Angry · Lucifer

I think Obama’s Nobel could revolutionize the way awards are given. This year’s Oscar for Best Actress should go to Ellen Page, who was pretty good in Juno and with the encouragement of a major industry accolade for Whip It! will probably make better pictures. The Cy Young Award should go to Joba Chamberlain who could turn out to be awesome, and likewise Jose Reyes for MVP because look at how the Mets sucked without him. On Survivor, they should declare the winner in week one based on the person the tribal council thinks will win anyway. Make up your own list of recipients. It’s fun.

Or here’s a thought, why not give Obama the Cy Young, the Heismann Trophy and the World Cup? Imagine a president who not only pitched the South Side into the ALCS, but led the Illinis to the Rose Bowl behind 2000 passing yards and headed a corner kick to beat Brasil? It does not matter that this has not happened yet. In the post modern world truth is merely the narrative I support.

It is somewhere between insulting and insufferable that Oslo condescends to hand out an award based on potential. WTG, sexy brown man, you’re a winner just for showing up. The nominations were locked on 1 February, eleven days after Neo was sworn in. I guess they didn’t see all of the Matrix trilogy. It would have been more dignified for them to stuff a crumpled 20 Euros in his underpants.

The Oslo idiots broke precedent and four of the five talked about how offended they were that Neo didn’t seem psyched to have 20 EU stuffed in his underpants. They then cited a few things he did after being nominated, which were encouraging but none of which were exactly the March on Washington. Chris Buckley was correct when he wrote that “Thanks, but no thanks,” was Obama’s only decorous way out.

African-Americans I talk to wildly disagree with what I’ve just said, and I understand their position. How many times have African-Americans been denied their true measure of well-deserved glory? The list would fill a very thick book.

Still, giving Neo the ultimate political award diminishes the status of the Peace Prize which was once a flicker of light when MLK or Mandela or the Dalai Lama won. And, okay, monsters like Kissenger and scuzz like Arafat have won in the past. Al Gore got one for a neat show and tell project. Three seated American presidents have won, and Jimmy Carter won as an ex simply for not shutting the hell up and accepting that until W came along he was the gold standard of bad presidents.

TR won for negotiating a settlement to a war between Russia and Japan which changed the dynamics of the Pacific Rim for a century. Wilson won for the hope that a League of Nations would end global wars, and when rebooted by FDR as the UN, it has. But brother Franklin didn’t win a Peace Prize, nor Eisenhower for chillaxing Korea, etc. Obama’s promise that he will do something amazing to earn this accolade rings hollow. Obama punked out on the Copenhagen Accords. I’m still waiting for a public health care option, an end to “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” an end to extraordinary renditions, unconstitutional searches and seizures,  corporate kleptocracy, some middle class relief from the financial meltdown,  and most everything else Obama promised but hasn’t had time to get to yet. So yeah, give him a Nobel to hang on the refrigerator next to Sasha’s 100% on her spelling test.

Other recent news brought a trifecta of dismal. I’m no longer writing eco-blogs to connect. I’m simply writing them to catalogue.

I don’t think AI is a great film, but I have always appreciated two things: Speilberg finished Kubrick’s movie in a Kubrickian way, which is a lot harder to do than it sounds, and the film’s notion that at some distant date aliens will come down to figure out what the hell happened to the late, great planet earth.

How stupid are Americans? Americans are this stupid:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/22/steep-decline-in-american_n_330315.html

So I guess I’m writing in hopes that aliens find this. In our time, on our planet, the tool-saving animals (as opposed to tool-using, which would have to include crows, otters, chimpanzees, etc.), have done an amazingly good job of denying their own agency in planetary ecology. Indigenous Australians recount myths from long ago which tell about the ancestors burning the forests to make hunting easier. But suddenly the Ice Age ended. It rained for 100 years, and without trees their descendants ended up without topsoil and a 10,000 year quest to find water.

Native Americans hunted dozens of meaty species like the horse into extinction in their corner of the world. Ancient Sumerians and Babylonians turned the Garden of Eden into a stinking desert by over-farming and cutting down trees, as did the Classical Greeks and the Medieval Spanish.

Century after century, local catastrophes became regional became hemispheric. The planet killers, Italy, France, Great Britain, the United States and now China in their turn paid lip service to responsible global citizenship.

This is what we animals do. Most of the nuts squirrels forage get lost because squirrels lack brains big enough to keep track. Locusts shouldn’t eat everything in front of them because they then have to go dormant or starve. It is hard to believe that Natural Selection can be so stupid in the particular and wise in the aggregate. When it comes right down to it, humans are as clueless as squirrels, cock roaches and shower curtain mold, acting on simple algorithms unmediated by conscious thought.

The first great entropy watershed, 900 to 1200 A.D.,  transformed civilization decisively but made much of Europe unpleasant to live in by introducing machines, coal, urban blight, STDs, the money economy, deforestation and pollution.  We were using a flawed model courtesy of Aquinas and Aristotle, but we still exported the concepts to the rest of the planet where they survive today.

Aristotle argued that it was impossible for species, and by extension genera, ethnic groups or earth itself to go extinct. He reasoned that becoming extinct creates a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum, QED. Aquinas picked up the thread around about the 13^th century and added the Christian wrinkle that reality was whatever God said it was, motherfucker. Nothing humans could do could deflect the Divine Will, so chillax.

And from that day to this, in spite of German scientists in the late 19^th century warning us that oil and coal-based technology could kill the planet, no one listened. The physical concept was tight, but the data was incomplete. It still is. In the meantime, our Weltanshauung completely cock-blocks new information. Like this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/04/arctic-seas-turn-to-acid

You’d think people generally would say, “Ooh, that’s not good.” But no, I’m apparently the only one who noticed. Eat all the shellfish and Salmon you can at Red Lobster now, folks. You’d suppose Red Lobster would at least have an investment in sustainable ocean harvests, but no, in five years they will become a credit card company because the fish will be gone or unappetizingly artificial, and the bottom line is all. So it goes.

Meanwhile, President Laureate comes down hard on the side of same shit, different day:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/04/us-climate-change-bill-browner

This isn’t change. This is schtick, like when you go to J&R to buy a computer you saw advertised, but they’re “sold out,” but they have a “much better” computer for more money, and you’re there anyway, so WTF. Obama is hoping to bum rush the industrial world into buying corporate America’s agenda. Did I vote for that?

Finally, if California were a country it would be in the G8. The congruence of a bad business cycle and the stupidity of citizens raised by shower curtain mold has led to this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/04/california-failing-state-debt

All the rich assholes in the OC fund-raising “renegades” who want to unleash the hidden power of unregulated business, all of the bigots who should focus on their own lives instead of twisting their underpants into a bunch about the “gay agenda” (Side note: I have many dear gay friends who are mostly the kindest, most decent and moral people I know, but seriously, have you ever helped gay men organize a party? Let’s get real. If there were a gay agenda, they couldn’t agree on a decor much less a caterer.). Cali also has up in here the rednecks in Stockton, the bangers in Compton and Fresno, the desert rats, the potheads deep in the woods, the vacant, burned-out American diaspora, Marin county and what you are left with is the death of the American Dream in the coolest, dreamiest part of America. And California may take the rest of us down with them, because what is Long Island or south Florida except California wanna-bes?

Did you know that California is one of the whitest states? Nearly 60% white, close to 34% Mexican, about 6% black. This does not leave a lot of room for Asians, Native Americans or others. California is where the suburban WWII generation circled their wagons against the onslaught of modern life with the aid of their trusty Mexican amigos who mowed their lawns, bused their tables and raised their children.

Keep your eye on Cali in the next two years. If they can drag the collective butt out of the fires by recognizing that a zombie attack against one is a zombie attack against all, there is hope. If not, California is the canary in the coal mine.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2572-second-law-of-thermodynamics-broken.html

In a sense, the notion that on the subatomic level all bets are off is actually consistent with the statistical approach to energy and matter from Maxwell to Heisenberg to Wheeler and beyond. There isn’t any necessary reason that all the gas in a room won’t congregate in a ceiling corner, except that it never does, and there isn’t any necessary reason that time’s arrow should be scale invariant, except we always used to believe it was until now. This could be a Big Deal if we figure out a way to trick large systems into believing they are subatomic; it could be a major bummer which sets absolute limits on nanotechnology and computer chips, or both. It might be how we invent a TARDIS.
Finally, comes this study:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327268.100-why-bankers-are-like-bacteria.html

If bankers are bacteria, what are we? Soap scum? Cloaca? Obviously, there are lots of analogues between natural systems and social systems, but I’m kind of uncomfortable with the suggestion that rotten, corrupt banker behavior is somehow “natural,” just as I have never been comfortable with the parable of the scorpion and the frog.

I’m a fan of Monbiot. Unlike, say, Al Gore and Ed Begley Jr. Monbiot isn’t getting his undies in a bunch about how riding bicycles and composting will save the world. He knows, as I have been saying for a while, that half-assed half measures will no longer do anything to reverse climate change. There is no political will in the West to inconvenience ourselves to save the world, and the rest of the world can’t wait to join the game of destroying civilization for fun and profit. So basically, we’re fucked. Kingsnorth agrees.
Sadly, my children had a dad like Randy Quaid in Independence Day. They became crafty. My daughter is handy with edged weapons, design and construction and my son is a martial artist who has smithing skills and knows how to make bullets, which as he points out is a lot more useful in an apocalypse than a big pile of guns that are out of ammo.
I do not think my daughter is destined to be Sarah Connor, nor my cop son the Road Warrior, but I do think they will be able to adjust in the decades to come better than a lot of people.
Kingsnorth believes that the time is ripe for environmentalists to say fuck it and give up, accept that the world is doomed. Let the games begin. Billions will die, more species will go extinct. Whatever. No one listened anyway. Let’s just enjoy the time we have left, burn tires along with our leaves in autumn, crank up the AC all day and all night. Western Civilization had a good run. The Pantheon, the Eiffel Tower, Poetry, Novels, Beatles ’65, the moon landing: nice stuff, good work.
Monbiot believes it is imperative to least try to mitigate doom, even if that means pretending to believe that efficient light bulbs and crappy hybrids are difference makers when we know the climate is already past the tipping point. He says that if we don’t pretend it’s not too late then even these half-assed measures will never be fully implemented and the decades optimists hope we have left will become years.
As I have said previously in these blogs, it is time to stop insisting that the avalanche is imaginary or pretending that throwing a few rocks out of the way will save the village. I don’t know, no one knows, if the expected breaking of the Greenland ice shelf will really happen in 2012, or in 2015 or 2020. I do know that when it does, the weasel words big coal and big oil insinuate in every conversation “data may suggest” “if these trends continue” will no longer be possible, but by then it will no longer matter. I do not understand what Monsanto or Citi thinks will benefit them by having giant piles of electronic assets in a post electircal world, unless aliens have a planetary cash for clunkers program I am unaware of.
Kingsnorth and Monbiot are guilty of fighting the last war, the one we lost against climate change. I know you don’t really see a difference between the world you lived in as a child and the world today. You aren't paying attention. My children grew up with a crackpot father who raised them on conspiracy theories, but they had nothing to compare it to, so that seemed normal to them. My cousins raised their children to believe that Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden for a split ranch in Islip Terrace. God left a new SUV in the driveway. That seemed normal to them, too. My childen are aware of entropy, and have lived their lives in an environmentally ethical way. My cousins and their offspring listen to Rush, listen to Gore and decide to wait and see.
Like a bartender on the Titanic asking a patron if he’d like some ice in his drink, we aren’t going to see the catastrophe until it hits, and when it does no amount of hand-wringing and New Year’s Resolutions to go green and pull the plug on our cable box every night (an actual AOL suggestion) will help.
What environmental thinkers like Monbiot need to be talking about is how do we plan for a world in 2050, when Florida is gone, when force five hurricanes are an annual event, when there is mass starvation, refugee wars, civil disorder, a breakdown in the integumenta of rational life. You can stockpile light bulbs. You can stockpile food and fossil fuel to a limited degree. You can’t stockpile electricity or the rule of law. I can make you a dynamo, and if you get me a ton of coal a day, it will supply the electrical needs of 400 people. I might be able to adapt to wind turbines, but that requires infrastructure and investment.
The 2050s seem like a long time away. So were the 1950s. I know. I was there.

Since the Moon landing is linked in the public mind to Cronkite, I thought I’d attach this link. There isn’t a whole lot I could add to this. It summarizes a lot of themes I’ve been talking about for a long time. It is worth reading and digesting, even though doing so is hard.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/18/cronkite/index.html

Adam Smith articulated the basic unicorns and jelly bean trees theory of markets. In his view, unregulated markets always equilibrate around the best prices and the highest wages because if you allow the “invisible hand” of the “laws of supply and demand” without governments screwing with things, then the “natural” process of business will lead us all to bliss. You’d be amazed (I am) by how many economists still do their math around 18th century, zero sum calculus.
This brings us back to Keynes who pointed out very rationally but not so mathematically in the 1930s that the 20th century had been a series of crashes. We remember 1929, but what about 1902, 1907, 1913, the Great War? The Monetarist position had broken down. Capital flowed like a river in the direction of Oz, but flowed out like a rivulet. Thereupon, it bought yachts, mansions, Carnagie Hall. Manipulating markets, especially foreign markets, pumped in new money exactly from those people who could least afford it, and that was a greater disaster than Colonialism had been in terms of Third World misery. I hope I am not trivializing his position by saying that Keynes realized we are all in the same boat. The chain I put around my neighbor’s leg is attached to me.
Keynes argued that rather than stimulate the economy by “priming the pump” from above in Herbert Hoover’s famous phrase, governments needed to pump money in at the bottom in the form of government spending, especially in developing areas. He argued that money was ultimately like coconuts. It's ultimately a fetish. Roosevelt did/didn’t believe this in the 30s. Yes, WPA, very nice, the CCC, lovely, Social Security, thank you, the TVA, but then he’d turn around and try to balance the budget. You can’t have it both ways, so the Great Depression didn’t end until Hitler and Tojo forced Roosevelt and Churchill to get nuts, spend gillions of dollars they didn’t have. They spent the money on Rosie the Riveter, GI Joe, the Manhattan Project, but also on US Steel, GM. The war finally jump-started the economy, even though nobody in Harlem noticed the difference until the 1980s.
So, yada yada yada, the late 50s, early 60s, the Western economies are feeling progressively groovy. Keynes seemed to be working. I think Barry Goldwater presciently nailed why Social Security would fail, but in the turbo-charged economy of the 60s no one was listening until Johnson crashed the American economy into a tree in Vietnam, while at the same time allowing Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay to tax and spend profligately until New York was beyond tapped out in the 70s.
Then we get Nixon, who was ostensibly a Keynesian, because in spite of the fact that he was an evil sack of shit, he was a smart guy, and he accepted the premise that classical theory hadn’t worked and was a grandfather clock in an era of quartz watches. Roosevelt had gotten rid of the gold standard, the idea that a country could only print as much money as it had bullion in its reserves. That saved our butt in WWII. Johnson eliminated the silver standard and then Nixon allowed the dollar to float against other world currencies like any other traded commodity, like sneakers, like coca cola.
Hoping that deregulating currency would shake off the chains that had begun to hobble overseas trade, hello General Motors, was a roll of the dice which came up snake eyes. The US faced an oil crisis, a credit crisis, an inflation crisis. It is ironic that it was Nixon who discredited Roosevelt liberalism.
Gerald Ford did worse, and Jimmy Carter did even worse than that. Carter used to get on television in the late 70s and yell at us like a Georgia football coach. You people are lower than Llama shit. There’s a malaise in this country, and until you straighten up and fly right, what do you expect me to do?
Milton Friedman had been kvetching about Keynes since the 50s, and he was a much better mathematician, but now people were reading him seriously. More importantly, the most essential, least appreciated figure enters the scene. Friedrich von Hayek was a polymath and one of those people who is so all over the place that it makes you go “Hmm.”
At the end of World War II, Churchill read von Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom and accepted his premise that the English Bulldog was well and truly screwed unless the Brits continued the fiscal austerity of the war economy to rebuild equity. It is Hayek who enshrined the triptych that you have fascism/capitalism/socialism on the menu. I’m sorry, we’re out of the fish. Churchill had just fought fascism for 12 years, and socialism was, you know, socialism. No one wants that.
Churchill called for election. His opponent, Clement Atlee, had a better idea. He ran on a platform of continued war spending, funding a National Health Insurance, a generous dole for unemployed people, unlimited free candy and comic books. He won handily, and even though Churchill eventually came back, the British piñata had burst.
As George Harrison sang in Taxman, “Let me tell you how it will be/ there’s one for you 19 for me/ ‘cause I’m the Taxman and you’re working for no one but me.” By the late 60s, Mick Jagger (London School of Economics grad) and many others had become tax exiles. More capital flight, the death of Empire, shabby gas heaters, toxic coal, council housing, hateful squats in Brixton.
Von Hayek stays busy. In addition to teaching young Mr. Jagger at the LSE (where he had tutored David Rockefeller a generation earlier), he goes off to the University of Chicago, the shower curtain of NeoCon thought.
At the same time his question, “Do you want the fascism or the socialism? I think we’re all out of the capitalism” rings in Republican and Tory ears. Bad times, indeed. And then, in the late 70s, Maggie Thatcher, who had been a young acolyte of Sir Winston thumped down a copy of von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in front of her at a Conservative meeting and announced that this was how the future was going to be.
The main rubric she took from Hayek was to avoid the coercion of some by others. Thatcher privatized British Industry, declared war on trade unions, destroyed the Greater London Counsel, enabled the rise of Rupert Murdoch, cut taxes, shredded regulation. Most importantly, she was Ronald Reagan’s brain. She came in to office in 1979 and stayed in power until 1990. She was the Cats of British politics. Reagan looked across the pond and said, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
This was the birth of the modern alliance between British and American capital interests that has endured to this day. One might quibble about the boundary between corporatism and fascism, but in any case, collusion between capital and government is what makes Sarkozy, Lulu, Chavez and many others nuts. Because we controlled the IMF, and because deregulated businesses like Citi, BP and Coca Cola could go anywhere they wanted and buy local oligarchies, the US and Britain made craploads of money but engendered a lot of bad will which was proportional to how many starving babies, people without potable water living in cardboard shacks during hurricane season, people utterly flummoxed by climate change (remember We Are the World?), the rise of pirates, drug gangs, terrorists these policies created. This is not a free market at work. It is global oligarchy siphoning resources and only sharing crumbs.
Keynes was on to this at Bretton Woods at the end of the war, but for many historically contingent reasons, some having to do with Harry Dexter Gordon and his nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, it didn’t work out. This is not conspiracy theory. You can find the particulars on Wikipedia.
What we got instead is the exponential growth of plutocrats. For example, in 1998, the IMF forced Indonesian banks into foreclosure. No bailouts for the browns. Haiti has been paying the minimum on their credit card bill to global banks for 30 years. Haiti can’t ameliorate the suffering, because their oligarchs are more concerned with skimming enough to buy the condo in Boca, and you can’t have it both ways. At the same time, the richest 1% of people in the world went from controlling 90% of the world’s income in 1980 to 98% now.
Bolivia is the main world source of lithium, without which our little silver boxes don’t have a battery, and where do you think your Prius stores power? We have decided that strategic fingers in Bolivian pies is more expeditious than fair trade. Bolivia also has excellent chocolate. You should try it. Who owns Bolivian resources? Global corporations who were rich enough and clever enough to exploit them first or the people who live on that land and at least have the right to fair compensation? Don’t even get me started about the problems in Africa. I appreciate O’s remarks in Ghana this week, but it would have been better if he had squared up on the issue of it is not you, it’s us.
Except us is not us. US is Citi, AIG, BoA, Monsanto. Big Business had a hic-cup last year and America smashed open the piggy bank of the only medicine they care about. I’m not seeing any trickle down. I don’t think that John Conyers is either. More importantly, small business is not seeing the return of liquidity. The vendors that Steve made his living from can’t borrow money to hire his services, because banks are not lending and the Fed does not seem to notice. At the same time, the globals are all over the HuffingtonPost reporting turbo-charged profits.
Krugman believes that unemployment will be worse in 2010 than it is now. Steve used the analogy that tax increases were like taking blood from one arm to transfuse it into another. I’d say rather that Corporatism has shot us in one knee and they are threatening to shoot us in the other knee unless they get what they want.
Robert Anton Wilson once memorably observed that conspiracy theory is like staring into a plate of spaghetti. You think you are observing a meaningful pattern, but when you pick up the noodle, it’s only two inches long.
Early this year, Krugman declared that the stimulus package would fail, and so far it has, but does that mean he’s pulling on a complete noodle?

Heylighen’s paper http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/Info-overload.pdf
J. Hu’s 1995 paper http://matwbn.icm.edu.pl/ksiazki/fm/fm155/fm15533.pdf