The Earth Shifts

By James Howard Kunstler
on January 31, 2011 9:43 AM

     Those Panglossians around the USA awaiting something like an election in Egypt are going to be disappointed. What's going on in the streets of Cairo right now is an Egyptian election - minus the American-style trappings of corporate grift, scripted "debates," and polling places that make our elections so satisfying.

     Many here in the dreamland of Happy Motoring and Cheez Wiz are asking themselves why President Obama is waffling about the obvious tides of "change" now lapping over the ancient Kingdom on the Nile. How can he not believe in it? Why isn't  Mr. O out there in front with a bloody bandage around his head, cheerleading for the street fighters? If you lay aside the subtleties, the answer is simple: nothing beyond the status quo of recent years is good news for America.

      For one thing, only people paid to flap their gums on Larry Kudlow's nightly CNBC show, and children under nine years old, believe that anything like "democracy and freedom" will arise out of a street revolt in this region of the world. Sure, the opening acts of an historic event like this bring on mass intoxication that the Shining City or the Kingdom of Heaven or some other ideal disposition of things is at hand. There may even be an intermezzo of civil factional interplay, as we saw in Iran thirty years ago, with figures like Shapour Bakhtiar, Mehdi Bazargan, and  Abolhassan Banisadr revolving through the turnstile of politics. It doesn't take long for the turnstile to turn into a meat grinder, and it doesn't take much vision to see all the things that can go wrong when that happens in that part of the world.

    Before I go any further, I don't want to be misunderstood by eager misunderstanders.  In my view, President Mubarak has about as much chance of sticking around his presidential palace another fortnight as a bluebottle fly has of conducting the next Easter mass at the Vatican. Mubarak's resistance to that message prompts one to wonder: what is it with these old despots that they can't manage some sort of orderly timely transition - even if they handpick the successor dude.? There must be a few capable younger replacement despots in a country that large (around 80 million). Why does it always have to come to this?

     For the answer to that abiding mystery I can only commend you to the works of Gabriel García Márquez.  Who else really knows what winds of confusion blow through the minds of old men in realms of power? But, on the "plus side," as they say in American positive thinking circles, the old bastard did manage to keep the peace for three decades at his end of things in the world's premier political hot-spot. This is truly one of the unsung miracles of the age we're living in. Of course, with Mubarak pulled down, all bets on this would be off.

     At the moment, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a seemingly rational, capable fellow of unquestioned gravitas is angling to replace Mubarak. By declaring his intentions, ElBaradei has already crossed some kind of line in the sand that, under less fateful circumstances, would get his ass tossed in a crocodile pit faster than you could recite an incantation from the Scroll of Thoth. But these are extraordinary moments. 

     More troubling is ElBaradei's flirtation with the Muslim Brotherhood, a venerable mostly underground opposition with a not altogether trustworthy agenda where the USA, and the OECD West generally, are concerned. Whatever the MB represents - and I don't think even the Arab Desk nerds at the State Department are even quite sure - there's a fair chance that it includes mischief like promoting a Sharia state, inciting trouble through Hamas, supporting uprisings in other key Muslim nations, and egging on new, unwelcome disorders in a region that the stability of the world hinges on these days.

     The key to all that is oil, of course, and mainly the oil of Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah there is at least 86 years old and in poor health.  Crown Prince Sultan, his successor, isn't much younger. If ever a country was ripe for a political flipping it is this shaky kingdom. Everyone from the White House to Foggy Bottom to Langley, Virginia, is probably messing his/her pants this week wondering how much longer the lid can be kept on that joint.

     To return to an earlier theme, what should amaze us now in the unraveling of this region is how remarkable and long the recent era of stability lasted. Meaning, most of all, how reliable those tanker shipments of oil have been moving through the Straits of Hormuz and the Suez Canal to their destinations in the lands of the Crusaders (and their younger kin in the New World). To put it pretty starkly, the so-called developed world can't keep its act together more than a week without that steady mainline of Arabian oil, even though it doesn't represent most of the oil traded in the world. The margins are too thin. There's no wiggle room, really, especially for us, in our kingdom of freeways. We lose ten percent of our oil supply and that's all she wrote for business as usual around here. I'll put it even more starkly: we can't afford to let this shit get out of hand for a New York minute.

     But it's not really up to us, no matter how many times Hillary Clinton says "uh," through her tightly pursed lips. And Barack Obama is kicking back like everybody else watching things beyond our control spin out on cable TV. Remember something else: these uproars in the Middle East are only the first stirrings of political reaction to a scarcity of key world resources, especially grain crops, which have never been in such short supply in modern times. And the part of this problem that isn't due to sheer population overshoot is almost certainly a result of climate change - which many idiots in the US congress refuse to acknowledge out of sheer obdurate stupidity.

    A word or two about last week's State of the Union speech. The platitudes were nearly too painful to bear: techno-magic and a zillion engineering PhDs will keeps us at the zenith of historic wonderfulness. Has anyone been to Youngstown, Ohio, recently? We're so full of shit about ourselves, our true condition, and our prospects, that you can see it through our eyeballs. I did, however, mutter a prayer of thanks that Mr. Obama did not act out the mortifying ritual (first established by R. Reagan) of introducing the various role models, heroes, and exemplars installed up in the gallery. We have enough award shows in this country, and it's the horror-inducing season for it - just as the world is flying apart at the seams.

 

http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/01/the-earth-shifts-1.html 

State of Suspension

By James Howard Kunstler
on January 24, 2011 9:52 AM

 

     You kind of wonder here in the flash-frozen northeast if, a few days from now, scores of dead bodies will be found in unheated trailers across the county. The Weather Channel said 20-below-zero this morning in upstate New York. I know there are people so desperately poor out there because a couple of weeks ago I overheard a supermarket worker say she couldn't afford to buy propane. And she had a job!

     I haven't left the house myself for two days and a Snow Leopard installation put my iMac into a hang-up deepfreeze all its own (I'm on the MacBook now). But enough about me.... I wonder if Barack Obama himself is sleeping in a casket in the White House basement these days, waiting for fairer conditions before facing a nation spinning into the dark unknown. Of course he has to put in the annual appearance before a mostly hostile joint session of congress later in the week. I can't imagine that coming off as anything but an orgy of self-congratulation for our national wonderfulness - especially on the occasion of a multiple slaying - and cheerleading for the marvelous restoration of the set of revolving rackets we call "the economy." I pray to all the Gods that assorted heroes du jour will not be planted in the balcony of the House Chamber and subject to the Reagan-style show-and-tell, which the Gipper's managers so astutely used as a sly distraction from straight talk about where we are at as a polity.

     The bloodbath in Tucson completely obscured a momentous development in Mr. Obama's executive sphere, when he brought on JP Morgan factotum William Daley as White House Chief of Staff, for Gawdsake, and nobody in the news media so much as coughed into his (or her) sleeve. He also hired recent Goldman Sachs errand boy Gene Sperling to direct the National Economic Council. At Goldman, Sperling was charged with running self-esteem workshops for Third Worlders - an obvious public relations ploy. You wonder now whether he'll be carting American "99-ers" off to the Aspen Institute for weekends of buffet line cruising and "ideating" - to use a popular new vapidity from the lexicon of Big Business.

     Last Thursday, Mr. Obama actually flew up to my home territory to visit the headquarters of General Electric and sign on its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, as yet another White House special economic advisor. Notice, by the way, that GE was the recipient of untold billions of TARP pixie dust. I wonder if the president got a good look at GE's home base, Schenectady, New York, a once-vibrant industrial dynamo now so sclerotic that it makes the former soviet Magnetogorsks and Traktorgrads sound like El Dorados. 

     Meanwhile, GE only incidentally makes electrical things anymore. Mostly, like everything else in America, they became a financial company, looking for ways to make money off of money, and mostly losing heaps of money in the process - for the excellent reason that it's really not possible to get something for nothing in this universe, though we wish it were not so. Likewise, GE's vaunted new battery initiative, which is aimed mainly at the idea that we can run the whole US vehicle fleet on electricity (mostly powered by coal, you understand, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels) is another quixotic project based on something-for-nothing wishes.

     The weird part is that a president can journey to a place like Schenectady - once a fine, small-scaled walkable city with first-rate public transit on a major waterway (the Mohawk River / Erie Canal system) plus the New York Central Railroad main line - and never notice that the future of this society waits in realms and actions other than the tragic habit of Happy Motoring. He certainly didn't use the occasion to make a single remark on that theme, which is probably the only true alt.energy scenario that might prevent America from sliding into a dark age.

    The appointments of Daley, Sperling, and Immelt show not just the total "capture" of Obama's government by sociopathic corporate interests (which, after all, have the sole mission of rewarding their shareholders, boards of directors, and executives), but it also shows the astounding poverty of imagination at the center of American political life. This is a fatal vacuum that invites something like revolution, because the only thing this vacuum seeks to do is suck things outside of itself into its own darkness.

     Revolutions come in many styles. This one is shaping up to look rather red-and-slippery, because the grift has really amounted to the wholesale theft of a generation's future. There are 21-year-olds out there right now laboring under massive burdens of college loans that they were swindled into signing at a time when the parts of their brain concerned with judgment had not fully developed, and they are every bit as smart as the men running the predatory corporations today. Even after they eventually give up paying their debt-peonage tuition loans, they are going to be very pissed off at the way the older generation ran their country into the ground. Let's just hope that the mental torture inflicted on them doesn't turn them into a legion of Jared Lee Loughners.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/01/state-of-suspension.html 

From a few months ago...you gotta love storms like this...they blow up quickly and can go severe in a heartbeat!

There is going to be some changes to this blog soon, more abt that later...

Watching...

Snow 2Day in McKinney!...bout 4 inches worth...

Fallen...

Statement as of 7:41 PM CST on January 08, 2011

... Winter Storm Watch remains in effect from 3 am CST Sunday
through Sunday evening...

A Winter Storm Watch for heavy snow remains in effect from 3 am CST
Sunday through Sunday evening.

A powerful storm system currently moving into far West Texas will
continue to move east and affect North Texas late tonight. Areas
of rain and isolated thunderstorms are expected to rapidly develop
across central and south Texas late this evening as moisture
surges northward. As the storm system moves across North Texas during
the day Sunday... temperatures are expected to fall to near or just
above freezing. Rain is expected to transition to snow beginning
Sunday morning and continuing into the afternoon. This is a very
fluid situation and many factors may change the forecast. It
should be stressed that if temperatures were to be slightly
warmer... no snow would fall in and around the metroplex. At this
time... temperatures do appear to be cold enough to support snow
and 3 to 5 inches of snow may fall over the area by Sunday
afternoon. The storm system is expected to quickly move east of
the area by early Monday morning.

Portions or all of this watch could be upgraded to a Winter Storm
Warning overnight if the forecast track of the upper low and the
temperature profiles remain similar to what they are now.

A Winter Storm Watch means there is a potential for significant
snow... sleet... or ice accumulations that may impact travel.
Persons with planned travel across north and northeast Texas and
into Louisiana on Sunday should monitor the latest forecasts
closely for any changes.

Taken over in the paupers section of the historical cemetery here...

A perfect example of how you can take an image that is crap, merge it with a few more and come up with something almost worth viewing...

Today, Secretary Geithner sent the following letter to Congress regarding the debt limit (download the signed letter here):

January 6, 2011

The Honorable Harry Reid
Majority Leader
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Mr. Leader:


I am writing in response to your request for an estimate by the Treasury Department of when the statutory debt limit will be reached, and for a description of the consequences of default by the United States.
Never in our history has Congress failed to increase the debt limit when necessary. Failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States. Default would effectively impose a significant and long-lasting tax on all Americans and all American businesses and could lead to the loss of millions of American jobs. Even a very short-term or limited default would have catastrophic economic consequences that would last for decades. Failure to increase the limit would be deeply irresponsible. For these reasons, I am requesting that Congress act to increase the limit early this year, well before the threat of default becomes imminent.


As you know, in February of 2010 Congress passed legislation to increase the debt limit to $14.29 trillion. As of this writing, the outstanding debt that is subject to the limit stands at $13.95 trillion, leaving approximately $335 billion of “headroom” beneath the current limit. Because of the inherent uncertainty associated with tax receipts and refunds during the spring tax filing season, as well as other variable factors, it is not possible at this point to predict with precision the date by which the debt limit will be reached. However, the Treasury Department now estimates that the debt limit will be reached as early as March 31, 2011, and most likely sometime between that date and May 16, 2011. This estimate is subject to change depending on the performance of the economy, government receipts, and other factors. This means it is necessary for Congress to act by the end of the first quarter of 2011.


At several points in past years, Treasury has taken exceptional actions to delay the date by which the limit was reached in order to give Congress additional time to raise the limit. These extraordinary actions include: suspending sales of State and Local Government Series (SLGS) Treasury securities[1]; suspending reinvestment of the Government Securities Investment Fund (G-Fund)[2]; suspending reinvestment of the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF)[3]; and determining that a “debt issuance suspension period” exists, permitting redemption of existing, and suspension of new, investments of the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund (CSRDF)[4]. Treasury would prefer not to have to engage again in any of these extraordinary measures. If we are forced to do so again, these measures could delay the date by which the limit is reached by several weeks. Once these steps have been taken, no remaining legal and prudent measures would be available to create additional headroom under the debt limit, and the United States would begin to default on its obligations.


As discussed in greater detail below, raising the debt limit is necessary to allow the Treasury to meet obligations of the United States that have been established, authorized, and appropriated by the Congress. It is important to emphasize that changing the debt limit does not alter or increase the obligations we have as a nation; it simply permits the Treasury to fund those obligations Congress has already established.


In fact, even if Congress were immediately to adopt the deep cuts in discretionary spending of the magnitude suggested by some Members of Congress, such as reverting to Fiscal Year 2008 spending levels, the need to increase the debt limit would be delayed by no more than two weeks. The limit would still need to be raised to make it possible for the government to avoid default and to meet the other obligations established by Congress.


The national debt is the total amount of money borrowed in order to fulfill the requirements imposed by past Congresses and under past presidencies, during periods when both Republicans and Democrats were in control of different branches of government. These are legal obligations, incurred under the laws of the United States. Responsibility for creating the debt is bipartisan, and responsibility for meeting the Nation’s obligations must be shared by both parties.



As the 112th Congress turns to this issue, I want to stress that President Obama believes strongly in the need to restore balance to our fiscal position, and he is committed to working with both parties to put the Nation on a fiscally responsible path. This will require difficult choices and a comprehensive approach to reduce the gap between our commitments and our resources. It will require that the government spend less and spend more wisely. The President has already taken important steps, including enacting the savings in the Affordable Care Act; restoring Pay-As-You-Go budgeting; and undertaking a three-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending. The President’s proposals would put us on a path to cut the deficit by more than half in the medium term, and substantially reduce the rate of growth in federal health care costs in the long term. The President looks forward to working with Members of the 112th Congress on additional measures to address our medium- and long-term fiscal challenges.


Because Congress has always acted to increase the debt limit when necessary, and because failure to do so would be harmful to the interests of every American, I am confident that Congress will act in a timely manner to increase the limit this year. However, for the benefit of Members of Congress and the public, I want to make clear, for the record, what the implications of a default would be so there can be no misunderstanding when the issue is debated in the House and Senate.


Reaching the debt limit would mean the Treasury would be prevented by law from borrowing in order to pay obligations the Nation is legally required to pay, an event that has no precedent in American history. Such a default should be understood as distinct from a temporary government shutdown resulting from failure to enact appropriations bills, which occurred in late 1995 and early 1996. Those government shutdowns, which were unwise and highly disruptive, did not have the same long-term negative impact on U.S. creditworthiness as a default would, because there was headroom available under the debt limit at that time.
I am certain you will agree that it is strongly in our national interest for Congress to act well before the debt limit is reached. However, if Congress were to fail to act, the specific consequences would be as follows:

• The Treasury would be forced to default on legal obligations of the United States, causing catastrophic damage to the economy, potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.
  
• A default would impose a substantial tax on all Americans. Because Treasuries represent the benchmark borrowing rate for all other sectors, default would raise all borrowing costs. Interest rates for state and local government, corporate and consumer borrowing, including home mortgage interest, would all rise sharply. Equity prices and home values would decline, reducing retirement savings and hurting the economic security of all Americans, leading to reductions in spending and investment, which would cause job losses and business failures on a significant scale.
  
• Default would have prolonged and far-reaching negative consequences on the safe-haven status of Treasuries and the dollar’s dominant role in the international financial system, causing further increases in interest rates and reducing the willingness of investors here and around the world to invest in the United States.
  
• Payments on a broad range of benefits and other U.S. obligations would be discontinued, limited, or adversely affected, including:
  • U.S. military salaries and retirement benefits;
  • Social Security and Medicare benefits;
  • veterans’ benefits;
  • federal civil service salaries and retirement benefits;
  • individual and corporate tax refunds;
  • unemployment benefits to states;
  • defense vendor payments;
  • interest and principal payments on Treasury bonds and other securities;
  • student loan payments;
  • Medicaid payments to states; and
  • payments necessary to keep government facilities open.

For these reasons, any default on the legal debt obligations of the United States is unthinkable and must be avoided. It is critically important that Congress act before the debt limit is reached so that the full faith and credit of the United States is not called into question. The confidence of citizens and investors here and around the world that the United States stands fully behind its legal obligations is a unique national asset. Throughout our history, that confidence has made U.S. government bonds among the best and safest investments available and has allowed us to borrow at very low rates.



Failure to increase the debt limit in a timely manner would threaten this position and compromise America’s creditworthiness in the eyes of the world. Every Secretary of the Treasury in the modern era, regardless of party, has strongly held this view. Given the gravity of the challenges facing the U.S. and world economies, the world’s confidence in our creditworthiness is even more critical today.



I hope this information is responsive to your request and will be helpful as Congress considers this important legislation.Sincerely,
Timothy F. Geithner

...in yourself!...

Sittin on the throne, talking on the phone!

How weird life would be if we woke up one morning and cell phone service was gone, couldn't talk to anyone, couldn't text anyone, couldn't receive email...

Image by Peta

This one is to long to post entire thing...

Forecast 2011 - Gird Your Loins for Lower Living Standards

By James Howard Kunstler
on January 3, 2011 7:22 AM

Introduction

     Sheesh. Was I ever wrong last year about those stock market indexes. I called for Dow 4000 and look where the darn thing ended up: 11,577.50.  Some of those fabled "green shoots" must have grown clean through my brain-pan while I slept off 2010's New Year's Eve festivities.The damage was so severe, apparently, that I missed the takeover of Wall Street by front-running high frequency computer programs battling for supremacy of the algo-space which, along with massive insider trading, daily tweaks stage-managed by the Federal Reserve via their trusted allies in large banks, and relentless propagandistic cheerleading on the theme of if-you-wish-it-so-it-will-be, kept the Dow Jones and Standard & Poors indexes in a frothy state of perma-levitation through the year.

     The outstanding question from the get-go of 2011 is just this: can a political economy be kept floating along like a Winnie-the-Pooh balloon on gusts of sheer fakery? To me, the simple answer is no. The people running things in the USA have tried everything from pervasive accounting fraud to complete opacity in trading procedures to looting the republic's future. The consensus trance of "recovery" makes itself manifest through every conduit of public utterance - cable TV news, The New York Times, the pronouncements of every last elected official - even though the Consumer Price Index omits items such as food, gasoline, and heating oil in its calibrations, while heaping on fictional "hedonic" adjustments.

     What's left of the American economy is a web of financial rackets divorced from the production of real wealth, dependent on an elaborate computerized three-card-monte edifice of swindling. Those groans and creakings you hear are the agonies of this ediface swaying under its burden of lies, while underneath it the ground of history shifts.

     A secondary outstanding question - I get it all the time - is whether the people running things know how fake this picture is, and how horrifying the view behind-the-curtain is. Does President Obama understand the relation of our energy predicament to the workings of our economy? How could he not? Certainly he has had a conversation or two with Energy Secretary (and eminent physicist) Steven Chu over the past two years. Mr. Chu should have explained to the president that a decline in the primary energy resource used by an industrial society portends a decline in living standards, which can be expressed in an economy, for instance, by people having less money, or  by people having lots of money that is increasingly worthless. This concept may lie outside the strict purview of physics, but surely somebody like Paul Volker was at hand in the White House to connect the dots - and perhaps explain further that anything in the picture beyond that equation amounts to a looting operation by people positioned to systematically cream off the dwindling equity base of a roughly 200-year-old venture.

     By the way, to aver to "people running things" is not evidence of a persecution complex. Lots of people are in positions to make decisions. The president may be a hero, a con man, a victim of history, a bungler, a hostage to events - but you can be sure that he makes real decisions that affect people's lives every day. Where I depart from darker views is the idea that there is some shadow gang of hidden puppeteers behind the visible leadership - the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers - bent on a quasi-religious crusade to impose "one-world government," or some kind of totalistic domination scheme out of comic book politics. I denounce such views as childish, deranged distractions from a reality that is challenging enough without the intrusion of paranoid fantasies. 

     If there are "bad guys" or string-pullers on the scene, then they are figures in plain sight, like Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein at the big banks, or John Paulson in his hedge fund, or the many figures who have moved back and forth between Wall Street and government in recent years, and their machinations are pretty well understood, and explicated daily by diligent observers on the scene - from William Black to Yves Smith, to Simon Johnson, to Janet Tavakoli, and many many others. The legerdemain of  the Federal Reserve in shoveling money to dominant banks has fooled only those who exhaust their attention on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Lady Gaga, and the National Basketball Association.

    The larger riddle of life-in-our-time surrounds the absence of the rule of law in money matters. To say that people are actually running things out there doesn't mean that are running them effectively or optimally. The US Department of Justice, for example, appears to be led by a zombie, Attorney-General Eric Holder, somebody of this world but no longer quite in it, who is pioneering a new method of Zen law enforcement based on a maximum of doing and saying of nothing. Of course, my ongoing theory since the national election of 2008 is that Barack Obama has been warned repeatedly by many credible figures that any move to disturb the operations of banking would bring down such a wrathful ruin on this nation that he had no choice but to keep his hands off the levers of enforcement. In fact, it's the only theory that explains adequately the yawning gap between reality and the representation of it by those assumed to hold authority.

     Whether we can overcome these obstacles to action and move this crippled society to a re-set of daily life consistent with what the planet provides is a whole other question. My guess is that we will eventually be dragged kicking and screaming to this re-set, which I have described in my book The Long Emergency and my novels World made By Hand and The Witch of Hebron. That outcome is rather severe, basically a "time-out" of unlimited duration from the orgy of techno-comforts that have defined existence in "developed" societies for many decades. It implies a massive loss of things that people will not let go of, and so the political games around money matters really all amount to one thing: a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs. It obviously requires monumental levels of mass self-deception, of pretending, of fakery, of lying, of denial. The psychology of all this is another thing that is thoroughly understood, but such is the collective anxiety about our situation that knowing how-and-why we behave a particular way does not alter our behavior.

     These have been my preoccupations in recent months, and they mostly revolve around what happens in the USA, but there is a wider world out there and I sense that the more clarifying actions will arise out there in the year ahead. Perhaps the most striking thing about the scene last year (and several preceding it) is the eerie absence of major disruptive events on the world stage. This suggests a dangerous build-up of tensions that are bound to release - and releases of this kind are often destructive, like the energy stored along tectonic fault lines. In fact, I'm describing many points of tension, which have the potential of setting each other off in chains of destruction. And in this fractal disposition of energy flows anything can happen.

The Forecast...

 

 

http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/01/forecast-2011---gird-your-loins-for-lower-living-standards.html

The furkid...

Anyone who knows our furkid knows for her to keep still long enough to shoot this is an enormous feat!

Having said that she's a gem!

The Moment of Convulsion

By James Howard Kunstler
on December 27, 2010 3:06 AM

     A little ways off the curb on the Boulevard Henry IV here in Paris, you can see the memory of the Bastille outlined by a course of masonry in the pavement, in particular one of the bulbous towers of the old fortress-prison. It marks one of those threshold moments in history when things got out-of-hand - in the late afternoon of July 14, 1789 - and by the time a mob had detached the head of Warden Bernard-René de Launey from his shoulders and paraded it around on a pike, everyone in the city knew that they had crossed into the politically unknown frontier of Revolution.

     Seeing this residue of history put me in mind of a riddle that one of my college professors presented to us one day years ago: why did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times? We came up with dozens of reasons ranging from conjectures out of the text of The Iliad to lame bits of Hippie numerology, but nobody could furnish the answer that the prof was looking for, which was eventually revealed: Because he [Achilles] was just that pissed off. 

     This was the idea that dogged me in the winter twilight of Paris late on Christmas Day as I pondered the fate of my own country back across the cold cold sea. A lot of Americans are beaten down and discouraged these days. They've lost not only jobs, incomes, and houses, but also a sense of purpose, and perhaps faith in the essential fairness of the American venture - as the propane runs out, and families try to subsist on Froot Loops, and the re-po squad turns up to haul away the Ford F-150 Raptor. Meanwhile, in their last remaining refuge from harsh reality, TV, they glimpse the likes of Jamie Dimon, Chloe Kardashian, and Jay-Z emerging from limousines looking hopelessly bored with wealth beyond imagination. When will the folks out there move from shame and despondency to being really pissed off about the disposition of things?

     Isn't that a question, though?

     The French Revolution arose first from a financial crisis that turned into a political crisis. The rule of law had been vested in a class of pampered imbeciles while the price of bread doubled, and sometimes there was no bread at all for the growing masses, or functioning law to govern the country. This was where the rising middle-class of the dawning industrial-commercial age stepped in to straighten things out - people such as Jean Paul Marat the itinerant physician (ahem), thief, sewer rat, and newspaper columnist, and Maxmilien Robespierre, lawyer. They had the example ten years earlier of the successful American Revolution, which Louis XVI had helped finance, and which helped bankrupt the French Treasury. But the new French political class botched the crucial part: a constitution that actually worked. The whole enterprise sank into a morass of absurd utopianism and, finally, paranoia. The guillotine turned out to be the perfect machine for that dark moment: efficient, elegant, and terrifying. The bloodthirsty competed with the incompetent for the soul of the nation until finally a twenty-eight-year-old artillery officer said (in effect), "Look here, fuckers! This will be quite enough of your shenanigans." After Monsieur General Bonaparte entered the scene, that was all she wrote for the revolution....

     Which brings me to the subject of our own financial crisis, soon to mutate into a political crisis. There really is no "solution" to our problem of debt except to become a less affluent society. You can get there via the path of compressive deflationary depression (no money), or hyperinflation (plenty of worthless money), but the destination is the same. In the meantime we're stuck with the extremely uneven distribution of hardship and luxury. Whole classes of formerly working people face the prospect of genuine ruin while an ultra-pampered class of celebrity clowns and professional swindlers fob off with whatever's left on the national buffet table. The real politics of all this are so far from being sorted out that sheer contemplation of what lies ahead leaves the mind harrowed and feeble.

     The Jacobins of 1793 France were basically the Left. It took only five hundred or so of them to bully a nation of 30 million. The Jacobins of the USA in 2011 are basically the Right Wing, followers of Senator Jim DeMint, the mind-slaves of Rush Limbaugh and "students" of Prof Glenn Beck, and, of course, the worshippers of Sarah Palin.  Their brand of politics might be labeled Nostalgic Sentimental Paranoid Know-Nothingism. They're proud and loud, pious and ignorant, so deeply insecure that they depend on flag lapel pins to remind them to care about their country, full of righteous anger about their own sexual impulses, the religious notions (or not) of other people, and the possible introduction of the rule of law in banking matters. They pretend to represent the folks freezing in their mobile homes who subsist on Froot Loops, but they're really protecting the country clubbers, the corporate poobahs, the fraudsters on Wall Street, and every other racketeer in the land - including their own class of political grifters.

     The Obama Democrats, the putative Left Wing, are analogous to the pro-monarchy center of revolutionary France. Their ethical sanctimony is fake while they do everything possible to keep the rule of law out of money matters. They are most of all ineffectual and impotent, capable only of grandstanding hyped up Great Compromises that accomplish nothing, and probably doom the party to be chewed up by the machinations of their bloodthirsty adversaries on the right. It's hard to shed a tear for them, their performance has been so purblind and wimpish.

      History has its own momentum and it is carrying the psychotic Right Wing into power. Fear not. After they stomp the moderates and the Left, they will themselves end up in an orgy of political cannibalism before somebody as yet unknown - perhaps some field brigadier just now in Afghanistan - steps up to say, "Look here, fuckers...." Meanwhile, America may have its own Bastille moment when something goes too far, some poor functionary at the Treasury Department gets scalped by a gang of 99ers, or a distressed physician goes after Glenn Beck in the student union of a Bible college, or... Gawd knows what.

     Meanwhile, you are sleeping and it's morning here in Paris. I get the feeling that we're at the end of the great era of tourism. Europe has been the world's premiere tourist theme park for half a century. Given Europe's bloody, riotous history, it's been a remarkable period of peace and affluence. Since the 1960s, everything here in Paris got buffed up to perfection. Notre Dame's white stone façade gleams in the winter sunlight. The Louvre, the Opera, the Conciergerie, the Tomb of Napoleon are all fixed, re-pointed, re-gilded. The café and restaurant scene operates like one great gastronomic machine, effortless and masterful. I'm already nostalgic for it.

     In the background, Europe's money situation is disintegrating, and with it probably the easy order that has reigned in this period. They are going broke, too, just as surely as America is, and they are responding in pretty much the same way: a game of extend and pretend (with some prayer as the cherry-on-top). Meanwhile, the price of oil has breached the $91 dollar line. If it goes just a little bit higher, and the winter weather stays harsh, you can bet that some airlines will be going down the drain. Combine that with the vanishing disposable incomes of the middle class and you get an ill-fated recipe for the tourism business - with perhaps some home-grown mob action waiting in the wings around Europe, not to mention friction between age-old enemies.

     I was fortunate to see Europe at its best in my time, and now we are entering a new time of great uncertainty and travail. I'll be back home next week with the usual gruesome forecast for the new year. And yes, I am aware that the Dow Jones Industrial Average did not settle around 4000 points, as I predicted a year ago. Obviously 2010 was a year of fabulous prosperity in the USA - just ask the people running out of propane with their bowls full of Froot Loops.

 

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/12/the-moment-of-convulsion.html 

 

 

Waste of time...waste of money...IMHO...

http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=110763&code=Ne2&category=2

US Mobilized for the Possibility of War on Korean Peninsula 

The United States government made preparations for the possibility of war on the Korean peninsula amid North Korea's continued provocations.
Columnist David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday that the Obama administration's recent foreign policy moves included "contingency plans for North Korea."
Ignatius reported that just three weeks ago US President Barack Obama warned Chinese President Hu Jintao over the phone that North Korea is a "nuclear nation" whose recklessness threatens the US.
Meanwhile, White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs said on Sunday that major changes with Obama's cabinet are not likely but that it is very likely that President Obama will seek re-election in 2012.
Gibbs added that the job market has improved since President Obama took office which the American President wants to continue.

DEC 27, 2010

Reporter : jiyoonjlee@arirang.co.kr

Posted for fair use and discussion.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...st-Arctic.html

How a freak diversion of the jet stream is paralysing the globe with freezing conditions

By Niall Firth
Last updated at 12:53 PM on 22nd December 2010

* It's snowing in Australia and California yet 'warm' in Greenland

The freezing conditions that have blasted Britain are being blamed on a series of weather patterns that are bringing Arctic temperatures to much of western Europe, California and even Australia.

One of the main factors is a change in the position of the jet stream - the fast-moving current of air that moves from west to east, high in the atmosphere.

Changes in the jet stream's path can cause massive changes in weather conditions across the globe and may be why Australians are now shivering their way through summer and the current freezing conditions in California.

In a normal British winter - when conditions are mild and soggy - the jet stream lies over northern Europe, at an altitude of between 35,000 to 50,000 feet.
Daily mean temperature anomalies around the world between 1st December and 20th December

Daily mean temperature anomalies around the world between 1st December and 20th December compared with the 30 year long term average between 1961 and 1990

During these grey winters, Britain's prevailing winds come from the west and south west, and bring with them warm and moist air from the sub-tropical Atlantic.

This year a high-pressure weather system over the Atlantic is blocking the jet stream’s normal path and forcing it to the north and south of Europe.

The areas of high pressure act like stones in a stream - blocking the normal flow of milder air from the west and instead forcing colder air from the north down across the UK.

In California more than 12 inches of rain has fallen in parts of the Santa Monica Mountains in the south and 13 feet of snow has accumulated at Mammoth Mountain ski resort.

And Australians expecting to bask in early summer sun this Christmas are instead shivering as icy gusts sweeping up from the Southern Ocean have blanketed parts of east coast states New South Wales and Victoria with up to four inches of snow.

When the jet-stream is blocked by high pressure it dips southwards and lets freezing air flood in from the Arctic regions.

Other weather patterns are also causing havoc across the may also be affecting the weather, such as the current in the tropical Pacific Ocean, called La Nina, which is disturbing the jetstream over the north Pacific and North America.

A combination of our usual wet Atlantic weather systems striking these freezing cold fronts results in huge amounts of snowfall – and brings Britain grinding to a halt.

A Met Office spokesman: ‘The problem is we are not getting the warmer Atlantic air that normally keeps our winters mild.’

‘We can see that it is unseasonably warm over Canada and Greenland, this is where warm air has been diverted.’

He said that any change in the pressure over the Atlantic would need to last for several days before we would notice any change in the weather in Europe.

Freezing-cold winters and milder winters tend to cluster in groups, as the jet stream changes its path.

Experts are still unsure why this is but suspect it may be related to the EL Nino weather system as well as changes in sea temperatures and solar activity.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...#ixzz18sdn5ynL

So how often do you see new barbed wire on a fence that looks to be a gazillion years old???

Egress from town!!...

Lookin like Christmas downtown these days!...

...somewhere between Detroit and Blossum TX...

And To All a Good Night

By James Howard Kunstler
on December 20, 2010 8:50 AM

     At this time of year, who can fail to understand the wish to forget all the woes and fiascos of our time, and to retreat into the cozy firelit nooks of Christmas, where a pint or so of grog, or egg-nog, or even seven fingers of Williams 'Lectric Shave in an empty jam jar might avail to wash away the frightening specters of debts, and banks, and, trade imbalances, and countries with economies composed mostly of losses?

     For now, America is a rug stretching from Maine to California, under which we've swept the filthy detritus of money matters and governance. It worked most of the year, though the rug has grown as lumpy as a landfill. Nothing is more important for the moment than provoking millions of people with no means for carrying their current obligations to ply the malls in search of Christmas merchandise, so the little ones will not be disappointed on the Great Day. Who could fail to understand this, too, since the sorrows of children only magnify the failures of the adults who love and fear for them.

     President Obama's tax deal with the corn-and-pork-fed mental defectives of the Red States has been spun into an historic act of political ju-jitsu - a sharp trade to great advantage for the slick city operator against the avaricious rubes - but to me it was just another act of Santa Claus Theater. You have to love the conceit that all this fuss about money is finally settled.  So we can settle back in the raptures of flat screen high-def 3-D TV and imagine that we're like the characters in Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life - which, by the way, in case you never noticed, is a story about a banker who gets into big trouble financing the first larval manifestations of suburban sprawl. If only Frank Capra had lived to see the Federal Reserve's Maiden Lane portfolio, a sack of shit so monumental it would make the fabled swag-bag of Kris Kringle himself look like the descending colon of a pygmy marmoset.

     Anyway, both parties are vying for a place in the graveyard of politics, and this is how it should be. Life is tragic, nothing lasts forever, and these two hoary old orgs are so far gone in corruption and cupidity that it would be hazardous to not bury them as fast as possible. If the USA is as resilient and resourceful as it pretends to be, then we can confidently come up with something better. In fact, I hasten to make a positive proposal: calling Howard Dean (former Vermont governor and head of the Democratic National Committee) to take the helm of a new Progressive Party (or whatever you want to call it) in opposition to the morbid histrionics of the Tea Baggers. It's not written on the wind that this country must be governed by morons and sell-outs. Governor Dean is the only character I see out there with more than half a brain who won't bend over for Weepy John Boehner and the minions of Goldman Sachs. I'm sorry that the cable networks juked him back in 2004, with the ridiculous charge that he had somehow lost his mind by raising his voice at his Iowa Caucus victory party.

     As I have averred more than once before, this period of US history resembles the 1850s, when the established political parties could not wrap their minds around the salient issue of the day, slavery, and so went out of business. Anyway, when Abraham Lincoln came along rather late in the day, nobody knew, fer gawdsake, that he was going to turn into Abraham Lincoln.  We kind of forget that the Civil War, which began almost the instant he took office, was a prolonged fiasco that looked fatal for the nation until very near the end - at which point Lincoln, who had been mocked more harshly than any president to that time, was transformed into a monument by 240 grains of lead.

     In this previous historic convulsion the issue was slavery; today the issue is the rule of law - the absence of which from banking is destroying the USA as effectively as a foreign invasion. Poor President Obama looks more like Millard Fillmore reincarnated every day, an empty figurehead servling of less-than-benevolent interests hiding in plain sight. What will become of this Republic when he puts his Santa suit away for the year, nobody knows (and many people dread).

     I'll be writing from Paris, France, next week - if the next ice age doesn't close down the airports, and if no trouble-maker manages to get on-board my plane with a Semtex suppository hidden in his vitals. I sincerely wonder if the European banks will implode before the holiday runs its course, but I suppose the folks in charge will be too drunk all week to even play Grand Theft Auto on their cell phones. I've got a sad, nagging feeling that this may be Europe's last year as the world's tourist theme park. They've gone through that before, too, by the way - history does repeat in patterns, if not in exact story-line - in the roughly century-long lull between Waterloo and the Guns of August, 1914. The memory of the Long Peace is why the First World War was so demoralizing to Western Civ. God knows what mischief awaits when the current game of Bank Back-stop Hot Potato comes to its certain end in Euroland.

      All that said, I take a certain consolation in the fact that Julian Assange is at large!

     Merry Christmas everyone, and to all a jolly week of schmoozing, boozing, gifting, grifting, and joy to the world! (Oh, and don't rob the house.)

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/12/and-to-all-a-good-night.html

More from the run thru east Texas yesterday...
Detroit itself is not worth the drive...not an epic fail by any stretch, but if you are looking for massive amounts of decay like that found in Honey Grove/Paris you will be disappointed...but there are some nice little things to be found wandering around going and returning that made the day...little oddities like the "Git Ur Done" gas station and store - brings whole new meaning to the word redneck...LOL...and then there's the Chapman Aircraft recovery business...hehehehehehe...its all good!

Found some fun stuff between Detroit and Paris TX this afternoon...

 

Somewhere in Sherman town...

The Revolutionary Moment

By James Howard Kunstler
on December 13, 2010 9:31 AM

     

     I overheard a conversation between two employees over at the Price Chopper supermarket last week. (The Price Chopper logo is a picture of a Mercury dime with an ax cleaving into Mercury's head; in other words, an ax murder.) The supermarket employees were both middle-aged women.

     First: "I'm going home to a cold house."

     Second: "Why don't you turn up the heat?"

     First: "I don't have no money for fuel."

     Meanwhile, 175 miles south in Manhattan somewhere, Lloyd Blankfein's personal shopper is trying to figure out whether to buy Lloyd's favorite niece a Fabergé egg themed Memories of Azov or a Jaguar XK convertible. 

     Maybe the catch here is that the anonymous supermarket workers are only freezing this Christmas season. If they were freezing and hungry, it might be a different story. But, working in a supermarket, a person might find a way to cadge a few tidbits here and there (whoops, we broke a bag of Cheetos on the loading dock) - the catch there being you could get fired for stealing the merchandise. O sorry nation!

     But don't fear! The president and congress are looking out for you, O nation of freezing supermarket employees (and flummoxed personal shoppers, and wily mega-bank CEOs)! They have fashioned a deal that we might call Stim-u-rama. Everybody gets a tax cut! Everybody! Not just Lloyd B but all you toiling and moiling shelf-stockers and check-out cashiers. Plus, you will get a reduction of several percentage points in your payroll deductions - a redoo in the dedoo! -  which must be good for at least one Justin Bieber action figure (if there are any left!) in these waning days of the Yuletide consumer frenzy.

     Meanwhile moreover, CBS 60-Minutes showed a segment Sunday night on the rip-roaring economic miracle of Brazil - "a little bit bigger than the USA geographically and loaded with natural resources" - as if to rub it in that we have become a sorry nation of losers to a bunch of no-account beach layabouts. As usual, the 60-Minutes reportage was full of lies and misrepresentations, for instance, that Brazil's offshore oil discoveries are so huge and so easy to extract that they will save industrial civilization.

      The sights and smells of Christmas usually put me in a mellow frame of mind. But this year there's an acid edge in the mulled wine, an off-taste in the plum pudding, a disconcerting odor of rot in the piped-in holiday potpourri.

     Obviously, the government tax deal along with the Federal Reserve's recent QE announcements represent a mighty effort to stuff some spendable lucre into this shuddering, doddering beast of  the American economy. The people running things don't know what else to do. We find ourselves in a decelerating system, hopelessly over-complex (and scheming, even, to add additional layers of complexity!), with money-making activity shifted from producing things of value into a runaway Wall Street machine dedicated to something-for-nothing rentier exploitation of interest rate differentials, arbitrages, short-sales, outright swindles, and other activities based on no creation of value whatsoever. While capital piles up in the salons of Central Park West and the cigar cellars of the Hamptons, social capital hemorrhages every day as masses of formerly-working Americans forego the acquisition of any useful skills, or forget old ones, or opt to lose themselves in the transports of methadrine, "reality" TV, and tattoo art. To put it perhaps a bit indelicately, our shit is falling apart.

     It's fascinating that in the background of all this the price of oil is fibrillating around $90-a-barrel - and nobody is paying any attention to that. We seem to have forgotten the lesson from back in 2008 that when oil gets above the $80 mark, things in this land of Happy Motoring and the Warehouse-on-wheels don't work so well. No wonder President Obama and congress are trying to stuff the country full of sugar plums just to get past the horror of a Christmas holiday when not a few working people will be freezing in their homes, if they have homes.

     And in not too many days ahead we'll get a peek at those Christmas bonuses landing in the laps of Lloyd Blankfein's minions at Goldman Sachs and the rest of the geniuses in the engine room of prosperity.

     When I was already a grown-up young newspaper reporter thirty-odd years ago, I never dreamed I'd see a revolutionary moment here in the USA - even with old Nixie pulling one fast one after another, before heading off to that helicopter for his last wave to the people who elected him. Now, I'm not so sure.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/12/the-revolutionary-moment.html 

Gone Exploring!!!

Not exactly what I was expecting to see at a Christmas Parade in downtown McKinney...

This is closer to my expectations, but to each their own I guess...

The Jobs Picture

By James Howard Kunstler
on December 6, 2010 9:57 AM

      The clarion cries of "recovery" cut painfully through the crisp pre-Christmas air while the now-perpetually unemployed huddle in their tents around the Sacramento delta, and the state AGs slug it out with the foreclosure goons, and not a few mortgage payment drop-outs enjoy luxury living in McMansions with no monthly carrying costs, and the minions of Goldman Sachs (with fellow squids) groom their beaks waiting for the massive chum slick of bonus checks to be dropped by helicopters in this the third holiday season since Wall Street committed suicide by an overdose of Ponzi. 

 

     It's pathetic to hear the wan cry of "recovery" issued by the high priests and tribunes of this land. Do the president and his train of wizards really suppose that all the necessary pieces are in place to re-start the economic dynamics of, say, 2003? A million busboys and lawn service lackeys lining up for half-million dollar liar loans at the Countrywide office? BCA, Citi, and all the other big banks pawning off bundles upon bundles of these worthless obligations to insurance companies, pension funds, foolish endowment fund managers and any other reckless entity desperate for yield? A hyperbolic consumer economy pyramid resting on a base of empty promises to repay?

 

     Sorry. There's no way the USA can ever "recover" to that lush breeding ground of swindling, fraud, and childish irresponsibility. The hardships of today do not represent a dip in some regular cycle of financial push-me-pull-you. This is a systemic, structural change in the socio-economic ecology of human life. Those who have been shuffling from one office to another with their dog-eared resumes, and clothing pressed under the mattress while sleeping, are bound to be disappointed. The very idea of a "job" may be obsolete, in the sense of bureaucratically organized endeavors complete with a "human resources" department that can just plug in human components like diodes in an engineered system.

 

      Among the surprises I've suggested over the years is the idea that people used to spending long hours in cubicles staring at video screens may, at some point ahead, begin to spend their days in the fresh air, cultivating food crops. I'm sure this sounds outlandish. But we begin to see the new dynamic of this world resolving in the nexus between a crisis of capital, climate change, and peak oil. 

 

     Food is getting scarce. Worldwide grain reserves stand at unprecedented lows. Droughts in Russia and Australia mean that basic foods will be in short supply on the margins - that is, the impoverished countries we used to call "third world" that depend on grain imports. The American supermarket aisles still groan with every conceivable staple and delicacy, but note the prices of things. A buck and a half for four little onions. $1.18 for one apple. $4 for a jar of jam. Compare these numbers with the wages that have not gone up effectively since around 1970.

 

      As I write this morning, oil is 11 cents short of $90 a barrel. That's well into the price range that destroys economic activity in the USA. Why is the price of oil creeping up relentlessly in a structurally impaired economy? My guess is the beginning of hoarding on the grand scale, as nations slowly wake to the reality of the world production peak, and scramble to max out their tank-farm capacity. By the way, the price of oil could easily crash again - and, I believe the period just ahead will be marked by extreme volatility in oil prices - but if it goes back down to $20 a barrel we'll probably be in a situation where nobody has any money to buy it even at bargain basement prices.That was exactly the situation 70-odd years ago during the Great Depression: plenty of everything; but no money.

 

     The crisis of capital still has many acts to play out. The current installment taking place in Europe is a game of musical chairs played by nations who cannot pay their debts or the regular bills. The Euro was on its way sliding into oblivion a week or so ago when the European Central Bank and the IMF came up with a few billion to cover bond interest for deadbeat countries through the Christmas season - at the same time that Ben Bernanke's Fed offered up a $75-billion-a-month bid for US Treasury bonds (and god-knows-really what other sort of dodgy paper, based on the Fed's track record of hosing up every distressed instrument on the landscape, including the notes on cheap chain hotels). The Euro bounced back, at least in relation to the US dollar. The same darn skit will have to be replayed in the first quarter of 2011 and my guess is that German voters will pull the IV-line of financial support out of its terminally ailing neighbors. The net effect will be stupendous economic confusion and a lot of bad feeling. This is the year that Europe ceases to be a theme park and reverts to a continent of dangerous squabbles and beefs.

 

     America has appeared to be a bystander to that spectacle - apart from all the European banks and insurance operations that Ben Bernanke dropped TARP money on, it was revealed last week - but the US financial situation is every bit as sketchy as Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, and we have no idea how we're going to cover our obligations after Christmas.

 

     This idea of "recovery" promulgated by authority figures who ought to know better is the cruelest swindle of them all, and perhaps the final one. If you want something like gainful employment in the years ahead, don't rely on the corporations, the government, or anyone with a work station equipped cubicle. Start reading up on gardening and harness repair. Learn how to fix a pair of shoes. Volunteer for EMT duty if you're already out of a paycheck, and learn how to comfort people in medical distress. Jobs of the future will be hands-on and direct. I have no idea what medium of exchange you'll get paid with, but a chicken is a good start.

 

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/12/the-jobs-picture.html

From the Christmas parade in downtown tonight...more to come later...