Maybe it’s just the psychology of selective attention, but tolerably often when I want to go into more detail about a point made in a previous essay here, stories relevant to that point in one way or another start popping up on the news. That’s been true even during this blog’s forays into narrative fiction, so it should be no surprise that it’s happened again—even though, in this case, the point in question may not be obvious to most readers yet.
One of the core themes of the Retrotopia narrative I’ve been developing here over the last month or so is the yawning gap between the abstract notion of progress that we all have in our heads and the rather less pleasant realities to which this notion has been assigned. The imaginary Atlantic Republic, the home of the narrative’s viewpoint character, is a place where progress as we know it has continued in exactly the same direction it’s been going for the last half century or so. That’s why it’s a place where income is concentrated in ever fewer hands, leaving most of the population to struggle for survival via poorly paid part-time jobs or no jobs at all; a place where infrastructure has been allowed to fall into ruin, while investment gets focused instead on a handful of high-tech services such as the metanet (my hypothetical 2065 “improvement” of today’s internet); a place where people make do with shoddy, wretchedly unpleasant consumer goods because that’s what a handful of big corporations want to sell them and there are no other alternatives, and so on.
Now of course the immediate response of many people to this characterization can be summed up neatly as “but that’s not progress!” Au contraire, the changes just noted, unwelcome as they are, are the necessary and inevitable consequences of exactly those technological transformations that have been lauded to the skies in recent years as evidence of just how much we’ve progressed. In the same way, my imaginary Lakeland Republic, with its prosperous working classes, its thriving urban centers, its comfortable clothing, and the like, has those things because it made certain collective choices that fly in the face of everything that most people these days understand as progress.
For instance, to cite a detail that sparked discussion on the comments page last week, the Lakeland Republic has abandoned computer technology—or more precisely, after the Second Civil War and the crises that followed, it rebuilt its infrastructure and economy without making computer technology part of the mix. There were a variety of reasons for that choice, but one was an issue I’ve raised in these essays several times already: when you have an abundance of people who want steady employment and a growing shortage of the energy and other resources needed to build and operate machines, replacing employees with machines is not necessarily a smart idea, while replacing machines with employees may just be the key to renewed prosperity and stability.
That’s an issue in the story, and also in our lives today, because computers have eliminated vastly more jobs than they’ve created. Before computers came in, tens of millions of Americans supported themselves with steady jobs as typists, file clerks, stenographers, and so on through an entire galaxy of jobs that no longer exist due to computer technology. The jobs that have been created by computer technology, on
the other side of the balance, employ far fewer people, leaving the vast remainder to compete for the remaining bottom-level jobs, and this has driven down wages and widened the gap between the well-to-do and everyone else. That’s not what progress is supposed to do, according to the conventional wisdom, but that’s what it has done—and not just in this one case.
Since 1970, in point of fact, the standard of living for everyone in America outside of the wealthiest 20% or so has skidded unsteadily downward. The nation’s infrastructure has been abandoned to malign neglect, and a great many amenities that used to be taken for granted either cost vastly more than they once did, even corrected for inflation, or can’t be had for any price. We pretend, or at least the vast majority of us do, that these things either haven’t happened or don’t matter, and certainly nobody’s willing to address the possibility that these things and other equally unwelcome changes have been the result of what we like to call progress—even when that’s fairly obviously the case.
What’s going on here, in other words, is the emergence of a widening chasm between the abstraction “progress” and the things that progress is supposed to represent, such as improved living conditions, a broader range of choices available to people, and so on. The sort of progress we’ve experienced over the last half century or so hasn’t given us these things; quite the contrary; it’s yielded degraded living conditions, a narrower range of choices, and the like. Point this out to people in so many words and the resulting cognitive dissonance tends to get some truly quirky responses; put it in the form of a narrative and—at least this is my hope—a larger fraction of readers will be able to recognize the tangled thinking at the heart of the paradox, and recognize a dysfunctional abstraction for what it is.
Dysfunctional abstractions, though, are all the rage these days. A glance through the news offers a bumper crop of examples. One that comes forcefully to mind, just at the moment, is the ongoing attempts on the part of US political and military spokescritters to find some way to talk about the US airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, without actually mentioning that the US carried out an airstrike on a hospital and killed twenty-two civilians, including three children.
It really has been a remarkable spectacle, and connoisseurs of weasel-worded evasions have had a feast spread out before them. Early on, the media in the US and its allies was full of reports that the hospital had been hit by an airstrike that somehow didn’t get around to mentioning whose aircraft was involved. Then there were stalwart claims that it hadn’t yet been confirmed that a US aircraft carried out the strike. Once that evasion passed its pull date—the Taliban, after all, doesn’t have an air force, and the public relations flacks at the Pentagon apparently decided that it just wasn’t going to work to insist that they’d somehow come up with one just for the sake of this one airstrike—the excuses began flying fast and thick. The fact that the four officially promulgated excuses I’ve seen so far all contradict one another doesn’t exactly make any of them seem particularly convincing.
What the excuses and evasions demonstrate, rather, is that the US military and government are treating what happened entirely as a matter of abstractions, rather than dealing with the harsh but inescapable reality of twenty-two smoldering corpses in a burnt-out hospital. To the media flacks at the Pentagon, evidently, this is all merely a public relations problem, and the only response to it they can think of involves finding some set of excuses, euphemisms, and evasions that will allow them to efface the distinction between a public relations problem and a war crime.
Now of course it’s not as though this sort of atrocity is unusual for the US at this point on the sorry downslope of its history. The only thing that makes the bombing of the Kunduz hospital at all unusual is that a significant fraction of the targets weren’t locals—they were physicians and hospital staff from the international charity Médecins sans Frontières, who can’t be ignored quite so easily. For well over a decade now, the US government has been vaporizing assorted groups of people all over the Middle East via drone strikes, and according to everybody but the paid flacks of the US government, a very large fraction of the people blown to bits in these attacks have been civilians. Here again, Washington DC treats this as a public relations problem, and simply denies that anything of the sort has happened.
The difficulty with this strategy, though, is that sooner or later you run up against an opponent that isn’t stuck on the level of abstractions, isn’t greatly interested in public relations, and intends to do you real, rather than abstract, harm. To some extent that’s what has sown the whirlwind that the US and its allies are now reaping in the Middle East. In many of the tribal cultures of the Middle East, vengeance against the killers of one’s family members is an imperative duty, and it doesn’t matter how airily the flacks in Washington DC dismiss the possibility that the latest drone strike annihilated a Yemeni wedding party, or what have you. The relatives of the dead know better, and the young men among them are going to do something about it, whether that involves hiking to Afghanistan or, say, joining the current mass migration into Europe, lying low for a while, and then looking for suitable targets.
The same difficulty has shifted into overdrive over the last few weeks, though, with Russia’s entry into the Syrian civil war. Russia’s current leaders are realists, which is to say, they assign abstractions the limited importance they deserve. The Russian presence in Syria, accordingly, isn’t a mere gesture, it’s the efficient deployment of an expeditionary force that’s clearly intended to wage war, and is in the early stages of turning that intention into hard reality. In an impressively short time, the Russians have built, staffed, and stocked a forward air base at Latakia, and begun systematic air strikes against rebel positions; work has gotten under way on two other bases; weapons and munitions are flooding into Syria to rearm the beleaguered Syrian army; the first detachments of Revolutionary Guard soldiers from Russia’s ally Iran have arrived. Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) and airborne units are en route to Syrian soil, where they and the Iranians will doubtless have something to do besides soak up rays on Latakia’s once-famous Mediterranean beaches.
Meanwhile Russia’s Black Sea fleet, led by its flagship, the guided missile cruiser Moskva, has positioned itself off the Syrian coast. That in itself tells an important story. The Moskva carries long range antiship missiles and an S-300 antiaircraft system; there are reports that another S-300 system has been set up on land, and Russian electronic warfare equipment has also been reported at Latakia. Neither the Islamic State militia nor any of the other rebel forces arrayed against the Syrian government have a navy, an air force, or electronics sufficiently complex to require jamming in the event of hostilities. The only nation involved in the Syrian civil war that has all these things is the United States. Clearly, then, Russia is aware of the possibility that the US may launch an air or naval assault on the Russian expeditionary force, and has the weaponry on hand to respond in kind.
Last night, working on this post, I wrote: “The Russian airstrikes so far have concentrated on rebel forces around the edges of the territory the Syrian government still holds, with some longer-range strikes further back to take out command centers, munitions dumps, and the like. The placement of the strikes says to me that the next moves, probably within weeks, will be against the rebel enclave north of Homs and the insurgent forces in Idlib province. I expect ground assaults backed up by artillery, helicopter gunships, and close-in air support—vastly more firepower, in other words, that any side in the Syrian civil war has had at its disposal so far.” This morning’s news confirmed that guess, and added in another factor: Russian cruise missiles launched from the Caspian Sea fleet, most of a thousand miles from Syria. Once Idlib and the rest of western Syria is secured, I expect the Russians and their allies to march on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s notional capital—and I don’t expect them to waste any more time in doing so than they’ve wasted so far.
All this poses an immense embarrassment to the United States and its allies, which have loudly and repeatedly proclaimed the Islamic State the worst threat to world peace since the end of the Third Reich but somehow, despite a seemingly overwhelming preponderance of military force, haven’t been able to do much of anything about it. Though it’s hard to say for sure, given the fog of conflicting propaganda, it certainly looks as though the Russians have done considerably more damage to the Islamic State in a week than the US and its allies have accomplished in thirteen months of bombing. If that’s the case, some extremely awkward questions are going to be asked. Is the US military so badly led, so heavily burdened with overpriced weapons systems that don’t happen to work, or both, that it’s lost the ability to inflict serious harm on an opponent? Or—let’s murmur this one quietly—does the United States have some reason not to want to inflict serious harm on the Islamic State?
I suspect, though, that what’s actually behind the disparity is something far simpler, if no less damaging to the prestige of the United States. I commented in an earlier post here that the US has been waging its inept campaign against Islamic State as though it’s a video game—hey, we killed a commander, isn’t that worth an extra 500 points? Look at that from a different perspective and it becomes another example of the total disconnection of abstraction from reality.
The abstraction here is “fighting Islamic State.” You’ll notice that it’s not “defeating Islamic State”—in the realm of dysfunctional abstractions, such differences mean a great deal. Obama has decided that under his leadership, the US is going to fight Islamic State, and that’s what the Pentagon is doing. At intervals, accordingly, planes go flying over various portions of Syria and Iraq to make desultory bombing runs on places where some intelligence analyst in suburban Virginia thinks an Islamic State target might have been located at some point in the last month or so.
That’s “fighting Islamic State.” Nobody can point a finger at Obama and say that he’s not fighting Islamic State, since the Air Force is still obligingly making those bombing runs. It doesn’t matter that none of this has done anything to slow down the expansion of the Islamic State militia, or to stop its appalling human rights violations; that’s in the grubby realm of realities, into which fastidious minds in Washington DC are unwilling to stoop.
Another abstraction that’s getting a lot of use in the current situation is “moderate Syrian rebels.” In the realm of realities, of course, those don’t exist. The Pentagon’s repeated attempts to find or manufacture some, to satisfy Obama’s insistence that a supply of them ought to be forthcoming, have yielded one embarrassing failure after another. This is for quite a simple reason, all things considered: the word “moderate” in this context means, in effect, “willing to put the interests of the US and its European allies ahead of their country and their faith.” (When American politicians use the word “moderate” about people in other countries, that’s inevitably what they mean.) Nonetheless, since the abstraction is so useful, the politicians and the Pentagon keep on waving it around. You have to read carefully to find out that some groups being labeled as potential moderates, such as the al-Nusra Front, are affiliated with al-Qaeda—you know, the outfit that the Global War On Terror was supposed to fight.
Such things should probably come as no surprise during the presidency of a man who got into office via a campaign that was never anything more than a blur of feel-good abstractions: “Hope,” “Change,” “Yes We Can,” and the like. Barack Obama will go down in history as one of the United States’ least competent presidents precisely because everything he’s done has been so utterly fixated on the realm of abstractions. The wretchedly misnamed “Affordable Care Act” aka Obamacare is a fine example. Its enactment has made health care more expensive and less available for most Americans; it took what was already the worst health care system in the industrial world, and accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of making it even worse.
To Obama and his dwindling crowdlet of supporters, though, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the resulting mess corresponds, to them, to the abstraction “national health care system.” He promised a national health care system, we have a national health care system—and of course it’s not exactly irrelevant that the privileged few who still praise that system are by and large those whose wealth shields them from having to cope with its disastrous failings.
It’s only fair to note that, deeply immersed in the realm of dysfunctional abstractions as Obama is, he’s got plenty of company there, and it’s not limited to the faux-liberal constituencies that put him into his current address. Listen to the verbiage spewing out of the overcrowded Republican clown car and you’ll get to witness any number of vague abstractions floating past, serenely disconnected from the awkward realm of facts. For that matter, take in the outpourings of the establishment’s pet radicals—I’m thinking just now of Naomi Klein’s embarrassingly slipshod and superficial book
This Changes Everything, but there are plenty of other examples—and you’ll find no shortage of equally detached abstractions drifting by in the breeze, distracting attention from the increasingly dismal landscape of fact down there on the ground.
What troubles me most about all this is what it says about the potential for really serious disruptions here in the US in the near future. I’m sure my readers can think of other regimes that reached the stage where moving imaginary armies across a landscape of dreams took precedence over grappling with awkward facts, and once that happened, none of those regimes were long for this world. The current US political system is so deeply entrenched in its own fantasies that a complete breakdown of that system, and its replacement by something entirely different—not necessarily better, mind you, but different—is a possibility that has to be kept in mind even in the near term.
256 comments:
10/7/15, 4:28 PM
Don Plummer said...
I'm enjoying the Retrotopia narrative, not least because I'm familiar with much of the geography your protagonist's train ride took him through. Plus I spent a lot of time in Toledo and northwest Ohio. Toledo the capital city of a partitioned former-US republic? Some would think that's a joke, but I could see it happening.
I'm looking forward to finding out why the Lakeland Republic was isolated for so many decades.
10/7/15, 5:07 PM
James St-Clare said...
10/7/15, 5:09 PM
jonathan said...
i'm more and more convinced that what's at work here is a form of magical thinking (with apologies to those of the druidical or wiccan persuasion) in which wishing will make it so. i would almost prefer that our leaders were merely sociopaths that were using abstract ideas to try and mislead the public. sadly, i think what were seeing is perhaps even more insidious than a propagandistic campaign to persuade the public that all is well. our leaders have succeeded in convincing themselves, just as karl rove did, that they can create their preferred reality by sheer force of will. under such conditions, reality based politics, diplomacy and economics are no longer possible.
10/7/15, 5:14 PM
dfr2010 said...
10/7/15, 5:16 PM
PatOrmsby said...
Your books I ordered came! I'm half way through Stars Reach, but off as soon as I hit the Publish button to the annual Kompira Shrine festival in Shikoku, where I became a priestess. So I won't see your reply for a week, but look forward to more Retrotopia, and agree wholeheartedly with what you said this week. Thank goodness someone's saying it!
Patricia Billsdotter
Prentice
Doomer Porn Guild
10/7/15, 5:17 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
On the topic of the second half of the essay, the reaction on the left-leaning blogs I've read to Putin's initiative in Syria can best be summed up as "please proceed Mr. Putin." They think that Assad is Russia's problem and they're looking forward to someone else doing the dirty work of cleaning up ISIS/The Sith Jihad. That Putin doing so instead of us pisses off the neonconservatives and other interventionists is just frosting on the cake to them. In addition, at least some in the progressive blogosphere are hoping that Syria turns into a quagmire for Russia. Better them than us!
10/7/15, 5:41 PM
Eric Backos said...
I am pleased to report this week’s Green Wizards’ Benevolent and Protective Association, Chapter Number 440 meeting is now listed in the MeetUps forum on greenwizards.org. Splendorem Lucis Viridis!
10/7/15, 5:44 PM
Ben said...
1 - In reference to the last paragraph, I would say the Roman penchant for watering down their legions by dividing them in half and then saying "see barbarians! you now face two legion instead of one!" certainly comes to mind...
2 - As for the Russian involvement in Syria, my guess is that, while effective in the early stages, their involvement will quickly devolve into a large scale replay of the Chechen wars of the 1990s and early 2000s. They will make a desolation, and call it peace. Over the long run, I'm not sure this will prove a tenable strategy. The Chechen war is not really over in any meaningful sense of the word. The cost to the Russian state and Russian people was very, very high, and I doubt it put an end to Islamist extremism nor Chechen nationalism.
3 - All that said, I listened to an amusing story on NPR this afternoon, in which the commentator was interviewing some talking head about how absurd it was that Russian was acting unilaterally and against the wishes of the US and the West! Why couldn't the commentator understand that that was unacceptable? And so on... While I disagreed with some of the talking head's specific points, the overall gist that not only does Putin NOT care what the West thinks, and is under no obligation to play by Western rules after two decades of getting kicked around by the West seemed spot on to me a very germane to this post.
10/7/15, 5:52 PM
Juandonjuan said...
So it wasn't an errant or misguided bomb, it was a targeted, repeated and rerepeated assault. Progress! Efficiency!
Also specifically equipped for night operations, so the excuse of accidental fire, especially for 30 minutes after the doctors called for relief.
10/7/15, 6:00 PM
Jean said...
10/7/15, 6:04 PM
Alexander Carpenter said...
As more than just the Chinese say, “May we live in interesting times,” as we watch (and, despite our huddling in dark corners against the Great Unwashed Chattels and their neo-Feudal owners, participate in) the unfolding and implosion of this dance of automatons.
10/7/15, 6:10 PM
will said...
Re Obama's incompetency - I'm inclined to agree with the conservative view that O's flailing is pretty well calculated on his part. Given his background and sympathies, he really does want to cut the USA down to what he sees as acceptable size. I imagine that it's not so much that O is by himself bringing about the decline of the USA and western civ - you know, as if the election of a contemporary conservative president would do all that much to arrest the decline - but that leaders like Obama just appear in times of decline.
10/7/15, 6:10 PM
jean-vivien said...
And last week I wanted to suggest to the folks of the United States actually building themselves the funeral bunker for their leaders, because it would at least ensure that no taxpayer money would be wasted on a building which was purposed to be bombed to bits anyway. In the same historical setting, the "landscape of dream armies" echoes this line of thinking. Why isn't anyone offering Obama a model of the American Iraq he would want to build ? Something to toy with while the Spestnaz are bombing W. DC. The parallels with the end of the Third Reich are increasingly striking, as will be the bombs. Or color flyers promoting regime change ? The mighty doctors getting a dose of their medecine...
As for closets, there are enough skeletons in there to stage a Halloween party, at least this year you folks won't have to waste any money on the costumes.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/21/us-mideast-crisis-turkey-arms-idUSKBN0O61L220150521
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/31/petraeus-use-al-qaeda-fighters-to-beat-isis.html
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.fr/2013/03/confirmed-us-shipping-weapons-to-syria.html
And a very recent article on Reuters, which actually talks about strategy... of other governments. My raw feeling is that from now on, the Western media will be talking about actual military strategy, but only since it is just trying to catch up with what the enemies of the Western world are doing. It's not even an Empire of Evil anymore, just an Empire of Stupidity...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/06/us-mideast-crisis-syria-soleimani-insigh-idUSKCN0S02BV20151006
I say "enemies"... not for long, at least in Ecnarf.
http://fr.sputniknews.com/international/20151005/1018601341/fabius-syrie-terroristes.html
I think the USA will be admired in the coming years, but not for the glossy, cocktail-table and chicks-in-sport-cars Great Country it once promoted itself to... just admired for its pragmatism, its sense of community, its appropriate tech scene (Green Wizardry, but also the Maker scene, the Indie video game scene...), and in general its ability to muster great pragmatism in order to deal with the host of practical challenges awaiting the Western world in general. People overseas might even order tools made by hand from craftsmen based in the USA through mail order. But that would overlap your Retrotopia, except I wish the harshest thing that continent will have to face should only be a couple of years with the most insignificant government in the world... Being insignificant might even help the leaders of the USA to do their job competently. A reality check is what your great nation truly needs, hopefully not inflicted on a bunker filled with the desperate remnants of the government toying with their model of an hypothetical American Iraq.
10/7/15, 6:13 PM
peteybee said...
Regarding Russian high tech military equipment: could be used to deter Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia (military budget as big or bigger than Russia's).
Regarding the term "moderate rebels" - could be a euphemism for PMC's hired by Syria's middle-east rivals, perhaps former Syrian Army now on someone else's payroll. Gray area. In any case, they ought to be a lot more moderate than committed jihadi's, expected to have the discipline to refrain from decapitating infidels, etc.
That said I agree with you and everyone else who'se saying its time to get real. If the anti-Syrian-government forces, such as they are, should overthrow the Syrian Government, it's a toss-up between (a) warlord-i-stan (b) caliphate, or (c) a military dictator brutal enough to defeat IS, i.e., another one just like Assad.
Lastly, in my opinion, if Russia really tried to conquer all of what used to be Syria, I don't think they'd fare any better than the US would. If Russian leadership really has a firmer grip on reality, and we are at a point where we're cheering this development, it is a bad, bad sign about how far the US has come.
Cheers. All the best!
10/7/15, 6:19 PM
Robo said...
As you note, the essential quality of civilized 'real life' for most citizens of the USA has been on a relentless downhill slide for decades. Consequently, it seems that many have resorted to living in an optimized virtual world of illusion, enabled by an array of electronic devices and fantasy media. Lately it appears that even our so-called leaders are opting for the dream state.
It so happens that I recently traveled through Toledo, Ohio and happened upon a mostly vacant suburban strip mall where a defunct supermarket space has been "temporarily" occupied by a vast flea-market. Inside.. amongst racks of old clothes, obsolete appliances, worn tools and discarded tchotchkes.. a small, aging tribe of gloomy vendors were patiently waiting to glean some last remaining dollars from the consumer jetsam of the past 50 years. I can only imagine how these people might fare in your prospective Toledo of 50 years hence.
10/7/15, 6:19 PM
Jason Fligger said...
10/7/15, 6:28 PM
frijoles junior said...
I'm struggling to find strong grounds for optimism on that point. It seems to me that the old guard must have been missing that particular fight.
10/7/15, 6:31 PM
Repent said...
I think you've lined up the situation perfectly, although there has been economic growth over the last 40 years, it really isn't progress. The quality of life hasn't improved and it has declined. The local municipal council where I live, recently got rid of almost all of the kiddie wading pools; or in some instances made them into automated splash parks because they can't afford them anymore. When I was a kid in the 70's, I'd spend almost everyday at the wading pool with my friends during the summer. This also allowed the teenage lifeguard to have a decent and respectable summer job. Is it progress, they can't afford to give a teenager a summer job, and the kids are treated to the banal push of a button (accompanied by their helicopter parent) splash park instead?
Recently I've noticed a few profound and worrisome changes. Everyone I know, at work, family, ect, has gone mad crazy with trying to win the lottery. As if the trillion to one chance of winning the 50 million dollar prize is an obtainable result. If they took the money they are spending on gambling and shared it among themselves instead, in an alternating pool system, they'd be better off with lesser amounts. This massive shift to compulsive gambling suggests to me that awkward reality is no longer fitting the social narrative, and that people are getting desperate.
Recently, on a routine visit to my family doctor, my quiet and mild mannered family physician told me that all of the doctors have had to install panic buttons in their offices, because people are screaming and yelling at them during visits, especially in instances where they refuse to prescribe narcotics. That's an unsettling circumstance. New signs posted everywhere in the clinic, that abusive behavior is not tolerated. It's as if respectful public decency has somehow suddenly vanished? Also a sign of increasing desperation.
This matched only with the deafening silence and lack of public outcry at the recent events in Syria. You'd think that people don't care that WWIII has recently become more probable? Daily stories about potential US and Russian pilots being on a trigger edge of starting dogfights in the air above Syria has me worried. Yet people at work are worried and fully engaged about ongoing hockey player contract negotiations. I find myself stunned at the disconnect!?
10/7/15, 6:34 PM
HalFiore said...
But I think you might be missing, or leaving out, some important aspects of our ongoing failures in the Middle East, which seem to me to be at least as damning as what you've outlined. I doubt that people as smart as Obama and our military leaders totally miss how ineffective our tactics have been thus far. Actually, I think you've overstated their ineffectiveness, but that's beside the point, so I won't argue it. They certainly haven't met their stated goals.
But I think our failures are less about a inability to understand the situation, and more the result of just playing a very poor game of chess. I had to look up Latakia to find it is the major port of Syria. Think about that for a moment: the Russians are ensconced in one of the presumably more secure parts of the subject nation, with "boots on the ground" and more importantly, eyes in the field. They have the cooperation and intelligence resources of the host nation, and allies in the region willing to put more troops on the ground, and the ability to coordinate with reliable Iranian and Syrian forces. We have none of that, having done a masterful job of alienating everyone in the region, with the possible exception of the Kurds.
The result: we have a very limited ability to locate targets, and then just the blunt instrument of air strikes as a weapon. We are living with the consequences of decades of terrible choices, and have more or less lost the ability to project force in that part of the world.
Obviously, I'm not totally disagreeing with you, mainly a different emphasis. I'll grant that you seem to have some good information sources, which I hope you can share with us. Please tell me it's not some guy with a blog.
10/7/15, 6:47 PM
pygmycory said...
But if it was an accident, it's a pretty massive accident. Why did it happen and why did they continue dropping bombs for so long?
10/7/15, 6:57 PM
Moshe Braner said...
[A note to those not in the US: for some strange reason, unlike other merchants, here gas stations (selling automobile fuel) all have their prices posted on large signs.] So, a local gas station thought that changing the posted prices on the signs by hand is too much labor (and labor cost), so they invested in digital signs, where the numbers are controlled by a computer somewhere. After a few months of operation, something went wrong with the labor-saving hardware, and what is displayed is a nonsensical group of letters and other symbols. That's been going on for weeks, and has not been fixed.
Second anecdote, also somewhat related to last weeks installment about Mr. Carr's clothing. Cold weather is setting in here in Vermont, close to freezing at night. I've had a hard time in recent years finding tall slippers to keep my (large male) feet and ankles warm in the winter, indoors, with the thermostat set not too high. The local stores mostly carry nonsensical offerings such as slippers that only cover the toes. Mail-order often brings in made-in-China slippers that are flimsy and 2 sizes smaller than claimed. So today I stopped by a sizable department store that belongs to a national chain. This store, in the few times I've ventured in there, seems to have more salescritters than shoppers, even in December. I couldn't find such (only a few in the women's department), so asked a salescritter. He said it is too early in the season, they'll come in in a month or two. I said "but it's going to freeze soon". Says he: "oh no, it's still 3 months before freezing weather." - Does he live inside the store? Commute by heated limousine from Atlanta? Sheesh.
10/7/15, 7:08 PM
Kevin Warner said...
Talking about abstract ideas of progress taking over from reality-based assessments, there is a perfect illustration of this in operation at http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-pentagons-concurrency-myth-is-now-available-in-supe-1689810660 and is very much worth reading all the way through. The F-35 fighter is notorious for being in production before design and testing were even completed and it was the idea of concurrency that was responsible for that - putting into something production while it is still in testing as the design process would be so great that testing would only be a formality. Guess how that worked out, go on, guess.
It now appears that the same abstract idea is being used in America's supercarrier construction so that the US Navy may end up with supercarriers that cannot even launch and retrieve aircraft reliably in port much less on the high seas during hi tempo operations. I remember reading your novel "Twilight's Last Gleaming" when it came out in installments back in 2012 and this makes the military defeats in your novel far more believable now.
Meanwhile the Russians are having a field day listening to American shrill comments on their operations in Syria. On their English version news & blog sites, there is a theory that the West was about to impose a no-fly zone in Syria to destroy the Syrian military and let the 'moderate' al-qaeda headchoppers win, hence the Russian military imposing their own no-fly zone. They point out, for example, failings that the West has made such as how ISIS took Palmyra but to do so they had to travel along a 150 kilometer road through a desert with no cover and somehow the Americans missed it? Really? Who is playing who over there?
10/7/15, 7:09 PM
Doctor Westchester said...
The 2015 Fall NYC Green Wizard meetup will be held on Thursday, October 22nd starting at 6:00 PM at Darbar Indian Restaurant, 152 E 46th St. between 3rd Ave & Lexington Ave., NYC, NY (212)-681-4500 near Grand Central Station.
The 2015 Fall Lower Hudson Valley Green Wizard meetup will be held on Saturday, October 24th starting at 1:00 PM at Bread & Bottle Bakery & Wine Bar, 7496 South Broadway, Red Hook, NY 12571.
To RSVP to either event or if you have any questions, please email me at doctorwestchester42 at Google mail.
10/7/15, 7:13 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
The dirty little secret of the computer geeks is that they defend their positions because they're generally very highly paid for those same positions. I've been in the position of having to hire those people, I know what they're demanding and getting paid. I have this mental image of them as hungry monsters - just like the banks - as they eat all before them without considering where tomorrow’s meal will come from. And to be sure, those computer geeks can demand those salaries, because they're putting people out of work. Economists have a delightful abstraction called: Labour productivity, and they're always banging on about it. But that little abstraction only counts people that are actively employed and sort of forgets about all of the unemployed (or the under employed because they're cheaper). It is shameful.
As a method of healing a very damaged workforce team years ago, I took a much lower salary than my predecessor, used the cost savings to more fairly equalise the pays in the team, immediately walked a troublemaker within hours of taking control and thus the majority of the healing was complete. From the outset I said to that team: What went on in the past was not on, and I will show you the way forward. When I eventually left employment there after about two years, some of the staff cried, I mean there were tears - it was really very sweet. The only person in the team that used to constantly whine about their pay was the computer geek and it used to really annoy because he wanted more money than I was on - with 1/10th of the responsibilities.
Oh, am I'm ranting? It does sound like it.
I hadn't heard about the hospital airstrike but it doesn't surprise me as no one wins hearts and minds with airstrikes on civilian targets out of the blue. If I was a warlord in that conflict, the response I would have to that situation would be the sort that you are referring to: a slow, quiet and effective burn - it is not as if it is hard to figure that one out.
I have been watching the involvement of the Russians and they've certainly decided that it is time to get serious and support the Syrians - Blind Freddy could see that.
No disrespect to the men and women on the ground in our armed forces as I reckon they're doing it tough, but the leadership of those forces must be senile, because how could a conflict become so protracted over such a wide sphere that it has gone on for more than the time that it took to complete World War I and II combined? Why isn't anyone asking the hard question, what are we trying to achieve there and why are we paying for that? It just makes no sense at all and what is worse is that the decision makers appear to be expanding the number of conflicts we are all involved in (please Sir, more!). A divided military cannot fight on so many fronts - sooner or later there will be a defeat, it is only common sense. And for every day that passes with no resolution we lose credibility.
Cheers
Chris
PS: I've got a new blog entry up: All day I dream about chickens where I write about unintended consequences with the new chicken housing project. It is an enjoyable read and some good photos. The farm has just been through an historically record breaking heat wave for this early in the year and the plants are growing strongly. There are some great photos which show the comparison in plant growth over just a few days. Plus, please spare a thought for us down here as there is a large and very out of control bush fire now burning over on the other side of the mountain range in the elevated plains (a map of the fire affected areas is at the bottom of the blog). Next week, I plan to write about that fire given that the subject of the ADR this week is abstractions.
10/7/15, 7:22 PM
beneaththesurface said...
If you are interested in attending (or staying informed of subsequent meet-ups), please RSVP to rwhite at fastmail dot fm
and I will then tell you our specific meeting location.
10/7/15, 7:30 PM
pygmycory said...
I get the impression most of The West thinks they're more important and more powerful than they actually are. There's this idea that we can do anything we set our mind to, and that we are the arbiters of all morality and standards on the planet.
One thing I notice is that a certain friend of mine is very much cheering at reduced infant mortality, raised education levels and similar metrics in the developing world. Increased poverty, infrastructure decay and the like gets dismissed on the grounds that all this is due to increased inequality, which could easily be fixed had we the will. Explaining that increased inequality and clueless elites is often found in declining civilizations doesn't seem to make any impact. It's like poverty here doesn't count somehow.
I think I'm going to have to avoid the subject of civilization decline with her. The discussion got a bit heated when I mentioned the possibility of large-scale migration over many decades from MENA to Europe as a possible contributing factor among many others. It's just frustrating; we used to think so alike on world issues and now on some subjects it's become very difficult to communicate. It's more me that's shifted than her.
10/7/15, 7:33 PM
Howard Skillington said...
Within this simple framework, Obama was the ultimate tabula rasa on which a voter could scribble whatever he or she wished to think “yes we can” might mean.
My sense of it is that this time a great many more voters have awakened sufficiently from their stupor to sense that neither side is offering them anything at all. Recognizable surnames that voters have been trained for a generation to associate with the presidency no longer seem to be causing any Pavlovian juices to flow.
Given the abstraction that the office has become, one senses that almost any sort of true alternative to the republicrats just might unleash a torrent of support for something that none of us has bargained for. If this were a movie I’d be watching eagerly to see what the heck that might turn out to be; in reality it’s difficult to anticipate such a development with anything but dread.
10/7/15, 7:48 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Six days and counting till the shadow moon. Should be quiet the show.
The abstractions are flowing like water even at the bottom of the pyramid. Not a day goes by now where I don't hear denials about the state of the economy, nevermind the number of businesses that are shuttering here are growing by the day. The result of mimesis is that people at the bottom believe they can abstract away the dangers of the world, just like their leaders believe.
Regards,
Varun
10/7/15, 7:53 PM
NoHype said...
They must be eating their souls out with spoons.
A rarely acknowledged paradox of effective public relations (i.e.: telling your story of good behavior well and efficiently) is that it inexorably attracts bad behavior. What psychopath can resist glomming onto a gold-plated reputation?
Most good communicators are empaths in the employ of a power broker. Granted, they should have enough sense to quit when a pragmatic boss is replaced with a bottomless ego wrapped in well moisturized skin. But it's easy to say what they should and shouldn't do with their lives and careers from a distance -- in the abstract.
The reputation of the U.S. military has now been sullied on its own terms; by its own set of definitions. Now that it has reached peak propaganda, the only thing left to do is rotate the PR faces ever more frenetically. The guys and gals behind the curtain won't change, of course. They think there's still some reputation to spend.
Perhaps they haven't heard that Iraq is now asking for Russian assistance, too.
10/7/15, 8:02 PM
Mickey Foley said...
But I generally disagree with your take on the US strategy in Syria, JMG. I think our campaign against Islamic State is a token gesture, because Washington knows that defeating ISIS would eliminate the biggest threat to Assad. The US would probably rather see ISIS topple Assad, at which point they would be free to bomb Syria without fear of Russian reprisals. Then they could install a "moderate" (nice technical definition) regime.
Defeating ISIS would require cooperation with Assad, something the US refuses to do. Russia, on the other hand, is an Assad ally and eager to shore up his power. They also have no problem working with Iran, another nation the US won't collaborate with in Syria.
The US is paying lip service to the fight against terrorism, as you point out in your distinction between "fighting" and "defeating" ISIS. But I think the reason is they consider Assad the greater threat, if only in a geopolitical sense. If they have to choose between leaving Assad or ISIS in charge of Syria, they'll take ISIS.
The assumption is that ISIS would be easier to depose than Assad, but letting the civil war proceed that far would surely ignite a regional war, a conflict that (even by narrow US elite standards) would generate far worse consequences than the survival of the Assad regime.
10/7/15, 8:30 PM
Marcu said...
Fast-forward a few years. Recently Australia has decided to take part in the mess that is Syria through a targeted bombing campaign. This time around there is plenty of news coverage with cockpit video provided by the air-force to illustrate how well Australia is fighting bad guys.
The level of censorship clearly shows where the priorities lie.
##################################################
On a different note. I have made a post over on the Green Wizards forum but I haven't had much interest. I thought I would just mention it here as well. If anybody is interested in a Green Wizards meetup group and can get to the Melbourne CBD please let me know. You can send me an e-mail at limitstogrowth1972 at gmail.com
Cheers,
Marcu
10/7/15, 8:33 PM
Bryan L. Allen said...
10/7/15, 8:50 PM
Myosotis said...
10/7/15, 9:00 PM
Steve Morgan said...
On the topic of the senility and death of Progress, a recent event stands out as a marker in my mind. At an interfaith gathering last month, a local university professor discussed a class exercise in which she told the students to imagine they had a working time machine. When would they like to visit?
The most popular eras were the 1960s and 1980s, but all were in the past. No student mentioned anytime in the future. When the professor asked directly, "Who would want to see what 2050 is like?" not a hand went up.
And this is in the belly of upper class privilege, with PV on every roof and luxury cars in the high school parking lot.
As you mention in this week's essay, the time when the US political system - and its global wealth pump - completely loses legitimacy and is open to serious challenge may not be that far off.
10/7/15, 9:05 PM
jbucks said...
- The article (Guardian newspaper)
- Link to the study itself
It is a study of census data in England and Wales since 1871. From the article:
' “The dominant trend is of contracting employment in agriculture and manufacturing being more than offset by rapid growth in the caring, creative, technology and business services sectors,” they write. '
Hard to tell whether this means some kinds of, for lack of a better term, bottom-level jobs have simply been replaced by other bottom-level jobs. For example, farming being replaced by bar staff (a job they say has risen).
It also doesn't say anything about pay; whether the new jobs they say have been created are better or worse paid than those that have been replaced.
They show that jobs in technology have risen, they don't take into account the obvious point that technology requires energy, and if we run of out of energy those jobs will disappear.
I'm also a little suspicious that they use absolute figures (showing the number of people employed through the decades) without seeming to take into account overall population growth. Maybe their use of the statistic 'percentage of workforce' accounts for this, but the percentage of workforce doesn't say anything about the total size of the workforce as compared to total population. Maybe someone with more knowledge of statistics can chip in!
10/7/15, 9:25 PM
jbucks said...
I wonder if the explanation for the US being ineffective militarily in Syria is mainly because the US, after two wars in the Middle East, cannot do more because US public opinion would be totally against another war in the region. Perhaps the administration feels it would be political suicide to send in ground troops, therefore they make the token symbolic air strikes in the way you suggest simply to look like they are doing 'something' about it.
Russia, seeing this situation, has either simply jumped on the opportunity to gain influence in the region, or, have made a deal with the US behind the scenes to attack Syrian rebels (which the US can't admit in public because Ukraine means that Russia is 'the enemy').
But this is just speculation...
10/7/15, 9:32 PM
Mike said...
10/7/15, 10:01 PM
Jim R said...
I shall be scanning the news for one.
10/7/15, 10:05 PM
Genevieve Hawkins said...
Toledo is the perfect capital of the Lakeland Republic....a lot of contrarians and feels like something's gotta give. Deep scars from being sold out to NAFTA still simmering in that town...
10/7/15, 10:11 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Don, we'll get to that. The short form is that it defaulted on "its share" of the US national debt, which the IMF, World Bank, et al. insisted that the post-US republics all had to pay off, and so got slapped with an embargo and the attempts at regime change already mentioned.
James, true enough! If I wanted to make a complete list of the dysfunctional abstractions that substitute for reality in today's US politics, I'd be typing for a very long time.
Jonathan, the irony with calling current thought patterns "magical thinking," as I've noted here in the past, is that real practitioners of magic don't actually think that way; quite the contrary, repeat Rove's famous rant to any operative mage I know and the most likely suggestion you'll get is that the person who said that needs psychiatric help. That said, you're quite right -- that sort of faux-magical thinking is pandemic in the corridors of power these days, and will bring this country down in flames if it remains too long.
Dfr2010, a direct hit! How did your dinner companion(s) take that?
Patricia, best wishes for the festival! Btw, it'd be "Pat darra (whatever your mother's first name was)" -- second names in 25th century Meriga are matronymic.
Pinku-sensei, I recall a winsomely titled book from the late 1970s, I think it was: Butterflies in my Stomach: The Role of Insects in Human Nutrition. Having eaten fried grasshoppers, I find the idea quite palatable -- certainly more so than the crow that's going to be eaten in DC and elsewhere if the Russians pull this off.
Eric, glad to hear it. I hope the meetings are going well!
Ben, I'm pretty sure that the Russian strategy is to pound the rebels into paste and then hand things over to Assad and the Iranians, who will keep a lid on things thereafter: arguably a workable plan. (The creation of an independent Kurdistan deeply beholden to Russia and Iran, and thus likely to do a good bit of their policing for them, may also be part of the project.) As for Putin, though, exactly -- this notion that he has the least interest in what the West considers "acceptable" or "unacceptable" is really quite funny.
Juandonjuan, yes, I'd read that, and of course it's a valid point. The question that needs answering, though I doubt it will ever be answered, is why it happened.
Jean, take a couple of deep breaths and then tell me why.
10/7/15, 10:45 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Will, I disagree. If Obama actually wanted to cause a decline, there are many more effective ways he could do that; it's the fumbling and handwaving, the endlessly rehashed slogans, and the obsessive management of appearances that lead me to think that he and the class he represents -- including its conservative elements -- are lethally detached from reality.
Jean-Vivien, I was wondering if anyone would catch the implied reference in that last paragraph; thank you. Those "moderate Syrian rebels" really do resemble the imaginary divisions Hitler thought he could summon to the defense of Berlin!
Peteybee, as noted in response to another comment, my guess is that the Russian strategy is to kick butt, hand things over to a highly motivated local despot, and go home to the victory parade. But we'll see.
Robo, in my fictional history, they and people like them became the sole source of consumer goods in the years immediately after Partition, when the devastated Midwest was trying to rebuild some kind of basic agricultural economy and housing stock. Thereafter, some of their kids and grandkids stayed in the recycled-goods trade, while others refocused on new goods once those were available; they're doing fine now, in the stable, quietly bustling Lakeland economy.
Jason, understood. I have the spare time to follow up on stories like these, and try to put it to good use.
Frijoles, move fast. I have no idea how much time you've got left.
Repent, thanks for the data points! It's received wisdom among occultists, by the way, that when people become fixated on winning the lottery, their lives stop. They basically just sit there with slack jaws and blank eyes, waiting for the big check that never comes. It's one of the most dismal self-inflicted hexes I know of.
HalFiore, it's not just some guy with a blog. When something in the news catches my interest, I go to Google News and read anything up to fifty or sixty different news reports, from different countries and political persuasions, sorting through the propaganda and bias and trying to get a sense of the ascertainable facts. Details (such as the armament of the Moskva) get looked up on reputable online sources or in reference books. There's a certain amount of search string fu in getting the useful stories, but it's easily learned from experience.
Pygmycory, nobody outside the US military knows, and in all probability, they aren't going to say. They weren't dropping bombs, by the way -- they were firing a cannon with explosive shells, over and over again for more than half an hour.
Moshe, both of those are fascinating data points. Thank you.
Kevin, the F-35 and the Gerald Ford-class carriers are at the top end of the "can't fight but makes lots of money for the defense industry" sweepstakes. I wonder how many other weapons systems the US military uses are just as dysfunctional, if not quite so lucrative. As for the taking of Palmyra, well, yes, among many other examples. If the Russians succeed in taking Raqqa, it will be very interesting to hear what kind of documents they find in the rubble.
10/7/15, 11:11 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cherokee, it's ironic that there's so much discussion these days of the anniversary of the First World War because today's Allies are painfully reminiscent of that classic description of the British army on the Western Front: "Lions led by asses." There are plenty of good people in the Aussie military and in ours, but there does seem to be quite the culture of institutionalized senility at the top!
Beneath, glad to see so many meetups! Best wishes for the Arlington meeting as well.
Pygmycory, I know, it's quite the frustrating experience. I wish I knew a way around it, but when worldviews differ -- especially when it's a matter of acceptance or rejection of a set of socially approved mythologies -- misunderstanding is usually the outcome.
Howard, exactly. In today's America, the most likely replacement for the existing order of things may just wear armbands and salute with a very stiff arm.
Varun, I've seen some of the same thing. It's really quite bizarre. Yes, I'm also wondering what the Russians et al. have planned for the dark of the Moon.
NoHype, nicely summarized. If Iraq becomes part of an Iran-Iraq-Syria alliance under Russian patronage, as seems likely now, the US will have suffered its worst foreign policy defeat in my lifetime, and the political and economic consequences will be stunning.
Mickey, obviously I disagree. Certainly the US is fixated on getting rid of Assad, but I don't think it's a matter of sane geopolitics at this point, more a reflexive "Dictator bad!" -- that is to say, another abstraction. Dictators are bad, and if you get rid of them then you get a democracy -- that abstract notion has been wedged sideways in too many American brains for decades now, despite a consistent failure of the facts to follow suit.
Marcu, do you have any idea if the boats are actually being stopped, and if so, what scale of human-rights abuses are we talking about?
Bryan, that's why I used the term "airstrike" rather than "bombing" in my post.
Steve, that's absolutely fascinating. Not that many years ago, that would have gotten a completely different result. That being the case, we may be very close to crunch time; when the children of privilege stop believing the myths that undergird their status, it's late in the day indeed.
10/7/15, 11:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Mike, that's entirely correct, of course.
Jim, "General Richard Weed"? I'm drawing a blank on that. Fred Halliot, perhaps, or President Jameson Weed, maybe...
Genevieve, well, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? As for Toledo, thanks for the comment about NAFTA -- I'm still building the backstory to the Lakeland Republic, and old grievances about trade treaties that sold the US working class down the river (as of course NAFTA et al. did) are good fodder for that.
10/7/15, 11:46 PM
John Michael Greer said...
10/7/15, 11:51 PM
Scotlyn said...
10/8/15, 12:22 AM
Scotlyn said...
10/8/15, 12:34 AM
ed boyle said...
10/8/15, 12:35 AM
Allexis Weetman said...
On computers, robots and jobs. I have a degree in crafts (majoring in ceramics, minoring in glass and fine metalwork)... currently useless but hopefully a future winner. Apologists for automation tell me that new niches will be found for human workers in their hypothetical future. But the developers of robotics and AI state that they want to make their machines better than human in every way. So where is this niche for humans? Azimov understood this and thought that governments would pay their citizens to be content with leisure, but he underestimated the penchant for unthinking cruelty within us. The Tory government of my country has shown us the way they will prefer to handle unemployment.
On Syria. The schadenfreude is palpable in my house. Your book is beginning to look prescient. Putin impresses us with his old fashioned real-politik.
10/8/15, 12:43 AM
jean-vivien said...
Possible intelligence lapses on Russia being probed
WASHINGTON - Senior U.S. lawmakers have begun probing possible intelligence lapses over Moscow’s intervention in Syria, concerned that American spy agencies were slow to grasp the scope and intention of Russia’s dramatic military offensive there.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0S20CZ20151008
News travels fast in America ! I am all out of popcorn now...
10/8/15, 12:49 AM
Jason Heppenstall said...
Just last week, here in Britain, the newly-elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said that he would never use nuclear weapons. It wasn't long after that the prime minister David Cameron was sitting on a sofa during a breakfast TV show and telling the nodding hosts that "of course" he would not hesitate to incinerate millions of men women and children and that anyone who didn't think this was necessary was living in 'cloud cuckoo land'.
Military tactics aside, and not withstanding the fact that the threat of nuclear annihilations has kept an uneasy peace for a few decades, the difference between the former and the latter man seems to be that the former can relate the abstract world of power politics to physical reality, while the latter thinks it's all one big game.
10/8/15, 1:29 AM
Marc L Bernstein said...
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/10/06/432288/US-Syria-assets-
Commenting to Press TV, Dr. Barrett said that “the American people will be very interested to hear that just 14 years after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, which were officially blamed on al-Qaeda - which even then was called by some people al-CIA-duh, having had relationships with the US in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union - that this supposedly demonized enemy group that we were told was responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001 is now our ally in Syria, and we should to go war with Russia and risk a nuclear war that could end life on the planet in order to punish Russia for fighting against al-Qaeda.”
When I posted this article on facebook I headed it: Is Brzezinski crazy?
Steve Lendman says more or less the same thing:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2015/10/lunatics-in-washington-want-direct.html
We are dangerously close to seeing a major escalation in Syria.
10/8/15, 2:07 AM
KoldMilk said...
One consequence of this emphasis on data from electronic sources is that tech graduates have displaced people with humanities degrees, i.e., there is a shortage of people who understand humans, and the US agencies are stuffed with people who (can only) work with (worship?) computers.
And computers only work concretely on numbers, everything else done on computers relies on abstractions.
10/8/15, 3:00 AM
Michael said...
10/8/15, 3:16 AM
Sue Jaiteh said...
10/8/15, 3:17 AM
jessi thompson said...
i think we've already had a few "richard weeds" in high ranking military positions.
thoroughly enjoyed the post. my 2 cents: the us military isn't in the business of ending conflicts hastily, or at all. the longer they can drag it out, the more money the military industrial complex makes. so before we question the competence of any military action, we need to be sure we understand the underlying strategy. i'm no military analyst, but to me, it appears our middle east strategy is to perpetuate chaos to continually resupply us with hateable military targets. securing oil and other resources seems secondary (though also important). just my two cents.
also i think it's tragic they attacked drs without borders, and surprising, but surely it was intentional, and thats sadly not implausible.
10/8/15, 3:46 AM
doomerdoc said...
That's not that long! Especially when you consider human civilization is what, 6000 years old? And large scale industrialization is at least 200 years old.
10/8/15, 3:56 AM
Tony f. whelKs said...
Putin has pulled bit of a blinder, although I'm rolling my eyes a bit at the generic Western response - "but, but, but, he's like just promoting his own national interest, dude" as though that's a privilege to be reserved for the USA or other bastions of 'democracy'.
That said, I don't think his target is 'terrorism' in Syria, any more than it was the "Coalition of the Willing"'s target in Iraq. My take (bear in mind I'm not employed by any geo-political military think tank, so this may be poorly informed... or not ;-) ) is that Russia's interest in Syria is pretty much the same as it was in Crimea. Latakia, meet Sevastopol. The difference is, in Syria, the incumbent regime is happy to have the Russian fleet there, Ukraine's government of the day less so. Keeping one port means protecting the incumbent, whereas keeping the other port required a change. It's all part of a replay of the 19th Century 'Great Game', imho - a big prize for Russia being access to warm-water ports, now as it was then.
Looking at the map, I shouldn't really have been surprised at the presence of a cruise-missile capable fleet there, though I was. I'm probably not alone in that... that gives a lot of coverage of the more fractious quarters of the World Island.
Maybe the most disappointing aspect is hearing British politicians repeatedly describing Putin as a 'thug'. That might just be for PR consumption, but I'm more convinced they believe it themselves, and are seriously underestimating their 'opponent'. Sun Tzu has some choice words on that... we are so ... skewered.
10/8/15, 4:10 AM
Odin's Raven said...
Even the American military seems to be infected with this attitude, hence the vast scams like the F-35 and the five hundred million dollar programme to create 'four or five' 'moderate' terrorists. I think there was a report issued on 911 and hence overlooked, that something like $2.3 trillion had disappeared from the Pentagon and just couldn't be accounted for (excluding the official 'black' programmes). Recently I think I saw that this figure is now up to about $8.5 trillion. Then there was Iraq and the pallet loads of $100 bills disbursed without any accounting. Obviously people whose only solution to problems is to literally throw money around find it hard to accept that bullets bombs and bayonets are sometimes more effective and appropriate technologies, and that other people may be more efficient in wielding them.
It's not only the military and the defence industry. The upper echelons of American society seem to feel no empathy for the rest of their people and no responsibility for the state of their country. Its all just a vast collection of looting opportunities. There's now a story from one of Hillary Clinton's guards that when she passed through a rural area she complained, 'What are we doing here? There's no f***ing money here!'
10/8/15, 4:13 AM
Somewhatstunned said...
I'll consider, down the road a bit, a detailed review of This Changes Everything ...
Gosh JMG, you actually bothered to read it? I somehow managed to pick up from reviews and excerpts that it was unlikely to offer me anything much either practical or analytical and there'd be better use of my reading time. Even without a TV I'm still impressed how much reading you do.
10/8/15, 4:20 AM
Martin B said...
Of course it's much more complicated, with Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia all having a finger in the pie, not to mention Hezbollah, Al-Nusra, the Kurds, various tribal groupings, and the religious divisions like Shia, Sunni, Alawite, Wahhabi, and Christian.
As we know, Israel pulls American foreign policy strings in the region. What does Israel want? I don't know. Israel shares a border with Syria, and occupies the Golan Heights which is Syrian territory. But AFAIK Assad has accepted the reality that Israel is too strong for him and lets sleeping dogs with tanks and missiles lie. So it's not in Israel's interests to overthrow Assad, unless they already have a deal with the rebels. Maybe that is why America supports the rebels.
If anyone can refer me to a good detailed overview of the situation, I would be grateful.
10/8/15, 4:47 AM
donalfagan said...
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/130624673286/president-obama-wizard-or-failure
"The Master Wizard filter says that President Obama – magnificent bastard and Commander in Chief – just suckered Russia and Iran into the quicksand while taking The United States out of an endless and unwinnable fight.
And … doomed ISIS in the process.
The United States can’t defeat ISIS militarily because doing so would require killing too many civilians. Russia and Iran will have fewer problems in that regard because they control their media and their leaders don’t need to ask permission.
And let’s say you want to build a virtual wall around ISIS to contain them. You would need a substantial military power to guard the coast.
You need Russia.
Right where they are deploying."
10/8/15, 4:52 AM
MigrantWorker said...
But what is this... a challenger? On foot? The crowd watches in disbelief. Does he really expect to stand a chance against a mounted knight? Doesn't he know what happened to a long string of challengers in the past?
But that does not matter. The games continue! The champion's supporters roar; some with encouragement for the champion, some with laughter at the challenger. And the champion launches into a charge!
Meanwhile his opponent quietly picks up a crossbow...
The knight charges, and what a magnificent sight he is! The shine of the armor; the flutter of the standard attached to his mount; the mount itself, a heavy horse, his steps thundering across the field; the speed at which the knight advances; everything speaks of the champion's power. The crown cheers him wildly as he passes; further down the track, the rest of the spectators boo at the challenger.
Meanwhile the challenger winds up his crossbow with practiced and purposeful motions...
The roar of the crowd subsides. The current champion ruled for so long that the recent tournaments got a bit... predictable. You wouldn't even win much if you bet your money on him. Perhaps it is time for a new champion after all? I mean, the challenger may be a mere foot soldier, but at least he still stands...
Meanwhile the foot soldier places a bolt on the crossbow and takes aim...
...and the champion is left with no good options. If he continues the charge, he will get shot - not fatally, after all the armor grants him a lot of protection, but he will still fall in front of all the crowd to see. Even if he manages to stay in the saddle and overpower the challenger, he will still be wounded and unable to compete in other tournaments. And if he stops, it will be even worse: not only will he personally yield to the challenger, but also it will become obvious that knights in general are no longer an unstoppable force.
So what is the champion to do when the rules of the game change on him? He can't just drop the lance in the middle of the field; he has become specialised in fighting from horseback. He doesn't even have any ranged weapons, since they would get in the way of performing an effective charge. In short, he never fought a fight which we was not equipped to win - until now. He cannot even withdraw from the fight - as opposed to the challenger, who can just leg it at will without his position on the scoreboard changing one single bit.
My guess would be that he would still charge and hope for the best (or more accurately, for the least bad). As long as he gets some support from the crowd, he at least has that to fight for.
MigrantWorker
10/8/15, 5:00 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
A Melbourne CBD ADR catchup would be cool and a lot of laughs and fun. What have you got in mind and hands up who's interested?
Cheers
Chris
10/8/15, 5:22 AM
Jim R said...
I understand there's a Spokesguy kicking around by the name of Josh Earnest right now...
10/8/15, 5:31 AM
Joy Hughes said...
"I just saw this on Abundance, and I am so inspired to share it. It is from a woman who thinks like this all the time, and she is so happy and fulfilled, Wow. She says in this post In a Women's Forum that helps each other that I am in:
I want to share an important key to calling in the money and opportunities you desire.
Wealth is infinite and it is available to you every single moment you dare to open your heart to receive.
It often shows up in unexpected ways and can always be recognized as divine by the way it makes you feel.
Bless everything you are grateful to experience and enjoy and watch the Universe bless you right back!
Using videos to get your message in front of your ideal clients allows you to communicate the value of your solution in a way that helps them right then and there. It allows them to like, know, and trust you and bless you with divine wealth and abundance by joining your list, becoming part of your tribe, and investing in the transformation you provide.
Everybody wins. And that is infinite wisdom and divine wealth at work!"
10/8/15, 5:35 AM
Dan Mollo said...
About "This Changes Everything" I had heard that it was a "very important book" and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Your comment about it makes me want to read it all the more to see what you are talking about. One of the things I've learned from all of your writing is the need to wade through ideas and narratives to look for reality. Perhaps people who don't like that you characterize Naomi Klein's work as slipshod and superficial is because they too think in ways that are slipshod and superficial?
10/8/15, 6:02 AM
flute said...
One minor quibble with what you write. The Russian attacks so far have (according to Bellingcat's analysis) not been directed against ISIS, but solely against other rebel groups in Syria. But I suspect, as you wrote here, that Russia's strategy is to first eliminate the weaker Syrian rebel groups and then go on to crush ISIS.
Apart from the US, Turkey also has a navy, air force and electronics to jam, and is a party that is one of the most likely to intervene in Syria. That's probably why Russia has brought along all the advanced equipment. On the other hand, Turkey is a US ally, so you might consider them part of the same block.
10/8/15, 6:18 AM
Renovator said...
10/8/15, 6:33 AM
Johannes Roehl said...
Only now the German automobile workers start fearing for their jobs (the CEO left with a pension of many millions, of course he claims he didn't know anything...) as the prestige of that most visible and prestigious (there are some equally prestigious but none as visible) of industries goes down the drain. (It seems very likely that other companies also cheated in a similar fashion. And maybe not only German ones. My brother joked that the German car manufacturers should set a prize for investigative journalist to uncover similar cheatings by the Japanese automobile companies).
As taxes for cars are to some extent coupled with the rate of emissions, VW customers are also unknowingly tax evaders, and it was already claimed that the company should pay those differences as well. Furthermore, there was some deal a few years ago with the government to hold up the pretense of manufacturing cleaner cars that worked with an average rate of emissions throughout the "fleet" (that is the range of models offered by a manufacturer, allowing more gas-guzzler etc. if it is offset by sufficiently many "clean" models"). They cheated against this agreement as well with the faux emission values...
10/8/15, 6:37 AM
Justin Patrick Moore said...
Not on today's topic but a piece of news of possible interest to those tracking the Rustbelt Renaissance. This brief article is about the expansion of Port Authority for a 226 mile stretch of the Ohio river and its possible economic impact:
http://www.urbancincy.com/2015/10/will-expanded-clout-for-port-authority-strengthen-its-economic-development-capabilities/
10/8/15, 6:40 AM
Thomas Mazanec said...
Sure those questions will be asked? Or will we just go on in the fog we are?
10/8/15, 6:41 AM
Leo Knight said...
10/8/15, 6:41 AM
zaphod42 said...
Where is our national Putin? Trump? Hardly! Clinton? Give me a break! Even Bernie Sanders, as fun as he is to consider, is not in the same league. Perhaps there is someone out in the 'wilds' of America who can lead us as clearly as Putin leads Russia; and if there is, the one thing I would be on is that (s)he is not a "captain of industry," and cannot operate in either political party in this nation, as they are presently constituted.
Moreover, if we do not find such a leader, should one exist today, the inevitable consequence to which you referred will be in the category of "worse."
And so, in the end, we se that the candidate who campaigned on the theme of "hope" has been effective only in destroying hope; the candidate of "change" has been 'more of the same' The man of "yes we can" has done more to make what needs to be done improbable if not impossible. And has become the worst nightmare of liberals who wanted, at last, a black President. The first black person in the White House has become one of the worst of all time. That this has nothing to do with his race, but rather with the polity, will do little to offset this setback to equality. Already it is worse, and the paradigm shift has barely begun.
10/8/15, 6:48 AM
Justin said...
10/8/15, 7:01 AM
Helix said...
I guess what depresses me most about all this is the peanut gallery lining up for a shot at the next presidency, out of which we will -- at best -- select the least sleazy to "lead" us. Thus our prospects have been reduced to -- once again at best -- yet another unsteady downward slide.
On another topic that seems somewhat related, I have recently been meditating on the recent shooting on Oregon. While watching news coverage of this event, I was struck by the similarity of this event with the usual TV fare on offer. I came away with the impression that Harper-Mercer was simply making real what we see on TV almost every night. And while I don't play video games, my impression is that once again, Harper-Mercer merely brought out the mentality behind the "Doom" genre of the video game space into the real world. I'd be interested in JMG's and other posters' ideas here.
We're doing this to ourselves. And I don't see us stopping anytime soon.
10/8/15, 7:20 AM
George Coles said...
in this post made me think of the following quote:
"Never answer the question that is asked of you.
Answer the question that you wish had been asked
of you." -- Rober McNamara.
10/8/15, 7:30 AM
Eric S. said...
10/8/15, 7:41 AM
onething said...
10/8/15, 7:48 AM
Denys said...
The only place my brain is going with this is how we use corporations and businesses for the things families and communities used to provide for one another - elder care, child care, education, apprenticeships, farming, and house watching while one is away. So deep is our mistrust of each other that we believe more in the statements and slogans in advertising than we do in the words of our families and communities.
Another thought is the postal system. It still delivers mail regularly, but when I must ensure that something reaches someone in a timely matter, my first thought is "oh no, not the post office". I go to Fed Ex and pay $18 or something more and am guaranteed that they did their job and delivered the envelope to the right person in a timely matter. It's really quite ridiculous. The post office even with its most expensive option will not guarantee its delivery of items by the time they said they would do it.
What did you have in mind?
10/8/15, 8:09 AM
FiftyNiner said...
"President Jameson Weed?" So close to 'jimson weed', the ubiquitous hallucinogenic weed. Is there a connection or am I over thinking something? Anyway, the name has a nice sound, though somewhat aristocratic.
10/8/15, 8:13 AM
Dammerung said...
Russia is serious business though. They didn't go into Syria half-committed. They aren't there to please a voting bloc or hand over taxpayer money to their military industrial complex. They're there to bust some terrorist heads - and the heads of anybody who tries to get in their way. Those S-300s (or S-400s?) aren't there to defend against the "extensive" Islamic State air force....
10/8/15, 8:23 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
10/8/15, 8:35 AM
Helix said...
At least I hope these clowns have that much sense.
10/8/15, 8:37 AM
Odin's Raven said...
Wouldn't it be great to see Obama, Netanyahu, King Salman and their leading generals and bureaucrats impeached before the world on the charge of plotting aggressive war against Syria? Oh yes, things like attacking Yemen and bombing hospitals and wedding parties could also be on the charge sheet.
What would be a suitable sentence? Perhaps 99 years plus life in Guantanamo, wearing orange overalls, handcuffed into stress positions, subjected to loud noises and regularly tortured?
10/8/15, 8:54 AM
adamatari said...
Secondly, Obamacare hasn't stopped the bleeding but it HAS made healthcare cheaper and more accessible to lots of people, particularly poor and near-poor people in states that accepted the medicaid expansion. Not to mention people with pre-existing conditions. A lot of people are getting healthcare for the first time in years. What it did not do is "fix" the American healthcare system, or stop the rise in costs, or weaken the corporate control of that particular trade. So people who have money are paying more, to subsidize those without money and to keep the fat cats fat.
I would say the shape of decline is not a narrowing of choices in the consumer realm, but rather a rise in prices of neccessities (rent, education, health care, transportation, and so on). There are more consumer choices than ever, but equally they are harder to find offline as amazon and other online shopping have done major damage to traditional retail. So for the wealthy, life is great, but for everyone else things have definitely gotten worse. An iPlaything is no replacement for homeownership or an education without crippling student loans. And those quality good that do exist are not easy to afford if you are putting more and more of your income into staying off the streets.
The rise in the price of neccesssities - basically, economic rent seeking - is, to my mind, perhaps the biggest issue. Income inequality is an abstract but rent is very real. When I say the rent is too damn high, people blow it off, but from my experience and what I see, even higher wages don't mean much if all of it gets sucked out by rising rents. When you say the abstract is being treated as more important than the real, what comes to mind for me is the price of rent, police brutality, and infrastructure issues. All things that are not addressed concretely even by "progressives" like Bernie Sanders. Heck, look at the marijuana issue - politicians have talked but it was outside groups that wrote the laws that were passed by the people in the West that legalized it (and it has turned out to be very simple and boring in practice). Major change simply is not coming from traditional politics anymore.
10/8/15, 9:01 AM
k-dog said...
Murmur indeed, should the Islamic State be actually defeated the war on terror would be reduced substantially in scope and the manufactured domestic fear of the Moslem horde might abate. With insufficient shiny objects left to distract, the American people could become critical of our government's disenfranchisement of them and their future survival.
Perhaps mine is an exaggerated and speculative perspective but inhabitants of suburban Virginia Suburbs are highly motivated to preserve and keep their pay checks coming. If that means annihilating a few hospitals from time to time it is all part of a days work to them. They take comfort in contemplating the 'bigger picture' as needed and should that not work pharmaceuticals are used I'm sure.
None of what I postulate here would bubble up into the realm of conscious awareness in the Virginia Suburbs except among those sufficiently sociopathic that their minds do not feel the need to protect against the harsh reality of their actions and how the town-house mortgage gets paid.
I'm enjoying your story and the essay breaks you are shoehorning into the weekly instalments. Keep it coming.
10/8/15, 9:03 AM
latheChuck said...
10/8/15, 9:13 AM
william fairchild said...
You raise alot of interesting points.
After reading last weeks post I was reminded of Potter's shoe store. They are many decades gone, but you could get a pair of shoes that fit, lasted, and could be repaired. Now the street they used to be on is populated with payday loan outfits, tattoo parlors, and pawn shops. And the WalMart is way on the east end necessitating a 30 min car trip or a 1 1/2 hr bus ride. I think this speaks volumes as to what was done to local economies.
I see the effects of robotization everyday. We named our two new kiosks "Tony" and "Melissa" after the employees who were laid off when they were installed. Not only does it cost jobs, but it degrades community, it destroys the interaction of one person to another. You don't have to be polite or considerate to a robot.
On Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine was a fine piece of work. I hve not read This Changes Everything. I've read many climate books. They generally follow the same pattern. Here is how dire it is. We reach an inflection point. And presto! Solutions! Of course people differ as to whether the market or a populist groundswell will deliver them. Klein seems to fall on the groundswell side. But they always seem to end up at the same point, a green energy revolution th at allows us to continue to live exactly as we are, just emission free. I just am so tired of that nonsense, I don't have the energy to read it. Paul Gilding's the Great Disruption was in the same vein and really dissapointing.
Whether or not you agree with Putin, one must confess, at least he is competent.
10/8/15, 9:14 AM
Helix said...
IMO, the best solution is to encourage a mid-east "summit" where all parties sit down with a view to redrawing national boundaries. "All parties", by the way, includes Israel, Palestinians, ISIS, Kurds, Turks, Iraqi Sunnis and Shi'ites, Saudis, Iranians, and... well, pretty much the whole lot. Notably absent would be the US and Russia.
It wouldn't work, of course. At least not at first. In fact, the first result might be renewed hostility between the parties -- not that there isn't a lot of that anyway. But it would plant a seed that could eventually bear fruit. The seed is the idea that the current boundaries were put in place for the convenience of colonial administration, and especially not to unite people but expressly to divide them. The fruit is that someday down the line, TPTB in these countries recognize that greater cooperation among them will pay dividends in a world dominated by superpowers. Kind of a Mideast Union counterpart to the European Union. And while a redistricting may not be practical, a measure of autonomy for the various populations might paradoxically allow for greater unity.
Nah! What am I thinking?
10/8/15, 9:15 AM
Moshe Braner said...
10/8/15, 9:22 AM
Keith said...
I very much appreciated this week’s posting. While I am very much enjoying the story over the past few weeks, I guess I like my philosophizing neat. Plus, reading fiction as a serial is maddening.
Dysfunctional abstractions are all the rage up here in Canada too, during our federal election. A particularly odious example has come up, as the current government has decided that the abstraction of “Canadian values” can be used to evoke a fear of otherness. In this case, our government has decided to ban the wearing of the niqab at the oath taking part of the citizenship ceremony, and to explore a ban in all public services. Whipping up fear of someone’s religious beliefs is cast by our demagogues-in-training as a reasonable approach to gender equality. Intolerance with a smile.
Using an abstraction allows politicians, and perhaps the public that supports them, to exploit anxieties while ignoring the ugly reality that bigotry inflicts on real people.
Great post as always.
Keith
10/8/15, 9:23 AM
gwizard43 said...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-07/syrian-crisis-what-will-happen-next
Given your statements about 'the potential for really serious disruptions here in the US in the near future' - with which I agree - I'm curious to know if you ever considered, or what you think about as one 'dissensical' approach - expatriation?
It seems to me that seeking a life based on Green Wizardry outside of the core imperial regions (i.e. US and allied nations) in areas that still have functional traditional communities (aka interdependent socioeconomic groupings) as can be found, for example, all throughout rural and quasi-rural areas in Latin America, might make more sense in the days to come than staying put, IF that is, one accepts the challenge to earnestly and truly assimilate into said communities, in full recognition that this can easily take many, many years.
For those of us who do not feel a strong emotional attachment to America - while recognizing the difficulty of overcoming the 'cultural DNA' that is our heritage - it seems to me that practicing Green Wizardry in areas less likely to be quite so dramatically impacted by the coming Age of Consequences (in many cases simply because the foregoing Age of Affluence passed them by!) - especially if that involves a Tea Party dictatorship or something similar! - in more peripheral climes may be a viable option.
I'm curious to know what you and other readers of TADR think about this?
10/8/15, 9:25 AM
team10tim said...
I imagine that you readers fall into two camps. Those that read it and loved it and those, like me, who haven't read it. I looked it up and the basic premise seems sound, that what we are doing isn't working in a big way and in order to avoid wrecking the place we need to go in a radically different and more ecologically sound direction.
How did Naomi drop the ball? Did she says that we could have our planet and eat it too or that her personal version of the right way was inevitable or that everything will work out if 'The Man' just comes to his senses and stops keeping all the good ideas down? I'm pretty sure that things are not going to work out in a big way so if she suggests that everything will be coming up roses then I understand your criticism. But I haven't read the book so I don't actually know what the argument that you're not having with the trolls is about. A little light might diminish the heat here.
Thanks,
Tim
10/8/15, 9:28 AM
william fairchild said...
It does have some practical benefits, primarily medicaid expansion for those states that opted in. The burder on ERs was seriously reduced. Overall costs long term come down some. (diabetes is treated early and managed rather than excalating to amputation and kidney faiure) But the abstraction of "socialism" and "the market" came into play. Obamacare is not socialist (with the exception of medicaid expansion), unless you consider giving taxpayer dollars (premium subsidies) to private companies (insurance rackets) socialist. What is particularly galling is that many families can't afford the deductibles and copays on their bronze and silver plans anyway. And the enrollment process is still a disaster. Oh and premiums increase every year.
IMO, healthcare is a public good and a human right and therefore the profit motive and private capital controlling healthcare is inappropriate.
10/8/15, 9:29 AM
latheChuck said...
Did the Taliban actually use the hospital staff as human shields, believing that using the hospital would make them immune?
Did the Taliban mount a deception operation, such that US forces were led to believe that an attack was coming from "those coordinates"? If they could spin up a bit of theater ("War of the Worlds" radio broadcast comes to mind) that makes action urgent, the chance of carrying off this propaganda coup increase.
Did anyone on the US side realize that "those coordinates" corresponded to the MSF hospital?
Suppose the Taliban staged a deception based on the idea that THEY were attacking the hospital, so US forces would hurry to "defend" it, and the coordinates would be very close. And then, assuming that they have a trusted spotter on the ground, maybe they could manipulate damage reports to walk the attack right into the hospital? Let's not assume that the only "insider attack" is an explosive belt under an Afghan uniform.
10/8/15, 9:31 AM
latheChuck said...
Not having read the book, only the reviews, I'll try to summarize: 1> We're ruining the planet. 2> We're practicing capitalists. 3> Therefore, renouncing capitalism will save us.
To simplify it further, the argument is:
"If we continue to practice capitalism, then we will ruin our planet; therefore,
if we do not practice capitalism, then we will not ruin our planet."
This is not a logically valid argument, whether or not you agree with the original premises. I don't see why we should let it distract us from more productive efforts to understand what's going on around us, and what we CAN do to prepare for likely futures.
10/8/15, 9:45 AM
Steve in Colorado said...
Both Russia and the US have their public face to what is going on. And of course there are also their real private agendas.
For Russia, it appears to be support for their man Assad, against all enemies. That is why at least so far they have been taking out Sunni groups opposed to Assad which were largely backed by the US (e.g. the "moderates"). No doubt, they will eventually get to ISIS itself, but their goal appears to be support for their man in the region so that they can keep their military port on the Med. They also seem to be building a Shiite support group in the region. If they succeed at this, it will change the political/military landscape in the ME, making them a key player.
For the US, it isn't clear they have a strategy. Perhaps they were/are hoping for a replay of Russia in Afghanistan, hoping to bog them down in a Sunni/Shiite war. But so far at least there is no indication they have a game plan. Properly done such a plan could work, there is a great amount of Sunni-Shiite hatred to play off, and Saudi Arabia is not likely to stand by and see a strong Shiite military alliance form in their back yard. Whether TPTB in the US can pull that off is another thing.
As always in the ME, there are plots within plots within plots. The real long term goals may well still be below the radar.
10/8/15, 9:57 AM
Gaianne said...
That Reuters article on intelligence lapses is very funny!--and an important indicator that US policy is in deep disarray. Essentially various US leaders are casting around for whom to blame, and intelligence agencies are never in a position to go public with how they were ignored by their bosses, since everything they do is classified secret.
This fits very well with the theme of this week's post. The White House--and in their own way, the Pentagon--create their own reality, and reports from informants and analysts who collect concrete facts are often ignored or rewritten by their superiors to better fit the prevailing group-think. When this goes wrong--as it often does, the blame is pushed down the hierarchy.
The funniest part of the article is the expression of surprise that Putin has made use of tactical surprise. But Putin has always made use of tactical surprise--not least when his goals are explicitly stated.
--Gaianne
10/8/15, 9:57 AM
Dave Ruggiero said...
Of course, we're hamstrung by the fact that we declared Assad a war criminal a couple years ago and insisted that he had to get out. The Russians have been in his corner all along and so the situation comes across as a little simpler to them. Nonetheless...isn't there somebody in the upper levels of our political leadership who's learned how useful it can be to apologize and admit that you were wrong? Makes me wonder what their marriages must be like.
10/8/15, 10:09 AM
Ron said...
Makes one wonder....
10/8/15, 10:13 AM
Bob Patterson said...
10/8/15, 10:24 AM
Bob Patterson said...
10/8/15, 10:27 AM
pygmycory said...
Airstrikes on a hospital that continue for half an hour despite pleas to stop... The whole situation makes no sense to me. It just doesn't compute. It really does sound like a war crime, but I can't think why anyone would want to commit it.
Scotlyn,
If Medecins san frontiers is considered a problem, I'd expect character assassination attempts, obfuscation, cutting them out of the loop as much as possible, and pressuring other actors not to do business with them. Murdering their field workers and patients from the air just makes the USA look evil without decreasing MSF's influence.
I was talking to said friend again, and she started talking about drone shipments of fresh vegetables to ships at sea. Headdesk. If that happens at all, it won't last very long.
10/8/15, 11:20 AM
nrgmiserncaz said...
I often use the abstraction "corporation" but I don't have meetings with corporations or build things to specifications written by corporations. I deal with people, and people want to keep their jobs and go on vacation and watch TV. If they lose their job, well that's a problem. So they write bid spec's that make a process more efficient and eliminate people. They make things automated so that they don't have to hire a skilled operator to run the machine - they can pull in anyone from the bus stop across the street to do it for way less money. Computers and technology are used ALMOST exclusively in my industry to eliminate jobs.
The funny thing is that a huge percentage of the people in my building are aware of the problem but can't really do anything about it because they would lose their job too. As long as we have an excess of available energy it will be more profitable to get rid of good jobs than to create them.
10/8/15, 11:23 AM
Clay Dennis said...
It seems to me that our leaders have exhibited such senility and fuzzy abstract thinking that their responses to future global military, finance, resource shortage, and climate disasters will most like make things worse and speed our way down the elevator shaft to preindustrial times. I realize that history demonstrates the concept of catabolic collapse very convincingly, but it seems like our technological society has created a situation where our leaders ( 1%, global elite, etc.) can be so insulated from reality and real world feedback that they may incompetant and foolish on a scale never before seen in history.
10/8/15, 11:26 AM
pygmycory said...
No word on any response from Canada, but I doubt he'll get a positive response.
10/8/15, 11:43 AM
Jill Grow said...
The business of the Progressives is to go on making mistakes.
The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
Almost seems to be true...
10/8/15, 11:50 AM
Roger said...
"Globalization" they call it, just to obscure what's really going on, what the real agenda is.
Maybe it's just my paranoia working overtime JMG but maybe the United States federal government has something akin to a Ministry of Silly Talks whose mission it is to distract and mislead.
Now, given that this is the US, I would further imagine that the function has likely been privatized.I mean, why work for a paltry civil service wage when you can set yourself up in a lucrative private business behind a corporate screen? But I digress...
See, this may explain such phenomena as Hillary's hilarious accounts of her email server which have gone something like "I wasn't watching, I wasn't there and besides I tripped."
Would a civil servant have come up with this? JMG, it only SOUNDS like amateur hour in the State Department. When you're confronted with the possibility of accusations of law-breaking, you defuse it with protestations of cluelessness. This sounds like a professional clean-up crew at work.
"Abstractions" as you say. Stay away from concrete facts, don't talk specifics, no, you say things like "I was busy, the pace and volume of work was tremendous ..." I mean, who can argue with that?
Was it cluelessness or was it deliberate law-breaking? Was there evidence of a guilty mind? Or was Hillary like the shop-lifter that walks zombie-like out of a store with his loot clearly visible in hand, and, if apprehended, protests his innocence, saying if he wanted to steal wouldn't he have concealed the object? No, he's no thief, he's just having a bad day.
When Wall Street stands accused of massive fraud, they say, no, it was only a massive failure of common sense. We're very, very smart which is why we're entitled to all this money. But, geez, sometimes we screw up.
Or, alternatively, when government bureaucrats stand naked and exposed to charges of monumental folly, they deny that it was folly at all. No, you see, all the apparent foolishness was to bedazzle the enemy with misdirection and deceit. See, Obama's phoney war against ISIS was just to exasperate Putin and draw Russia into a quagmire it can ill afford.
B.S. you say? Are you sure? Look, Russia is already neck deep.
Was Hillary's email server hacked? No doubt. But just wait. The spin could be that this was fully anticipated and so the server was loaded with counter-intelligence (that is, lies). Where was all this counter-intelligence? Well, remember all those deleted personal emails? Full to the brim. Clever no? And no, they'll comment no further as this involves issues of national security.
Absurd you say? My imagination working overtime? Maybe. But no more absurd than what we've heard so far. I mean, if you're going to lie, tell a big one.
You wonder, isn't it less trouble to show some due diligence before one acts? Yeah but you see, JMG, my experience in dealing with government is that, by and large, you're swimming against a tide of sloth and indifference.
How does government inflict so many absurdities and ludicrous injustices? Simply, they just don't give a damn. Nobody in a bureaucracy is responsible for anything.
I think you had said in a previous post, people find themselves in increasingly desperate and futile struggles with government departments that don't even pretend to carry out their mandate. And why should they even pretend?
They know that the citizen is powerless. There's a gross asymmetry in knowledge and information and especially in resources. For guys like you and me, taking on the government is like a solitary herbivore fighting a pack of wolves. Do you want to take on the government? Good luck. If you fight according to the rules, you abide by rules that THEY'VE devised.
10/8/15, 12:11 PM
Roger said...
Which brings us to the issue of those enraged young men from those violent corners of the globe. I don't think they're as docile as the herbivorous inhabitants of North America. They don't meekly follow our rules, that is, rules set up by our governing elite to protect them from us.
While we yawn or laugh at bizarre Hillary-esque lies, or we bemoan what the governing class dumps on us, or, if we're really mad, we get a lawyer, I would agree that these aren't necessarily the traditions of people in other parts of the world. Especially, as you say, if their village has just gone up in smoke. They don't sue for damages, rather, repercussions tend to be of the more kinetic variety.
Now don't get me wrong, discussing these things is very refreshing. But will it do any good? Of course, it gives your readers a heads up, it gives the view of other sets of eyes. Forewarned, as they say....
But as far as deflecting the course of the future, well, that's another thing. Because I've found out over and over that people don't listen and people don't learn. Least of all governments.
10/8/15, 12:13 PM
Dau Branchazel said...
And all signs seem to point towards them being either on the fighting for the "them" side of things, instead of for the "US". Russia, also, is not constrained by the western preferred type of pretense. They have an image to uphold, without a doubt, are not forehead-deep in twenty years of denied imperialism faecal matter. To they're mind, they are now buffering, and playing the long game of humiliating the "US", while bringing the "them", into their sphere of influence. What country isn't more maleable once they are indebted to you for ridding them of the scourge du jour? Syria will suck the sores off Russia new imperial feet after this is through. Even Iraq is on the verge of inviting Russian cruise missile strikes.
Goodbye status quo.
Now what do we know about dramatic shifts in the status quo; in the political equilibrium...
10/8/15, 12:30 PM
max said...
Note on ACA. Family works in a hospital that reports "negative impact" due to the high medical deductibles (know single mom, one child with epilepsy - $800 monthly medication costs, $300 monthly premium and a $13k deductible!). Watch for hospital closings due to budgetary problems, and/or accelerated medical industrial complex consolidation.
10/8/15, 12:44 PM
Hubertus Hauger said...
Just today I talked with a friend, crossing that particular subject. We are all under so much pressure. So many people seem to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Myself included. Quirky reactions where I go. We are right in the middle of the anticipated collapse and it maelstrom is dragging us along.
@ HalFiore: "...we have a very limited ability to locate targets..."
May be there is another most simplest reason for the immobility of the US-warforce in Syria. The collapse is making itself noticable.
Lack of ressources! That is the hardware. Maybe even the software is insufficent. Not enough money! Everything on the limits! And that for sure one cannot publicly annouce that.
Couldn´t the US-Cavalery have enterd just via Israel, with their super logistics. Just a few ten-thousand troops. Just like Russia is doing today. I completely guesstimating, but it is not far-fetched, that the US-army can not even spare such numbers in fightforce anymore. Not enough means available.
We have finally reached the limit of growth, hurra!
10/8/15, 1:17 PM
latheChuck said...
Saying "let's abandon capitalism; whatever comes after it just has to be better", sounds kind of like "let's just overthrow [Saddam Hussein, Ghadaffi, Assad, etc.]; whatever comes after just has to be better."
(I meant to write that in my earlier post.)
10/8/15, 1:24 PM
Shining Hector said...
Not sure if this was a piece of the tapestry you just wove, but I think back to the popular quote from Putin's recent UN speech, "Do you even realize what you've done" or something along those lines depending on the translator. At first I took it as a rhetorical jab. Now I wonder if it was a sincere question. After that, I wonder if he asked it knowing some people would recognize it as a sincere question. Then I wonder if the perfectly accurate answer would be "no, not really". Each step along the way makes my stomach sink a little further.
10/8/15, 2:16 PM
Jason Heppenstall said...
"Klein does not easily fit into most people’s view of a committed environmentalist. She drives a car (it is a hybrid). She flies, already a lot more than most people, and is set to rack up air miles that would make her, by her own admission, “a climate criminal”. There is a brightly coloured plastic playhouse in the garden that was probably made in China. Yet she confesses to getting weepy when she thinks about the future under climate change."
Leading from the front, then.
10/8/15, 2:30 PM
Glenn said...
I find this philosophy fascinating.{Snip!}:
I want to share an important key to calling in the money and opportunities you desire.
Wealth is infinite and it is available to you every single moment you dare to open your heart to receive.
It often shows up in unexpected ways and can always be recognized as divine by the way it makes you feel.
Bless everything you are grateful to experience and enjoy and watch the Universe bless you right back!
Using videos to get your message in front of your ideal clients allows you to communicate the value of your solution in a way that helps them right then and there. It allows them to like, know, and trust you and bless you with divine wealth and abundance by joining your list, becoming part of your tribe, and investing in the transformation you provide.
Everybody wins. And that is infinite wisdom and divine wealth at work!""
I've heard this before, it was from a "circle" one of our female neighbors attended. Turns out, it was actually an ordinary pyramid scheme. Most con jobs are based on the greed, or need (if you wish to be polite) of the victim.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
10/8/15, 2:49 PM
Pantagruel7 said...
10/8/15, 2:50 PM
Moshe Braner said...
10/8/15, 2:51 PM
chubasco said...
10/8/15, 2:54 PM
Glenn said...
I can't help but feel that if the current crop of American politicians had been in charge in 1941, they'd be anxiously trying to locate a group of "moderate Stalinists" to ship jeeps and boots to in Moscow."
Ah, Dave, were you aware that after Hitler started Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941, that we shipped a great deal of war material to the Soviet Union via both the Murmansk Run (over the top of Norway and the White Sea) and the Bering? IIRC, that included 4 Wind Class icebreakers for the duration. Shipmates of mine collected the Cyrillic labels from the machinery and control panels after their return.
Glenn
USCG, Retired
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
10/8/15, 3:18 PM
Unknown said...
Having grown up, and for a time attended, a prep school that produces many of the people who end up in the halls of power, I can't help but think that these people feel that they can do no wrong. Their connection to reality is rather tenuous to begin with and so help to further insulate the "deciders" from the mood of the general public and what is really going on. After a career in academia and non profits (fantasy worlds of their own) and shifting by circumstances into working retail, I can really see that the mood of the people is getting more desperate. I had a customer yesterday who wanted a particular item that we could not readily get and told him so. He then reminded me that he was going to spend $20,000 at the store...okay, but you still can't get it, dude.
In any case, do pop over to Orion magazine and check out Charles Mann's new article on the "Fantasy of Peak Oil". He suggests that there is an "infinite" amount of oil that we can get with technological means. He goes on to say that our problem of global climate change is not one of scarcity of resources, but one of abundance and that we'll have to cut back our consumption to slow the inevitable.
Thanks again for your blog, Mr. Greer. As someone posted earlier, Thursday morning can't come around quickly enough around here!
Tad Lyford
Unknown in Maine
10/8/15, 3:23 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...
10/8/15, 3:27 PM
latheChuck said...
http://www.rei.com/product/855499/rei-down-booties-mens
If someone else makes something like this without the polyester / polyurethane fabrics, that would be worth mentioning.
REI is a co-op store, so I guess I should say that your purchase may infinitesimally increase my annual dividend.
10/8/15, 3:47 PM
MawKernewek said...
Having said that, there's plenty of room for some sort of misunderstanding over the skies of Syria with tragic consequences.
10/8/15, 4:16 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Allexis, exactly -- and of course "better than humans" presupposes the reduction of human beings to machinery in the first place. Since machines are better than humans at being machines, why, yes, the machines win. Unfortunately for the geekoisie, their whole fantasy depends on limitless supplies of energy and other resources, which the universe cruelly fails to provide.
Jean-Vivien, get some more popping; the show is just getting started.
Jason, I'll be interested to see what Britons generally think of the difference between those two politicians' statements.
Marc, we are indeed -- unless somebody notices that the result of that escalation could be the collapse of the entire system of US hegemony. All it would take is an attempted US air strike being savaged by Russian antiaircraft batteries, and the myth of US invulnerability has just gone out the window for good.
Michael, thank you!
Sue, I'm definitely considering it.
Jessi, I think that could be a factor, yes.
Doomerdoc, I'm not arguing. Political systems can change very fast -- consider how little time it took to transform the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union -- and a system as desperately dysfunctional as the one in the US could fall apart very suddenly.
Tony, Putin's taking a calculated gamble. If he can take out the US- and EU-funded mercenaries and militias, and give Assad the necessary help to get public order restored, he can probably bring the troops home -- except for those permanently stationed in Latakia and Tartus! -- and leave a relatively stable ally in place. He may be wrong, but from his perspective, it's a logical thing to try.
Raven, that's unquestionably part of the problem. Money is in some ways the uber-abstraction, and just as vulnerable to disconnection from reality as any other abstraction.
Stunned, it's not as though it's particularly heavy reading -- a fluffy little journalistic piece pushing a simplistic argument with a boatload of unstated agendas. I got it from the library and read it on a slow afternoon, between more interesting books.
10/8/15, 4:26 PM
jonathan said...
10/8/15, 4:44 PM
Marcu said...
The government were quick to move the "refugee processing centres" off shore to Nauru and Papua New Guinea where the government appointed contractor Transfield services could deal with the "problem".
The issue has basically disappeared off the media here and the only time I hear about it is when severe abuses crop up in some of the more fringe sources I follow. Internees being raped, committing suicide, sewing their lips shut and children growing up behind barbed wire fences are all taking place out of sight and out of mind.
I don't know what the answer is but I do think the problem will be getting worse as climate change starts to really bite.
########################################
@Chris
Two is a company! Let me just find a nice venue to meet up and I will get back to you.
10/8/15, 4:45 PM
dfr2010 said...
For those thinking (hoping?) the attack on the MSF hospital was a mistake: I do not believe that. If it had been a mistake, not only would there have been a sincere-sounding apology in hours (as opposed to a half-(*donkey*)ed apology days later) but the pilot and gunner would have immediately been named-and-shamed along with facing courts-martial. I suspect whoever gave the order is politically connected, or has serious dirt on the politically-connected. It may take decades to learn the truth.
As for Syria, I stated emphatically a few years ago when the govt first started to "arm and train" the "moderate rebels" that there are no such creatures, and they really don't need training because as early as summer of 2003, I heard the infantry talk about attackers coming across the Syria-Iraq border to hit patrols, then running back to the Syria side where our troops could not follow. My brother-in-law scoffed, saying, "That's ancient history by now!" It is not only our elites that are willfully senile/ignorant/clueless.
10/8/15, 5:34 PM
Dau Branchazel said...
Maybe they have "succeeded" - if you can call such atrocious actions successful - but do the ends justify the means? For me, no. Many have died at sea, but only the the survivors are in hell.
10/8/15, 5:35 PM
John Michael Greer said...
MigrantWorker, funny. And apropos.
Jim, good heavens, no need to apologize! I was just trying to figure out who you had in mind.
Joy, the classic privilege bunny's metastasized sense of infinite entitlement! I got to hear a lot of that when I was living in oh-so-liberal Ashland, Oregon, where it was generally used either to sell pyramid schemes or to explain why it's not necessary to have compassion for the destitute and downtrodden.
Dan, by all means read Klein's book. As you do, I'd encourage you to ask yourself two questions. The first is whether she actually offers a concrete alternative to the things she's criticizing; the second is whether she provides any evidence that her alternative would be any better.
Flute, the Russians have done only a few strikes at Islamic State itself, but those appear to have hit significant targets. I haven't seen any evidence that the US bombing campaign has done more than inconvenience a few stray camels.
Renovator, I'll have to take your word for it -- that wasn't a program I watched.
Johannes, that's a good example -- more abstractions ("clean emissions") generated by subterfuges and handwaving. I wonder how much of Germany's supposed success with green technologies has been produced in the same way.
Justin, that's good to hear. The Ohio River and the waterways and canals that connect to it will be of immense economic and political importance in the millennia ahead.
Thomas, they're already being asked, outside of the US.
Leo, funny! Yes, that's about right. I suspect the Ministry of Funny Policies is in there somewhere, too.
Zaphod, I think of Obama as one of history's great examples of the Peter Principle. He'd be perfectly fine in any position in which he didn't have to make crucial, reality-based decisions all the time. In such a position, he's as bad as George W. Bush and very nearly on a par with Warren Harding.
Justin, exactly. Saying "Russia is weak" doesn't change the fact that the Russians are taking decisive action and could care less what the US thinks about it.
Helix, exactly. There are plenty of other countries in which guns are readily available to the populace, but mass shootings are vastly more common here than elsewhere. Why? That's the question nobody wants to ask, because they're scared of the answer.
10/8/15, 5:44 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
10/8/15, 5:52 PM
Fabian said...
This is how the Russians pacified Chechnya. They found several Chechen clans that were willing to switch sides and work with them and got them to do most of their dirty work. David Goldman ("Spengler") had some great observations on this in one of his essays. Today, Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov is essentially a feudal lord who swore fealty to Vladimir Putin. So long as he keeps things under control in Chechnya and doesn't get too big for his britches, he pretty much has carte blanche to run things as he sees fit.
Speaking of Kadyrov, he started his own private army, the Islamic Legion, modeled after the Légion Etrangère. He offered its services to Putin and noted that the Islamic Legion would be well suited for situations where it would be inadvisable for the regular Russian military to get involved. Several hundred Kadyrov loyalists did fight in Eastern Ukraine as members of the Death Battalion.
Kadyrov also asked Putin for permission to send the Islamic Legion to Syria to fight as an infantry division. While Putin has not officially given permission, a Russian admiral recently reported that several thousand volunteers from Russia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Eastern Ukraine and elsewhere are already headed to Syria to fight alongside the Syrian army and indicated the Russian government has no intention of stopping them.
10/8/15, 6:05 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Eric, yes, and it's another grand example of the way that abstractions take precedence over reality in today's America. I really wonder whether any of these buffoons have considered the possibility that when the real economy of goods and services falls apart, it won't matter how many quadrillions of dollars in derivatives they've got...
Onething, that is to say, you'd like to see the unemployment shared out more evenly. In theory, that might have been an option.
Denys, a century ago all US cities and most towns of any size had cheap, clean, effective public transit provided by streetcars and urban rail systems; parks were by and large clean and well maintained, and so were most other public works; the mail was delivered twice daily, six days a week; outside of the really big cities, there was little homelessness, because real estate was inexpensive and cheap lodging readily available; a vast number of goods and services that you can't get any more were readily available, and the quality of clothing and household goods was by and large vastly better than it is today; doctors made house calls, which cost about as much as a visit from the plumber; and so on. I could go on at great length.
Fifty-Niner, excellent! Yes, that was deliberate. Similarly, the names of the two presidents who succeeded him are deliberate jokes of equal obscurity.
Dammerung, you're assuming that mechanization actually produces additional wealth. In some cases it does so, and in that case it becomes a matter of distribution. In other cases no new wealth is created -- the machines simply do jobs that used to be done by people. Computer technology, with some minor exceptions, belongs to the second category -- it doesn't produce new wealth, it simply redistributes the existing wealth in a more unequal way.
Sven, thank you. Sometimes current events just beg for commentary.
Raven, unless the Russians or Chinese have managed to figure out how to knock nuclear weapons out of the air, that's not likely to happen. On the other hand, if somebody ever does figure that out, the US is going down very hard, and yes, war crimes trials will doubtless follow.
Adamatari, obviously I disagree. First, the Russians so far have done a far more competent job of entering into the conflict on a much less lavish budget than the US has managed for decades. Whatever happens hereafter, that's an impressive achievement. Second, Obamacare has driven up premiums to the point that many people who are eligible for insurance can't afford it, and pushed up deductibles to the point that a vast number of people who have medical insurance still can't afford medical care. On the other hand, if you want to talk about rent seeking, I won't disagree at all -- the single most important reason that life is so difficult for so many Americans is the amount of rent-seeking parasitism on every productive dimenison of the economy.
K-dog, that may well be part of it, but I wonder if that's all of it. My hunch -- and it's just a hunch -- is that there are wheels within wheels at work here.
10/8/15, 6:08 PM
John Michael Greer said...
William, Potters' Shoe Store is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind -- goods and services that people want but can't get any more, because it's more profitable to industry to push shoddy crap instead. As for Klein, she's playing much the same game, though from a different and somewhat more interesting angle.
Helix, in the best of all possible worlds...
Keith, "Canadian values" -- oog. Down here it was "family values." Both phrases basically function as excuses to hate.
Gwizard43, for some individuals, in some situations, leaving the US could be a viable option. Stop for a moment, though, and ask yourself this: the way the US is behaving these days, what kind of a welcome do you think expatriate Americans are going to face in much of the world as the US goes further down its current road? The pervasive fantasy of entitlement, by which so many Americans convince themselves that they ought to get whatever they want and be welcomed wherever they want to go, may not be a useful guide any more, if it ever was.
Team10tim, er, do you realize how arrogant that first statement of yours comes across -- as though nobody who read Klein's book can possibly find it shallow and meretricious? As for the rest, that'll wait for the review, thank you.
William, when I say that Obamacare has made medical care more expensive and less available, that's not disproven by pointing out that some people benefit from it. A lot more have been harmed by it, and soaring premiums and sky-high deductibles are a very large part of the reason why.
LatheChuck, until and unless an independent international body investigates the Kunduz hospital airstrike, I for one won't believe anybody's story. As for Klein, good -- that's the standard logic these days on the left. "X is bad, therefore anything but X must be an improvement!" Ahem...
Steve, the Russian strategy is fairly clear -- or, at least, their actions make sense in terms of their stated policy. US actions make no sense in terms of our stated policy; I'm not sure they would make sense in terms of any stated policy at all.
Dave, no argument there.
Ron, that's been reported elsewhere as well. The Saudis have gotten themselves backed into an unenviable corner at this point, and seem fixated on making things much, much worse for themselves.
Bob, modernity is a style choice, and it's also about passivity -- the technologies of every other period require more knowledge and effort to use, which is part of their charm.
10/8/15, 6:27 PM
RCW - said...
"Do not think yourself better because you burn up your friends & enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done."
10/8/15, 6:36 PM
August Johnson said...
My wife and I, through our lifelong living frugally and simply, are able to take care of our own Healthcare expenses while still living on an income that many would consider below poverty. So that we would not have to pay a penalty for not having Health Insurance, as decreed by Obamacare, we signed up for the Bronze policy that would be totally covered by the subsidy. The government is paying ~$750/month directly to the Insurance Company for the two of us.
OK, now we have wonderful Insurance for Healthcare, right? Well, not for most low income people. Since there's a $5000/year deductible per person we're still responsible for a slightly reduced pay schedule until it's met. A 15 minute appointment will run $150 (Reduced from $190), and having a mole checked out with a biopsy was >$700 (Reduced from ~$900). What low-income person that you know will even be able to use that insurance?
To get a policy that begins to cover expenses, you have to fork out $200-$500+ each month in addition to the ~$850 subsidy (for 2 people). Obamacare didn't change a thing for low-income people, what it did was somewhat help those middle-class people who already have a decent income but couldn't get insurance through their employer. For the Low-Income person, all it did was offer the Insurance Company of free money for a policy that won't be used.
10/8/15, 6:41 PM
Fabian said...
Here another I came across, arguing that after the disastrous attempt at neo-liberal “economic reforms” failed, the Russians decided to pursue their own path of economic development, one that rejected becoming a resource colony for the US and EU, while also declining to pursue the East Asian model of low cost export-oriented manufacturing in favor of a strategy that takes advantage of Russia’s strengths and talents.
As the experiences of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler show, underestimating the Russians as opponents has been one of history's riskiest and most dangerous bets...
10/8/15, 6:45 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Nrgmiserncaz, exactly. The elimination of jobs is deliberate, and companies have good reasons to do so -- reasons that have a lot to do with the structure of taxation, and with subsidies for fossil fuels and the like. More on this as we proceed.
Clay, I've noticed that a lot of Americans have a hard time keeping track of the fact that the survival of industrial civilization and the survival of the United States are not the same thing. Could the US plunge into a really disastrous political and economic crisis overnight, mismanage the response catastrophically, and devolve into a Third World failed state? Sure. Does that mean that everyone else in the world would jump in after us? Not a chance. As I've been pointing out for a very long time, the US in particular is close to crisis, and its implosion will likely bring about a period of global politics and economics as difficult, and as bloody, as the one that ran from 1914 to 1954 -- you know, the two world wars, the Great Depression, the rise of Communism, the end of European colonial empires, et al.? That, in turn, will be one set of incidents on the broader slope of the decline and fall of industrial civilization.
Pygmycory, that does sound like the Russian sense of humor!
Jill, almost?
Roger, I learned a very useful rule long ago: "never blame conspiracy for something that can be adequately accounted for by stupidity."
Dau, exactly. If the Russians can pull this one off, the status quo in foreign affairs is over for good.
Max, I frankly expect the medical industry in the US to suffer a pretty fair collapse in the years immediately ahead. We've got a medical-pharmaceutical bubble, and it's going to turn into a really ugly bust.
LatheChuck, good. I discussed that same thinking in a post a while back, but it bears repeated viewings.
Hector, that's high praise! You're right, though: if Nylarlathotep, the crawling chaos, the soul and herald of the Great Old Ones, were to rise up before us in his crimson robes and utter words of chill import sufficient to strike terror into the hardiest soul, I doubt he could do better than to simply state the obvious fact that the people in charge of the United States of America are living in a dreamworld of dysfunctional abstractions, living lives so detached from the rest of the cosmos that they really have no idea what effects their policies are having.
Jason, I get suspicious anytime anybody spends their time weeping about climate change. So often it's an excuse not to do anything about it. If I do that review of Klein's book, it'll probably be titled "This Changes Everything (Except Naomi Klein's Lifestyle)."
Pantagruel, the phrase "target-rich environment" comes to mind.
Moshe, here again, what you're saying amounts to suggesting that unemployment caused by technology simply needs to be distributed more evenly. Yes, in theory, that's an option...
10/8/15, 6:54 PM
latheChuck said...
10/8/15, 6:58 PM
August Johnson said...
Interestingly, just last night I was reading some late 1940's QST magazines. The author of a article describing the quite complex receiver he'd built started by saying something to the effect of "Increased simplicity of operation is always accompanied by increased complexity of design." Sound familiar?
It's odd to now be looking back at what was thought to be complex and seeing that it's simple by comparison to today's design. ummm... Progress?
10/8/15, 7:00 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
There's a long, long backstory to this very widespread attitude in American culture. It begins with the American Swedenborg churches and Mesmerism. It picks up steam with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, Emma Curtis Hopkins (and Malinda Eliot Cramer on the West Coast). It finds its first institutional homes in Christian Science and the various religions of the New Thought movement. It is reformulated in openly magical language by William Walker Atkinson (also known as Theron Q. Dumont, Theodore Sheldon, Yogi Ramacharaka, and at least one of the "Three Initiates" who wrote _The Kybalion_), and then by Al G Manning. And finally it entered mainstream (nominally Christian) culture with Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, and now _The Secret_. Even today, in the early 21st century, it retains its hold on a very large number of Americans.
This odd American point of view seems (to me) to be a complete mystery to most Europeans, who were never heavily influenced by these 19th-century American authors and movements.
I grew up in that world, and I learned my first magic there. (So did Dion Fortune and several other well-known writers on magic and esoterica.) So I can say with some assurance that the first principle underlying all its thought is this: the physical world of matter and energy, in time and space, is nothing more than an old collective hallucination, an alluring delusion, a total illusion. Only thought, mind, spirit, etc., have any reality at all, any permanence. (As I grew up and learned more about magic, I discovered just how false that first principle is, though I still have a sort of emotional attachment to it as a hangover from my childhood.)
People, even Americans who were not born into that sector of American culture, who were not raised in it, may find it hard to fathom how anyone could actually believe such things. However, they do believe them, even when they later give lip-service to mainstream views as a form of protective coloring. And I expect that careful genealogical research would discover that a sizeable fraction of our elite politicians and would-be statesmen are descended from parents and grandparents who had read these authors and joined these movements; and they have a sort of "mind-over-matter hangover" inherited from their forbears.
10/8/15, 7:02 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown Tad, everything I've heard about the way that scions of the upper class get raised in America these days makes it sound like somebody set out to come up with a factory to produce clueless twits. As for Mann's bit, that particular delusion is wildly popular among privileged greens, since it feeds the fantasy that the universe is under our control and depends on us to save it. Impact with brick wall in 3,2,1...
Varun, I wonder if the US government would accept a bid to fire the CIA and hire me instead. It really isn't hard to figure out what the Russians are doing -- all you have to do is say, "what would a competent commander do if tasked to do what Putin says Russia is going to do?"
MawKernewek, in terms of Europe, I'm sure you're right.
Jonathan, understood. I considered calling it "economic thinking" for a while, since economists so often practice it, but that never caught on.
Marcu, that's about what I expected. Remembering the history of the late Roman empire, I'd watch for signs that the guards have become corrupt enough to sell weapons to the refugees...
Dfr2010, makes sense to me.
Dau, no argument there. I suspect this is all going to end very, very badly for all concerned, including the citizens of Australia.
Iuval, I've focused on computers because there it's so obvious. There are some technologies that actually do create jobs, and interesting jobs at that -- lens technology is one, the suite of technology involved in building and running railroads are another -- but it's a question of where to slip in the opening wedge.
Fabian, Kadyrov is on the cutting edge of the new protofeudalism; he's got his own army, bound to him by personal (rather than institutional) loyalty, and can deploy it anywhere in the service of his liege lord. I really do think Putin ought to simply get himself crowned Tsar of All the Russias and cut back on the pretense!
RCW, I ain't arguing.
August, exactly. If my wife and I were to sign up for Obamacare, it would cost us more than our house payment; we have no reason to think the claims about how much subsidy we'd get are true, as a very large number of people discovered this last tax season; and the deductible and co-pay would be so high that we'd still have to declare bankruptcy in the event of any serious health crisis. That's equally true of many other people I know.
Fabian, thanks for the essays. I'd be happier if more people in Russia had an eye toward what's going to happen as fossil fuels (theirs and everyone else's) run short, but Russian culture copes well with extreme adversity, so I figure they'll muddle through one way or another.
10/8/15, 7:12 PM
John Michael Greer said...
August, why, yes, it sounds very familiar. Me, I find skill more interesting than technological complexity.
Robert, fascinating. Of course I'm familiar with the history, but it never occurred to me to connect that with the behavior of today's politicians. Hmm and again hmm!
10/8/15, 7:16 PM
Fabian said...
The Russians have been developing an impressive new range of advanced new weapons systems, some of which have already entered service, such as the Su-34 and Su-35 fighters and the Yasen and Borei class submarines.
Due to enter service within the next few years are the Tu-160M2 heavy bomber (a new-build version of the Tu-160 White Swan with stealth technology and state of the art weapons, electronics and engines), the PAK FA stealth fighter, the S-500 Prometheus mobile long range air defense and ABM system (according to manufacturer Almaz-Antey, it can hit airplanes up to 600 km away and intercept cruise missiles, stealth aircraft and ICBM's), the Armata tank and the Kurganets IFV (BMP replacement).
For the longer term, the Russians are also developing the PAK DA stealth bomber (next generation follow on to the Tu-160), the Zircon hypersonic cruise missile (scramjet powered missile that travels at Mach 7-8), the MiG-41 (a Mach 4 interceptor and spy plane based on the MiG-31) and a whole new generation of nuclear submarines, with SSBN, SSGN "carrier killer" and SSN "hunter-killer" (anti-submarine) versions planned. So the American military could end up losing its much vaunted technological superiority as well and find itself outgunned and outclassed on the battlefields of the near future if the US is stupid enough to blunder into a war with Russia.
PS You mentioned that if the Chinese or Russians found a way to neutralize the American nuclear deterrent, we could see America come crashing down in a hurry.
The Brazilian journalist and political commentator Pepe Escobar has been arguing that once the Russians start deploying the S-500 Prometheus in large numbers, Russia will become effectively invulnerable to American ballistic and cruise missile strikes. While such claims need to be taken with a large truckload of sodium chloride, its worth noting that it was Obama's predecessor that made that particular nightmare a possibility by unilaterally abrogating the ABM Treaty and ignoring Russia's warnings about the possible consequences of doing so and that Obama has done nothing to reverse that decision.
10/8/15, 7:28 PM
Unknown said...
Tomxyza here. Look up the book "On Killing" by Grossman. He clearly lays out the issue Helix bought up and offers significant insight into the history. A very disturbing read.
10/8/15, 7:58 PM
August Johnson said...
10/8/15, 8:10 PM
Karl Ivanov said...
Let me preface these comments by saying that I have not put in nearly the time or effort in studying these issues as the Archdruid or many others who comment on this blog. These are merely the questions and musings of one ignorant American.
In the short term, it seems Russia and China are outmaneuvering, or at least working hard to outmaneuver, America in the squabble over the remaining resources of our finite planet.
But are the Russian and Chinese leadership actually any wiser when it comes to facing the reality of planetary limits and peak oil? Even if their societies are less dependent on fossil fuels than our own, they too are part of world industrial civilization, dependent on its common way of doing things, and will be forced to downgrade their economies and lifestyles as it comes unglued. I should think facing up to this fact is as unpalatable to their elites as it is to ours- not to mention the rest of their society. I wonder as well, will winning geopolitical battles at this point in the arc of decline help a nation longer term, or will the nation be better off that collapses first and avoids the rush, willingly or otherwise? Will the nation(s) that ends up more powerful in the final round(s) of collapse end up better off in a dark age, worse, or is it impossible to say?
On a personal note I must thank you, John Michael Greer, for the good you have done for me and my family. Your blog helped inspire my mother and grandmother to revitalize our family farm in Alabama. When I am home, we often read the weekly posts aloud, and they have sparked many a lively debate. Your writings on magic have given me a new perspective on the interesting clash between my very academically centered upbringing (everyone on my mother’s side and many on my father’s are Ph.D.s or equivalent) and the needs of the physical discipline that is my profession and passion, classical ballet. Ballet teaches one a thing or two about abstractions, reality, and the relationship between the two that scholars often, in my experience, fail to face. I don’t know what chance my art form has in a collapse, but their is some hope for it- it survived the French Revolution, and actually ended up thriving after several communist revolutions.
I must say I cannot see the future. I do not know where our civilization is headed, the degree to which your forecasts are right or wrong. But the fine details are irrelevant- the central point of this blog is clear. Our society is dependent on fossil fuels- these are being used up- we do not at present have an energy source with which to replace them. Thus, it is in our interests, individually and collectively, to use less. That is enough for me to try to work on changing my lifestyle, to the extent I can.
10/8/15, 9:24 PM
Tye said...
10/8/15, 9:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown Tomxyza, thanks for the book tip.
August, I look forward to having quiet nights with nothing approaching deadline someday!
Karl, many thanks! It's always good to hear from someone who's made constructive use of these essays. With regard to your point about Russia and China, of course you're quite correct; whoever comes out on top this time around will be the target du jour in the next round of crises, if they last that long. In the long run no nation wins the game of Decline and Fall; it's just a matter of the shape of the trajectory, and that's hard to predict. "Collapse now and avoid the rush" is intended as advice for individuals, families, and local communities. Above that scale, I'm far from sure that any advice will help much.
Tye, of course there's more going on than I could fit into one weekly post! You're right, though, that Putin isn't the final victor. As I noted to Karl just above, in the game of Decline and Fall, no nation wins.
10/8/15, 10:22 PM
HalFiore said...
It seems the web experience has become much more passive over the years, and I hardly noticed. Now there always seems to be Some Dude With a Blog, or, worse, a Youtube video that explains everything.
It seems one is supposed to think that if it's not on the first page of a google search, it doesn't exist. Good to see someone who still does it the old way.
10/8/15, 10:39 PM
steve pearson said...
As to the American habit of abstract and delusional thinking, during the Vietnam war they always reported Vietcong/NVN casualties as 10 times their own. I remember one report of an American company being ambushed and wiped out with all 180 men killed; the Vietcong losses were reported as 1,800.
As to Obamacare, my daughter, a 32 year old middle class worker, ended up paying almost double for much worse coverage than she previously had.In the immortal words of Bob Dylan " Tell me, great hero, but please make it brief, is there a hole for me to be sick in"
cheers, Steve
10/8/15, 11:19 PM
Kevin Warner said...
This made me go back looking for two articles that I had read on the subject. The first is called 'The Coddling of the American Mind' at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/ which talks about how, in the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like which is having a chilling effect on what their teachers can even mention in class.
The second is called 'The Disadvantages of an Elite Education' at https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/ and is an extensive article on the warped values that are instilled on our 'elite' in places of higher education who's students now, apparently, cannot even stand the idea of solitude or intimacy.
Don't get me wrong. This is not just an American phenomena. Not even close. The appalling quality and lack of decent manners of leadership in major Western countries nowadays demonstrates to me that they must have been exclusively recruited from the shallow end of the genetic pool. This leads me to believe that the only pragmatic changes that will be taking place will be mostly on a local level.
10/8/15, 11:31 PM
Scotlyn said...
Ye have the First Sight and the Second Thoughts, just like yer granny. That’s rare in a bigjob.’
‘Don’t you mean second sight?’ Tiffany queried. ‘Like people who can see
ghosts and stuff?’
‘Ach, no. That’s typical bigjob thinking. First Sight is when you can see
what’s really there, not what your heid tells you ought to be there. Ye
saw Jenny, ye saw the horseman, ye saw them as real thingies. Second
sight is dull sight, it’s seeing only what you expect to see.”
END QUOTE
Tiffany Aching conversing with the Kelda, Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett.
The "First Sight", the ability to see what's really there, not what you expect to be there. An exceedingly rare quality that you manifest in spades, JMG. Thanks for the stories, and the First Sighted commentaries on the world, in equal measure.
10/8/15, 11:53 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Well yeah, of course. I finally came across your oft mentioned Conan quote from Beyond the Black River: "Civilisation is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always triumph". Unfortunately, I recall that another commenter mentioned that quote a few weeks back, but it is worth repeating for its sheer elan!
Speaking of dud leadership but good fighting forces, another quote from that story comes to hand: "The river could be patrolled constantly. But the Government wouldn't do it. Soft-bellied fools sitting on velvet cushions with naked girls offering them ice wine on their knees - I know the breed. They can't see any farther than their palace wall. Diplomacy - hell! They'd fight picts with theories of territorial expansion. Valannus and men like him have to obey the orders of a set of damned fools. They'll never grab any more Pictish land, any more than they'll ever rebuild Venarium. The time may come when they'll see the barbarians swarming over the walls of the Eastern cities!”
Very relevant to today, I reckon.
As a funny side story, I was enjoying a quiet coffee Thursday morning after picking up the mail and weekly supply of fresh milk, and reading that story (it is an impressive looking beautifully bound and massive book) and chuckling quietly to myself and was interrupted by a lovely older lady who asked me - from a sense of curiosity I suspect - what I was reading that was making me chuckle so. After a short conversation I believe that I failed to convince her that it really was a rollicking good story.
The weather here has truly reached the bizarre stage because I sat on the veranda this afternoon and watched what appeared to me to be a monsoon - accompanied with large hail - dump a short, sharp and heavy rainstorm over the farm - after which the sun reappeared as hot as before the storm. Weird stuff. The fire is still burning out of control though…
Cheers
Chris
10/9/15, 4:56 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Cool. As a suggestion, the city has plenty of places, or if you are on the northern side of town Lygon street in Carlton would be good too? I'll leave it to you.
Cheers
Chris
10/9/15, 5:01 AM
Martin Larner said...
I chuckled when you said about uttering in a low whisper that maybe the US doesn't really want to defeat ISIS.
There are several reasons for this. One is that a defeat of ISIS would largely remove the pretext for US presence and military action in the region and we can't have that can we?
Another is that the US's regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and perhaps Israel have been supporting ISIS pretty directly. I'm willing to bet that if the money used to buy all those Toyota trucks was traced, it would point back to the Gulf Monarchies somewhere.
Another reason is that US presence in the region is geared around Regime Change, not fighting ISIS which is probably another factor in why the attacks haven't been too effective. Sure, the US has been attempting to prune the bad bits like a metaphorical rose bush, but I certainly wouldn't want someone of that level of incompetence let loose in my garden.
There's also the fact of the DIA report available at Judicial Watch that clearly demonstrates that the US Government knew the "Rebels" they were trying to pass off as "Moderates" were dominated by Salafist/Al Nusra/Muslim Brotherhood types, that this support would result in some kind of "Caliphate" and that to the West and it's regional allies this was a desirable outcome.
So all things considered, ISIS is a creation of Western - mainly US - foreign policy and although there isn't a unified policy within the US establishment, their tendency to double down on failing strategies is continuing to drive it forward. It's interesting that Obama commissioned a study to ascertain if arming "rebels" or whatever had ever had a positive outcome (considering that the US has been doing this since Afghanistan in the 70s and we ended up with the Taliban and al Qaeda). The CIA (I think) who did the study basically came back and said that no, it never turned out well and on the contrary has consistently been a negative disaster. Obama's reaction? You guessed it. More of the same. I've lost count of the amount of times that competent field agents and analysts warned against such policies and were overruled by the Executive.
It's been interesting watching people like Samantha Power declare that "Russian bombing will provoke Extremism" as though US bombs are somehow blowback immune. I do also feel that Putin won't make the same mistakes of Afghanistan in the 80's and Chechnya and they're working on the basis of a proper strategy and better intelligence than the US. Putin doesn't want a confrontation with the West and it looks to me as though they're pushing towards a situation that will force a peace settlement in which Assad will remain for the time being and not create a power vacuum.
As for the Kunduz bombing, it's definitely deliberate and my best guess at this stage is that it's punishment for the MSF policy of treating the wounded of the "other side" in a conflict as well as the designated "good guys", and it will be followed by an attempt to use the event as a precedent to establish "legality" - the kind of legal approval you only get when you pay a flack for the express purpose of coming up with a convoluted way to declare the indefensible, legal.
I agree that had it not been deliberate, an attempt at apology would have been made - although as you suggest, it would be treated as nothing more than a PR problem with some rhetoric followed by an investigation in which "failings" are discovered but no-one is actually held accountable except perhaps some low ranking fall guy, and a bit of cash chucked at the victims families after a long drawn out process culminating sometime in 2023.
10/9/15, 5:44 AM
daelach said...
- it took the US totally by surprise that Putin launched his cruise missiles. The secret services were inefficient. No wonder - NSA & Co have taken the habit of spying on their own civil population and on their servile vassals. Sending "national security letters" to US companies, requesting backdoors and server access is not effective against a nonconforming opponent. Perhaps they start to understand that Putin's aquisition of old-fashioned typewriters was not a PR gag?
- the cruise missiles hit their targets at a distance of 1500km. Go to the south of the Caspian Sea and draw a circle with a radius of 1500km around it. Lo and behold, the whole Persion Gulf is in range! Putin has just told the US that their aircraft carriers are fish in case of a confrontation.
- the S300 air defense systems would make a hard opponent for the USAF.
- the US war strategy over the last decades has been: Sent bombers, bomb the whole target country to the ground, destroy every defensive capabilities as well as civilian infrastructure. When the enemy is helpless, ground troops may be sent. The two points before have just told the US "your strategy has passed its pull date".
- the 2002 manoeuvre desaster ("millenium challenge") was 13 years ago. It's only now that the US elite starts to grasp that changing the rules of a manoeuvre just might not be a winning strategy against a non-complying opponent. Reality can be such a b..ee.
- the US have more military toys than Russia, but if some cruise missiles could be used to sink a carrier fleet, Russia's somewhat weaker economy would have to produce so much less than the US in such a war that the economic outcome would imply an American defeat.
The helplessness of the Western reactions deserves some popcorn:
- The US complain that Russia didn't announce the strikes. Oh no, what a surprise - perhaps Russia didn't want the US to give word to the ISIS forces for carrying some civilians to the targets? And when have the US ever announced airstrikes to Russia? Entitlement dreams blowing up!
- NATO secretary Stoltenberg complains that Russia is using up to date weaponry (not that long before, he complained that Russia's weaponry was outdated). Why, does that mean the NATO hadn't used up to date weaponry? If so, why not?
- Some days ago, Brzezinski claimed Russia would be helpless in that area if cut off from home. Think again.
conclusion: the US just realised they have been caught with their pants down. Plus that Iraq and Iran (full of oil that rightfully should belong to the US!!11) are lining up with Russia. Let's see when they will throw out the petro-dollar (and let's prepare a lorry full of popcorn for that day).
If the European vassal regimes were not so utterly senile and corrupt as they are, they would recognise it's high time to re-adjust their politics towards Russia.
@ JMG: "what would a competent commander do if tasked to do what Putin says Russia is going to do?"
There are certainly some competent officers in the US military - given the sheer numbers, that's a safe statistical bet. The problem is that it's part of the senility of the elites that they don't recognise them. Moreover, it is also part of the elites' senility that they prefer to listen to incompetent leaders who are in line with the elites' dream world than to listen to a competent one who isn't.
It wouldn't even astonish me if most of the top level ranks in the US military aren't there because they are competent leaders, but because they are good at demanding things from the tax payer which make sure that the tax dollars get channelled to the "right" companies - see e.g. the KC-46A tanker aircraft affair where the USAF ended up with a second class tanker aircraft. Only that this isn't exactly the most useful skill in case of a confrontation with a serious opponent.
10/9/15, 7:13 AM
onething said...
"
Onething, that is to say, you'd like to see the unemployment shared out more evenly. In theory, that might have been an option. "
Well, not exactly. If automation brings greater productivity, then a 40 hour per week job should not be necessary. Couldn't we have gotten a 30 hour workweek, or a 4 day week, or what have you?
10/9/15, 7:28 AM
Raymond Duckling said...
I'd like to recommend to those who have not yet heard of it, to Eliyahu Goldratt's novel "The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement". It is a bit outdated, and firmly framed in the Abundance Capitalism paradigm, but even back then it was clear that automation never was not such a fantastic idea. The story is about one Alex Rogo, manager with actual technical chops, who sets out to save his and his men's jobs by reorganizing the factory floor in a financially distressed American company. Not a work of high art, but an entertaining and enlightening read if you ask me.
The reason I think this is relevant is because it highlight a pervasive bias of ideological origin amongst the moneyed class. The reason to exist for complex machinery (aka automation) is to displace labor, period. It does not matter that it cost more to do that, this is a fact already known to the executives. The bias is the thing that says that there are two kinds of expenses: salaries are *bad* and capital investment is *good*, even if it costs more.
This bias is enforced by accounting practices. Good costs (automation) are recorded as investment and not seen as an expense at all. They are thought to "accumulate" in the assets sheet. Bad costs (aka salaries) are recorded in the books as money leaving the company (energy moving off-system). Even worse, since employees keep earning a salary every week/month, they are recorded in the liabilities sheet.
Of course, entries in the assets sheet are not really valuable just by themselves (unless you are a corporate raider with an eye to hostile take over and liquidation of the company, but that's another story). So, once you have fallen in the trap of recording your automation expenses in the asset sheet, you will experience pressure to make those assets pay for themselves. You will find yourself trying to run those machines as close to full capacity as it is technically feasible to do, regardless of how much (if at all) money that actions will earn you.
10/9/15, 7:48 AM
ourgreattransition said...
Wonder how red some of the backs are from the collective back slapping that must inevitably go along with such pronouncements? The article fails to put any of its bold statement into context, or indeed, accuracy.
Don't get me wrong, it's a positive step, albeit a bit late. But I can't help but think that this article confirms our societal lack of understanding of energy and fossil fuels. We just don't get it, it seems.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sweden-first-fossil-fuel-free-country-in-the-world-a6684641.html
10/9/15, 7:53 AM
onething said...
Perhaps your mistake was taking the Bronze. I chose the silver, which was essentially the same, in fact, exactly the same as I had had with my employer. What Obamacare did for me was decouple my job from my insurance, for which I have been very grateful, as my job was sort of killing me, but you have to keep so many hours per week to qualify for employer-assisted insurance. And for some reason, with Obamacare, those required hours increased from 20, to 24, to 30.
I was able to change to 2 part-time jobs and get the insurance through the Marketplace (Obamacare). I had to pay a monthly fee, but I saw that the bronze plan was useless. Also, the premium was about the same as I had paid through my employer. However, the next year the premium more than doubled, unconnected to my income. At that time, due to changes made in my life, we now qualified for medicaid. With medicaid, all was free, although we have not used any healthcare except for my once in 6 months appointment. Husband does not go.
But then, a couple of months ago, we got a confusing set of brochures in the mail, via medicaid, telling us to choose from one of three insurance companies. I was confused, called the medicaid office, and the person there was obviously incensed by the whole thing and said, "They are giving us a number for people to call. We don't know anything about this, and they did not tell us!"
So, it appears we have all been handed over to the insurance companies!
Obamacare has personally benefited me but I've been annoyed for years the way people focus on getting insurance, when the costs of medical care are so outrageous. Indeed, Obama said while he was campaigning in '08 that if the costs were not contained they would eventually bankrupt the nation. As recently as 2001-2003 I was able to purchase as an individual, for myself and 3 kids, good coverage for 300 monthly, then it went up 50 per year. Now, for a family of 4, it costs well over a thousand.
10/9/15, 7:53 AM
Travis said...
Now instead of an industry that employees logging crews of ten people or so, one would see two old men on high-tech machines that do the work of fifty people.
Obviously the recognition that "our" and "our technology's" specific progression and "success" does not come up as a reason. Instead the culprit is an abstraction the always evil and dangerous "environmentalist." So it goes...
Here is a link to one such technological job killer. The music to the video is a bit silly, non the less.
Thanks again for another insightful post!
10/9/15, 8:46 AM
Travis said...
10/9/15, 8:49 AM
Denys said...
The interviewer suppressed a laugh. I groaned out loud.
I am so annoyed and shocked that grown adult men in elected office are talking about how their feelings are hurt when it comes time to discuss issues. What a bunch of sissies.
*Not an Onion article.
10/9/15, 9:12 AM
MindfulEcologist said...
10/9/15, 9:28 AM
Denys said...
OK so 1900 - 1930 or so? I was born in 1968 and I don't have any memory of clean parks or much else of what you mentioned. I figured I had to go further back than the 1970's.
I have a question about context of those things you mention. The adults of a century ago are as culturally different from us today as the we are from the Chinese or the Russians of today. I believe some of what we experience is as much to do as how we treat each other with such contempt these days. People dismiss people who don't agree with them and have long lists of grievances and grudges. People in 1910 couldn't afford to do that - work needed to be done and many hands were required to do it. There was no way to buy your way out of work. If you wanted apple pie, you peeled the apples, sliced, cooked and baked them. No quick run to the grocery store for it.
I really don't see much interest in people in working these days. And what people consider work is laughable. How does sitting around a table talking, then emailing a bunch of people for hours qualify as "work"? Obviously people are busy. We hear a lot about how busy everyone is. But work. No way. People really believe that if they watch a you tube video about how to make something, then they know how to do it.
10/9/15, 9:30 AM
indus56 said...
I suspect some of your critique would address implausible claims of a post-carbon transition that might purport to leave Everything Else Unchanged, but if your critique runs to a more searching interrogation of something along the lines of ecosocialism, I'd be glad to read it.
10/9/15, 9:40 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
By the way, are you watching the Republican implosion, and the Democrats crowing in victory? I feel like this would be a great time for the universe to gut punch the country.
10/9/15, 10:56 AM
Ursachi Alexandru said...
10/9/15, 11:23 AM
August Johnson said...
My point was how this doesn't help a low-income person without savings get Healthcare, since they can't afford to pay for anything above the Bronze level and then still can't afford to pay the required fees and charges.
Yes, absolutely nothing has been done to reduce the costs of Healthcare. In fact I see this as just helping to drive up the costs even more! It's not going to be very long before this whole system caves in on itself. When you have costs increasing at 10%-12%/year, you don't have to wait long! People don't understand the exponential function!
10/9/15, 11:29 AM
Leo Knight said...
10/9/15, 11:49 AM
Anselmo said...
The war of Syria in the context of the crisis of our world is an issue absolutely secondary, but we live in this time, and the Syrian question is affecting directly to our lives, now.
Your stark and realistic ideas about the affairs in Syria, in my humble opinion are very correct. But I have some reflections that I would like to submit to your consideration:
1º) The actuation of USA is not the exclusive result of the will of Obama, there are another groups with different projects. So we are not seeing a politics but various politics, in some cases contraries against the others.
2º) The public image of USA and the West in general have suffered a fatal discredit.
3º) Russia China and Iran have formed a military alliance, and I fear that we´ll see the proof of it in few days. In my humble opinion the terrestrial attack will be executed by Iran troops. Russia and China will aid this terrestrial offensive, with electronic means, air force, navy and logistic
10/9/15, 12:19 PM
Greg Belvedere said...
When I tell people I don't have insurance they recommend I get it through the exchange. The cheapest plan for someone my age is over $350 a month. For someone who would treat all but the most severe illnesses with alternative medicines, it makes no sense for me to purchase this. So I have to weigh the cost of buying insurance (which still won't cover much due to deductables, copays, and all kinds of complicated abstractions that make me feel a bit ill just thinking about them), vs paying the penalty. For me this is not some kind of abstract wonky discussion about health care. It is an issue that directly affects my life. I get that it made a few needed fixes to the system, but those are very few and I live in a state that already had those laws in place. This is such a great example of people being attached to abstraction. A lot of my friends on the left see this as some kind of step towards universal single payer healthcare, when it is nothing of the sort.
I do hope the medical bubble pops and soon. It drives me nuts that I have to pay a fine for not buying health insurance I won't use. At some point the penalty will cost more than the insurance and I will just have to buy. JMG will you buy a cheap plan once the penalties get too high?
I will leave you with a little Frank Zappa quote that feels apt.
Republicans is fine,
If you're a multi-millionaire
Democrats is fair,
If all you own is what you wear
Neither of 'em's really right,
'cause neithor of 'em care
'bout that hot-plate heaven,
'cause they ain't been there
10/9/15, 12:27 PM
Fabian said...
When an empire and its leaders come to be seen as pathetic laughingstocks by the rest of the world and have lost whatever credibility they had left, that empire is close to its terminal stage, if it hasn't already entered it.
10/9/15, 1:29 PM
valekeeperx said...
Fifty-Niner wrote,
"President Jameson Weed? So close to jimson weed, the ubiquitous hallucinogenic weed. Is there a connection or am I over thinking something? Anyway, the name has a nice sound, though somewhat aristocratic.”
In response, JMG wrote,
“Fifty-Niner, excellent! Yes, that was deliberate. Similarly, the names of the two presidents who succeeded him are deliberate jokes of equal obscurity.”
I read the series of How It Could Happen essays as they came out (as well as Twilight’s Last Gleaming) and found them very instructive and enjoyable. But, I have been always been somewhat confused by the choice of Jameson Weed for the president’s name. On the surface, I’ve always understood that it is a reference to the perceptual effects of toying with the plant by westerners and the delusions of the senile political elite. At the same time, I’ve read about how the plant was used by indigenous peoples here in North America. Particularly, it was used in rites of passage for young men, by other tribal members in other rituals, and was used by shamans for magical spirit flights. It was used medicinally as a pain reliever, as a sort of antivenin against poisonous bites, and to alleviate bronchial and nasal congestion. It was also used to increase strength and stamina, and alleviate hunger while hunting or on other extended travels. The Nahuatl word for the plant is rendered as toloache, which roughly means to bow one’s head in reverence. So, the plant was highly respected, if not the subject of outright worship.
Given your broad background and respect for the spiritual methods and practices of others, as well as druidic work with plants, and considering the relationship that indigenous peoples had with the plant, this name choice for the president as a deliberate joke has never made sense to me and seems a little dismissive.
Maybe I’m just a little daft and over-sensitive, but please understand that this comes from a place of sincere respect.
Best regards,
valekeeperx
10/9/15, 2:07 PM
Fabian said...
I have also heard from people I know in the military that one of the reasons why the American air campaign against Daesh has been so ineffective is because of over-centralization. Since a senior officer must personally approve each airstrike, it can take hours for a strike to be approved. It doesn’t help that these senior officers are almost invariably sitting in an air conditioned headquarters hundreds or even thousands of miles from the scene of the action. Micromanagement and technology worship at it worst.
I have heard lots of stories of American pilots who saw a nice juicy target, like a large truck convoy, an obvious defensive position or a sizeable troop concentration, but circled overhead for hours waiting for permission to strike. In many cases, the target was already gone or the planes had already returned to base because they were low on fuel by the time permission was given. Or someone high up in the chain of command denied permission to carry out the strike and a high value target was allowed to get away while the American aviators fumed in vain. So the fact that Daesh was able to successfully capture Palmyra in spite of having to travel over 150 km in terrain perfectly exposed to air attacks does not surprise me in the least.
10/9/15, 2:08 PM
Jason Panno said...
I'm curious, what 'foreign policy defeat' from before your lifetime would you say was worse than this? Was that just a choice of wording on your part or am I seeing this as a bigger blow to America's empire than it really is. Has the USA ever lost this badly before?
-
You might have seen this already. Trouble in other parts of the empire, the unraveling seems to be accelerating...
http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2015/10/08/grosse-rolle-rueckwaerts-eu-will-normale-beziehungen-zu-russland/
It's surreal watching all this play out.
I've been a lurker hear for quite awhile, reading every post and all the comments each week as far back(atleast) as the begining of your series on empire that became 'Decline and Fall'. Before that I bounced around different parts of the peak-oil and prepper blogosphere going back as far as 2004-5. So it's not like I haven't been expecting this, it's just... weird seeing it finally happen. Especially with how unaware most of the people around me seem to be.
I really wish I had prepared more for this...
I suppose I am better off than most Americans, I've 'collapsed before the rush' to a certain degree, and considering I was among the working poor at the get go I have some experience doing without, but, I really wish I had done more to prepare.
-JRP
10/9/15, 2:38 PM
Disinterested Observer said...
MSF is highly reliable and has stated unequivocally that no one was firing from the hospital compound. Note that the hospital was in a large compound and not integrated into the city. The building itself was surrounded by significant open space. So this seems certain.
The US had been given the geo-coordinates of the hospital many separate times.
Since there were no Taliban inside the compound using it as a firing platform it is pretty implausible that the Taliban had any means to trick the US into firing on it.
Note that the Afgan govt does not like MSF at all as they treat injured with no regard to affiliation.
Just a couple of weeks before the incident under discussion Afgan Special Forces raided the MSF compound.
My speculation: The US got played by the Afgan's. In that during the fight they saw the opportunity to hit the hospital by claiming to the US (whom they can ask air support from) that they were under heavy attack from the hospital by the Taliban. Note that there were not actually any US forces with the specific Afgan forces in this part of the fight apparently. There was huge shame to the US and the Afgans for losing control of the city earlier and while they were expelled the MSF was treating mostly Taliban and civilians. Not so good from the Afgan perspective. So trick they US into a nighttime air strike. Problem solved from their perspective as they could care less about anyone complaining about it.
It would not be the anywhere near the first time this basic ruse has been used to get the US to target someone we would not deliberately hit. Rival tribes, political opponents, etc. It happens all the time.
10/9/15, 3:06 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
You're good! - I've been waiting for this article for - what is it now? Months or years - but brace yourselves people over in the US:
Police Taser drones authorised in US state.
Your prediction has more or less come true about the use of drones against US citizens. Chilling stuff. The sad thing is that the US is always about 5 to 10 years ahead of us down here on such progressive reforms. ;-)!
And just in case the housing bubble has dropped off peoples radar, I spotted this article: Average Victorian home loan jumps $61,700 in a year. No need to read the article because the title really tells it all and my choice quote was:
"The average new loan for an owner-occupier in the state has increased nearly 20 per cent in the year to August to $378,100, official figures showed on Friday.
This is faster than the 10.6 per cent lift in Melbourne home prices over the same period, and the strong growth suggests many buyers are responding to record low interest rates by borrowing more."
What that suggests to me is that the increase in the supply of money has far outstripped any underlying growth in real world income. It is hardly surprising given our main exports: coal, iron ore and gas have all plummeted in price, but nobody seems to want to take a hit to their incomes. What could possibly go wrong?
Oh well, when the inevitable riots take place, at least the police will have taser drones at their disposal, but then they will probably be impacted by the economic bubble explosion too and may feel some serious sympathies for their fellow humans. Where will the anger be directed is an interesting question.
Cheers
Chris
10/9/15, 3:26 PM
Odin's Raven said...
Tulip Bulb Society
10/9/15, 3:29 PM
Myriad said...
I'm not sure there's such a big difference there. Phrasing it as "defeating Islamic State" would merely bring into play a different kind of dysfunctional abstraction, one that's increasingly common and particularly frustrating: the pretense of dictating outcomes.
Certain executives have always had the privilege of declaring what they want to happen, and leaving it up to others to figure out how. In government, the very process of making laws encourages that kind of thinking. News reporters generally play along. They'll write something like "This new law will keep guns out of our schools," as though the text is going to leap off the pages of the Congressional Record and grab the firearms out of shooters' hands, instead of whatever the law actually dictates (such as, a zero tolerance policy that requires third grade students be punished for pointing a finger and saying 'bang!' in the schoolyard).
But, executives are supposed to have underlings who immediately translate the "what's supposed to happen" into concrete measures that are both practicable, and likely to have the requested outcome. They might often fail at achieving the latter part, but they're supposed to at least try. More and more, instead, the requested outcome itself just gets passed down the chain of command. "We need more customers!" from corporate management doesn't turn into improved products, better service, more attractive prices, or even more advertising; instead, the minimum wage employee at the counter finds his performance suddenly being evaluated by how many customers come to the counter, something he has (assuming he's not driving them away with abusive behavior) no control over.
At the big box chain store my wife works at, there are many formal "policies" that sales people are supposed to follow without exception to improve customer satisfaction. One is that each customer must receive the sales person's undivided attention for as long as they need it. Another is that no customer may be kept waiting for a sales person's attention. These absolute dictates obviously become mutually contradictory the moment two or more customers show up at the same time. Both of those policies are clearly desirable in the ideal case, but rather than take measures to ensure that they are practicable (e.g. by arranging for adequate staffing at peak times), the corporation merely demands the employee make good whether it's possible or not.
As a result, all the policies become a joke (in a manner that reminds me of production quotas in the former Soviet Union), as the store managers have no choice but to report back to Corporate that of course every one of them is being followed to the letter. Meanwhile, it should be no surprise that at some stores in the same chain, the service is poor even when staff is available. A fact that Corporate no doubt finds perpetually bewildering...
And my wife's is, by today's standards at least, a good service-sector job at a good and genuinely useful store where she enjoys helping people with real needs. Things are clearly much worse elsewhere.
I can't help wondering if something similar is happening in the U.S. military chain of command. For example, that the individual infantryman is being ordered simultaneously to carry out assigned missions regardless of adversity using all force necessary, and to avoid harming civilians at all costs. After all when you're "an army of one" you can do two different contradictory things simultaneously, right?
10/9/15, 3:50 PM
Myriad said...
There's an old joke about managers (or dictators, generals, etc.) declaring "the beatings will continue until morale improves." I think we're actually worse off than that today! At least the beatings represent an attempt, as misguided and counterproductive as the joke implies, to address the actual problem. Today's version would be "We've hired a top consulting firm to perform quarterly morale surveys, from which we'll compute monthly morale improvement targets and organize low-morale-coping-skills workshops where we'll talk about the problem until it goes away by itself." That program would then be quietly discontinued after two quarters, after 62% of participants polled respond, "we prefer the beatings, thanks."
One more thing about the habit of blindly dictating outcomes: it does appear to parallel, and could be related to, the growth of the complexity of technology. When the user sets the dials (so to speak) for the immediate needs of the task at hand, a simpler tool suffices, but the operator has to know what she's doing. Tools become far more complex when they're designed to allow the user to directly specify the desired end result instead. Those complex tools put us into the role of clueless executives demanding results without understanding or contributing to them. Does that train us to prefer abstractions?
Decades ago, noticing these trends of technology not only being misused but seemingly being deliberately designed to encourage misuse, I formulated "Freitag's Law" (yes, sophomorically named for myself). Which is: "Never use a tool that's more intelligent than you are."
It was a joke, back then.
10/9/15, 3:52 PM
Lizardx said...
I find a very useful antidote to the complete nonsense being spewed by the US media to be rt.com, I like that site, as do many others, enough for the US government to attempt their own lame version of anti russian web site. But the US gov doesn't grasp that one big reason rt.com is popular in the west is that it's consistently anticorporate, particularly anti-US Finance corporate. I'll resist the temptation to hold my breath until the US gov funds a similarly anticorporate state media resource. One thing I like about state run sites like rt.com, al jazeera, bbc, and so on, is that their biases are clear and fairly open, they are biased towards the state that runs them, so it's easy to just skip that type of weighting.
One thing that wasn't emphasized in your overview this week was the intensely corrupting influence of what Eisenhower so astutely warned about, the military industrial complex, a term now so familiar that we stop realizing just why he warned about that, it was precisely for the reasons we see today: military engagements carried out in order to maximize two things: current military industrial profits, ie, weapons sales, using up weapons systems, replacing parts, etc, and to guarantee the generals who decide x today a future position as a high paid advisor/lobbyist for the same contracting firms their decisions profit today.
China and Russia, and India, to a lesser extent, you can be absolutely sure, are hyper aware of this fact, all their recent weapons systems development is clearly aimed at highly defensive focused, but also very robust and cost effective strategy.
Re the Russian Syria engagement, that's no mystery at all, Putin met with Obama a bit over a week ago, and a week later, the Russian engagement began. That doesn't require rocket science to understand. It does lead one to wonder if Obama finally realized he is essentially powerless to change the US system from within, and basically just gave Putin the go ahead to actually deal competently with the syrian situation. Obama does after all detest Netanyahu if I remember right, and may not be as fond of the Israeli lobby as others in the US administration. I know, I know, I'm trying to find even a hint of spine or active intelligence in Obama, but I have to suspect there there may be a touch there.
I can't personally stand pseudo-intellectuals like Naomi Klein, I've read that type of stuff off and on my entire life, and it's always the same, roughly: provide a decent overview or analysis (at best, for this type of writing), then have some totally absurd, highly fantasy based 'what to do about it' last chapter or two. One thing I find particularly irksome about her and her ilk is their extreme fondness for using air travel, for self promotion usually, while preaching to the choir about climate change. I believe you occupy a tiny subset, numbered possibly in the sub 10s, globally, of people who are A: aware of the situation, and publishing about it, and B: live their lives consistent with that awareness, ie, no car, no air travel unless absolutely necessary, etc.
10/9/15, 4:13 PM
Caryn said...
Well, Thanks again for providing reality and a forum ( it's the only place I know of) to actually discuss reality without the bulk of the discussion fighting the blank stares of the distracted; the folks who can't see, who refuse to see what's right in front of them.
Shining Hector put it exactly as I feel; It's devastating - I would prefer to embrace the evil-geniuses-conspiracy-theories. It's far more horrifying that the theory that really fits their actions is that they really are that incompetent and really do believe their own nonsensical rubbish.
The first glimpse of this horror I found was in John Perkins's "Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man". While the tales he tells of his work as a 'e-hit man' bring a tsunami of emotional outrage and salacious impact; what I found most important and again horrifying, was explanation that these big shots, these global movers and shakers are not the plotting monsters we'd expect. They're just humans, with families, dogs, kids... who are smart and really good at the game, but not prescient enough to REALLY see or digest the destruction they are wreaking, nor the inevitable blowback it will have on all of us, including themselves. They also wear blinders of distraction. Insomuch as there is a conspiracy: They are just really powerful people who's interests sometimes align, so they work together - to gain MORE money and power. They cannot see and our societal narrative has never allowed for 'enough is enough'. No matter how powerful they are - they want more. An oversimplified way of saying it is - in terms of power - they are penny-wise and pound-foolish. I'm sure there are more succinct and appropriate quotes, but at the moment, they elude me.
The one bright, (light) spot in this week's essay was the reference to Naomi Klein. I was blown away by 'The Shock Doctrine', it was incredible work. Yes, especially for an author capable of that - 'This Changes Everything' was an embarrassment. I read it some time before I found the ARD and this forum of ideas - and still as I was reading it, I couldn't help thinking Naomi herself was spinning her own delusion. She's lost it. She can't face the reality that this problem IS too big for us to tackle, (at least in the established methods we, (she) know and accept). Unfortunately, my sweet son bought me that book for my birthday, with his own first-job money - I'll never be able to chuck it!! Haha.
10/9/15, 5:16 PM
Auriel Ragmon said...
Two things: My wife and I (I'm pushing 80 and am not a strong person) put up a 200 foot heavy duty field fence over the past two weekends, had to dig out all the old posts, put new posts in concrete and unroll 100 ft. lengths of heavy woven fence. Involved our truck, two fence stretchers, one home-made, and a come-along. Voila! all stretched and stapled to the posts.
Now we have to dog-proof the low parts. And we got the basic info from Yootube...
Second: Interesting novel published in 1967, by William Borden called Superstoe, about two guys from North Dakota who take over the US gummint by various means, mostly nefarious.
Obviously out of print for a long time, but darkly hilarious!
Jim of Olym
10/9/15, 5:23 PM
Auriel Ragmon said...
Jim of olym
10/9/15, 5:26 PM
Glenn said...
Reading all the ACA gripes has me somewhat puzzled. Are you all middle class or upper middle class people living in red states? Seriously. We're living below the poverty line in Washington State. A blue state, which accepted the Medicaid support. WA added dental coverage to the ACA. My military retirement health coverage is great, and satisfies the ACA insurance requirement, but does not cover dental. So, we are eligible for the State Dental coverage at no cost to us, due to income level.
My brother and his wife (contractor and nurse) are also living slightly below the poverty line. Before the ACA they paid over $500 a month for catastrophic only coverage with a $5K deductible. They now have complete coverage at no cost to them. The biggest winner is the local hospital, which now gets paid by Medicaid for treating their family; formerly since they were so poor, the hospital would not charge them for urgent care.
So in Washington State the ACA has been a clear improvement for very poor people and the rural hospitals. YMMV.
Yes, it's paid for by taxes. Which we pay a great deal of our income in. Washington's tax structure is one of the most regressive in the nation; property, sales and Business and Occupancy tax, but no graduated income tax. I'm glad to be getting something back for a change.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
10/9/15, 5:41 PM
Ben said...
All that said, they are pulling off quite the foreign policy coup. And all the while, my guess would be that the head honchos at the Chinese Politburo are laughing their butts off at both of us for messing around in the Middle East.
Side note, just read an article on BBC.com saying that IS has advanced to within a few miles of Alleppo. So, question for you, give their tenacity, and the fact that you have called them a nascent warband before, what are the chances all this backfires on Russia as it is doing on the West? Russia does have a sizeable Muslim population in which Islamist militants do hide, and Russians are just as brutal, maybe more so, than white folks are to minorities in this country.
10/9/15, 5:55 PM
Caryn said...
As I work in one of those factories churning out clueless elites. Of course, you know - we're not trying to produce dunderheads, but most of the establishment, (admin, faculty and parents) can't seem to get past the ideal of offering MORE opportunity, more protection from anything bad, making things easier, more entertaining, more immediately fulfilling to the kids. (Your lesson plan is not fun enough. You're not engaging them enough, not making it exciting enough…) They want the kids to soar like eagles, but they don't want them to have to suffer the hard work of building up the muscle in their wings. After all; it's 2015! Technology! We've surely found an app for that by now, no?! Socially; the kids are in a bubble - the adults around them want to protect them totally - and the CAN, so they do. They're simply not exposed to very much in life that is hard or negative or doesn't go their way. Academically, it's a great education, but in life-skills, it simply cannot be, because we grow and become stronger from hardship, not ease. Sadly, the academics themselves are not even accessible without some boring work put in, so they are also often lost on the kids.
I adore my little students, I often feel like the subversive Auntie trying to sneak in tangible skills and more importantly the idea that nothing worthwhile in life is easy. To really enjoy making art, music, playing a sport, anything - you have to build up your skill and muscle and there's just no getting around it - it's hard, boring, slogging, tedious work before you can actually fly. You also have to get your hands dirty, but so what? You can wash them. Such is life. I know I sound like an old meanie; a Calvinist, Victorian, tight-lipped spinster, but IMHO, by providing so much for them, we are failing them. On the social interactions front: well, that could take a whole blog in itself!
My students come from the privileged class. In any collapse, some of the parents may have the means to withstand a lot of bad weather. They may be OK, but I do really worry for them. My subversive, old grannyish efforts are fighting against a tide.
10/9/15, 6:08 PM
thenoteswhichdonotfit said...
Lots of KMT politicians are leaving the party or threatening to leave the party because they think being associated with Hung is political suicide.
The leadership of the DPP (the opposition party) is significantly more realistic (granted, being more realistic than Hung is a very low standard), and all of the polls indicate they are going to win the presidency, and possibly, for the first time, win the legislature as well.
10/9/15, 7:34 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Steve, yes, I was also struck by the felicity of the name of the new carrier class. Maybe they can rename the F-35 the Flying Edsel -- though the name I coined for it in Twilight's Last Gleaming, the Lardbucket, is probably closer to what the pilots will call it once it goes into service.
Kevin, I grant that it's not solely an American thing -- in particular, I've heard utterances from Tory politicians in the UK that push the borders of clueless absurdity at least as far as anything US politicians have said.
Scotlyn, funny. A good solid Pratchett -- and thank you.
Cherokee, hmm. Maybe I should put Robert E. Howard on the required reading list for the Lakeland Republic's military academy!
Martin, that's entirely plausible.
Daelach, and you'll notice that the US just pulled its one carrier in the Persian Gulf out in a hurry. Someone in the Pentagon realizes what the score is -- and knows that one US carrier sent to the bottom by cruise missiles is all it would take to pop the bubble of US global power forever.
Onething, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You've got to reduce hours worked by a quarter, you have everyone go to 30 hours a week rather than laying off one person in four.
Raymond, exactly. In the US, at least, the tax code is also set up to reward "capital investment" and punish hiring workers, so that just amplifies the same phenomenon we're discussing.
Ourgreattransition, no, I hadn't seen that yet. It's a classic, and typical of the way that establishment Greens finesse the real fossil fuel costs of industrial society.
Travis, exactly. Thanks for the news from the front lines!
Denys, oh dear gods. You couldn't make these things up.
MindfulEcologist, thanks for the link!
10/9/15, 8:53 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Indus56, I've put a hold on the book at the local public library, so should be able to do a review in a few weeks. Yes, it'll go beyond the fantasy-island talk about powering a modern upper middle class lifestyle on wind and sun.
Varun, the Democrats may be crowing but their anointed front runner loses in polls when matched up against most of the plausible GOP candidates. Time to get more popcorn popped...
Ursachi, of course! As I've noted in previous posts, it took the US a huge amount of misplaced effort to drive Russia and China into each other's arms, since the two countries have very few interests in common and may causes for rivalry. Once the US is gone, no doubt things will heat up between the bear and the dragon -- just as things heated up between Russia and the US once Hitler was squashed. Of course that didn't save Hitler, and it won't save us, either.
Leo, good heavens. I didn't remember that detail at all. Thanks for the blast (literally) from the past!
Anselmo, all those seem entirely reasonable suppositions.
Greg, my guess is that at the rate health care premiums are soaring, the penalty will always be cheaper than the cheapest health care plan.
Fabian, that's not a safe assumption. Satire directed at the other side's leadership is an ancient practice, and is as often aimed by fading powers at the leaders of rising ones as the other way around.
Valekeeperx, oh for crying out loud. I wove a reference to Datura stramonium into the name of the president in Twilight's Last Gleaming because the herb in question is a potent hallucinogen -- I know people who've taken it, for what that's worth -- and thus suggests something about President Weed's state of detachment from the hard realities of my fictional 2025. In the same way, Leonard Gurney got his name from his role vis-a-vis the body politic of the United States -- and no doubt you could find some reason, if you work at it, to insist that by calling him that I'm being disrespectful to undertakers. Please don't cross the line between sensitivity and concern trolling!
Fabian, micromanagement by top brass is by all accounts pandemic in the US military, and it's enabled by computerization -- another way in which computer technology "progresses" toward dysfunction.
Jason, agreed. I've been watching and waiting for this for decades, and it's more than a little eerie to see it finally playing out!
10/9/15, 9:14 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Raven, nice to see such sensible talk spreading.
Myriad, granted, but "defeating Islamic state" would arguably have given rise to a different set of dysfunctional behaviors. Aiming for an arbitrary goal (or worse yet, as you point out, two or more contradictory goals) and leaving subordinates to figure out how to get there produces one kind of common failure these days, but another comes from those situations where the leadership figures want to be seen doing something about the crisis du jour, without concerning themselves with whether their actions have any results or not.
Lizardx, one of the things that I find most entrancing about all this is the way that the US politicians and media insist at the top of their lungs that they can't figure out what the Russians are up to, when the Russians have explained patiently over and over again exactly what they're doing and why. Our leaders seem to be so busy trying to create their own reality that they literally can't process when reality turns out to have other ideas!
Caryn, I should probably do a post one of these days about all the ways people try to convince themselves that somebody must be running the world, even if they're running it into the ground -- because the alternative is to accept that the world is not subject to the human will, that it has its own agenda and doesn't care in the least what we want. Most people in modern industrial societies find that latter idea unspeakably terrifying.
Auriel/Jim, good honest work never hurt anybody. Quite the contrary!
Glenn, no, quite a few of us are working class people who live in blue states, and we're still getting screwed by Obamacare. By all accounts the expanded Medicare program, from which you're benefiting, is one of the few dimensions of the program that actually helps anybody, and those of us who don't qualify for it or live in states that don't have it don't share your experience.
Ben, I figure that the Russian boots on the ground will be limited to Spetsnaz and airborne forces taking out high-value targets. As for the latest news about Islamic State, of course -- the al-Qaeda forces in the north of the country have had to pull troops away from their own eastern front in order to try to counter the Russian threat from the west, so IS has been able to advance against the weakened forces that remain. Watch what happens when the Russian-Syrian-Iranian advance finishes clearing out the al-Qaeda affiliates and slams into Islamic State.
Caryn, exactly. That sort of thing always starts out of misplaced affection, the desire to shield the children from bad feelings and unwelcome experiences. The result is uniformly disastrous, but try telling that to doting parents!
Notes, okay, I'm impressed. Hung could clearly run for the GOP nomination here in the US with some chance of success!
10/9/15, 9:49 PM
Glenn said...
"By all accounts the expanded Medicare program, from which you're benefiting, is one of the few dimensions of the program that actually helps anybody, and those of us who don't qualify for it or live in states that don't have it don't share your experience."
Well, for Ghu's sake, lean on your state legislature. Ours has actually been quite responsive.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
10/9/15, 10:07 PM
Martin B said...
10/10/15, 1:15 AM
Scotlyn said...
10/10/15, 1:37 AM
Nastarana said...
P. 16, Grandin quotes Kissinger to much the same effect, "Kissinger said it four decades earlier", quoting a passage in which a young Kissinger claims the USA needs realists willing to create facts.
I would tend to look for the origins of what I call a doctrine of malleable reality in National Socialism with its' notion of triumph of the will, but, the trends identified by Mr. Matthieson above might well have predisposed many Americans to not question Mr. Rove or his policies.
Travis, greetings. A wise government would put guys like you in charge of managing forests. I doubt anyone knows them better than you do.
10/10/15, 6:35 AM
Ursachi Alexandru said...
10/10/15, 6:54 AM
Nastarana said...
The Russian govt. has just announced a homestead program for Siberia. Only Russians citizens need apply. Watch for a lively trade in forged Russian identity documents.
10/10/15, 7:19 AM
Bob Patterson said...
for a fake city, another article mentioned building a complete fake city to observe interactions, etc.
These seem to indicate either a lack of money or a lack of risk taking, or both.
In another article, the top 15 top tech companies hemorraging cash were listed (including Twitter). Huge gambles on "progress and "growth" that defy normal business economics. But maybe they are the next Google.
10/10/15, 8:07 AM
Ken Barrows said...
Yet, although time will tell, it may have slowed the increase in health costs. Because everyone has to get insurance, the uninsured visiting the ER drops a bit. Medicaid, for the first time, was expanded to include low-income childless adults.
If you put your mind to it, I am sure you'd deliver an essay as a counterargument to these points.
10/10/15, 8:40 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
The House has voted 261-159 to lift the oil export ban. Boehner said doing that would "lower prices at the pump, create jobs, and boost the economy." Echoed by our state's junior Democratic representative. Another Republican said it would "strengthen national security and weaken (our) economic and political rivals." Neither one said how doing so would accomplish this. I can give a fairly good guess as to what they see as the chain of events, but it's only a guess. Selling the oil abroad would get the drilling going again, probably.
It would be nice to know what the military thinks of this move as well. Me, I shake my head and ask if they've ever heard of the advice Joseph gave Pharaoh in a time of prosperity.
10/10/15, 8:52 AM
beneaththesurface said...
Five years ago he had invited me to come visit him in Syria, though I hadn't seriously considered doing so (I try to avoid flying, for one reason). At that time, it was a fairly safe and peaceful country to visit; tourists would pass through and he had couchsurfers stay at his house. Now it would be insane to go visit him. It is a reminder how much can change in a country in just a few years. And not just in countries like Syria, but even in countries like the U.S.A... Five years from now, my country and the world may be drastically different in ways I can't predict right now.
10/10/15, 9:52 AM
Tidlösa said...
10/10/15, 10:02 AM
Robert said...
10/10/15, 10:21 AM
The other Tom said...
Although I think it is more accurate to point out that elites and bottom feeders each have stereotypes of the other,e.g.,elites are too overeducated to know about the real world, and working class people are too steeped in banality to have any intellect.
I have always been a blue collar guy but due to the weird circumstances of my life I have associated with quite a few Ivy League alumni. There were some who fit the stereotype perfectly, and there were notable exceptions, some people with an admirable combination of education, experience, and empathy. I have great respect for them because it would be easy for them to live in a comfortable cocoon, but they do get out in the "real world." The others, however are frightening. These are usually the ones who went to prep schools and have never met anyone who ran out of money. They seem to view the lower classes like displays in dioramas, as if they are tourists in a world put there for their entertainment. I have seen them in a neighborhood bar where everyone is drinking $3 drafts, remarking to each other that ordinary people have real lives too, as if it were a revelation that working people have ideas and plans. I don't take this as deliberate snobbery, or defective intelligence. It is because they are so insulated.
All that intelligence going to waste on hedge funds or whatever they end up doing. It's like a 500 horsepower car with bald tires and a faulty suspension: it is useless or even dangerous.
Many years ago I read "Into the Abyss," by Jack London. It is a description of his 30 days lived in the slums of east London, circa 1900. Although he grew up poor, at this time he had already become a wealthy writer. He was concerned about losing touch, so he put on some old clothes and survived as a day laborer for a month to refresh himself. Maybe this would be the perfect "life experience" course at a university. There is nothing like the loneliness of being broke to throw you back on yourself and examine everything you thought you knew.
10/10/15, 11:56 AM
Ezra Buonopane said...
10/10/15, 12:06 PM
Lizardx said...
"WILKERSON: ...since World War II and the acquisition of this enormous power by what in essence is the new Rome in the world, the United States, part of the shift that takes place in manipulating and managing that new power is a centralization of foreign policy away from the old cabinet places where it used to take place, most prominently through the Foreign Service and through the secretary of state, to the White House and to the creation of the 1947 National Security Act, the National Security Council. So if you ask me pro forma where does it exist today, it exists more in the National Security Council and its staff than it does anywhere else, certainly anywhere else in the cabinet. So what I'm saying is it's centralized in the White House.
But what does that mean in terms of, I think, your real question, who's behind the White House, and who's therefore behind U.S. foreign policy, more or less? I think the answer today is the oligarchs, which would be the same answer, incidentally, ironically, if you will, for Putin in Russia, the people who own the wealth, the people who therefore have the power and who more or less (and I'm not being too facetious here, I don't think) buy the president and thus buy American foreign policy. So that's as succinct an answer as I can give you and touch on a few historical points.
....
I think it's probably less fundamental and less precise, and therefore less in the interest, often, of the United States than you might think or that the American people might think. Because of what you've just suggested, that there are many poles in American foreign-policy, from the Congress to even the Supreme Court, to the White House, to the State Department, the Foreign Service, and so forth, it's a very complex mix, and it's rarely ever articulated in a way or manifests itself in a way that good leadership can control it, handle it, and manage it toward a real strategic objective. That's part of our problem in the world today.
But I would submit to you that certain oligarchs, anyway, big food, big pharmacy, big energy, oil, real estate, things like that, they like it this way because then they can flow into the void in the particular region or function or both that they want to control, that they want to manipulate, and do so effectively, whether it's subsidies from the federal government for oil companies or whether it's massive efforts by the government, clandestinely or otherwise, to influence someone like Monsanto being able to operate in Latin America and do the things that it does. So it's incredibly complex, difficult to analyze from a strictly governmental standpoint.
But when you start probing and you start analyzing, you begin to discover that there are centers in this mess, if you will, that are getting what they want. And what they want is basically wealth and power. And they then turn that wealth and power back into political contributions, which now almost have no limits, no constraints on them, and they influence people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Bob Menendez and Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank when he was in there and so influential with the banking committee, and they get what they want in terms of legislation that oftentimes I'm convinced the legislatures do not even realize they're doing. They don't understand that they're fulfilling this objective of a particular oligarch or conglomeration of oligarchs. And yet they're doing it, and they're doing it because they are well paid for doing it, in the sense that their PACs are flush and full and they get reelected."
10/10/15, 12:06 PM
Lizardx said...
The above interview with wilkerson is fairly astounding for those of us used to ingesting the pure and utter gibberish that our corporate media spews forth, and most politicians in the US.
I came across Wilkerson's name, of course, in a recent rt.com interview. I'm always vastly cheered to find signs of life and intelligence on the 'right' spectrum, since any reality that is reasonably 'real' should be visible to anyone who is willing to see it.
Keep up the good work, druid, you're on the right track I think, in most areas.
10/10/15, 12:36 PM
MawKernewek said...
The events around the dissolution of the USA included cyber-warfare, which would have devastated the infrastructure of the Internet, caused economic chaos especially in the tech companies, who are impacted by a complete collapse of trust by the public and investors.
As well as this, the physical infrastructure of data centres was reaching a stage at this time where a lot of the hardware itself was needing replacement.
So what I think happened is that to rescue things, something like the "Internet.org" initiative where net neutrality is thrown out the window, and users access a limited version of the internet via a portal owned by a single company came in. The 'metanet' is in fact a brand name of META Networks, originating as some kind of consolidation via takeover/merger of Facebook, Amazon and some other companies.
The Chinese also went down the route of encouraging devices with minimal local storage and processing, because their leadership wanted their equivalent of the metanet to be locked down to maintain control for similar reasons to the Atlantic Republic.
Perhaps having a 'metanet' connection is imperative because a large proportion of the Atlantian population do not have 'jobs' in the 20th century sense but are freelancers who get work via the metanet in the same way as day labourers in ancient Rome would be hired off the wall.
The cyberwarfare in the 2020s impressed to the Russian government that they should make their own relatively simple but durable electronics, less vulnerable to cyberattacks. Though this was initially focused around military needs, they did, along with a company based in present-day Germany (the area of Berlin where they are headquarted is known as Hackertopia), later market a range of computers with a performance roughly equivalent to turn of the century PCs to those parts of the world whose markets were not closed to them, such as Lakeland who had no real use for them except perhaps a handful of university departments, or Atlantic Rep. and China (and presumably Cascadia) where these products are banned as a threat to the "metanet" model, since these computers are designed to be useful even if an always-on net connection is not available, or is only low bandwidth.
Though the European effort to revitalise the infrastructure of the Internet as it faced decay and the damage of the cyberwar is mostly pragmatic, there are some who have grandiose schemes (not including building a 1000m mountain) that are a source of tension.
10/10/15, 3:22 PM
Marian Veverka said...
The outcome of all this will not only be important to the current residents of Toledo & Lucas county, but future residents might look back on the outcome of all this as one of the major reasons why things are as they are.
10/10/15, 3:41 PM
Caryn said...
I suspect this is partly to justify their own jobs and partially a societal obsession/delusion about busy-ness and visible progress. They can't see the value in occasional boredom, tedium or down time. How they ever get through a good gym workout is beyond me!
My co-teacher and I just had an evaluation wherein the Headmaster came and sat in on a class. The Year 5's (10 to 11 year olds) were turning a flat 2-D Wassily Kandinsky painting into a 3-D abstract expressionist sculpture. From the questions the kids were asking and their total concentration and contentment in the boring task of cutting out their shapes from cardboard to build, I was thrilled. They got it! From their comments and questions, I could see their little brains were buzzing, planning, envisioning in their heads - a thing that has yet to exist; a thing that THEY will bring into existence. THAT'S what art class is about!! Yippy!
We got a terrible evaluation. The headmaster said, "They're not progressing, it's not exciting, they're just cutting paper".
Facepalm. Deep Breath. Maybe I need to give him a good talking to & sit him down in one of our classes with scissors and cardboard!
On the Syria/Russia issue: Thank You, JGM and fellow commenters for great links and perspectives of this. I've learned a lot. Yesterday, Sat. was a good slow day- I spent too long surfing the web reading articles on this. I wanted to note that on every news blog or site with comments below the articles, be they left-leaning or right-leaning, almost every commenter seemed to see through the claptrap media narratives: 'West=good guys, Russia=Bad guy'. "OMG! Putin is lying! He's only trying to prop up his own dictator! He's only out for Russia and his own power! The Nerve of the guy!" A few commenters seemed to champion Putin, most did not - but they almost all saw the double standard and double-speak being foisted on them. It was so clear, it was an embarrassment to the 'journalists' still spinning this, "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" obfuscation.
In more and more ways, People ARE waking up. At least they're trying to.
10/10/15, 4:07 PM
Susan J said...
Rebuttal to Cherokee Organics,
Don’t blame the computer geeks, blame their bosses. Being well paid is important, it gives you credibility.
What can you blame the bosses for? The belief that software is no different than groceries or . . . and that it can all be managed in the same way, for not knowing the difference between complete specifications and incomplere specifications, for not knowing how to test, for believing that daily stand-up team meetings can take the place of written requirements, specifications, and test plans, for thinking that it is “strategic” to build something in a few weeks before you have verified its 12-month usefulness. I could go on.
Blame the employers who hire the off-shore workers. Yes, off-shore workers cost less than on-shore US citizens, but they lack the cultural and social background that businesses rely on in their labor force in order to understand the business needs.
In this context I am referring to work groups composed solely of several computer technicians and their manager. I have no experience with a team having only one computer technician.
10/10/15, 4:29 PM
Unknown said...
@The other Tom--Yeats said it first and better in The Second Coming.
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html
10/10/15, 4:39 PM
Nick Bentzen said...
10/10/15, 6:36 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
I wasn't talking about new technologies in general, but industrial technologies in particular. Are you suggesting that the industrial lens technology suite employs more people per capita, and gives them more interesting work than in the times of Venice eye-glass guilds, Huygens, van Leeuwenhoek, Hooke, Galilei, Newton and Spinoza? The first claim seems more likely than the second. Lens grinding for microscope, glasses and telescopes is pretty interesting work. Pushing buttons on a lens making machine is not. Nor is the factory work to make the lens making machine interesting, although its design was interesting, I bet, but so was the design of pre-industrial tools.
10/10/15, 7:50 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
It is a good lens with which to consider technology and I'm now starting to wonder about the seriousness of your predictions about the future of the open platform of the Internet. It does seem like a sitting duck.
Also, I'm not sure whether you read the drone article or not, but one of my favourite bits of silliness from it was the very serious mention of the: Drone economy. Seriously, what is with that? It certainly paints an emotive image, but it is a totally weird concept. I have noticed that they have pushed drone technology in the business section of the newspapers down here recently. Did I just hear someone say: Innovative new practice that will revolutionise the way we work and earn money?
The other thing about the article that blew my mind was that the drones were slated for use in North Dakota of all places and there is a whole lot to be read into that. My thinking was either the state police department had way too much excess funds as a result of the fracking bubble - or they expected some serious civil disturbances after that bubble popped and they anticipated that they may not be able to provide enough active staff for. There are probably other things to be read into that situation too. Maybe, the powers that be think that drones can be operated from a considerable and thus safe distance away from the situation thus replacing expensive boots on the ground with robots? Dunno.
Well, the soldiers of the Lakeland Republic could do a whole lot worse! Hehe! Too funny, I do hope that there is a mention of Sun Tzu, but as you've stated before you'll get to that all in good time. I'm enjoying the story as it is an excellent way to highlight differences in situations that people have otherwise been well programmed to ignore.
I look forward to the next instalment and just to confuse everyone, I enjoy the more gritty ADR essays too! ;-)! Hehe!
Cheers
Chris
10/11/15, 4:01 AM
Kyoto Motors said...
I have been short on time for comments here, but I must thank you for this commentary on the war in Syria... I wouldn't dismiss outright the possibility of not truly wanting to defeat the Islamic State. It's a convenient notion after all, and a galvanizing -if not polarizing - issue. Russia appears to be raising the curtain on the wizzard of Oz - so to speak.
I'd love to hear more on your analysis of Klein's latest "slipshod" entry in the climate debate.
I'll try to peruse the 200-plus (!?!!) comments for more on that...
Cheers!
10/11/15, 7:05 AM
anioush said...
Now, I have people in my familiy having led that kind of life, in the Soviet Union - my mother who emigrated to Austria by ways of marriage decades ago, and is still glad and thankful for not having to spin her own wool, make clothes, breed chickens, use hot water every few days, and harvest potatoes on the communal fields. A little pickling and baking and repairing one's clothes will do for her now as a hobby. My 88-year old grandmother who joined us a few years ago with her husband was expecting to find the land of milk and honey (she visited regularly before) and is now constantly grumpy because her chronical pain can't be helped even in the golden West. I'm trying to learn some of those things before they forget them, and other skills too, but they find it conspicuous.
All this to say that people can adopt a low-tier life and find it much better than the times of war, German labor camps, and Stalinist repression (like the land reform that took away their livestock), but after decades of peace and relative prosperity, might they not end up wanting "more", as they grow old and less able to do everything by hand? What will it take to make young people, who never saw worse times nor other countries by their own eyes, to understand the principles Lakeland was built on?
10/11/15, 7:46 AM
pygmycory said...
Fortunately there's a lot of middle ground, but where approximately would you say it lies?
10/11/15, 10:20 AM
nuku said...
10/11/15, 3:43 PM
Scotlyn said...
10/11/15, 3:51 PM
Scotlyn said...
10/11/15, 3:54 PM
AT said...
10/11/15, 5:50 PM
onething said...
I suspect it is different in different states. I paid only $68 per month for the silver plan, co pays were $30 for a doctor visit, $40 for a specialist. So it seemed fairly good. By the way, at the "Marketplace" we had the choice of exactly one insurance company.
My point was how this doesn't help a low-income person without savings get Healthcare, since they can't afford to pay for anything above the Bronze level and then still can't afford to pay the required fees and charges.
Absolutely, this has driven costs up even more than before.
"When you have costs increasing at 10%-12%/year, you don't have to wait long! People don't understand the exponential function!"
Well, they're about to.
10/11/15, 7:33 PM
Martin B said...
People don't seem to realize that the US still imports nearly half its crude oil. The impression is given that since fracking became widespread the US is swimming in oil. Not so. Of course, most of the imported oil comes from Canada and Mexico which seem to be considered provinces of the US, but even if you include their oil, North America as a whole consumes more oil than it produces.
If the US does export oil, it will export from the Gulf of Mexico area, and take more Canadian tar sands oil to compensate. Hmmmmm. It would be interesting to follow the money on this one.
A quote from tradingeconomics.com: "The United States has been running consistent trade deficits since 1976 due to high imports of oil and consumer products. In recent years, the biggest trade deficits were recorded with China, Japan, Germany and Mexico. United States records trade surpluses with Hong Kong, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates and Australia."
Some wag commented that the US was the world's biggest third-world country because it exports commodities (corn and now oil) and imports consumer goods. It was a joke, because the US still exports massive quantities of machinery, electronics, aircraft, vehicles, medical stuf, etc etc, but it is becoming more and more true.
10/11/15, 11:17 PM
donalfagan said...
Obama also claimed that Putin having to prop up Assad's regime was a sign of weakness. Of course the US has been propping up both the Saudis and Israelis for decades.
10/12/15, 6:08 AM
valekeeperx said...
RE Comment on Jameson Weed
My mistake. Apologies.
Best regards as always.
10/12/15, 6:47 AM
Ed-M said...
As you can see, I'm quite a bit late to the party. My, this post is popular -- over 200 comments, now!
Now commenting on the Syrian situation, I'm basically floored on how it virtually mirrors your Twilight's Last Gleaming Tanzanian scenario for 2024.
Now just slightly OT, here is a liberal comic's take on the current absurd priorities in the US. And I don't think we'll get the "at best" results that will come in train, either. Like you, I think the whole nation will unravel, but further, with everyone eventually fighting each other like starving rats, in mutual hatreds.
10/12/15, 8:48 AM
jean-vivien said...
"NATO says will help Turkey against Russia if needed"
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0S61DU20151012
Shivers for Halloween... :-(
Even Reuters is taking the hint with headline articles like these :
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0S506F20151011
"OBAMA POLICY UPENDED
The Russian intervention has upended the strategy of the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama, which has led a separate bombing campaign against Islamic State for a year but failed to establish strong ties with fighters on the ground."
10/12/15, 9:12 AM
Bob Patterson said...
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/12/dick-bove-us-banks-have-been-nationalized.html
10/12/15, 10:20 AM
Ezra Buonopane said...
10/12/15, 11:41 AM
Alex said...
Obamacare is really Hillarycare and was going to be Romnycare.
What we need is something like the NHS in Britain with a private optain, or whatever the french are doing, they seem to be making out well.
Printed paper, give us a mailing address, we will send you random amounts of paper !money, and subscribe to your mimeographed newsletter, the modern internet for the non 1% is miserable!
10/12/15, 2:11 PM
DoddGreer said...
Dodd Greer, UT
10/12/15, 2:31 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
Pat, G,D,R.....
10/12/15, 4:11 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
Pat
10/12/15, 4:19 PM
steve pearson said...
10/12/15, 5:46 PM
Hubertus Hauger said...
I think, its useless, to let our reflexes run wild. I mean to go for the conventional drive. Like go for that war theaters, that health insurance, these saviour type leaders and what more hoping them getting all right again. Nothing will become alright. Change is inevitable. Everything is whirling.
Much better than to engage for lost causes, let us find solidarity among each other and build a ark for the arising tide of change. Resilent bases, where we can gather. Cooperatively getting used to build up means of collective survival.
While around us people try to be VIP´s, climbing their mountains of money or whatever shiny wealth they climb upon. The wave of change will sweep it away, like sand. The titanic as touched the iceberg. No use the put our hopes on the captain for him to choose a better course. Captain is confused himself. No help from him. Our world is sinking. Lets look for the lifeboats. ... and get on moving.
10/12/15, 11:54 PM
Scotlyn said...
http://www.techinsider.io/removed-eric-pickersgill-2015-10
10/13/15, 12:28 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/
10/13/15, 6:25 AM
latheChuck said...
I console myself with the thought that the plumber is a skilled local tradesman and a pleasant fellow to chat with as he advises me on repairs I can do for myself.
10/13/15, 7:52 AM
Bob Patterson said...
It is becoming more and more evident that the financial world has adjusted to operating in a zero interest environment.
Mergers and aquisitions are up in number and valuations.
see: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34513520
A lot of these deals are self perpetuating, that is the sideline players (investment banks, advisors, lawyers, accounting firms)
are screaming for them to procede. Just think of the juicy fees on a deal valued at $106 billion.
And the arguments are persuasive - borrow money for practcally nothing and become bigger and more dominant in your industry.
The fact that most of these deals sink from the weight of debt rather than flourish in a blaze of masterful management and synergy is ignored.
In addition, low interest loans have led to bond funds borrowing to get leverage to speculate (see Pimco suit),, insurance companies borrowing to shore up assets,
corporations borrowing to shore up earnings, pay management bonuses, pay dividends, pay for share buybacks,
What the heck, it does not cost anything!
Something is very, very bad about this situation
10/13/15, 10:30 AM
nuku said...
Re low interest environment: The currency "carry trade", where big players borrow a very low interest rate currency and use it to buy a higher yielding currency, is also flourishing. This was a huge money maker between the Jap yen and the NZ$ some years ago, when the yen was paying about 1% interest and the NZ$ paying 8-10%. Beside earning the higher interest, astute (and lucky) players could make even more $ on the currency cross trade, and if the currency trades are done in a tax haven, no tax is paid on the deal! Yes, another way to exploit the system.
10/13/15, 1:40 PM
Glenn said...
http://www.capitalgazette.com/news/naval_academy/ph-ac-cn-celestial-navigation-1014-20151009-story.html
So it would seem _one_ U.S. institution can learn from experience.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
10/13/15, 1:43 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Quote:"Something is very, very bad about this situation"
But of course! It appears that a lot of the big multi-national players have adapted to zero inflation rates by performing all sorts of accounting trickery which they appear to be utilising to avoid paying company taxes. That's how I believe they are pretty much adapting to low interest rates and yet still growing their share of the pie. That whole thing is what I believe to be a zero sum game and it does have a finite end point.
Incidentally, how come all of the people over in the US have somehow assumed that quantitative easing is over - as perhaps it technically is? But then, ask yourself the question, how do you reckon the gargantuan government deficits are being financed?
Cheers
Chris
10/13/15, 2:14 PM
Glenn said...
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
10/13/15, 3:00 PM
Glenn said...
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/raf-given-green-light-shoot-133352631.html#LBJW2qp
This does not look like it will end well.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
10/13/15, 3:51 PM
Unknown said...
@Glenn et al.--My late father, Annapolis 1938, wrote a handbook on celestial navigation at some point in his career. I inherited a copy; it looks self published. Maybe I should scan that puppy and find somebody at the Naval Academy to send it to.
My father was a math whiz and that's probably what interested him in navigation. The Navy made an engineer/marine architect of him and he didn't spend much time on the water after he got his commission.
10/13/15, 6:32 PM
Castus said...
For foreign policy, specifically on this region, I would suggest the Institute for the Study of War. While using a variety of sources is the most prudent course, if you could pick one, this would be it, in my humble professional opinion (you likely don't remember, but I'm a military member from a foreign, but allied country to yours).
http://www.understandingwar.org/
http://iswresearch.blogspot.ca/
The second is their blog; some extra products are available on there.
Regards,
Castus
10/13/15, 10:34 PM
Morgenfrue said...
10/14/15, 10:49 AM
Adrian Skilling said...
10/14/15, 2:56 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
Was your grandfather named Benjamin Dutton? If so, his textbook seems to have gove through many editions.
10/14/15, 4:50 PM
Unknown said...
@Robert Mathiesen--My father (I'm just a few years younger than you) was Commander Irvin Jack Frankel, USN retired, went into aerospace for his second career. I learned late in my father's life that he had written it, and I don't know when he wrote it or whether it had any distribution.
After posting my previous comment, I looked on my bookshelves and couldn't find my copy, so it's probably in storage and will have to be searched for. I inherited it and certainly did not throw it out; it's in A Safe Place. I think I'll try to find out whether the Library of Congress was sent a copy. That constitutes publication. Otherwise it's just a bound manuscript.
10/14/15, 6:58 PM
Unknown said...
@Robert Mathiesen--by God, there's a copy for sale on Amazon. The Internet is wonderful.
An Outline of Navigation Student Outlines Co. 1943.
http://www.amazon.com/outline-navigation-Irvin-Jack-Frankel/dp/B0007ELBWU
10/14/15, 7:10 PM
Genevieve Hawkins said...
If you are still trying to build a backstory about failed trade deals into Retropia, I have my own NAFTA perspective I feel like sharing. Toledo, Ohio happens to be my hometown. I was coming of age in the mid 1990's in Toledo when NAFTA's effects started really being felt. My first boyfriend lived with two male roommates and all three of them worked at a manufacturing company called Bunting Bearing. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of little manufacturing companies with jobs like those. A whole generation of men were growing up expecting the simple things that their fathers had, a decent high paying job with benefits good enough that they could settle down and even let the wife stay home and take care of the kids. Toledo was called The Glass City, and though Libby Glass was a very large employer the most coveted positions were at Jeep. They renamed the street from Willy Parkway to Jeep Parkway and everyone had some hometown pride.
Then Bunting Bearing left for Mexico, just like dozens of others, in a span of 2 to 3 years. A whole generation of men lost those good jobs, and replaced them by becoming truck drivers or night store clerks or something else that paid less in real terms and had no benefits. If you were a woman, either educated or remotely pretty, you left town for bigger things elsewhere. It got so bad one mayor campaigned and won on the slogan that he kept Jeep in Toledo. No comment when Jeep silently shuttered a few years later. Now I think the largest employer is Promedica, who has been buying up hospitals left and right. I guess that makes sense for an overweight, overmedicated, and downtrodden populace. But I do feel something is going to give, and is slowly for those that remain...
10/17/15, 5:51 PM