichi plant.  He simply would not countenance the "hyperbole" surrounding what little real reporting there has been about radiation from the site, even as 300 tons of radioactive water began flowing from Daiichi into the Pacific Ocean, even as reports filtered in that all large fish caught in the Pacific these days contain traces of Fukushima radiation.  Even as we have learned that three of the nuclear reactor cores "have gone missing."  Yes, that's right; TEPCO, the hapless operator of the plant, cannot tell us where the molten remains of the melted-down reactor cores of Reactors 1, 2 & 3 are right now.  Somewhere down there, they're pretty sure, maybe under the concrete floor of the reactor buildings. Maybe they're in the groundwater, maybe they've already reached the Pacific Ocean.  Maybe they're in China.  They'll turn up.

TEPCO is now about to undertake the most dangerous engineering project in the history of human civilization.  It's going to remove the 1,500 fuel rods from the spent fuel pool in Reactor Building 4. This building was badly damaged in a hydrogen explosion that occurred early in the disaster in March, 2011.  The spent fuel pool is leaking, listing, it has no roof, and the computer-controlled apparatus designed to remove the fuel rods doesn't work anymore and cannot be repaired.  Mr. Denninger, who favors nuclear power (of the thorium breeder-reactor type) remains serene.  He even warns his readers, mostly of the libertarian persuasion like Mr. Denninger himself, that any "alarmist" commenting on his site about Fukushima will be deleted and the commenter will be banned.

Kind of touchy, I think.  Mr. Krugman, Ace Economic Scientist for a Great Metropolitan Newspaper, is similarly touchy.  The care and feeding of his own enormous ego is essentially Mr. Krugman's entire shtick.  He deliberately provokes controversy by attacking those who disagree with him in the most ad hominem terms possible, then retreating behind a facade of decorous propriety and civility.  Mr. Krugman was recently the subject of a three-part broadside by Niall Ferguson, the Scottish writer and historian at Harvard and Stanford's Hoover Institution.  Ferguson pointed out errors that Krugman has made, despite Krugman's oft-repeated assertion that he's right about everything.  Ferguson's attack was followed up by a long piece in Forbes that piled on with more anti-Krugman diatribes (h/t: W of the Show-Me State).

Well, of course Krugman is as wrong as often as he is right, whatever those designations may mean.  Krugman is an economist.  He's involved in a silly game of posting graphs and describing the correlations he wants to tease out of them.  Krugman doesn't even talk about the American economy. I don't think he's very interested in it.

Krugman is the ultimate Bar Bet Economist and Faculty Lounge Debater.  His goal is to draw attention to himself, and he is extraordinarily good at that.  And Krugman is smart enough to know that the field in which he plies his dubious trade is about as rigorous as third-grade social studies.  He knows he can't be "right" about anything, not in the same way his Princeton colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Studies are right about things.  And by the same token, he can't be wrong about anything, either.  Mr. Krugman wants to be taken seriously as a "scientist," but he knows that's not possible, because he's in the wrong field.  So he's doing what he can with his field, which is to make himself rich and famous, and a man of his somewhat limited intellectual resources (and awful, clunky writing style) can best do this by creating controversy about himself.  Thus, Niall Ferguson has played right into Mr. Krugman's hands.  Mr. Krugman revels in this stuff.  It's what he's after: attention.

As he travels from his home in the leafy neighborhood of Princeton, to his apartment in Manhattan, or jets down to his condominium in St. Croix, Mr. Krugman makes a big show of demonstrating his deep compassion for poor people.  They are his cause.  Okay, sure.  But to fill in the time and the blizzard of blog posts, Mr. Krugman will throw down the gauntlet to keep himself the center of attention, challenging those things that "everybody knows" that Mr. Krugman knows just aren't true. 

1.  Contrary to popular belief, globalization is a good thing, and it has not harmed the American working man.

2.  Contrary to another popular belief, America does not need Chinese support for its Treasury bond market; indeed, it would be good if China sold out its position altogether, if the dollar became weaker, and we simply allowed the Federal Reserve to buy all of our own debt, and, Friday's capper:

3.  Contrary to the "apocalyptic" ravings of the Deficit Scolds:  

"And I do mean fantasies. Washington has spent the past three-plus years in terror of a debt crisis that keeps not happening, and, in fact, can’t happen to a country like the United States, which has its own currency and borrows in that currency. Yet the scaremongers can’t bring themselves to let go."

There you have it.  Mr. Krugman has at last arrived in the bulrushes of the Hamptons, along with George Costanza.  America cannot have a debt crisis, because the dollar is our currency, we borrow money denominated in dollars, and therefore we can never run out of money.  If those holding dollars won't lend it to us anymore, our own central bank can just conjure the money out of thin air and buy our own bonds.  It's that simple.  You wanna get nuts?  Let's get nuts!

On the Book Shelf

Currently I'm reading an Italian novel by Fabio Volo (in English translation, of course). He's a European sensation, this guy Volo, whose easygoing writing style reminds me of Nick Hornby's books.  Fabio is a radio personality, a film maker, an actor, and a lady's man.  I don't guess he's having much fun in Roma, right? 

This novel is called "One More Day," and it's kind of an extended thought experiment.  A young Italian guy living in Rome, Giacomo, with a ho-hum job, takes the tram to work every day.  His schedule is the same as a young woman's who also takes the same tram almost every day.  He becomes obsessed with her.  He finds her a thing of matchless grace and beauty.  Uncharacteristically, he finds he is too shy ever to speak to her or to make much in the way of eye contact.  This goes on for a long time.  Finally, one day she asks him if he would like to get off the tram and have a cup of coffee with her.

So he does.  They talk and it develops that the next day she is flying to New York to take a new, dream job.  She is having a party that very night, in fact, and she (her name is Michela) invites Giacomo to come.  He makes up an excuse and begs off (his diffidence still in place).  The next day, however, he goes to the airport to spy on her departure.  Giacomo sees Michela in the company of a young man and figures she must be attached (this proves to be wrong; it is her brother).  Naturally, at some point Giacomo travels to New York to find her, and it is at that point that the "thought experiment" about relationships begins.

I like simple human tales like "One More Day."  I needed a break from the doomsday stuff, frankly, having just finished a couple of books by Clive Hamilton, the Australian economist/natural philosopher, including "Requiem For A Species."  This book, as the title hints, explores the reasons that humans never did anything about global warming.  Why the outbreaks of Denialism, the obstinance, the venality that blocked any effective response?  If, 30 years ago, we had simply reacted rationally, as a species, it is probable that the global warming crisis could have been averted without significant pain.  Indeed, it is likely that the overall quality of life would have been much better at this point.

A "reaction," of course, would have meant a comprehensive response involving Draconian population control, a powering down in energy usage, a massive retreat from consumer materialism, a "de-Americanization" of the world's economies, and a shift to ecological rhythms and limits in the way we live.  But it would have been fine.  It would have been nice. I would actually prefer it if the Pacific Ocean were not filled with a Texas-sized slurry of degrading plastic.

That's not what we did, of course.  We went the other way, although we began talking a great deal about what we weren't doing.  We substituted "concern" for action, and that's still mostly where we are. 

As far as the "Requiem" is concerned, I'm not completely convinced of explanations, where human psychology is concerned, that involve "many reasons."  I don't think humans really process decisions that way.   The adage that a decision is simply the last thing we were thinking when we got tired of the problem makes the most sense to me.

I think that human beings are simply naturally fatalistic.  While modern industrial civilization, the artifact of human ingenuity, has now produced our own extinction event, we each had a personal extinction event that predated this one.  We call it death.  When we read that we must do something now to avoid a sea level rise of 20 feet in the year 2100, for example, unconsciously we do a quick calculation and move on to the...Fabio Volo novel.

Eventually, the threat of near-term extinction will match up, or be congruent with, the timeline we associate with a human life.  We may well be there now, but the vagaries of climate science give us enough wiggle room to avoid thinking that way in conclusive terms.  Maybe I will get through my life and experience only these "super storms" that the mass media now write about, timorously suggesting that maybe this is connected to climate change, before the news outlet is inundated with vicious, corporate-sponsored Denialist troll attacks.   The weather has always varied!

It's what makes this trudge toward oblivion darkly humorous, in a sad, George Carlin way.  Our extinction is hiding in plain sight.  It's the weather, for crying out loud.  But as I say, maybe that's all I will ever see, and with luck, it's all my daughter's generation will ever see.  Strangeness in the weather, as the Arctic ice disappears, and Greenland melts, and the oceans acidify, the meridional flow of the jet streams brings us odd climate events like annual 100-year floods and searing droughts - but we get through it okay.  The wheels don't completely come off. 

As a selfish Homo sapiens, another ape not half so smart as he thought he was (and definitely Too Smart For His Own Good), I would gladly take that.  Let me read about Italian romances in peace, and may my daughter have the same luxury.  That's all I really ask at this point.

Sound & Fury, Signifying Nothing

Another line borrowed from the "This Shit Writes Itself" man.  A particularly good line, actually, although Shakespeare's reference was to all of life.  Anyway, the corrupt solons of the District of Calumnia are busily strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, but it's not likely we'll hear no more from them.

Partly as an answer to good friend TJR's welcome letter: I have managed to maintain a sang-froid attitude about these budget & debt ceiling shenanigans because I don't think the country's real problems are related to choosing the right "political theory" to manage the economy, or to redistribute wealth, or to ensure our "freedoms."  The use by the Tea Party of Obamacare as its rallying cry, because enforced health insurance is the surest sign of tyranny, must be some kind of bad joke. How utterly confused can you get?  Obamacare was devised by the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank.  It is a corporate giveaway that channels money from the government to private health insurance companies by means of tax-supported subsidies.  Obamacare is the result of liberal/conservative compromise because it's politically impossible to provide single payer health care in this country to the general populace.
 
But we all knew that.  The Tea Party is simply the kind of political movement that arrives right on schedule whenever times get hard for the general populace, and things have gotten hard and will probably stay hard...more or less forever.  That is because we have reached the limits to growth in the United States and in the Western world (including Japan) generally.  Tea Parties, or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Nazis, are political parties of resentment and opportunism.  The Tea Party is mostly made up of obese, diabetic, poorly-educated, Baby Boom white trash, and their militaristic cadres in the younger generations,  who know their lives have gone off the rails, who don't understand how the modern economy works (or why it doesn't work), and are looking around for someone to blame.  In Germany scapegoats were provided by the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Slavic untermenschen.  In modern America we have turned to our perennial favorites, African-Americans (thus, the rabid, irrational hatred of the President), along with immigrants and gays, who have been brought back for a command encore. Playing off these hatreds and prejudices can propel a mediocrity like Ted Cruz to national prominence, exactly as it did a failed Austrian artist about 80 years ago in Germany.

Well, what other avenue was Ted Cruz going to follow to the top?

Meanwhile, back at ground level, the Earth's bounty is beginning to sputter.  Although you would never know it from reading liberal economists such as Paul Krugman, an economy is ultimately dependent on the natural world, a circumstance which arises from our carbon-based essence.  Mr. Krugman and his ilk, who live inside dry lab models of an America which existed mainly between about 1950 and the late 1990's, cannot admit their irrelevance without becoming one of the unemployed masses studying books on subsistence organic farming.  As Gail Tverberg wryly notes - Mr. Krugman, or Larry Summers, or Eugene Fama, the latest Nobel winner in this dubious field, these witch doctors are proponents of a political system called "Economism," which posits the likelihood (and necessity) of endless growth on a finite planet, with an ever-increasing population.  Thus, the addition of more and more debt, which multiplies itself exponentially, will never be a problem because of the exponential growth that lies just ahead, as soon as we come up with the right re-jiggering of the elements of the economy, the correct level of money-printing, or stimulus, or tax redistribution.

Well, it works on paper.  Does it work so well in the real world where the increasing cost of the basic energy fuel, petroleum, keeps going up because of the increasing costs of extraction and the daunting difficulties of getting at the ever harder to find remaining supplies?  Does it work so well when the atmosphere now has 400 parts per million carbon dioxide, and ominous signs, such as methane vents in the Arctic and Siberian tundra, presage the onset of a runaway greenhouse effect?

That's the real world, if you ask me.  The circus in Washington is a massive, hallucinatory diversion in which the corporate politicians give interviews to the mouthpieces of the corporate media and talk as if all this "debt ceiling" and budget cutting nonsense is any kind of answer to the problems of the real, physical world.  As you watch the spittle fly from Chris Matthews's bloated face, do you ever hear him place these problems in any kind of environmental context?  Does the President ever mention this stuff?  He's talking again about igniting "growth" in the country so we can have "good jobs" and "get America working again."  So America can "pay its bills."

Nature bats last, as Guy McPherson reminds us.  We are moving full-speed into a resource-constrained world, where oil, fresh water, arable land, and a viable climate will all be in increasingly short supply.  We narcotize ourselves with ideas of easy transition to alternative energy and "renewables," figuring there will be plenty of time for such a seamless transition "some day" into a Green Future, but for the moment, let's bail out General Motors, squeeze those tar sands, level those Kentucky mountains and extract that "clean coal," fill the Pacific Ocean with cesium and strontium from crumbling reactors.  We have all the time in the world, we just have to get the country moving again so that the economy is operating at "full potential."

The ultimate fantasy being: the world at large will enjoy the American lifestyle, in all its opulent, porcine glory circa-1985, all seven or eight billion people, warm, toasty and well-fed with their solar and wind-powered everything doing the work.  It will all take care of itself, and no one ever has to even talk about it.  We just need to lift that debt ceiling and get America back to work, doing something or other, powered by something or other else.

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.