Getty ImagesPretty much says it all!
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
000
WTNT31 KNHC 301140
TCPAT1
BULLETIN
HURRICANE ALEX INTERMEDIATE ADVISORY NUMBER 19A
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL012010
700 AM CDT WED JUN 30 2010
...ALEX MOVING IN NO HURRY......
SUMMARY OF 700 AM CDT...1200 UTC...INFORMATION
----------------------------------------------
LOCATION...23.4N 95.3W
ABOUT 155 MI...250 KM E OF LA PESCA MEXICO
ABOUT 220 MI...355 KM SE OF BROWNSVILLE TEXAS
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...80 MPH...130 KM/HR
PRESENT MOVEMENT...WNW OR 290 DEGREES AT 7 MPH...11 KM/HR
MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...959 MB...28.32 INCHES
WATCHES AND WARNINGS
--------------------
CHANGES WITH THIS ADVISORY...
NONE.
SUMMARY OF WATCHES AND WARNINGS IN EFFECT...
A HURRICANE WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR...
* THE COAST OF TEXAS SOUTH OF BAFFIN BAY TO THE MOUTH OF THE RIO
GRANDE
* THE COAST OF MEXICO FROM THE MOUTH OF THE RIO GRANDE TO LA CRUZ
A TROPICAL STORM WARNING IN IN EFFECT FOR...
* THE COAST OF TEXAS FROM BAFFIN BAY TO PORT OCONNOR
* THE COAST OF MEXICO SOUTH OF LA CRUZ TO CABO ROJO
FOR STORM INFORMATION SPECIFIC TO YOUR AREA IN THE UNITED
STATES...INCLUDING POSSIBLE INLAND WATCHES AND WARNINGS...PLEASE
MONITOR PRODUCTS ISSUED BY YOUR LOCAL NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE
FORECAST OFFICE. FOR STORM INFORMATION SPECIFIC TO YOUR AREA OUTSIDE
UNITED STATES...PLEASE MONITOR PRODUCTS ISSUED BY YOUR NATIONAL
METEOROLOGICAL SERVICE.
DISCUSSION AND 48-HOUR OUTLOOK
------------------------------
AT 700 AM CDT...1200 UTC...THE CENTER OF HURRICANE ALEX WAS LOCATED
NEAR LATITUDE 23.4 NORTH...LONGITUDE 95.3 WEST. ALEX IS MOVING
TOWARD THE WEST-NORTHWEST NEAR 7 MPH...11 KM/HR. A SLOW WEST TO
WEST-NORTHWESTWARD MOTION IS EXPECTED OVER THE NEXT 24 TO 48 HOURS.
ON THE FORECAST TRACK...THE CENTER OF ALEX WILL APPROACH THE COAST
OF NORTHEASTERN MEXICO OR SOUTHERN TEXAS BY LATE THIS AFTERNOON OR
EARLY EVENING...AND MAKE LANDFALL IN THE HURRICANE WARNING AREA
LATE TONIGHT OR EARLY THURSDAY MORNING.
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS REMAIN NEAR 80 MPH...130 KM/HR...WITH HIGHER
GUSTS. ALEX IS A CATEGORY ONE HURRICANE ON THE SAFFIR-SIMPSON
HURRICANE WIND SCALE. ADDITIONAL STRENGTHENING IS FORECAST...AND
ALEX COULD BECOME A CATEGORY TWO HURRICANE PRIOR TO LANDFALL. ALEX
WILL BEGIN TO WEAKEN AFTER ITS CENTER CROSSES THE COASTLINE.
HURRICANE FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 25 MILES...35 KM...FROM
THE CENTER...AND TROPICAL STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 200
MILES...325 KM. NOAA BUOY 42055 LOCATED SOUTHEAST OF ALEX RECENTLY
REPORTED SUSTAINED WINDS OF 54 MPH...86 KM/HR WITH A GUST OF 63
MPH...101 KM/HR.
THE MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE MEASURED BY AN AIR FORCE RESERVE UNIT
HURRICANE HUNTER AIRCRAFT WAS 959 MB...28.32 INCHES.
HAZARDS AFFECTING LAND
----------------------
RAINFALL...ALEX IS EXPECTED TO PRODUCE TOTAL RAINFALL ACCUMULATIONS
OF 6 TO 12 INCHES OVER PORTIONS OF NORTHEASTERN MEXICO AND SOUTHERN
TEXAS...WITH ISOLATED MAXIMUM AMOUNTS OF 20 INCHES. THESE RAINS
COULD CAUSE LIFE-THREATENING FLASH FLOODS AND MUD SLIDES...
ESPECIALLY IN MOUNTAINOUS TERRAIN. RAINBANDS ASSOCIATED WITH ALEX
ARE SPREADING ONSHORE IN NORTHEASTERN MEXICO AND SOUTHERN TEXAS.
WIND...TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED TO REACH THE COAST
WITHIN THE HURRICANE AND TROPICAL STORM WARNING AREAS LATER THIS
MORNING...MAKING OUTSIDE PREPARATIONS DIFFICULT OR DANGEROUS.
STORM SURGE...A DANGEROUS STORM SURGE WILL RAISE WATER LEVELS BY
AS MUCH AS 3 TO 5 FEET ABOVE GROUND LEVEL ALONG THE IMMEDIATE COAST
TO THE NORTH OF WHERE THE CENTER MAKES LANDFALL. THE SURGE COULD
PENETRATE INLAND AS FAR AS SEVERAL MILES FROM THE SHORE WITH DEPTH
GENERALLY DECREASING AS THE WATER MOVES INLAND. NEAR THE COAST...
THE SURGE WILL BE ACCOMPANIED BY LARGE AND DESTRUCTIVE WAVES.
TORNADOES...ISOLATED TORNADOES ARE POSSIBLE OVER PORTIONS OF EXTREME
SOUTHERN TEXAS TODAY.
NEXT ADVISORY
-------------
NEXT COMPLETE ADVISORY...1000 AM CDT.
$$
FORECASTER AVILA
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
Say What?
I think America missed something. It must be the time of year, what with inhaling all those fumes from the charcoal starter... and fueling up the Jet-skis so as to turn a perfectly good mountain lake into something like a Cuisinart on the guacamole setting... and the rousing evenings in the Nascar parking lots hitting palmetto bugs with your wiffle bat... and all that anxious waiting for a 10W-40 hard rain to fall on the Gulf Coast states - but President Obama made a very interesting remark when the financial regulation package passed in the senate the other day. He said the bill would make sure that "Main Street is never again held responsible for Wall Street's mistakes."
Whoosh....
That was the sound of something going over America's head. Something about the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile. And frankly I don't think the president even meant to be coy or deceptive. It just means he doesn't get it either. Never again....
Never again?
What the fuck?
Why even this time? Why isn't there an army of federal attorneys out there, their teeth bristling with subpoenas, beating the bushes in every lane and skyscraper floor of lower Manhattan (and Fairfield County, Connecticut, not to mention a thousand office parks around the USA) to roust out the grifters and swindlers who took Main Street to the cleaners this time.
The audacity of cluelessness! And the hilarity of "next time."
Earth to President Obama: there isn't going to be a next time. This time was enough to git 'er done. Wall Street - in particular the biggest "banks" - packaged up and sold enough swindles to unwind 2500 years of western civilization. You simply cannot imagine the amount of bad financial paper out there right now in every vault and portfolio on the planet. Enough, really, to sink any company even pretending to trade in things more abstract than a mud brick or an hour of labor. What's more, the cross-collateralized obligations between them are so vast and intricate that all the standing timber in North America could not be fashioned into enough pick-up sticks to represent the hideous death-dealing tangle of frauds waiting for the wing-beat of a single black swan to come crashing down.
Go out and get a copy of Michael Lewis's recent book The Big Short for a close-up view on one micro-corner of the investment world. You will discover that the people fabricating things like synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) had no idea what the fuck they were doing - besides deliberately creating documents that nobody would ever understand, that would never be unraveled by teams of law clerks or secret words or magic incantations or prayers to some dark hirsute deity, and were guaranteed to place in jeopardy every operation of the world economy above the barter level. Sorry to invoke the hoary old metaphor about the horse being out of the barn - but the larger problem is what the horse left behind in a great steaming mound clear up to the rafters. There was nothing to understand in all this crap, except that betting against it was a good idea, and then only for those who placed the earliest bets - because everybody else is going to get just as screwed as those who stuffed their vaults and portfolios with Triple-A rated horseshit.
What banks and governments have been doing for the past eighteen months is a dumbshow meant to distract the public from the fact that the world financial system has been effectively destroyed. There isn't enough money left in the known reaches of the universe to pay off the outstanding claims. In fact, not even close. Everything that proceeds from this fiasco will be in service of impoverishing most of the population and, incidentally, probably bringing down governments and, with them, convenient social usufructs such as due process of law and civil order. What remains - what you're watching right now on CNN or Fox - is just a representation of the former structures of civilized life, what Joe Bageant refers to as "the hologram," a kind of 3-D picture you can see around, that looks like reality, but is actually immaterial, a collective hallucination. It's comfortable living in a hologram - until you discover that you're in one.
In the summertime, when there are weenies to grill and Jet-skis to commit suicide on, the public is usually having too much fun to pay attention to anything. Maybe this is how come summertime is also when lots of bad shit happens, or gets ready to happen. The guns of August... blitzkrieg... 9-11... the death of Lehman Brothers....
A few other social notes this week: Something else the public (and, of course, the news media) missed in the General McChrystal affair. It wasn't just that the general badmouthed his civilian superiors. It was that he was not the other thing that an army officer should be: a gentleman. He was a lout who reveled in everything lowest in his own culture. He was a man so disturbed by having to spend a night in Paris at a good restaurant with civilized people that it seems to have driven him plumb batshit. General George Patton - a man renowned for his own profane intemperance - would have boxed Stanley McChrystal's ears for his sheer childishness and assigned him to Graves Registration. When the USA falls apart in a few years, let's hope General McChrystal doesn't ride over the horizon on a white horse with an army of Af-stan vets flexing their neck tattoos behind him.
Oh, and something else: notice that the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher has vanished from the front pages of The New York Times and even The Huffington Post. Nobody gives a shit anymore. Bring it on.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
000
WTNT31 KNHC 261147
TCPAT1
BULLETIN
TROPICAL STORM ALEX INTERMEDIATE ADVISORY NUMBER 3A
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL012010
700 AM CDT SAT JUN 26 2010
...ALEX HEADING TOWARD BELIZE AND THE YUCATAN PENINSULA...
SUMMARY OF 700 AM CDT...1200 UTC...INFORMATION
----------------------------------------------
LOCATION...17.0N 85.3W
ABOUT 200 MI...320 KM E OF BELIZE CITY
ABOUT 225 MI...360 KM ESE OF CHETUMAL MEXICO
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...40 MPH...65 KM/HR
PRESENT MOVEMENT...WNW OR 285 DEGREES AT 8 MPH...13 KM/HR
MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...1004 MB...29.65 INCHES
WATCHES AND WARNINGS
--------------------
CHANGES WITH THIS ADVISORY...
NONE.
SUMMARY OF WATCHES AND WARNINGS IN EFFECT...
A TROPICAL STORM WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR...
* THE COAST OF BELIZE AND THE EAST COAST OF THE YUCATAN PENINSULA OF
MEXICO FROM CHETUMAL TO CANCUN
* THE ISLANDS OF ROATAN...GUANAJA...AND UTILA IN HONDURAS
A TROPICAL STORM WATCH IS IN EFFECT FOR...
* THE COAST OF HONDURAS FROM LIMON WESTWARD TO THE BORDER OF
HONDURAS AND GUATEMALA
A TROPICAL STORM WARNING MEANS THAT TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS ARE
EXPECTED SOMEWHERE WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN 36 HOURS.
A TROPICAL STORM WATCH MEANS THAT TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS ARE
POSSIBLE WITHIN THE WATCH AREA...GENERALLY WITHIN 48 HOURS.
ADDITIONAL WATCHES AND WARNINGS MAY BE REQUIRED FOR PORTIONS OF THE
YUCATAN PENINSULA LATER TODAY.
FOR STORM INFORMATION SPECIFIC TO YOUR AREA...PLEASE MONITOR
PRODUCTS ISSUED BY YOUR NATIONAL METEOROLOGICAL SERVICE.
DISCUSSION AND 48-HOUR OUTLOOK
------------------------------
AT 700 AM CDT...1200 UTC...THE CENTER OF TROPICAL STORM ALEX WAS
LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 17.0 NORTH...LONGITUDE 85.3 WEST. ALEX IS
MOVING TOWARD THE WEST-NORTHWEST NEAR 8 MPH...13 KM/HR. A GRADUAL
TURN TOWARD THE NORTHWEST WITH AN INCREASE IN FORWARD SPEED IS
EXPECTED DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS. ON THE FORECAST TRACK...THE
CENTER OF ALEX WILL APPROACH THE COAST OF BELIZE AND THE YUCATAN
PENINSULA TONIGHT OR SUNDAY MORNING. SOME ERRATIC MOTION IS
POSSIBLE TODAY AS THE CIRCULATION OF ALEX CONSOLIDATES.
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 40 MPH...65 KM/HR...WITH HIGHER
GUSTS. ADDITIONAL STRENGTHENING IS EXPECTED BEFORE THE CENTER OF
ALEX REACHES THE COAST OF BELIZE OR THE YUCATAN PENINSULA.
TROPICAL STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 105 MILES...165 KM
TO THE EAST OF THE CENTER.
ESTIMATED MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE IS 1004 MB...29.65 INCHES.
HAZARDS AFFECTING LAND
----------------------
RAINFALL...ALEX IS EXPECTED TO PRODUCE TOTAL RAIN ACCUMULATIONS OF
4 TO 8 INCHES OVER THE YUCATAN PENINSULA...EASTERN GUATEMALA...MUCH
OF HONDURAS AND BELIZE THROUGH SUNDAY EVENING. ISOLATED MAXIMUM
AMOUNTS OF 15 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE OVER MOUNTAINOUS AREAS. THESE
RAINS COULD CAUSE LIFE-THREATENING FLASH FLOODS AND MUDSLIDES.
WIND...TROPICAL STORM FORCE WINDS ARE EXPECTED TO REACH THE BAY
ISLANDS OF HONDURAS BY THIS AFTERNOON...AND REACH THE COAST OF
BELIZE AND THE YUCATAN PENINSULA WITHIN THE WARNING AREA BY
TONIGHT.
NEXT ADVISORY
-------------
NEXT COMPLETE ADVISORY...1000 AM CDT.
$$
FORECASTER AVILA
Friday, June 25, 2010
000
WTNT41 KNHC 252216
TCDAT1
TROPICAL DEPRESSION ONE SPECIAL DISCUSSION NUMBER 1
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL012010
600 PM EDT FRI JUN 25 2010
THE AIR FORCE RESERVE HURRICANE HUNTER AIRCRAFT INVESTIGATING THE
DISTURBANCE IN THE WESTERN CARIBBEAN SEA HAS FOUND A WELL-DEFINED
CIRCULATION CENTER WITH A MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE OF AROUND 1004
MB. BASED ON DATA FROM THE AIRCRAFT...ADVISORIES ARE BEING
INITIATED ON TROPICAL DEPRESSION ONE AT THIS TIME. THE INITIAL
INTENSITY IS SET AT 30 KT BASED ON A BLEND OF WIND DATA FROM THE
AIRCRAFT AND SURROUNDING OBSERVATIONS.
THE DEPRESSION IS VERY CLOSE TO TROPICAL STORM STRENGTH...AND
CONDITIONS APPEAR FAVORABLE FOR SOME INTENSIFICATION BEFORE IT
REACHES THE YUCATAN PENINSULA IN A DAY OR SO. AFTER WEAKENING OVER
LAND...THE CYCLONE COULD REGAIN SOME STRENGTH WHEN IT ENTERS THE
SOUTHERN GULF OF MEXICO. THE OFFICIAL INTENSITY FORECAST IS CLOSE
TO THE DECAY SHIPS MODEL...WHICH INCLUDES THE EFFECTS OF
INTERACTION WITH THE YUCATAN PENINSULA.
THE INITIAL MOTION IS RATHER UNCERTAIN BUT THE BEST ESTIMATE IS
300/09. A MID-LEVEL RIDGE IS FORECAST TO PERSIST OVER THE GULF OF
MEXICO FOR THE NEXT 48 TO 72 HOURS...THEREFORE A GENERAL
WEST-NORTHWESTWARD MOTION IS EXPECTED DURING THAT TIME...WHICH
SHOULD BRING THE CYCLONE ACROSS THE YUCATAN PENINSULA AND INTO THE
SOUTHERN GULF OF MEXICO. AFTER 72 HOURS THE TRACK MODEL GUIDANCE
DIVERGES...WITH ONE GROUP...INCLUDING THE HWRF AND GFDL...TAKING
THE SYSTEM ON A MORE NORTHERLY OR NORTHEASTERLY TRACK. A SECOND
GROUP OF GUIDANCE...INCLUDING THE GFS...ECMWF AND NOGAPS KEEPS THE
SYSTEM ON A MORE WESTERLY TRACK OVER THE SOUTHERN GULF OF MEXICO.
THE OFFICIAL FORECAST IS A BLEND OF THESE TWO.
A TROPICAL STORM WARNING IS REQUIRED FOR THE EAST COAST OF THE
YUCATAN PENINSULA AT THIS TIME. IF THE CYCLONE MOVES SOUTH OF THE
OFFICIAL FORECAST TRACK...A TROPICAL STORM WARNING FOR BELIZE MAY
BE REQUIRED LATER THIS EVENING.
FORECAST POSITIONS AND MAX WINDS
INITIAL 25/2200Z 16.5N 83.5W 30 KT
12HR VT 26/0600Z 17.4N 84.7W 35 KT
24HR VT 26/1800Z 18.5N 86.5W 40 KT
36HR VT 27/0600Z 19.5N 88.0W 45 KT...INLAND
48HR VT 27/1800Z 21.0N 89.5W 25 KT...INLAND
72HR VT 28/1800Z 23.0N 91.5W 30 KT
96HR VT 29/1800Z 24.0N 92.5W 35 KT
120HR VT 30/1800Z 25.0N 93.5W 40 KT
$$
FORECASTER AVILA/BRENNAN
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Forecast for 93L
NHC is giving 93L a 40% chance of developing into a tropical depression by Thursday morning, which is a reasonable forecast. Given the storm's current lack of spin and relatively modest amount of heavy thunderstorms, the earliest I'd expect 93L to become a tropical depression would be Wednesday afternoon, with Thursday more likely. Wind shear is expected to be low, less than 10 knots, over the central and western Caribbean this week. Water temperatures will be warm, dry air absent, and the MJO favorable. I don't see any major impediments to the storm becoming a tropical depression by Thursday, and it is a bit of a surprise to me that the computer models have been reluctant to develop 93L. The GFS, NOGAPS, and UKMET models do not develop 93L, and the ECMWF model doesn't develop 93L until after it crosses the Yucatan Peninsula and enters the Gulf of Mexico in a about a week. The current (2am EDT) run of the GFDL model predicts 93L will be a weak tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico in five days; its previous run had 93L as a major hurricane in the Gulf. Given all this model reluctance and the current disorganization of 93L, I give the storm a low (less than 20% chance) of becoming a hurricane in the Caribbean. Expect 93L to bring flooding rains of 3 - 6 inches to Jamaica, eastern Cuba, and southwestern Haiti today through Wednesday. These rains will spread to the Cayman Islands and central Cuba by Thursday, and western Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on Friday. The current run of the SHIPS model has 93L slowing down late this week to a forward speed of just 6 knots (7 mph) from its current speed of about 10 mph, in response to a weakening in the steering currents. A trough of low pressure is expected to swing down over the Eastern U.S. early next week. If this trough is strong enough and 93L develops significantly, the storm could get pulled northwards and make landfall along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast in the oil spill region. This is the solution of the Canadian GEM model. If 93L stays weak and/or the trough is not so strong, the storm would get pushed west-northwestwards towards the Texas coast. This is the solution of the ECMWF model. The amount of wind shear in the Gulf of Mexico next week is highly uncertain. There is currently a band of high shear near 30 knots over the Gulf, and some of the models predict this shear will remain over the Gulf over the next 7 - 10 days. However, other models predict that this band of high shear will retreat northwards and leave the Gulf nearly shear-free. The long-term fate of 93L remains very murky. My main concerns at this point are the potential for 3 - 6 inches of rain in Haiti over the next two days, and the possibility 93L could become a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico next week.
NHC is giving 93L a 40% chance of developing into a tropical depression by Thursday morning, which is a reasonable forecast. Given the storm's current lack of spin and relatively modest amount of heavy thunderstorms, the earliest I'd expect 93L to become a tropical depression would be Wednesday afternoon, with Thursday more likely. Wind shear is expected to be low, less than 10 knots, over the central and western Caribbean this week. Water temperatures will be warm, dry air absent, and the MJO favorable. I don't see any major impediments to the storm becoming a tropical depression by Thursday, and it is a bit of a surprise to me that the computer models have been reluctant to develop 93L. The GFS, NOGAPS, and UKMET models do not develop 93L, and the ECMWF model doesn't develop 93L until after it crosses the Yucatan Peninsula and enters the Gulf of Mexico in a about a week. The current (2am EDT) run of the GFDL model predicts 93L will be a weak tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico in five days; its previous run had 93L as a major hurricane in the Gulf. Given all this model reluctance and the current disorganization of 93L, I give the storm a low (less than 20% chance) of becoming a hurricane in the Caribbean. Expect 93L to bring flooding rains of 3 - 6 inches to Jamaica, eastern Cuba, and southwestern Haiti today through Wednesday. These rains will spread to the Cayman Islands and central Cuba by Thursday, and western Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on Friday. The current run of the SHIPS model has 93L slowing down late this week to a forward speed of just 6 knots (7 mph) from its current speed of about 10 mph, in response to a weakening in the steering currents. A trough of low pressure is expected to swing down over the Eastern U.S. early next week. If this trough is strong enough and 93L develops significantly, the storm could get pulled northwards and make landfall along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast in the oil spill region. This is the solution of the Canadian GEM model. If 93L stays weak and/or the trough is not so strong, the storm would get pushed west-northwestwards towards the Texas coast. This is the solution of the ECMWF model. The amount of wind shear in the Gulf of Mexico next week is highly uncertain. There is currently a band of high shear near 30 knots over the Gulf, and some of the models predict this shear will remain over the Gulf over the next 7 - 10 days. However, other models predict that this band of high shear will retreat northwards and leave the Gulf nearly shear-free. The long-term fate of 93L remains very murky. My main concerns at this point are the potential for 3 - 6 inches of rain in Haiti over the next two days, and the possibility 93L could become a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico next week.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
A STRONG TROPICAL WAVE OVER THE CENTRAL CARIBBEAN SEA IS PRODUCING A LARGE AREA OF DISORGANIZED SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS OVER PORTIONS OF THE CENTRAL CARIBBEAN AND THE ADJACENT LAND AREAS. UPPER-LEVEL WINDS APPEAR TO BE CONDUCIVE FOR GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT AND A TROPICAL DEPRESSION COULD FORM DURING THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS. REGARDLESS OF DEVELOPMENT...LOCALLY HEAVY RAINFALL AND GUSTY WINDS ARE POSSIBLE OVER PORTIONS OF PUERTO RICO...THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC... HAITI...AND JAMAICA DURING THE NEXT DAY OR SO AS IT MOVES WEST-NORTHWESTWARD AT ABOUT 10 MPH. THERE IS A MEDIUM CHANCE...40 PERCENT...OF THIS SYSTEM BECOMING A TROPICAL CYCLONE DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS.
Monday, June 21, 2010
If the National Hurricane Center's forecast verifies, 93L will enter the GOM south of Cuba. The shear is easing, and the ridge over Texas is supposed to start moving off to the east. The ridge allows a dry heat, but it also blocks tropical systems from heading our way. http://www.wunderground.com/blog/Jef...?entrynum=1513
Forecast for 93L NHC is giving 93L a 20% chance of developing into a tropical depression by Wednesday morning, which is a reasonable forecast. With wind shear expected to drop to low values less than 10 knots over the central and western Caribbean this week, I don't see any major impediments to the storm becoming a tropical depression by Friday. The ECMWF model is the most aggressive in developing this system, taking it into the Gulf of Mexico as a hurricane next week. The NOGAPS model keeps the storm weak and farther south, predicting that 93L will bring heavy rains to northern Honduras as a tropical disturbance or tropical depression on Friday and Saturday. The GFS model does not develop 93L. Expect 93L to bring flooding rains of 3 - 6 inches to Jamaica, eastern Cuba, and extreme southwestern Haiti on Wednesday. These rains will spread to the Cayman Islands and central Cuba by Thursday.
ETA:NHC has risen the threat of development in the next 48 hours into the 30-50%.
Mismanaging Contraction
Lesson of the Macondo: Blowout preventers don't prevent blowouts. This comes as a shock to people attuned to the on-schedule arrival of techno-miracles. Now, all the acronym-studded invocations of techno-mastery by men wearing interesting hats will not avail to put the schnitz on an epic horror show in the Gulf of Mexico.
President Obama's speech to the nation a week ago was designed as a kind of blowout preventer for the legitimacy of the federal government. It did little to stop the hemorrhaging of confidence in political leadership. A nation foundering in a crippled vessel in the horse latitudes of collective purpose on a sea of red ink looks to its captain - who puffs a few platitudes into the tattered sails and retreats belowdecks to pace and stew. This is a society truly lost at sea, where even the friendly dolphins are turning belly-up and the dying seabirds stare accusingly under their cloaks of crude oil. The feeling grows that we can't do anything right. Will someone please turn off the TV?
In 2008, the voters turned to a lanky newcomer from Illinois to rescue itself from just the sort of technocrat jerkoffs who had run the nation into a ditch with their invocations of "mission accomplished" and "Good job, Brownie." Change was in the air. Alas, consistent with the apparent fact that history rhymes but doesn't repeat, Barack Obama proved to be the reincarnation of Millard Fillmore, not Abe Lincoln. Sometimes history works in free verse and this stanza was off by a few syllables. It turns out that change was exactly the one thing not really in the air. America does not want change, except from the cash register at WalMart.
The last time America faced a convulsion as profound as the present one was the late 1850s. The internal contradiction of slavery was driving the nation crazy. The Whig party had been running things for a couple of decades. The Whigs were the party of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. They tried everything possible to finesse the expansion of US territory around the inflammatory issue of slavery. Fillmore came along just in time for the Compromise of 1850, which was intended to settle things and did absolutely nothing to settle things. By the time the election of 1852 happened, Both Webster and Clay were old men preparing to meet their maker and the Whig party absolutely fell apart. Scroll forward a few years and we're in the slaughterhouse of The Civil War.
A hundred and sixty years later now, and the USA faces a new and very different set of internal contradictions. We've ramped up a living arrangement that has no future, just as slavery had no future. We're uncomfortable with the mandates of reality, which is trying to tell us we have to live differently. The American people don't want to hear this. The president doesn't want to tell them. It's possible that he is not tuned into the reality radio station that is broadcasting its mandates. You'd think the Macondo Blowout horror show was coming across loud and clear.
Right after President Obama gave his vapid speech last week, he traveled to Ohio to brag about how much federal stimulus money was going into "shovel-ready" highway projects there. I sincerely believe that the last thing we need right now in this country is more and better highways. Every president since Jimmy Carter has acknowledged that there's a problem with our extreme oil dependency, but none of them have made the short leap to understand that we have a more fundamental problem with car dependency. Someone paying attention to the mandates of reality would get the choo-choo trains running from Dayton to Columbus to Cincinnati to Cleveland - and he would tell General Motors to get into the business of making railroad cars so we don't have to import them from Canada.
Reality is telling us to downscale and get different fast. Quit doing everything possible to prop up the drive-in false utopia and all its accessories. Get local. Tighten up. We have no intention of doing that. The idiocy that passes as informed opinion wants the US money managers to kick out the jambs handing out more money created out of thin air to promote a fantasy called "recovery." To what purpose? To keep the tailgate parties going down at the Nascar ovals? Over at The New York Times Monday morning, the fatuous Paul Krugman says that "stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery." Earth to Krugman: we're mismanaging contraction. Further expansion is just not in the cards right now for the human race. We don't need more people on the planet and we don't have the means to accommodate them. There will be no 'recovery" to "growth" - especially by means of pumping more oil into the system. There is no techno-miracle alt-fuel panoply waiting in the wings to take over from oil. And there is no research-and-development program that will make it happen, no matter how many acronym-studded incantations we drone out.
I admit that contraction is a hard reality - but so is the recognition that we don't get to live forever, something every child begins to grapple with around age seven. The inability to face comprehensive contraction will only insure that its side effects are more debilitating.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
File under things that make you go Hmmmmmm....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_uMg84BBzE&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_uMg84BBzE&feature=player_embedded
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Fierce Urgency
The exquisite morbidity of the BP oil spill has concentrated the collective national mind like few other events in this ongoing long emergency. How many times a day does it occur to you -- perhaps while sitting in traffic, or oogling some girl in a nearby cubicle, or cruising the freezer stacks in the supermarket -- that one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico that crude is just blasting away into the deep blue sea? Anyway, it troubles my hours. But what if it hadn't happened? What if the nation's attention was not fixed on the "fierce urgency" of this disaster and we were left with all the tiresome familiar problems of politics and economy?
After the financial storms of May, people in the knife-and-fork-using nations may feel that all our troubles with money have been sorted out and settled. Greece had an apoplexy and Europe somehow survived -- at least so far. Spain fell to its knees and apparently remains there, in mid-aria, waiting for an orchestra to strike up the next measure. Portugal is trying to hide in plain sight, like a beach-goer who has lost swimsuit in the surf. Hungary choked on something last week and was left sitting at the table with its face in a plate of goulash. Iceland has been put on, well, on ice after stiffing its British account holders. The Brits have discovered that they have enough money to run their country in the style of Edward the Confessor. France is weeping over all the Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese bad paper in its bank vaults. Italy, having become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Silvio Berlusconi, is eating a sparse lunch under the grape arbors. The Baltic states are sinking into a northern peat bog of penury.... And Germany remains upright, wondering how it can wiggle out of this sad-ass collective of fazed cookies.
June so far is a strange ebb tide of of events relating to the world's money, but when the water goes out like that, you know it's sure to return before long, and the peaceful mud-flats of June may vanish under a summer tsunami. I know I'm not alone in the creepy feeling that really nothing has been sorted out and the world is waiting to get hammered six days to Sunday by the consequences of living too large for too long. The markets have been stranded, too, gyrating on the peculiar life-support of robot-traders -- since all the humans have packed up and left the scene for higher ground. The corporate creaming-off of anything not nailed down in America continues apace, with the cream ending up as icing on the petit fours passed around the twilight lawns of East Hampton.
President Obama may be lucky that he has something he can pretend to be decisive about in the BP oil spill. It's allowed him to completely avoid taking a public stand on crucial parts of the financial reform legislation working its way through congress like a stinking bolus. For instance, where does Mr. Obama stand on the reform of credit default swap activities? This dark realm of swindling has come close to choking the American money system to death -- and might yet do the job -- but the president hasn't offered up a word of leadership on it. My guess is that the gestures of reform will leave reform completely unfinished by the time the high water of events starts rushing back in. All the structural fault-lines will remain as even more decay sets in and new cracks appear. Something is gonna give this summer.
It all comes down to one thing: the world is mismanaging contraction. The world will not solve the problems of massive over-complexity with more complexity. But scaling down is apparently not an option, though it will happen whether we participate or not. The USA is like Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener who, when asked to do anything, replied, "I prefer not to." His preference led him to a pauper's grave.
The future attempts to regulate undersea oil drilling will send many companies to do their thing in other parts of the world where nobody gives a shit what you do offshore as long as you pony up the royalties to the grifters in charge onshore. America is going to lose a whole lot more of its own oil production. Smaller companies may shut down altogether from the cost of complying with new safety rules and an inability to get insurance. The oil from deep water in the Gulf of Mexico was how we hoped we would offset the ongoing depletions in Alaska. We're going to have to import even more oil than the two-thirds-plus we already depend on. One thing President Obama -- nor anyone else with an audience or a constituency -- will speak a word about is our massive, incessant purposeless motoring.
Pretty soon, the oil missing from the Gulf will leave a message at the 7-Eleven stops in Dallas and Chattanooga, and before the year is out the cardboard signs that say "Out Of Gas" may hang on the pumps. A great hue and cry will rise out of the Nascar ovals and righteous lady politicians with decoupaged hair-doos will invoke the New World Order and the Book of Revelation in their rise to power. Reasonable men with moderate views will dither on the sidelines, afraid to offend one faction or another.
Sometime this summer that ebb tide of events is going to reverse and we'll have more to contend with than just the shrieking wildlife suffocating in orange gunk, and the ruined spawning grounds of the shrimp, and the lost livelihoods of the sportfishing charter guides, and the tarball covered beaches and devalued real estate. We decided to de-complexify the hard way, the way that brings about as much pain and disorder as possible until we discover that the long emergency beats a path straight into a world made by hand.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Here's this morning's discussion from a weather site I look at: http://www.crownweather.com/?page_id=325 Discussion Invest 92-L, Which May Become A Tropical Depression Today: I continue to monitor an area of low pressure, labeled Invest 92-L, which is located about 1050 miles west-southwest of the Cape Verde Islands. It has become better organized over the last 12 to 18 hours and the cloud signature is becoming much more typical of a tropical depression. Satellite imagery showed that convection intensified overnight and the ball of convection observed is indicative of a strengthening system. Based on the satellite presentation alone, I suspect that Invest 92-L will be upgraded to a tropical depression later this morning or at the very latest this afternoon. It is also not of the question that this system may become a tropical storm by this time tomorrow morning. I expect Invest 92-L to continue tracking to the west-northwest at a forward speed of about 15 mph today through Tuesday. After that, 92-L may bend back a bit towards the west by the middle of this week. I am leaning towards the tracks of the TVCN and TVCC dynamic model tracks, which ultimately carries this system into the Leeward Islands by this weekend. Environmental conditions are forecast to remain favorable for development and intensification from today through Tuesday. After that, wind shear values are forecast to increase to 20 to 30 knots during the middle to last part of this week. Based on this, I expect this system to be upgraded to a tropical depression later this morning and maybe a tropical storm by tomorrow morning. Weakening seems likely later this week as hostile wind shear values should affect this system. All interests in the Leeward and Windward Islands should keep close tabs on the progress of Invest 92-L. Another strong tropical wave has just emerged off of the coast of Africa. This disturbance has the potential to develop over the next few days and it will be monitored very closely. It should be noted that the African tropical wave train will continue for the next week to 10 days. After that, it appears we may see a break for 2 to 3 weeks. After that, the wave train from Africa will come back around mid-July and it could go gangbusters at that point in terms of named storms. Obviously, this is unprecedented to be discussing tropical cyclone development in the eastern Atlantic in mid-June. This is very bad news as it appears that this is a sign of things to come and it is indicative of a potentially dangerous and possibly historic hurricane season. Development from the African Wave Train in mid-June is extremely early and is very concerning.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
ABNT20 KNHC 131730 TWOAT TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL 200 PM EDT SUN JUN 13 2010
FOR THE NORTH ATLANTIC...CARIBBEAN SEA AND THE GULF OF MEXICO...
CLOUDINESS...SHOWERS...AND THUNDERSTORMS ASSOCIATED WITH A BROAD AREA OF LOW PRESSURE LOCATED ABOUT 975 MILES SOUTHWEST OF THE SOUTHERNMOST CAPE VERDE ISLANDS HAVE BECOME BETTER ORGANIZED TODAY. ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS APPEAR CONDUCIVE FOR ADDITIONAL SLOW DEVELOPMENT OF THIS SYSTEM OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS AS IT MOVES WEST-NORTHWESTWARD OR NORTHWESTWARD AT 10 TO 15 MPH. THERE IS A MEDIUM CHANCE...50 PERCENT...OF THIS SYSTEM BECOMING A TROPICAL CYCLONE DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS. ELSEWHERE...TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS.
This thing keeps gaining strength...
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Monday, June 07, 2010
Uncirculated
Brad Abrams
Opening Reception
Saturday, June 12th 7-10pm
Inspired by the recent economic downturn and the need to efficiently recycle readily available material, Brad Abrams responds with a new body of work and coins the term "B-Disks" for his monolithic kiln-cast glass sculptures on exhibit at Laura Moore Fine Art Studios.
Opening Reception
Saturday, June 12th 7-10pm
Inspired by the recent economic downturn and the need to efficiently recycle readily available material, Brad Abrams responds with a new body of work and coins the term "B-Disks" for his monolithic kiln-cast glass sculptures on exhibit at Laura Moore Fine Art Studios.
Which Horizon? by James Howard Kunstler
Greetings, everyone. Here is Jim's Monday morning blog. Fair use applies...
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/06/whi...izon.html#more
Which Horizon?
by James Howard Kunstler
on June 7, 2010 6:18 AM
Did the nation heave a sigh of relief when BP announced that their latest gambit to "cap" the Deepwater Horizon gusher will result in hosing up fifty percent of the leaking oil? If so, the nation may be sighing too soon since the other half of the oil will still collect in underwater plumes and hover all around the Gulf Coast like those baleful mother ships in the most recent generation of alien invasion movies. I shudder to imagine the tonnage of dead wildlife flotsam that will wash up with the tide for years to come. It will seem like a "necklace of death" for several states, though even that may not be enough to distract them from the more gratifying raptures of Nascar and NFL football.
For the moment we can only speculate on what the still-unresolved incident will mean for America's oil supply. The zeal to prosecute BP for something like criminal negligence has bestirred a Department of Justice comatose during the rape-and-pillage of the US financial system. BP may be driven out of business, but then what? The net effect of the oil spill, one way or another, will be the gradual shut-down of oil drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. New government supervision will make operations very costly, if not non-viable, and the surviving companies will probably pack up for the west coast of Africa where supervision is almost non-existent. Anyway you cut it, the US will produce less oil and import more -- and have to rely on the political stability of places like Angola and Nigeria, not to mention the simmering Middle East.
So far, also, the US has done nothing in the way of holding a serious national political discussion about the the most important part of the story: our pathological dependency on cars. I don't know if this will ever happen, even right up to the moment when the lines form at the filling stations. For years, anyway, the few public figures such as Boone Pickens who give the appearance of concern about our oil problem, end up down the rabbit hole of denial when they get behind schemes to run the whole US car-and-truck fleet on something besides gasoline.
This unfortunate techno-narcissism shows that almost nobody wants to think about living with fewer cars driving fewer miles. We're going to be dragged there kicking and screaming, but that's our destination, like it or not. All the effort now going into developing alt-fuels and "green" cars is just a form of "bargaining" on the Kubler-Ross transect of grief.
Traveling around the US, it's easy to understand our failure to come to grips with reality. The nation is fully outfitted for extreme car dependency. You go to places like Atlanta and Minneapolis and you understand how deep we're into this. We spent all our collective national treasure -- and quite a bit beyond that in the form of debt -- building the roadway systems and the suburban furnishings for that mode of existence. We incorporated it into our national identity as the American Way of Life. Now, we don't know what else to do except defend it at all costs, especially by waving the talismanic magic wand of techno-innovation.
The obvious remedy for the oil-and-car problem would be to live in walkable towns and neighborhoods served by the kind of public transit that people are not ashamed to ride in. But it may be too late for that. We're going to be a much poorer society from now on. We squandered the financial resources for that transition on too many other things. We're stuck with our investments in houses and their commercial accessories, built where they were built, and no Jolly Green Giant is going to pick them up and move them closer together in an artful way that adds up to real towns. A reorganization of American life will occur, but now it will be on much less deliberate terms, a much messier and more destructive operation, a default to the smaller scale by extreme necessity, with a lot of losses along the way. The Deepwater Horizon incident only hastens the process.
Anyway, the collapse of suburbia is running neck and neck (and hand-by-hand) with the collapse of capital. Angela Merkel, flicked US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner off like a flea over the weekend at the G-20 meeting in Sitges, Spain. Germany doesn't want to hear about bailouts and stimuli anymore. Germany is looking to reinstate something like a "normal" economy based on producing things of value and paying for things when you have the capital to do it. Germany is pulling the plug on the debt-o-rama banking rackets -- at least insofar as these rackets leave Germany holding the bag for a growing list of deadbeat nations. I don't see how the Euro survives. The remarkable appearance of prosperity in places like Greece and Spain turned out to be a combination of borrowed money and all-time-high tourist flows. Both of these "resources" are heading way down. There's a dwindling supply of middle-class candidates for tourism, especially in the US and the UK, and the Europeans have woken up painfully to the recognition that existing debt is unserviceable. National dominos are wobbling left and right, from Hungary to Latvia to Portugal....
Even the severe steps initiated by Germany may not be enough to keep the lights burning in Europe since the continent has little oil and nat-gas of its own. Europe's experiments with wind power have been valiant (and France's nuclear venture has been daring), but neither of these things will offset the problems associated with peak oil, especially if trouble starts in the Middle East. It was chastening for me to bike around Berlin a week ago and realize that even nations with sturdy cities and good railroads can fall into political chaos. Berlin was a charming place when Hitler arrived on the scene and twelve years later it was a smoldering heap of shattered brick and glass.
The American Way of Life is not so charming, but its very sprawling character may prevent a political maniac from controlling enough of a base to hold all the states and regions together in a thrall of fascism -- and there are all those firearms to think about. I maintain that the trend is down for centralized power here, in the direction of impotency and decreasing competence at anything. I don't subscribe to the paranoid themes of Big Brother government domination, the surveillance state and related fantasies. It'll be more Home Alone meets Risky Business -- a dangerous place with no adult supervision.
The New York Times ran a front-page story on Sunday suggesting that maybe there was something to this nutty idea of Americans preparing for trouble in the months and years ahead, paying down debts, putting some food aside, thinking about where to ride out a socio-economic storm. Their attitude was patronizing of course, and where the actual issues of our oil predicament were concerned, the editors went straight to their "go-to-guy" Daniel Yergin and his public relations shop, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the official PR whore of the oil industry. The Times obviously finds it amusing that some Americans see a collapse on the horizon. The Times is so deep into its own collapse that it doesn't even remember how to cover a story.
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/06/whi...izon.html#more
Which Horizon?
by James Howard Kunstler
on June 7, 2010 6:18 AM
Did the nation heave a sigh of relief when BP announced that their latest gambit to "cap" the Deepwater Horizon gusher will result in hosing up fifty percent of the leaking oil? If so, the nation may be sighing too soon since the other half of the oil will still collect in underwater plumes and hover all around the Gulf Coast like those baleful mother ships in the most recent generation of alien invasion movies. I shudder to imagine the tonnage of dead wildlife flotsam that will wash up with the tide for years to come. It will seem like a "necklace of death" for several states, though even that may not be enough to distract them from the more gratifying raptures of Nascar and NFL football.
For the moment we can only speculate on what the still-unresolved incident will mean for America's oil supply. The zeal to prosecute BP for something like criminal negligence has bestirred a Department of Justice comatose during the rape-and-pillage of the US financial system. BP may be driven out of business, but then what? The net effect of the oil spill, one way or another, will be the gradual shut-down of oil drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. New government supervision will make operations very costly, if not non-viable, and the surviving companies will probably pack up for the west coast of Africa where supervision is almost non-existent. Anyway you cut it, the US will produce less oil and import more -- and have to rely on the political stability of places like Angola and Nigeria, not to mention the simmering Middle East.
So far, also, the US has done nothing in the way of holding a serious national political discussion about the the most important part of the story: our pathological dependency on cars. I don't know if this will ever happen, even right up to the moment when the lines form at the filling stations. For years, anyway, the few public figures such as Boone Pickens who give the appearance of concern about our oil problem, end up down the rabbit hole of denial when they get behind schemes to run the whole US car-and-truck fleet on something besides gasoline.
This unfortunate techno-narcissism shows that almost nobody wants to think about living with fewer cars driving fewer miles. We're going to be dragged there kicking and screaming, but that's our destination, like it or not. All the effort now going into developing alt-fuels and "green" cars is just a form of "bargaining" on the Kubler-Ross transect of grief.
Traveling around the US, it's easy to understand our failure to come to grips with reality. The nation is fully outfitted for extreme car dependency. You go to places like Atlanta and Minneapolis and you understand how deep we're into this. We spent all our collective national treasure -- and quite a bit beyond that in the form of debt -- building the roadway systems and the suburban furnishings for that mode of existence. We incorporated it into our national identity as the American Way of Life. Now, we don't know what else to do except defend it at all costs, especially by waving the talismanic magic wand of techno-innovation.
The obvious remedy for the oil-and-car problem would be to live in walkable towns and neighborhoods served by the kind of public transit that people are not ashamed to ride in. But it may be too late for that. We're going to be a much poorer society from now on. We squandered the financial resources for that transition on too many other things. We're stuck with our investments in houses and their commercial accessories, built where they were built, and no Jolly Green Giant is going to pick them up and move them closer together in an artful way that adds up to real towns. A reorganization of American life will occur, but now it will be on much less deliberate terms, a much messier and more destructive operation, a default to the smaller scale by extreme necessity, with a lot of losses along the way. The Deepwater Horizon incident only hastens the process.
Anyway, the collapse of suburbia is running neck and neck (and hand-by-hand) with the collapse of capital. Angela Merkel, flicked US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner off like a flea over the weekend at the G-20 meeting in Sitges, Spain. Germany doesn't want to hear about bailouts and stimuli anymore. Germany is looking to reinstate something like a "normal" economy based on producing things of value and paying for things when you have the capital to do it. Germany is pulling the plug on the debt-o-rama banking rackets -- at least insofar as these rackets leave Germany holding the bag for a growing list of deadbeat nations. I don't see how the Euro survives. The remarkable appearance of prosperity in places like Greece and Spain turned out to be a combination of borrowed money and all-time-high tourist flows. Both of these "resources" are heading way down. There's a dwindling supply of middle-class candidates for tourism, especially in the US and the UK, and the Europeans have woken up painfully to the recognition that existing debt is unserviceable. National dominos are wobbling left and right, from Hungary to Latvia to Portugal....
Even the severe steps initiated by Germany may not be enough to keep the lights burning in Europe since the continent has little oil and nat-gas of its own. Europe's experiments with wind power have been valiant (and France's nuclear venture has been daring), but neither of these things will offset the problems associated with peak oil, especially if trouble starts in the Middle East. It was chastening for me to bike around Berlin a week ago and realize that even nations with sturdy cities and good railroads can fall into political chaos. Berlin was a charming place when Hitler arrived on the scene and twelve years later it was a smoldering heap of shattered brick and glass.
The American Way of Life is not so charming, but its very sprawling character may prevent a political maniac from controlling enough of a base to hold all the states and regions together in a thrall of fascism -- and there are all those firearms to think about. I maintain that the trend is down for centralized power here, in the direction of impotency and decreasing competence at anything. I don't subscribe to the paranoid themes of Big Brother government domination, the surveillance state and related fantasies. It'll be more Home Alone meets Risky Business -- a dangerous place with no adult supervision.
The New York Times ran a front-page story on Sunday suggesting that maybe there was something to this nutty idea of Americans preparing for trouble in the months and years ahead, paying down debts, putting some food aside, thinking about where to ride out a socio-economic storm. Their attitude was patronizing of course, and where the actual issues of our oil predicament were concerned, the editors went straight to their "go-to-guy" Daniel Yergin and his public relations shop, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the official PR whore of the oil industry. The Times obviously finds it amusing that some Americans see a collapse on the horizon. The Times is so deep into its own collapse that it doesn't even remember how to cover a story.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
107,000 Floridians lose jobless checks June 4
107,000 Floridians lose jobless checks June 4
By Jim Stratton, Orlando Sentinel
6:58 PM EDT, June 4, 2010
About 107,000 Floridians will lose their unemployment benefits today, a number expected to grow by 34,000 people with each passing week.
Payments will stop because Congress has not reauthorized legislation to pay for the complicated mix of programs that keeps benefits flowing to millions of jobless across the country.
For the state's long-term unemployed — 107,000 or so receiving checks under the "Extended Benefits" program — today marks the end of the last week of payments.
For those receiving benefits under one of six programs — one state, five federal — payments will end gradually. Laid-off workers will be paid through the end of whatever tier they are on, but they will not move on to the next level.
That's because federal funding is drying up.
Congress has been covering virtually all of the costs of the programs, reauthorizing them on an almost monthly basis since early this year. But amid growing concerns about the deficit, lawmakers have balked at fully funding them beyond today.
Federal legislation is in place to cover half of the costs of the programs, but Florida and other states have said they can't afford to pay for the rest. The National Employment Law Project, a worker-advocacy group, estimates about 1.2 million people across the country will lose benefits this month.
Federal officials say about 615,000 people in Florida have requested benefits during the past few weeks. Benefits max out at $300 a week.
The U.S. House narrowly passed a $54 billion measure recently reauthorizing the programs through November — while stripping out subsidies for health insurance — but advocates worry the bill won't be approved by the Senate.
"There's push-back from the deficit hawks," said NELP Deputy Director Andrew Stettner. "The whole program is in jeopardy like it's never been before."
Even if the Senate does pass the House bill, a third group of unemployed won't get any help. Those workers have already exhausted all of their benefits and won't receive anything more unless Congress passes an additional tier of federal payments.
Currently, the longest anyone can receive unemployment is 99 weeks — that number has never been higher — and there is little political will to increase that.
"Last week, [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi took that off the map," said Judy Conti, NELP's federal advocacy coordinator. "Sadly, she made it very clear, there won't be any talk about tier five at least until November."
Advocates insist benefits must be available for all jobless workers because the nation's labor market remains in hibernation.
New figures Friday show the national unemployment rate dipped slightly to 9.7 percent in May, but temporary census workers accounted for most of the improvement. The private sector added only 41,000 jobs, fewer than had been projected and not enough to accommodate natural growth of the labor market.
Laid-off workers receiving no unemployment pump little money into the local economy, and that can slow the recovery. They buy fewer things, stop going out to eat and often retreat into a financial cocoon. That, in turn, sets off economic ripples within their communities.
"Consumers make up about 70 percent of our economy, and income from employment makes up about 80 percent of the typical family's income," wrote Heather Boushey, a senior economist with the Center for American Progress. "Without job gains … consumption will stall, which in turn will drag down economic growth.''
Orlando resident Don Meier learned this week that his benefits have run out. He's 64 and lives with a friend in a condo, relying on a small pension and his late wife's survivors benefits. He lives simply, he said, but has a car loan and his son's student loan to pay.
He's worried about losing his unemployment check — "For me, it was awfully handy," he said — but his bigger concern is for young couples with children. He knew lots of people like that, he said, when he worked as a boat captain at Universal.
"I feel so bad for those people," he said. "They won't be getting any money, and there still aren't any jobs out there. I'm just afraid it's going to get worse and worse."
By Jim Stratton, Orlando Sentinel
6:58 PM EDT, June 4, 2010
About 107,000 Floridians will lose their unemployment benefits today, a number expected to grow by 34,000 people with each passing week.
Payments will stop because Congress has not reauthorized legislation to pay for the complicated mix of programs that keeps benefits flowing to millions of jobless across the country.
For the state's long-term unemployed — 107,000 or so receiving checks under the "Extended Benefits" program — today marks the end of the last week of payments.
For those receiving benefits under one of six programs — one state, five federal — payments will end gradually. Laid-off workers will be paid through the end of whatever tier they are on, but they will not move on to the next level.
That's because federal funding is drying up.
Congress has been covering virtually all of the costs of the programs, reauthorizing them on an almost monthly basis since early this year. But amid growing concerns about the deficit, lawmakers have balked at fully funding them beyond today.
Federal legislation is in place to cover half of the costs of the programs, but Florida and other states have said they can't afford to pay for the rest. The National Employment Law Project, a worker-advocacy group, estimates about 1.2 million people across the country will lose benefits this month.
Federal officials say about 615,000 people in Florida have requested benefits during the past few weeks. Benefits max out at $300 a week.
The U.S. House narrowly passed a $54 billion measure recently reauthorizing the programs through November — while stripping out subsidies for health insurance — but advocates worry the bill won't be approved by the Senate.
"There's push-back from the deficit hawks," said NELP Deputy Director Andrew Stettner. "The whole program is in jeopardy like it's never been before."
Even if the Senate does pass the House bill, a third group of unemployed won't get any help. Those workers have already exhausted all of their benefits and won't receive anything more unless Congress passes an additional tier of federal payments.
Currently, the longest anyone can receive unemployment is 99 weeks — that number has never been higher — and there is little political will to increase that.
"Last week, [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi took that off the map," said Judy Conti, NELP's federal advocacy coordinator. "Sadly, she made it very clear, there won't be any talk about tier five at least until November."
Advocates insist benefits must be available for all jobless workers because the nation's labor market remains in hibernation.
New figures Friday show the national unemployment rate dipped slightly to 9.7 percent in May, but temporary census workers accounted for most of the improvement. The private sector added only 41,000 jobs, fewer than had been projected and not enough to accommodate natural growth of the labor market.
Laid-off workers receiving no unemployment pump little money into the local economy, and that can slow the recovery. They buy fewer things, stop going out to eat and often retreat into a financial cocoon. That, in turn, sets off economic ripples within their communities.
"Consumers make up about 70 percent of our economy, and income from employment makes up about 80 percent of the typical family's income," wrote Heather Boushey, a senior economist with the Center for American Progress. "Without job gains … consumption will stall, which in turn will drag down economic growth.''
Orlando resident Don Meier learned this week that his benefits have run out. He's 64 and lives with a friend in a condo, relying on a small pension and his late wife's survivors benefits. He lives simply, he said, but has a car loan and his son's student loan to pay.
He's worried about losing his unemployment check — "For me, it was awfully handy," he said — but his bigger concern is for young couples with children. He knew lots of people like that, he said, when he worked as a boat captain at Universal.
"I feel so bad for those people," he said. "They won't be getting any money, and there still aren't any jobs out there. I'm just afraid it's going to get worse and worse."
Friday, June 04, 2010
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Welcome Home To Slum Nation
It's sad to be a citizen of a nation that can't do anything right. While BP was fumbling its "kill shot" into the Deepwater Horizon hole, and the dying pelicans were flopping in the poisoned marshlands, and rumors seeped across the Internet that nothing short of an atom bomb would avail to stop the underwater oil gusher -- not to mention, meanwhile, all the other problems out there, such as the ongoing melt-away of of capital in every corner of the world -- I found myself in Berlin, Germany, touring the city on a rented bicycle (after a 4,500-mil airplane ride, it is true).
When last I was in Berlin in 1997, the town was still reeling from the shock of reunification. Only a few tentative businesses had started up on the former communist side, and most of the route of the infamous wall remained a yawning, weedy scrape-off zone. Now the repair of the city is well-advanced, though I give very mixed reviews to some of the premier projects.
Back in '97, my biggest surprise was, holy shit, the place is in color. After almost fifty years of watching Hitler documentaries I'd assumed the city only existed in black-and-white. By extension, of course, I realized that Hitler himself had been in living color, and that's where a really vivid sense of the horror set in. In '97, the scars of World War Two still showed all over the east side, where an acne of bullet holes and artillery craters defaced virtually every older building. They said the communists had been too poor for cosmetic renovation -- or else the Russian overlords took a certain sadistic pride in their wartime handiwork and wanted to keep the hostage denizens of the east cowed with never-ending reminders of their subjugation. A necrotic odor of defeat lingered in the streets there. The west side, meanwhile, was all jaunty with shopping and techno-pop teens and the normal hoopla of a money economy.
The the Battle of Berlin, fought mainly by the Russians, had left most of the important civic stuff inside the communist zone of the city -- major museums, the opera and symphony, Humboldt University, the Brandenburg gate and the grand avenue called the Unter Den Linden leading off it, the site of the old royal palace, most of the old government buildings (their shells at least), and, of course, the chief souvenirs of Hitlerdom, especially the dreadful bunker of the final days. It was all in pretty shabby shape when I was there in '97. Hitler's bunker, which had proved too sturdy to blow up even with controlled demolitions, was finally just filled with sand by the Russians, and looked like a mere weedy mound in a vacant lot. The spot was apparently deemed too spiritually toxic to do anything with it. The nearby Potsdamer Platz, once Berlin's Times Square, was a vast set of holes in the ground with a bizarre network of primary-colored pipes emanating from them to drain groundwater preceding foundation work. And finally there was Sir Norman Foster's rebuilding of the Reichstag, just then getting underway in a rubble-strewn plain.
All those projects are about finished. The area around the Brandenburg Gate, once a forlorn encampment of morose ragtag Russians hawking fake amber plastic necklaces, now swarms with tourists. Likewise the Reichstag and its landscaped front and rear courts. The Unter Den Linden is almost too crowded to walk down. And the whole region around the old communist Alexander Platz -- originally designed by the commies to look like a Jetson's shopping mall, minus the shopping of course -- seems to have become the consumer electronics mecca of Europe. Sad to say, those holes in the ground around the Potsdamer Platz grew up to be a set of inglorious glass box towers, each trying to out-do the next in sleek corporate narcissism, while the streets themselves look like something the state of Georgia DOT would come up with -- intersecting six-laners, a demolition derby in a suburban office park.
When I was there in '97, I was struck by how utterly all remnants of Hitler had been erased. I suppose it was a form of post traumatic stress syndrome. Quite a bit of memory has been recovered since then, and new monuments abound, from the Peter Eisenman-designed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe -- very solemnly eloquent -- to a smaller memorial to Hitler's gay victims in the big park called the Tiergarten. Plaques explaining one Nazi horror after another are now liberally deployed around the old city center, and Herman Goering's Air Force Ministry was left standing as the last example of Third Reich art deco -- a form of extreme stripped down neo-classicism with all femininity removed, no curves, no ornaments. The site of Hitler's bunker is no longer a weed patch, but perhaps appropriately one of the city's rather rare surface parking lots, with a plaque telling the tale and tourist docents pointing out (I swear I heard this) that "...Hitler's bedroom lay about where that white Audi is parked...."
It seemed to me that, altogether, the German expression of regret appears deeply sincere now and absolutely straightforward, with no side-trips into the realm of excuses or attempted explanations. With the German social mentality now restored to normality -- laughter in the busy streets and all dark thoughts of race vengeance banished -- one was prompted to reflect on just how such a civilized folk could fall into a mass psychosis like Naziism. And by extension, it was hard to evade the question as to how the USA might not lurch into something worse. The Germans were punished pretty severely for losing (and starting!) the First World War. Depression and hyper-inflation drove them to their knees. I daresay, too, that something about industrialization meshed with their ethnic neuroses to very bad effect (though this is a subject that would take a book to lay out). Anyway, it drove them batshit. They followed a madman through the gates of hell and made a smoking ruin of their home place.
America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic, than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don't even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground -- we're digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster.
Biking around Berlin -- especially the non-tourist neighborhoods, and the beautiful, shaded paths beside the little river Spree, where young people sat enjoying the simple tranquility of the waterside on a spring day -- I could only imagine the scene back home at the Indianapolis Speedway (or the dozens of Nascar ovals around Dixie) -- the frantic idiocy of America-on-wheels, the fat slobs in beer can hats grilling cheez dogs in the parking lots, letting loose their asinine rebel yells as though this made men of them, and above it all the deafening noise of a people literally driving themselves to death and madness.
Meanwhile, the evil plume of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico grows ever-larger by the hour and every living thing in that quarter of the sea faces slow death. That's our memorial-in-the-making to ourselves. I feel sorry for Barack Obama in this situation. Dmitry Orlov is right: this is our Chernobyl. This is the cherry-on-top of all our feckless foolishness. Memorial Day this year is the welcome mat to our hard time. We'll be lucky if some honorable as-yet-unknown colonel in the wadis of Afghanistan comes home to overthrow president Glenn Beck, or whichever lethal moron ends up in power after 2012. We'll be a very different America then, with no going back.
Coming home to the USA was like re-entering a special kind of mega-slum where nothing that can be screwed up is left un-screwed up. My Delta flight was two hours late, of course. Amusingly, the explanation given was that new runways were under construction at JFK airport -- like, Delta just discovered it that morning, or somehow they've been unable to work that into their scheduling process after months and months. The things we tell ourselves are so absurd that even the late George Carlin couldn't make them up. We stopped on the tarmac at JFK because they didn't have a gate for us. We passengers were put onto some kind of people-mover contraption. The engine failed so we we sat in this steel box in 90-degree heat until they fetched another one. Then there was the journey through a set of dim tunnels to customs, and another journey up a steep ramp shared by motor vehicles and their exhalations to the terminal exit. Welcome home to Slum Nation.
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