All the options are good?

We have done things in an less-than-elegant manner for over two hundred years now.  We have overspent and crashed more times than you can shake a stick at.  We have gone through gilded ages, robber barons, several stabs at central banks, slavery, a great depression, the roaring twenties, I won't even waste your time with a continuation of the enumeration of the very long list.

What is getting stale is the ranting of a bunch of paunchy middle aged men (myself at the forefront) bitching because the game is rigged.  When the rig was running toward their trough, all was right and fair and good.  But now the game has changed.  The delivery to the middle aged men trough has been diverted to the trough of a different and smaller set of middle aged men.

The deal is is that we now are starting to realize that there probably isn't enough to go around in sufficient quantities to make everyone rich.  Oh, don't get me wrong, this isn't common knowledge yet, but even the most rah-rah of those around us are starting to get a view that they don't particularly care for.

Any country is a series of trade-offs.  Security for liberty.  Equality for freedom.  The list is innumerable.  Current beliefs are exemplified by the ravening given full voice over at Zerohedge, Mish, and their ilk.  These folks give a hard edge to the imperative of wealth and virtual power that drives their need for status.

We are in the coils of a situation that is solidifying more and more into a predicament.  We have a defined underclass who are becoming more and more marginalized.  The underclass is approaching 30% of the population and it would appear that the rate of growth for this group is accellerating.  We also have an extremely small rich class with 1% of the population owning over 40% of the wealth.

We are in a situation where there is no good choice.  Screw the rich to get some money in.  Screw the poor to stop some of the hemorrhaging.    The middle class won't get their dreams of a bourgeois retirement.  Our lives will be a lot smaller.  Living large will be a memory.

But really all that we are talking about here is the readjustment of our daily lives away from the fever dreams that characterized the last quarter century.  The solution will not please anyone.  Add to this the fact that no one knows what the workable solution will consist of.

So, in the end, all that can be done is to turn to those around you that you know and can trust.  You have to carve a place for yourself that will work and get you through the spasm that is most surely ahead.   A lot of of it will entail simple things.  Well stocked pantries, Working gardens, insulated houses, walking, and friends will be well met.

So, instead of spending two hours today with the blogos enumerating what is wrong (the list is getting rather unwieldy), only spend one hour and use the spare go out and do something useful to your real life.  I am going to go and get the garden bedded down for the winter.

Just don't get rid of the idea that "just a piece of paper" will deter us

So, I wonder what would happen if one of the miscreants wanted to start attending a Mosque?

http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/weird/Church-or-Jail-Alabama-Judge-Gives-Criminals-Choice-130444648.html

And since the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is a private entity, not a government agency, that pesky first Amendment doesn't really count.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/66281284/Frbny-Social-Media-Rfp

Disasters

I was over at Russell's the other morning and read this piece.

Got me thinking about the whole concept of FEMA and our expectations.   Now, right off the bat, having an agency coordinate during the aftermath of a major natural disaster is a damn fine idea.

But, how much of FEMA consists of handing out checks to folks who were inconvenienced by an act of God?

Titania and Oberon

“Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.”                                                     ―                                Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

The real issue facing the blogerati is that they are trying desperately to simplify the equation.  While this is often acceptable and to be praised in a pre-algebra class, that isn't the type of equation that most folks sitting and pounding on their computers are discussing.


The main problem with us is that we are and the end of an age.  I would say that the closest temporal equivalent would have to be the end of the British Empire and the closest structural equivalent would be the ending of the ancien régime.  Things have run out on the ad hoc structures that we have put together over the past.


What is going to happen in the upcoming phase change is the same thing that has happened innumerable times in the past, we will develop a new set of ad hoc structures to replace the fallen ones.   What is hoped for here in blogoland is a struggle to put ones own favorite hare-brained scheme in the forefront.  But your hare brained schemes are usually a focus on single causes attached to a buzzword (freedom, socialism, free markets, welfare state) that allows one to simplify the equation.


This desire to simplify has led us to the current paralysis of government at all levels.  Single causes have overtaken large swathes of government at all levels.  


This fossilization of political discourse brings to mind a similar train of events in sixteenth century China.  Here, the teachings of a scholar Wang Yangming (王陽明) fueled the fire (Kinda reminds me of that douchebag Milton Friedman).  Here it was decided that the conscience of the individual was the only thing that mattered.  It brought about the ossification of the politics, debates and controversies were framed not as issues for compromise and pragmatism but as black-and-white moral issues.


Simply put, when this happened in the time of the Wanli emperor, Zhu Yijun (萬曆), it preshadowed the fall of the Ming and the rise of the Manchus.  The inability of the empire to reach a workable compromise allowed the fall of the empire.


Thus it goes here.  We are going into another government shutdown threat over 3-4 billion in disaster relief dollars or around 0.03% of the total budget.  Kabuki theatre at its best.


What is really happening in Washington is that our political leaders, or anyone else in the country for that matter, simply do not have the intellectual or experiential background to deal with the problem.  It is just too f*&$ing complex.   We have a set of priests (the federal reserve and their owner banks) demanding more cargo cult sacrifices.  We have a large group of poor who do not and will not ever have a set of marketable skills.  We have a middle class that is sinking fast due to the twin pressures of global wage arbitrage and excessive, self-inflicted debt.  We have a political class more intent on the kabuki theatre that they hope will allow them to continue feeding high on the hog than than trying to figure out the causes of the problem.  


This sorry state of affairs will probably continue for a time now.  Phase changes in chemistry are usually quite rapid.  Phase changes in politics less so.  I figure we have now just left the discovery phase that we are well and truly screwed.  We are now entering the wild thrashing around stage where everyone starts grabbing for as much of the pie as they can hold.


Because you see, if you don't really understand what is going on, all you can do is scramble.

Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?"  

Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded– they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.
―                                Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Elizabeth Warren

Albert, Meet Isaac

http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf

I am really hoping that this will be verified.  It might make science interesting for a while and get folks thinking that maybe we aren't omniscient and that the guys with the white coats may not be as good as their press flacks assert.

-We don't allow faster than light neutrinos in here, said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

-Neutrino. Knock knock.

-Hipsters liked neutrinos before they arrived.

-I wrote a speed of light joke...but a neutrino beat me to it.

-A. To prove particles can travel faster than light Q. Why did the neutrino cross the road?

-I'm going to tweet my neutrino joke yesterday.

Maybe Y'all Should Read This

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/16/the_empire_at_dusk?page=full

Sargasso

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path. ... This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

J. Krishnamurti , Dissolution Speech , 1929 

You have to admire this guy.  He threw it all away in front of everyone he knew.

Would that more folks saw it this way.

We here in blogoland are filled with our little truths.  We pound away at our keyboards, exasperated that no one seems to see it the way that we do.   But, we are all too caught up in our own mental vision of Utopia to see that place as it truly is;  it has always been a fable.  Our little mental visions of the truth seem to lead us away from the thing we seek.  We posit our innumerable faiths then go out and live our day to day live in direct contravention of what the truths say.

So we are sitting here in a world that we know will be draining away.  We will be going into a world where the structure of the society is much more tightly constrained than the easy ways we have been taught so far.  Our old myths of what it was to live in society are dying, and we don't have a clue where we are going next.

The truths that we are moving away from are the tried and true Americana.  Greatest country in the world, greatest education. big middle class, retirement for everyone.  All this stuff is slipping down the pipe.

The first thing that I noticed leaving is the middle class which was the main driver for the Bourgeois lifestyle that we have come to cherish.   When you get down to it, this has been going for quite some time now.  Springsteen wrote about it back in 1985.  In retrospect, This was always a transient.  We always held in us the same fate as the British Empire, when you are the first to the trough, it will run dry for you the fastest.

We are living a bunch of false dreams and discredited truths.  We have to throw them away and move on.  But right now we are stymied.  Not enough have recognized that changes will occur, and the majority of our friends and neighbors sit squatting on their pile of old truths and glaring at us for speaking of moving on.

It is a temptation to say "screw 'em" and wander away.  But all that will do is create the sides of a future war.  We have to sit here every day and gently pull folks along.  That will take doing things that necessity demands of us to get to where we need to be.  Nearly all of these will take years of patient work.

Get to it.

Necessary Responses

You know, I really like Chuck Smith over at "Of Two Minds", but sometimes he publishes stuff that is just shy of bizarre in my world view.

We started down the primrose path in 1971 sez the guy writing the article.  Man, are you paying any attention?  Somehow Nixon taking us off the gold standard started us down the road to perdition?  Oh my, this is such a target-rich environment.

Look, Nixon is starting to look like a freaking statesman compared to the clowns we have running the show now.  I think that the Watergate "Scandal" was small cheese.  What we have had in the past five administrations is scandals and indiscretions every bit as dishonorable as what Nixon pulled off, but without anything resembling the outrage over a minor bit of political art.  Hell Gordon Liddy would be a plaster saint when compared to Rahm Emmanuel or Carl Rove.  The Watergate break in was just small potatoes.

When Dick Nixon made the decision to "close the gold window" he did so without asking the "Masters of the Universe" of the time.   It is my opinion, unsupported by any direct facts, that closing the gold window put him in the cross-hairs of the big boys and they laid in wait until he did something that could hang him with.

No, what Nixon did was completely in line with what any other president would have done.  Pander to the greatest number of voters, the greatest number of money donations, and keeping the good times rolling.  To ask the country to put on a hair shirt and live within it's means is a great first step on writing your memoirs. 

Nixon's shock probably bought the country 30 years of easy living.  Not a bad deal.  The idea that we got all the oil for slips of paper was genius.

The party lasted longer than we had any right to hope.  We all started thinking that "things are different this time", and made no effort to maximize our collective gain.  We just went stupid for thirty years and now we are pissed because we are waking up from a very pleasant dream into an uncomfortable reality.

What the Hell do we do with them?

Every jobs program has a huge training and education component to it.  This stems from the tightly held American ideal that we are all equal and we can all be interchanged.

Nothing is farther from the truth.

Anyone who lives this side of a hole, and doesn't work for the educational establishment knows that there is a large portion of the populace that is as dumb as a doorknob.  These are the folks who have been hanging on for years at jobs that the could never quite accomplish.  Your group of workers has several of them.  Hell you might even unwittingly be one of them.

No amount of training and education can fix dumb.  It goes through to the bone.  Those are the jobs that we have lost.  Bolting on the same part in a car factory is better done by robots than by humans.  Watching skeins of yarn in a textile mill the same.

The jobs that used to support the economy in production are going, going, gone.  Vanished by the invisible hand of global wage arbitrage with the cost savings going straight into the pockets of the plutocracy.  They won't come back under the current system of cheap plastic crap and the consumer as a target.

Meet Your Masters

http://planetsave.com/2011/08/28/who-runs-the-world-network-analysis-reveals-super-entity-of-global-corporate-control/

Read the above article at Planetsave.  Simply put, Duh.

The banks seem to think that they own us.  They have managed to generate a monopoly over some magnetic media in a computer somewhere.   They feel that they have the wealth and now, they are a class above us.

Don't let them have that power over you.  What they have is not true wealth, what they have is the dead vapors of wealth.  Real wealth is you, Dear Reader, getting up every morning and going to work and making something or doing something for someone.   Real wealth is your children growing up and improving themselves.

The ones and zeros that are the gravestone of the false wealth that the bankers own will be vanishing soon.  That is what happened back in 2008 at Lehman and in Iceland.  It is what is happening now in Athens and Lisbon.  False wealth is now being recognized and all the "Peaks" that we will be living through are starting up their run.

The folks over at Mish's and Zerohedge and the like are not onto this yet.  They want part of the dead wealth pie.  They argue over which bankrupt bond will provide them the most safety,  whether seventy-nine protons or forty-seven protons are preferred as a fiducial.   But really all they want is their share of the gravestone for the death of dreams

Increased recapitalization of the banks

Margaritaville

Tags: 

SOUTH

PARK

more...

I think that sometimes life imitates art to too great a degree.  Consider for a moment this little tidbit over at Der Speigel (HT to the Automatic Earth).

When we look at the European situation, there has to be fiscal consolidation qualified by growth-intensive measures. In addition, there has to be increased recapitalization of the banks. Clearly, the two go together. The sovereign debt issue weighs on the confidence that market players have in European banks. [..]

The spectrum of policies available to the various governments and central banks is narrower because a lot of the ammunition was used in 2009. But if the various governments, international institutions and central banks work together, we'll avoid the recession.

Oh my, here we go again.  New face, same statist based dogma.  Continue adding growth to the system which is overgrown.   Debt needs to be added.  Money from the national governments MUST be infused into the banks.  The peoples that the governments represent will just have to deal with less.

The countries of the world are in the same condition as the people.  They are getting older, with acquired tastes that cost too much and a debt level that it too high for continuing them.  The "growth" that everyone wants to chase isn't organic, it is based upon borrowing more money to make more crap that people can go into debt to purchase.  That horse has died, it is time to start beating it.

The world that we are heading into seems to be immune to the prescriptions of the past.  The economy which feeds and shelters us is a political construct.  It is not an organic lifeform with its own lifecycle.  We are coming to the end of the Reagan/Freeman wet dream and are getting to the place where we have to come up with a new idea.  The true believers that have profited and their sad screwed cousins who mouth the dogma in hope of crumbs for the table are winding up for one last sermon.

We are getting to the point where we have to make changes.  It is like jumping into a lake from a high place.  Hardly anyone just goes and does it, they take a while huffing and puffing and getting their nerve worked up.

I really think that the next couple of years are critical as to whether we will continue to survive as a going concern here in the old USA.  The right is starting to trot out some pretty scary folks.  When the best that they have to offer is a Mormon version of Gordon Gecko, we are in for some serious shit ahead.

Obama is the last Democrat who will be able to get himself elected the way that the past couple of (D) presidents have gotten elected (read here, lie your ass off during the campaign, then turn Republican as soon as you hit the White House).  So I am thinking that either the 2012 or 2016 elections will see an actual choice between competing ideals or we will be over.  Someone will come along to represent the populace and, if elected, will probably go the way of the Gracchi.  The landed gentry will savagely defend their privileges, and whoever they elect will stand a decent chance of becoming Caesar.

It just depends.

Club of Rome

Back when I first got to University, back in the bleak year of 1972, the smart guys at MIT tossed out a little computer simulation called World3 and a little book called the limits of growth.  I was forced by one of my professors to read the damn thing (while an excellent book by my current "old geezer" status, it did not at all fit the worldview of the cocky young jock that inhabited this body in that time frame).

I really can't say that too much of it stuck from that first reading, other than the general idea that things were going to get screwed up sooner or later so I had better do some reaping.  Forty years later, I now find that the book is prescient  to an alarming degree and that it has been widely ignored all the while.

I still remember the Professor who forced me to read it.  He spent the whole time berating the feudal nature of the Mormon church (this was Utah) and letting everyone know that in the new world he envisioned, he would be quite the mover and shaker.  Well, it would appear that the Mormons may have been right in ways that he did not seem possible.  The semi-feudal nature of their faith and culture will probably do pretty well, though the population growth rates that they espouse will probably test those systems sorely.

Anyway, back to the meander.  One of the main methods that folks like us denizens of doomerland use to support our e-Rantings is the liberal use of "scientific" or "academic" studies to support our proposals for fixing the damn mess.   But we rarely dig at the research we so freely bandy about.   If it supports us and if it has a name with a couple of letters and periods following it, in it goes.

I have, over the years, finished the process of joining that professor with the church he so hated.  They are of the same cloth, people who are certain of the rightness of their beliefs and more than willing to go to any length to grab the power needed to make the world aright.   The folks at the Club of Rome weren't all that dissimilar from the folks who hung out in Temple Square.

I have watched to many intellectual fads come and go to take any of the science (especially economics) seriously.   There are just too many variables for a human brain to keep track of.  Models are useful in the sense that they allow "what if's" to be explored.  But for the most part, science is a discipline that serves the highest bidder.  Just ask the folks who ran around setting up an alternate America in the seventies what they thought when Reagan and the conservatives pulled the rug from under their funding and started funding other "scientists" who agreed with him.

Saturday Night

Inference

We speak of statistics as if it were a god.  We choose how we eat, where we live, and how we treat others in our lives based on the vagaries of a little known, but much quoted field of mathematics.

Folks choose what they eat and what pills they shove into their bodies because statistics tell them that high cholesterol is bad for them, gives them heart attacks.  Badness.

Yet I have watched people, including your humble correspondent, eat bacon and eggs and cruise along with serum cholesterol in the 160's.  I have watch other folks frenetically monitor their diet, eating nothing but vegetables and tofu, have their cholesterol in the 300's.  Pity.

We are so intent on control of our lifespan that we lose track of the nature of fate.  We have built a world view where our medical and technological marvels are bent around "beating the odds".   But the odds beat us.  We try to control shallow surface phenomenon that our scientists have identified in the fabled past, blithely ignoring the fact that the surface effects that we so diligently monitor are mere epiphenomena.

We appear to run our entire society like this.  The vagary of the stock market passes itself off as the health of the economy while the unemployment and misery soar.  The treatment of symptoms take precedence over the underlying conditions.  Attractive appearance trumps personal virtue.  A well turned phrase overturns rigorous analysis.

I suppose that the old men in ancient Greece sounded just like this.

Government Done Right

The Mars Rovers have been a great thing.  Seven years into a three month mission.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/images/mer20110719.html

Hip Hip, Hurray