Clusterfuck Nation
Posted: Monday, September 10, 2012 - 13:09
Filed Under:
Governance, Foreign Policy, Transportation, Farming, Elections, Military, Politics, Environment, Energy
Governance, Foreign Policy, Transportation, Farming, Elections, Military, Politics, Environment, Energy
In an age of gross zeitgeist dysfunction -- when untruth, delusion, and deception rule - politics is mere advertising, which is to say surface shimmer playing on the public's wish-fulfillment fantasies. The trouble at this moment in history is that the American public's wishful fantasies are inconsistent with the circumstances that reality offers to us and the choices for action that they present.
President Obama's historical role will be seen as a wish-fulfillment totem for late 20th century progressive liberalism - the first black president. The Democratic Party apotheosized the genial young lawyer with his appealing family in order to demonstrate the triumph of social justice, which was their great struggle of the era. Evidence of...
Posted: Monday, September 3, 2012 - 09:14
Filed Under:
Business, Economics, Food&Health, Media, Governance, Foreign Policy, Transportation, Farming, Elections, Military
Business, Economics, Food&Health, Media, Governance, Foreign Policy, Transportation, Farming, Elections, Military
Reality is the only party with an agenda consistent with what is actually happening in the world. Reality doesn't need to drum up dollar donations from anyone. Reality doesn't have to pander to any interest group or subscribe to any inane belief system. Reality doesn't even need your vote. Reality will be the winner of the 2012 election no matter what the ballot returns appear to say about the bids of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to lead the executive branch of the government.
In the vicious vacuum that national party politics has become, the Republicans and Democrats are already dead. They choked to death on the toxic fumes of their own excreta. They are empty, hollow institutions animated only by the parasites that feed on and...
Posted: Monday, August 20, 2012 - 13:27
Over the years, I've spotlighted America's telephone system as the single best example of the diminishing returns of technology in everyday life. This sort of negative "blowback" occurs when you apply technological innovation to make a system work better, and you actually make it worse. As I tell it, we've spent four decades and untold billions of dollars to computerize every phone system in America. The objective was to "improve communications." The net result of all this effort and investment is that it is now just about impossible to get a live human being on the phone at any company, agency, or institution in our land. Instead, you get to talk to robots who emit the reassuring message: "...your call is important to us...." Of course,...
Posted: Monday, August 6, 2012 - 20:36
A great orgasm shuddered through the money world last week when Mario Draghi paused between scamorza con arugula tidbits to remark that the European Central Bank (ECB) would stop at nothing to keep the financial blood of Europe circulating. Of course you wonder how many pony glasses of Campari he knocked back before that whopper came out. The markets squirmed with glee. I suppose it feels good to have quantities of smoke blown up your ass.
This is the last month of the Great Pretending over on that lovely continent of exquisitely preserved towns and the corniche winding down to the crashing green sea, and the lunch table under the grape arbor... I mean, compared to, say, the universal slum vista of tilt-up, strip-mall America along the...
Posted: Monday, July 23, 2012 - 09:55
Europe is giving new meaning to the term "bootstrapping," the age-old (virtuous) idea of picking oneself up off the floor after some blow or reversal of fortune has laid you low. The new method might be called "skyhooking" in which a massive rescue apparatus secured at some mysterious point unseen in the clouds lifts whole exhausted nations from their knees in order get them to summer vacation. Hence: the interesting spectacle of an entire continent headed for vacation despite facing utter financial ruin, revolution, and civil war.
No one who has been to Europe in our time can doubt that it is a lovely place to stage human existence. The towns and cities are in immaculate condition, even the ones bombed to gravel in the receding...
Posted: Tuesday, July 17, 2012 - 15:37
The word lamppost is popping up lately with alarming frequency in connection with the word banker in all kinds of respectable places, and I don't think this refers to, say, men in Armani suits searching for their car keys where the light is shining on the sidewalk after quaffing a few rare cuvee jeroboams of Louis Roederer Cristal. Rather, it seems to suggest a certain unease with the levers of jurisprudence in this republic of grifters, stooges, and bought-off lackeys.
Also of late come rumblings from the most august newspaper in the land that certain questions concerning LIBOR-fixing among American bank officials might soon be entertained in a federal courtroom. But isn't it a fact that the US Department of Justice has its hands full -...
Posted: Monday, May 28, 2012 - 11:58
Way up here in the heartland, far from the craft beer parlors, Facebook stock bucket shops, and gender obsessions of the mythical Urban Edge People, the detritus of your country is up for sale. The lawns are strewn with the plastic effluvia of lives lived through humankind's weirdest moment: Pee Wee Herman action figures, creeping tot tables, failed kitchen appliances that created more labor than they were designed to save, extruded plastic this-and-that, unidentifiable knick-knacks of forgotten sitcoms, Jimmy Carter Halloween masks, trikes brittle and faded from ultraviolet exposure, artworks conceived in a Zoloft fog, pre-owned cat litter boxes, someone's deceased mother's lawn fanny, the complete works of Jacqueline Susann, a savings...
Posted: Tuesday, May 22, 2012 - 08:04
So many shoes are dropping out there that reality is startingto look and sound like the tap-line in a Busby Berkeley production number. The meme-scape, too, is humming with viral transmissions of dire doings. Is JP Morgan unwinding like a 1911 knitted woolen Yale varsity sweater? Did it booby-trap the credit default swap universe in the process, and is that getting ready to blow? The whole world is hanging by its fingernails, refusing to be dragged into the future.
That future is all about contraction. We could navigate our way into it but we don't want to. We want to stay right where we are with all our stuff and no need to make new arrangements and we are trying every last trick to do that. Can you not sense a terrible tidal surge of...
Posted: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - 15:26
The New Urbanists held their big annual meet-up for four days last week and I stomped a big carbon footprint flying down to West Palm Beach for the doings. I don't know who exactly picked West Palm, but it was at once peculiar, disheartening, instructive, and exhausting.
The Congress for the New Urbanism has been throwing this yearly fandango since its founding in 1993 as a fire-eating reform movement dedicated to transforming the horrifying and toxic human habitat of America. Hopes were lofty in the early days that the US public would recognize the self-evident benefits of ditching suburban sprawl for walkable towns, but it didn't quite work out that way. The last frantic phase of sprawl-building commenced exactly the same time, jacked...
Posted: Monday, May 7, 2012 - 09:07
Filed Under:
Finance, Business, Economics, Foreign Policy, Elections, Military, Politics, Environment, Energy
Finance, Business, Economics, Foreign Policy, Elections, Military, Politics, Environment, Energy
Europe may soon be choking on that plat du jour of government a la Hollandaise with the side of chopped Greek salad. The whole world, in fact, has got something like a giant hairball stuck in its craw. The hairball is composed of filaments of lies wound over a core of supernatural indebtedness. The lies are promises that the debt will be paid back.
For two months the financial markets have gone sideways on a cushion of the European Central Bank's Long term Financing Operations and the hot air of austerity chatter. The illusion of remaining airborne may dissolve now with the Hollandaise denunciation of Franco-German team spirit while a centripetal vortex of unpaid obligations sucks notional wealth through the event horizon of massive...