Just at the moment, many of my readers—and of course a great many others as well—are paying close attention to which of the two most detested people in American public life will put a hand on a Bible in January, and preside thereafter over the next four years of this nation’s accelerating decline and fall. That focus is understandable, and not just because both parties have trotted out the shopworn claim that this election, like every other one in living memory, is the most important in our lifetimes. For a change, there are actual issues involved.
Barring any of the incidents that could throw the election into the House of Representatives, we’ll know by this time next week whether the bipartisan consensus that’s been welded firmly in place in American politics since the election of George W. Bush will stay intact for the next four years. That consensus, for those of my readers who haven’t been paying attention, supports massive giveaways to big corporations and the already affluent, punitive austerity for the poor, malign neglect for the nation’s infrastructure, the destruction of the American working class through federal subsidies for automation and offshoring and tacit acceptance of mass illegal immigration as a means of driving down wages, and a monomaniacally confrontational foreign policy obsessed with the domination of the Middle East by raw military force. Those are the policies that George W. Bush and Barack Obama pursued through four presidential terms, and they’re the policies that Hillary Clinton has supported throughout her political career.
Donald Trump, by contrast, has been arguing against several core elements of that consensus since the beginning of his run for office. Specifically, he’s calling for a reversal of federal policies that support offshoring of jobs, the enforcement of US immigration law, and a less rigidly confrontational stance toward Russia over the war in Syria. It’s been popular all through the current campaign for Clinton’s supporters to insist that nobody actually cares about these issues, and that Trump’s supporters must by definition be motivated by hateful values instead, but that rhetorical gimmick has been a standard thoughstopper on the left for many years now, and it simply won’t wash. The reason why Trump was able to sweep aside the other GOP candidates, and has a shot at winning next week’s election despite the unanimous opposition of this nation’s political class, is that he’s the first presidential candidate in a generation to admit that the issues just mentioned actually matter.
That was a ticket to the nomination, in turn, because outside the bicoastal echo chamber of the affluent, the US economy has been in freefall for years. I suspect that a great many financially comfortable people in today’s America have no idea just how bad things have gotten here in the flyover states. The recovery of the last eight years has only benefited the upper 20% or so by income of the population; the rest have been left to get by on declining real wages, while simultaneously having to face skyrocketing rents driven by federal policies that prop up the real estate market, and stunning increases in medical costs driven by Obama’s embarrassingly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” It’s no accident that death rates from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning are soaring just now among working class white people. These are my neighbors, the people I talk with in laundromats and lodge meetings, and they’re being driven to the wall.
Most of the time, affluent liberals who are quick to emote about the sufferings of poor children in conveniently distant corners of the Third World like to brush aside the issues I’ve just raised as irrelevancies. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve heard people insist that the American working class hasn’t been destroyed, that its destruction doesn’t matter, or that it was the fault of the working classes themselves. (I’ve occasionally heard people attempt to claim all three of these things at once.) On those occasions when the mainstream left deigns to recognize the situation I’ve sketched out, it’s usually in the terms Hillary Clinton used in her infamous “basket of deplorables” speech, in which she admitted that there were people who hadn’t benefited from the recovery and “we need to do something for them.” That the people in question might deserve to have a voice in what’s done for them, or to them, is not part of the vocabulary of the affluent American left.
That’s why, if you pay a visit to the town where I live, you’ll find Trump signs all over the place—and you’ll find the highest concentration of them in the poor neighborhood just south of my home, a bleak rundown zone where there’s a church every few blocks and an abandoned house every few doors, and where the people tipping back beers on a porch of a summer evening rarely all have the same skin color. They know exactly what they need, and what tens of thousands of other economically devastated American communities need: enough full-time jobs at decent wages to give them the chance to lift their families out of poverty. They understand that need, and discuss it in detail among themselves, with a clarity you’ll rarely find in the media. (It’s a source of wry amusement to me that the best coverage of the situation on the ground here in the flyover states appeared, not in any of America’s newspapers of record, nor in any of its allegedly serious magazines, but in
a raucous NSFW online humor magazine.)
What’s more, the working class people who point to a lack of jobs as the cause of middle America’s economic collapse are dead right. The reason why those tens of thousands of American communities are economically devastated is that too few people have enough income to support the small businesses and local economies that used to thrive there. The money that used to keep main streets bustling across the United States, the wages that used to be handed out on Friday afternoons to millions of Americans who’d spent the previous week putting in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, have been siphoned off to inflate the profits of a handful of huge corporations to absurd levels and cater to the kleptocratic feeding frenzy that’s made multimillion-dollar bonuses a matter of course at the top of the corporate food chain. It really is as simple as that. The Trump voters in the neighborhood south of my home may not have a handle on all the details, but they know that their survival depends on getting some of that money flowing back into paychecks to be spent in their community.
It’s an open question whether they’re going to get that if Donald Trump wins the election, and a great many of his supporters know this perfectly well. It’s as certain as anything can be, though, that they’re not going to get it from Hillary Clinton. The economic policy she’s touted in her speeches, to the extent that this isn’t just the sort of campaign rhetoric that will pass its pull date the moment the last vote is counted, focuses on improving opportunities for the middle class—the people, in other words, who have already reaped the lion’s share of those economic benefits that didn’t go straight into the pockets of the rich. To the working classes, she offers nothing but a repetition of the same empty slogans and disposable promises. What’s more, they know this, and another round of empty slogans and disposable promises isn’t going to change that.
Nor, it probably needs to be said, is it going to be changed by another round of media handwaving designed to make Donald Trump look bad in the eyes of affluent liberals. I’ve noted with some amusement the various news stories on the highbrow end of the media noting, in tones variously baffled and horrified, that when you show Trump supporters videos designed to make them less enthusiastic about their candidate, they double down. Any number of canned theories have been floated to explain why that happens, but none that I’ve heard have dealt with the obvious explanations.
To begin with, it’s not as though that habit is only found on Trump’s side of the fence. In recent weeks, as one Wikileaks email dump after another has forced an assortment of stories about Clinton’s arrogant and corrupt behavior into the news, her followers have doubled down just as enthusiastically as Trump’s; those of my readers who are familiar with the psychology of previous investment will likely notice that emotional investment is just as subject to this law as the financial kind. For that matter, supporters of both candidates are quite sensibly aware that this election is meant to choose a public official rather than a plaster saint, and recognize that a genuine scoundrel who will take the right stands on the issues that matter to them is a better choice than a squeaky-clean innocent who won’t, even if such an animal could actually be found in the grubby ecosystem of contemporary American politics.
That said, there’s another factor that probably plays an even larger role, which is that when working class Americans get told by slickly groomed talking heads in suits that something they believe is wrong, their default assumption is that the talking heads are lying.
Working class Americans, after all, have very good reason for making this their default assumption. Over and over again, that’s the way things have turned out. The talking heads insisted that handing over tax dollars to various corporate welfare queens would bring jobs back to American communities; the corporations in question pocketed the tax dollars and walked away. The talking heads insisted that if working class people went to college at their own expense and got retrained in new skills, that would bring jobs back to American communities; the academic industry profited mightily but the jobs never showed up, leaving tens of millions of people buried so deeply under student loan debt that most of them will never recover financially. The talking heads insisted that this or that or the other political candidate would bring jobs back to American communities by pursuing exactly the same policies that got rid of the jobs in the first place—essentially the same claim that the Clinton campaign is making now—and we know how that turned out.
For that matter, trust in talking heads generally is at an all-time low out here in flyover country. Consider the way that herbal medicine—“God’s medicine” is the usual phrase these days—has become the go-to option for a huge and growing number of devout rural Christians. There are plenty of reasons why that should be happening, but surely one of the most crucial is the cascading loss of faith in the slickly groomed talking heads that sell modern medicine to consumers. Herbs may not be as effective as modern pharmaceuticals in treating major illnesses, to be sure, but they generally don’t have the ghastly side effects that so many pharmaceuticals will give you. Furthermore, and just as crucially, nobody ever bankrupted their family and ended up on the street because of the high price of herbs.
It used to be, not all that long ago, that the sort of people we’re discussing trusted implicitly in American society and its institutions. They were just as prone as any urban sophisticate to distrust this or that politician or businessperson or cultural figure, to be sure; back in the days when local caucuses and county conventions of the two main political parties still counted for something, you could be sure of hearing raucous debates about a galaxy of personalities and issues. Next to nobody, though, doubted that the basic structures of American society were not merely sound, but superior to all others.
You won’t find that certainty in flyover country these days. Where you hear such claims made at all, they’re phrased in the kind of angry and defensive terms that lets everyone know that the speaker is trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t entirely believe any more, or in the kind of elegaic tones that hearken back to an earlier time when things still seemed to work—when the phrase “the American Dream” still stood for a reality that many people had experienced and many more could expect to achieve for themselves and their children. Very few people out here think of the federal government as anything more than a vast mechanism operated by rich crooks for their own benefit, at the expense of everyone else. What’s more, the same cynical attitude is spreading to embrace the other institutions of American society, and—lethally—the ideals from which those institutions get whatever legitimacy they still hold in the eyes of the people.
Those of my readers who were around in the late 1980s and early 1990s have seen this movie before, though it came with Cyrillic subtitles that time around. By 1985 or so, it had become painfully obvious to most citizens of the Soviet Union that the grand promises of Marxism would not be kept and the glorious future for which their grandparents and great-grandparents had fought and labored was never going to arrive. Glowing articles in Pravda and Izvestia insisted that everything was just fine in the Worker’s Paradise; annual five-year plans presupposed that economic conditions would get steadily better while, for most people, economic conditions got steadily worse; vast May Day parades showed off the Soviet Union’s military might, Soyuz spacecraft circled the globe to show off its technological prowess, and tame intellectuals comfortably situated in the more affluent districts of Moscow and Leningrad, looking forward to their next vacation at their favorite Black Sea resort, chattered in print about the good life under socialism, while millions of ordinary Soviet citizens trudged through a bleak round of long lines, product shortages, and system-wide dysfunction. Then crisis hit, and the great-great-grandchildren of the people who surged to the barricades during the Russian Revolution shrugged, and let the Soviet Union unravel in a matter of days.
I suspect we’re much closer to a similar cascade of events here in the United States than most people realize. My fellow peak oil blogger Dmitry Orlov pointed out a decade or so back, in a series of much-reprinted blog posts and his book Reinventing Collapse, that the differences between the Soviet Union and the United States were far less important than their similarities, and that a Soviet-style collapse was a real possibility here—a possibility for which most Americans are far less well prepared than their Russian equivalents in the early 1990s. His arguments have become even more compelling as the years have passed, and the United States has become mired ever more deeply in a mire of institutional dysfunction and politico-economic kleptocracy all but indistinguishable from the one that eventually swallowed its erstwhile rival.
Point by point, the parallels stand out. We’ve got the news articles insisting, in tones by turns glowing and shrill, that things have never been better in the United States and anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong; we’ve got the economic pronouncements predicated on continuing growth at a time when the only things growing in the US economy are its total debt load and the number of people who are permanently unemployed; we’ve got the overblown displays of military might and technological prowess, reminiscent of nothing so much as the macho posturing of balding middle-aged former athletes who are trying to pretend that they haven’t lost it; we’ve got the tame intellectuals comfortably situated in the more affluent suburban districts around Boston, New York, Washington, and San Francisco, looking forward to their next vacation in whatever the currently fashionable spot might happen to be, babbling on the internet about the good life under predatory cybercapitalism.
Meanwhile millions of Americans trudge through a bleak round of layoffs, wage cuts, part-time jobs at minimal pay, and system-wide dysfunction. The crisis hasn’t hit yet, but those members of the political class who think that the people who used to be rock-solid American patriots will turn out en masse to keep today’s apparatchiks secure in their comfortable lifestyles have, as the saying goes, another think coming. Nor is it irrelevant that most of the enlisted personnel in the armed forces, who are the US government’s ultimate bulwark against popular unrest, come from the very classes that have lost faith most drastically in the American system. The one significant difference between the Soviet case and the American one at this stage of the game is that Soviet citizens had no choice but to accept the leaders the Communist Party of the USSR foisted off on them, from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev, until the system collapsed of its own weight.
American citizens, on the other hand, do at least potentially have a choice. Elections in the United States have been riddled with fraud for most of two centuries, but since both parties are generally up to their eyeballs in voter fraud to a roughly equal degree, fraud mostly swings close elections. It’s still possible for a sufficiently popular candidate to overwhelm the graveyard vote, the crooked voting machines, and the other crass realities of American elections by sheer force of numbers. That way, an outsider unburdened with the echo-chamber thinking of a dysfunctional elite might just be able to elbow his way into the White House. Will that happen this time? No one knows.
If George W. Bush was our Leonid Brezhnev, as I’d suggest, and Barack Obama is our Yuri Andropov, Hillary Clinton is running for the position of Konstantin Chernenko; her running mate Tim Kaine, in turn, is waiting in the wings as a suitably idealistic and clueless Mikhail Gorbachev, under whom the whole shebang can promptly go to bits. While I don’t seriously expect the trajectory of the United States to parallel that of the Soviet Union anything like as precisely as this satiric metaphor would suggest, the basic pattern of cascading dysfunction ending in political collapse is quite a common thing in history, and a galaxy of parallels suggests that the same thing could very easily happen here within the next decade or so. The serene conviction among the political class and their affluent hangers-on that nothing of the sort could possibly take place is just another factor making it more likely.
It’s by no means certain that a Trump presidency will stop that from happening, and jolt the United States far enough out of its current death spiral to make it possible to salvage something from the American experiment. Even among Trump’s most diehard supporters, it’s common to find people who cheerfully admit that Trump might not change things enough to matter; it’s just that when times are desperate enough—and out here in the flyover states, they are—a leap in the dark is preferable to the guaranteed continuation of the unendurable.
431 comments:
This will most assuredly end badly for us all. It is merely a matter of when. Just as the virus spreads through Westworld, it is spreading slowly and steadily through our country. You can't stay on the wrong path forever, yet we seemed determined to double down and go full speed ahead.
One important point left out here (or rather, only hinted at indirectly) is the global economic experiment we have embarked on, which is just as much a journey into the wilderness with no end in sight. The global central bank takeover is very much at the heart of the asset inflation that keeps the elite cozy in their positions of power. You only need think back to 2008 to realize how scared, insular and clueless these people are...and ultimately, how vulnerable they are in the future once everything falls apart again. Next time, it won't be so easy to just trot out the duct tape and bailing wire and make it appear unbroken.
11/2/16, 9:47 AM
Hubert Horan said...
The comparisons to the late stage USSR are important. Maybe you've done this in the past but I think the key parallel is the use of propaganda techniques--not just Fox News or your "talking heads" but 40 years of corporate/plutocrat investment in "narratives" and the ability to use propaganda techniques to totally hollow out journalism, academia, the judiciary and similar groups in order to totally exclude evidence and arguments that might have challenged the dominance of these elite groups.
11/2/16, 9:54 AM
Mister Roboto said...
I find Trump too detestable to cast my vote for him (he's going to be charged with fraud for his Trump University scam and he's an aggressive sexual harasser if not a rapist), but if the Flyover Country laboring classes want to put him in the Oval Office, I won't stand in their way, because I know how fully legitimate their grievances are. The whole shebang is precipitously heading for collapse anyway and the rot of our society and its politics fully reflect this fundamental truth, so "what the hey"?
I only hope whoever wins doesn't start the ICBMs flying. Last night someone was hot-rodding down my street in their muscle-car, and the sound was a little bit like how the civil-defense sirens sound when they start their nightmarish wailing call. Let me tell you, my heart started thumping like the proverbial jackrabbit!
11/2/16, 9:54 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Clinton's one positive is that she is a known quantity, no mystery about what a Clinton administration will and won't try to do. The devil we know, or the loose canon we don't?
My own vote has been cast, for neither of them.
Substantial prospects for significant change in the American trajectory on this presidential cycle evaporated early in the primary season.
11/2/16, 10:14 AM
Vadim said...
as interesting and intelligent your writing is, it seems to miss some important points. One is, both candidates are equally disliked by a big group of electorate. However, there is very little proof (to say the least) that D.T. has any intention or abilities to change anything in DC. He has showed some abilities in staying on top of a wave of discontent (even at that he is far from being brilliant), and an astonishing lack of anything resembling leadership qualities. He got that far only because both the things are quite bad in the "flyover states" and his opponent is, well what she is.
I do find your reading of the situation a bit disturbing. 'cause, if you really see DT as somebody "admitting issues" or "takes the stand on them", the country is really primed for a collapse.
Then, maybe, it is because I am one of the better-off coastal liberals?
11/2/16, 10:16 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
11/2/16, 10:21 AM
Robert Mathiesen said...
11/2/16, 10:24 AM
Matt Beresford said...
11/2/16, 10:33 AM
Rich_P said...
What's concerning to me (as a self-described republican [little 'r'] constitutionalist who favors decentralized governance) is that we've reached this point. Where healthcare for a nation of 300+ million people is based around a failed program named after a president. Where desperate people look to the president to somehow bestow upon them jobs as though he's Jesus with loaves and fishes. Where in Article II of the Constitution are these powers given to the Chief Magistrate (as Washington called the office)? This is extraordinarily dangerous and, dare I say it, pathetically desperate.
The fallacy of statism is that economic and political power consolidated in the hands of the "benevolent" and "all-knowing" few is desirable and productive. Instead, it creates corruption, disconnectedness, and ultimately threatens liberty itself. E.g. we defeated the Soviet Union so our economy could be steered by a politburo of econ PhDs at the Fed who debase the fiat currency for the benefit of asset holders.
Unlike other coasties, though, I am not surprised by Trump's ascent, though I always viewed his candidacy as a rather ham-fisted "F U" to a clearly-broken system. I am saddened that this justifiable anger is not directed at intelligently fixing the underlying issues and has instead been channeled behind an egomaniac blowhard.
11/2/16, 11:03 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Welcome back, hope you had a good time with your lodge!
Cracked recently published another article about the possibility of a second civil war in the US, it is another really good read.
Whether Hillary or Trump win, I feel that this is the end of the road for working class support of the liberal program. I consider myself a lefty in many respects, but even I’ve started to talk about liberals with a great deal of contempt. A fair number of my liberal friends are clinging to our current institutions, universities and such, like their lives depend on them. Their lives probably do depend on those institutions, but they refuse to consider a future without those places. They’re also crawling paycheck to paycheck, though not a one will admit it how close they are to disaster.
Whatever happens we really do need these years of fire. The weakness and arrogance of some of the more educated members of our society needs to be dealt with, and hardship is the only solution. I’ve increasingly started to look upon the affluent, and those people who should know better, with a great deal of contempt. The only thing worse than a know-it-all with power, is a know-it-all without.
Regards,
Varun
11/2/16, 11:07 AM
David, by the lake said...
Once again, a well-wrought, cogent, and unsettling essay. I must admit that while I cast my ballot for Stein weeks ago, fully cognizant of the fact that she has zero chance of winning, and while I am more than aware of Trump's shortcomings and less-than-pleasant qualities (reasons I did not vote for him despite agreeing with him on a handful of select, key issues), I have been quietly hoping for something that would dislodge our politics from the senile status quo. I have no illusions about the odds as to whether or not such a change would be better, but as you point out, the present course guarantees that it will not be.
I also realize that I need to get out more. I live in what I'd consider a small-to-mid sized city (~12k), but it is the second largest city in the county (there are three) -- other communities are organized as villages or are unincorporated county (townships). So, despite it being non-metro, I am still not really exposed day-to-day to experiences in the more rural life. (And it is not like I have to go far. Just off my well-beaten path a bit and I'm in farm country.) I need to de-bubble myself. Quickly.
Your comment re the dark, uncharted night brings to mind a bit of news I saw this morning:
https://politicalwire.com/2016/11/02/communist-party-seeks-trumps-defeat/
I thought immediately of your posts discussing the various games and everyone's assigned roles. I guess that these folks are uncomfortable with the idea of uncharted territory and change, preferring their old role? It seems odd at first, but makes total sense when viewed from the perspectives you've suggested previously.
Building the local relationships and economies needed to find our way through this unknown landscape is more important than ever. I hope that I can keep myself from getting pulled back into the nonsense of our national politics so that I can focus on what actually matters. It is not always easy and I admit that I do not always succeed. Discipline and practice!
Thank you, again, for your observations and analyses on this blog. You do a great service and it is much appreciated.
11/2/16, 11:09 AM
Peter VE said...
11/2/16, 11:15 AM
Doug W. said...
11/2/16, 11:16 AM
Rustin Gray said...
Marijuana legalization, being a baby step to end the drug war, and marriage equality being small exceptions.
I think we hunger for something grand and something we can be genuinely proud of. Bringing money back to our communities is critical and some economic floor, some sense of security is critical. That's why I think Trump needs to come out in favor of a Universal Basic Income.
It could be part of "the biggest deal, the best deal, this deal, it's solid gold", give the people some small bit of relief in exchange for reducing the size of government, deregulation, and haircuts for oligarchs.
It's a long shot, but I think it's worth fighting for.
11/2/16, 11:19 AM
Breanna said...
The author praises machine politics, backroom deals, and all the rest of the things that the media has hitherto regarded with faux horror. This article drops all pretense and goes for full-on persuasion complete with head-shaking at the author's own juvenile idealism. It describes Sanders and Trump both as "political sociopaths."
It's like the mainstream media has suddenly noticed all the things you talk about and taken the complete opposite position on them.
11/2/16, 11:38 AM
dfr2010 said...
I've seen a grand total of three bumper stickers in my county that had the name Hillary on them, and two said, "Hillary For PRISON 2016."
I am seriously thinking of adding my vote to the big one finger salute to the District of Criminals.
11/2/16, 11:48 AM
FiftyNiner said...
Your magnificent analysis of the forces impinging on this exceedingly momentous time in the life of our country leaves me fearful of all the possible outcomes. The irony is that the status quo candidate wants to propel us into a future we do not want and the change candidate seeks to find a "reset" button somewhere in the past where everything could be put back on track. In the middle of the noise of this campaign, most people have not stopped to consider how near to impossible it will be for Trump to halt the inertia of this dying system and salvage anything of value from it. It is only in reading you for last few years that I have allowed myself to admit to the mess that we are truly in. If Trump wins--and I think and hope that he will--it will be then that the "work of democracy" will begin in earnest and the people will have to back him with all their vigilance and might against the forces that will be arrayed against him.
11/2/16, 12:17 PM
pygmycory said...
Trudeau is also annoying a goodly number of people in Coastal BC by reneging on promises with respect to oil tankers and proper scientific and public review of pipelines. The recent sinking of the front portion of an articulated tanker right by the Heiltsuk's clam beds and fishing grounds, and the utterly inadequate cleanup in rough weather really doesn't help his case.
He's started getting protested by youth about climate change inaction (sure, he talked a good line in 2015, but when it comes to actually doing anything...), and about lack of jobs.
I'm sad to see that it looks like I was right about him.
11/2/16, 12:36 PM
Matthew Lindquist said...
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2403-6-reasons-why-new-civil-war-possible-terrifying.html
It is interesting that both Cracked and The Onion seem to be unburdened from the enforced elite consensus by their sheer irreverence. Cracked in particular has been impressing me with their return to good old-fashioned journalism in the form of actually sending people to the places their articles are about- even to Ukraine and Syria.
As for the election, I'm not sold on Trump at all. I agree that he'd scrap some elements of the current kleptocracy, but not by a long shot do I believe that he's in it for anything other than himself. Which is to say, I must thank you again- it's reassuring(inasmuch as reassurance can be found these days) to know that many Trump supporters do in fact see what I see, and have simply made different value judgements about the current situation. My fear was that they were operating on blind faith, and would perhaps react violently if their savior turned out to be another traitor.
That being said, I'll be damned if I vote for Hillary. My current plan is to send some votes toward a third party(haven't decided yet, but probably the Greens), and hope that next election cycle, the Democrats will be overwhelmed by their own outsiders in the same way the Republicans were overwhelmed this time around.
There is some hope there; I have been telling my friends that 2016's Democratic primary resembled nothing so much as 2012's Republican contest, with Hillary in the role of Mitt Romney(they're certainly both robotic enough!) and Bernie Sanders representing the rage of the dispossessed that finally manifested in Trump. Perhaps, just perhaps, things may hold together long enough for a "Bernie-crat" to run away with the nomination in four to eight years. That's my sliver of hope. But I'm not holding my breath.
On another note, I finally made it to Ashland, after years of living out here in Eugene, and I can say I totally understand why you left! I don't know if you ever frequented "Oberon's Three-Penny Tavern" when you were there, but the friends of mine who own that bar were the friends I was there to see, and since then they've been driven out by the yuppification of their own hometown. It was sad to see, but it was also some clarity- "Bobo Americanus" is out there in force! I suppose a silver lining of the decline and fall will be to make all of that go away forever. At least, that's another hope.
Hope your travels went well,
Matt
11/2/16, 12:36 PM
pygmycory said...
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12206221/1/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-the-Noldor-in-Middle-earth
11/2/16, 12:39 PM
pygmycory said...
11/2/16, 12:52 PM
Jordan said...
You might enjoy this (5min) video of Bernie Sanders grilling Alan Greenspan back in 2003 for being one of those people who think that the destruction of the working class in America doesn't matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJaW32ZTyKE
11/2/16, 1:00 PM
hhawhee said...
11/2/16, 1:01 PM
Ezra Buonopane said...
11/2/16, 1:06 PM
beetleswamp said...
On another note it's getting interesting in Hawaii. Not many Hillary stickers, and a good percentage of them mention prison. There aren't many Trump stickers either, but I'm guessing that it has more to do with avoiding retaliation than lack of support. This state is being run into the ground by the crony capitalist left, who made a living monument of their corruption with a hopelessly dysfunctional and pointless elevated Rail line surrounded by growing homeless encampments. At some point there will be a backlash, and it may have already started.
Yesterday the bumbling but very popular Big Island Mayor Billy Kenoi was acquitted on charges of stealing $30k on a city credit card. Only the media is incompetent enough to not realize their witch hunt against the small beans anti-GMO mayor is actually driving the rage of the population as to why the Oahu politicians get a free pass after stealing billions of taxpayer dollars for the Rail (and still managed to mess it up).
11/2/16, 1:13 PM
Christopher Henningsen said...
Worst case... well, our Canadian talking heads do love their refugees.
11/2/16, 1:21 PM
Mister Roboto said...
One scenario I can readily imagine is Trump winning, and then the day after he takes the oath of office, pulling a Howard Beale at the end of Network.
11/2/16, 1:24 PM
[email protected] said...
Like many here, I have my reservations about Donald Trump but on core issues, including relations with Russia, trade policy and cutting back on the global empire pretensions of the elites, I do think that he genuinely means what he says. What struck me during the debates was that he slapped down Mike Pence brutally, on front of the American population, on the issue of Syria - Trump is his own man and won't be pushed around by anybody on the issue of resetting relations with President Putin.
So, unlike some of the more cynical commentators on your forum, I do think that Trump, if elected, will try as much as possible to change the foreign and economic policy trajectory of the United States.
I have outlined what may likely be seen in a Trump presidency in my blog, which some may be interested in reading.
https://forecastingintelligence.org/2016/09/24/the-global-implications-of-a-trump-presidency/
My own prediction, at this point in the race, is that Trump will win on 8 November 2016.
11/2/16, 1:27 PM
David, by the lake said...
11/2/16, 1:46 PM
Old Professor said...
It doesn't matter in the long run who wins the presidency because the system is corrupt and people have lost faith in it. This is true not just in the US but in many other parts of the world. The big question now is into what and how will a new politic and economy come into being? My feeling is that the Union will fail and that people will sort themselves out into culturally based groups that could encompass states (or provinces). The problem is that history shows that people with power and weapons do not voluntarily relinquish either. At this point I think it is time to move north of the 45th parallel.
11/2/16, 1:47 PM
NomadicBeer said...
One thing that came out was that he apparently knows he has no idea what to do as a president. That single fact is enough to raise him above 99% of the politicians, including HC.
Another thing - it's a big jump from "locker talk" to rapist. I don't like the current political correct climate where is okay to shoot innocent black kids just as long as you don't use the N word.
I think it's the same with DT - he is obviously a womanizer and a BS-er and he would be an easy target for people that want money. And yet there is no history of women complaining about abuse, it all started just now. Hmm... Compare this to the long history of HC corruption and evil.
That being said, I voted Green. All I did was empty my mind and read the candidates pages in the pamphlet. For better or worse, I decided to take them all at their word - and the Greens were the only ones NOT completely delusional.
11/2/16, 2:07 PM
Shane W said...
11/2/16, 2:19 PM
John Randall said...
11/2/16, 2:20 PM
NomadicBeer said...
I talked to some people at a Halloween party and what I gathered is that yes, if you have money the Obamacare increases healthcare costs (I see that with my work provided health insurance too!). But if you are poor, Obamacare helps by removing preconditions and providing free healthcare.
Is there any truth to this? I am not poor and I am willing to pay more to live in a more equal society, but my fear is that all the rate increases will go to the top and the poor will get screwed again.
11/2/16, 2:23 PM
Dale NorthwestExpeditions said...
This is one election where I believe the Vice-Presidential candidates should be given a closer look. Violence seems to be heating up in our country and, heaven forbid, one of those two could end up holding the bag. Pence scares the bejezus out of me. A white-haired Cheney! Kaine seems to represent the old SNL character who was born without a backbone. Too bad that there isn't another Teddy Roosevelt standing in the wings. It took a malcontent Republican to clean out the Robber Barons of another age.
11/2/16, 2:23 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
11/2/16, 2:30 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
Not that there's anything better on the horizon. Even so - sorry. Either way, this will not end well.
11/2/16, 2:31 PM
tolkienguy said...
And, contra JMG, I feel like either Trump or Clinton would be equally disastrous, just in different ways. If Trump gets elected, a large portion of the country will, from day one, hate his guts and think he's some kind of proto-Hitler-and Trump has shown no sign of doing anything to remotely conciliate these people. I can easily imagine city after city-including a few I've been to, and care about-going up in massive riots, all while certain ends of the political class-while piously deploring the violence, of course-implicitly encourage it by blaming everything on the half of the country that voted for Trump, and go on and on about how the country would be so much better if flyover country like...never voted again, or something.
Likewise, a Hilary presidency (still most likely, IMO, though less likely than it was a couple weeks ago), will be almost as bad. A good hardcore of Trump's supporters will probably buy into conspiracy theories about the election being stolen, and form protest movements that spiral out across Appalachia, the Deep South, and the Dryland West, making the Tea Party look tame with noisy rallies for the "legitimate president". And meanwhile, Hillary's presidency will be rocked by scandal after scandal, the economy will get worse for everyone who doesn't live inside Manhattan or the Beltway (fueling the pro-Trump protest movement and its numerous splinters), and the whole country will slowly stumble and lurch towards disaster.
What America really needs right now is some kind of national reconcilation and healing from the last two decades of hyperpartisan madness. And unfortunately, I don't see any way we're going to get it.
11/2/16, 2:32 PM
thenoteswhichdonotfit said...
In a bigger rural town (population 1,400) there are a lot of retirees moving in, mostly from the SF Bay Area, because the cost of living in SF Bay Area is too high. I met some of these retirees from the Bay Area. They are mostly middle class, but I also met two working class retirees who relocated from the Bay Area. That town's main streets has a mix of thriving small businesses (the town is proud of not having any chain stores) and abandoned store fronts. When I talked to the long-term locals, though they are not thrilled about the cost of housing going up, they consider the people moving in from the Bay Area to be a net positive since they help sustain local businesses.
I do not know how representative the communities I visited are of Northern California as a whole, and I know they are not representative of rural American in general.
And yes, many affluent people here are clueless about how people in rural areas feel, though some are not clueless (especially those who at one point had lived in flyover country, or had once been blue collar). I have seen many more Hillary than Trump signs (though Bernie signs remain more common that Hillary and Trump signs combined).
11/2/16, 2:38 PM
Danil Osipchuk said...
Also one have to admit it is very entertaining to follow all the twists - so much scandals and intrigues - the reality outdoes fiction, truly grotesque.
Not that arguing with general trend outlined in the post, but again trying to bring back factor of decent people who must be present in every country to have any work done.
Dear JMG, do you remember 'anon-fbi' thread on 4chan? You then dismissed it as a complete nonsense and I had to say that we probably will see soon if there is any substance in it.
Now there is a sudden rush of FBI to reopen the probe and share its previous findings: https://vault.fbi.gov/hillary-r.-clinton/hillary-r.-clinton-part-01-of-04/view
May be the following does mean that something is brewing?
http://truepundit.com/breaking-bombshell-nypd-blows-whistle-on-new-hillary-emails-money-laundering-sex-crimes-with-children-child-exploitation-pay-to-play-perjury/
11/2/16, 2:42 PM
peakfuture said...
Being outside of a big city, with traditional liberal leanings, the view from most of my colleagues is that things will continue, and Clinton will win. They do admit to being a bit nervous, though.
Michael Moore had another bit on Trump that speaks to this stuff, in the same vein:
http://altnews.com/2016/10/michael-moore-says-donald-trump-will-win-the-election-transcript-and-video/
11/2/16, 2:42 PM
Richard Larson said...
11/2/16, 2:54 PM
Gabriela Augusto said...
Unfortunately it is not only the US election the reason why I suspect that our brand of democracy often fails to provide an acceptable choice of leaders. Just ask the French, the Spaniards, the Brazilians to name just a few. Shouldn't our government system atract reasonable decent people? I am starting to believe we would be better served by some kind of random selection to appoint our governments.
11/2/16, 2:57 PM
Jay Moses said...
11/2/16, 3:13 PM
MawKernewek said...
11/2/16, 3:23 PM
Armata said...
Meanwhile, Friedman can only offer Trump voters and the rest of us in "fly-over country" same platitudes, catch-phrases and lullabies that Bush, Obama, Clinton and the rest of the establishment have been repeating for decades and a defense of the same policies that got us into the terrible mess we are in today. Things look an awful lot different when you spend your life in an ivory tower or aboard a private jet and don't have to mix with the masses whose lives are being destroyed by the policies you are defending.
The smartest thing we can do now is to keep our economy as open and flexible as possible — to get the change signals first and be able to quickly adapt; create the opportunity for every American to engage in lifelong learning, because whatever jobs emerge will require more knowledge; make sure that learning stresses as much of the humanities and human interactive skills as hard sciences; make sure we have an immigration policy that continues to attract the world’s most imaginative risk-takers; and strengthen our safety nets, because this era will leave more people behind.
This is the only true path to American greatness in the 21st century. Trump wants to make America great in ways that are just not available anymore. “What do we have to lose” by trying his way? Trump asks. The answer is: everything that actually makes us great. When the world gets this fast, small errors in navigation have huge consequences.
While Clinton has failed to inspire, her instincts and ideas will keep us hewing to basically the right course. And however great her flaws, she is still in the zone of human decency. Trump is not.
Shills like Friedman remind me a great deal of the French aristocracy prior to the Revolution of 1789. Words cannot begin to describe how much I and most of the people I know despise the Friedman's and Clinton's of this world. While I have serious misgivings about Trump, I ended up voting for him because I like and trust Clinton even less and I know that a vote for her is a vote for more of the same ruinous policies that are destroying America from within. If that makes me a "Deplorable", then I will wear that label with pride and honor.
11/2/16, 3:55 PM
Edward said...
In the interest of salvaging something good out of our nation, Trump's candidacy may be a case of the right message but the wrong messenger. His lack of acuity is astounding. When asked if he would accept the results if Hillary wins, he fumbled badly. It would have been easy to think of something to the effect that the voters would regret their choice and he'd be back in 4 years. He probably wouldn't, taking his ball and going home, but perhaps the forgotten populace in the flyover states should start working on a more suitable candidate to run in 4 years.
Both Trump and Hillary are among the most hated candidates ever and one of them will go on to become one of the most hated presidents ever.
11/2/16, 3:55 PM
Bill Blondeau said...
Hard to imagine a more destabilizing political perception.
11/2/16, 3:56 PM
Justin said...
I will occasionally watch a Trump rally, and one interesting bit of rhetoric - something that Sanders did not do - is he talked about the value of vocational training and skilled trades. He's been doing this for at least a week, probably longer.
When's the last time a presidential candidate did this? I don't mean a bit of working-class pandering, but actually suggesting that becoming a welder or something was actually a decent life decision.
I agree with Bill that Trump is likely full of shale, but his rhetoric and criticism of government and other aspects of the current era will not go away now that it has entered the public sphere. I hope that the Conservative Party of Canada (the other two are hopeless) is watching and learning.
11/2/16, 3:57 PM
Armata said...
PS - Is it just me, or is anyone else having issues with getting Blogger to accept comments today? It seems like most times I have tried to submit a comment today, I have received an error message and have had to make multiple attempts before it would accept the comment. Blogger is really going downhill fast, especially after their latest so-called upgrades. We've been talking about the law of diminishing returns when it comes to technological "progress", but you can really see that phenomenon in action with Blogger after the latest so-called upgrades.
11/2/16, 4:17 PM
jean-vivien said...
the rest of the Western world does not suffer from all the problems plaguing the USA, so I am far from sure Trump's election would have such an impact on Europe, for example. But it would still be a shock, as in Europe the same distrust of the European technocracy is felt as for the USA's folks towards their government.
Hubert,
if you take Trump's stance on energy, it would make things even worse for the USA as he advocates a return to the Reagan era of oil guzzling. It would even be a disaster for the entire world... That's the thing with disruptive candidates : they get votes because people assume that if they got in power, it would completely upheave the status quo and hopefully some good might come out of the upheaval. The "jump into the dark" described by JMG. In this case, Trump's election would not necessarily mean he is approved as President, but that a lot of people want to upheave things. And when it turns out that he doesn't upheave things a lot after all, I guess that the next "new frontier" will be plain violence. Or he might be smart enough to enact a populist agenda... A big risk to take, but at least it beats maintaining the status quo. Violence might come out just as quickly if the status quo were maintained in power by the Democrats.
In general, we get a bit of the same feelings here in France, with the Presidential function reaching so far unprecedented heights in distrust and impopularity. The differences are too numerous to be listed here, however one of the most significant is that the enemy of the lower classes is twofold this time : both the French elite and the European elite. Therefore a candidate with a strong authoritarian slant and a clear support for economically patriotistic policies might very well get an easy way to the Elysée's Palace, and make for a good President once in office. However the most credible candidates have all been in power previously, all come from the same school (the ENA). And the ENA is slowly becoming the symbol of the formatting of an elite where political orientation matters less than the social separation from the nation's daily life. A lot of them (which includes, erm, a former President) are even mired in corruption/misdeed trials.
So yes, France is at a similar stage of its History. We have found many of the solutions for a post-industrial future (we still have good rail service, a growing organic agricultural sector...), and yet we need an actual alternative for leadership. The sense that people would do a better job governing themselves than the government has sipped through the Nuit Debout movement which tried to discuss ideas such as randomly chosen elects, universal basic income. But Nuit Debout was too Parisian, too much well-to-do, and the current political offerings on the left have yet to catch up...
There has yet to come a movement that advocates giving back the work to people, versus rampant automation,offshoring or mass immigration.
I fear that if a left-wing political movement does not rise to defend that proposition, which would also help us face the Long Emergency, we will end up stuck on a devil's choice between either the far right, or radical religious ideologies.
11/2/16, 4:32 PM
Repent said...
It's a little early yet to revisit the predictions that you made at the beginning of this year, but they are uncannily correct. Saudi Arabia is borrowing huge gobs of money to pay its bills and it is teetering on collapse, Trump is the likely victor of the election, also one of your 'out there' predictions about a push to solar energy can be seen in this Hillary propaganda ad that came out of the wikileaks dump recently:
https://youtu.be/_ZwguLJVxsM?t=1s
Meanwhile the general decline of the long decent continues its winding path downward. How do you do it? Premonitions?
11/2/16, 4:34 PM
Shane W said...
11/2/16, 4:43 PM
Mark Mikituk said...
11/2/16, 4:48 PM
Shane W said...
11/2/16, 4:54 PM
Avery said...
A few months ago you pointed out the amusing rhetoric of anti-Russian hysteria in the American press, and suggested that contrary to the established narrative, there are plenty of Americans who would love to see a President tackle the rampant corruption and greed in our country with the ruthless efficiency that Putin exercised in Russia. One thing that should be pointed out, though, is that as this rhetoric intensified into all-out conspiratorial paranoia over the past few months, it also became familiar to a certain group of people: those who personally lived through the Soviet collapse.
Those who felt the impact of the collapse in their homes tell me that in the final decade of the Soviet Union, those few voices in the wilderness who claimed that the Union itself would collapse were lambasted as CIA plants or pro-American traitors. Certainly the CIA obviously was operating in the USSR -- and based on that kernel of truth, the establishment was able to conjure up a vast conspiracy by the other Cold War power to subvert people's faith in the motherland. This conspiracy became the go-to response to any sort of concerns about the stability of the Union. Does this sound at all familiar?
As you've pointed out on this blog before, the appearance of infuriated defenses of the status quo often tells us more about the people doing the defending than it does about those doing the questioning. A healthy status quo does not need to be defended. And check out the headline of Breanna's link! A full-fledged defense of corruption, as she said, and it's entitled "How American Politics Went Insane"... see any unintended reflexivity there?
I feel like this thing must have reached its peak this past Monday, when Hillary Clinton tweeted out a claim that Trump owns a "secret server" that talks to a large Russian bank. I say this must have been a peak because this was too ridiculous even for the New York Times and Washington Post, who both quickly debunked the theory. But on the other hand, I'm just setting myself up to be surprised by what happens next.
One thing's for sure, whatever sort of collapse we see will not be the end of the story. Life goes on regardless of politics, and the history of Russia in the 1990s should be a good message to us that political turmoil will not slow down when a new government is installed.
11/2/16, 4:54 PM
John Michael Greer said...
That said, on to the comments...
Gee, since this is a weekly blog post rather than a book, I didn't include every relevant factor. The gyrations of the central banks in recent years are indeed important, though my interpretation of them veers as far from the conventional wisdom as it does from any of the standard theories out here in the doomosphere. I'll be doing a post on that, focusing especially on negative interest rates, as we proceed.
Hubert, I'm not entirely sure that you're right. The GOP is by no means as unanimous as you make it out to be, and a Trump victory is going to show every ambitious politician in the country which policies will get him or her an instant following among voters. Still, we'll see.
Mister R., glad to hear it. I'm enough of an old-fashioned small-d democrat that I consider voting an important civic ritual, if nothing else.
Bill, as I noted in my post, many of the people who are voting for Trump know as well as you do that they can't be sure that electing him will help. What they know for a fact is that voting for Clinton will prolong the unendurable, and voting for Trump will at least annoy the political class. As for substantive change, that's on its way, though not because of the two figures currently whacking each other in our quadrennial Punch and Judy show...
Vadim, the fact of the matter, as noted in my post, is that Trump has consistently talked about exactly those issues I enumerated. Whether that's pure opportunism or not, it's taken him from the fringe to an election in which he has a serious chance at victory -- and that right there means that the issues in question are not going to go away, because every ambitious politicisn in the country now knows how to win an instant mass following.
Bill, my guess is that you're quite correct. When I first heard of the scale of the latest round of Obamacare rate hikes, my immediate reaction was that that, all by itself, could put Trump in the White House. But we'll see...
Robert, no argument there! We're headed for very, very troubled times.
Matt, thank you. I've noticed that if you just keep spelling things out over and over again, sooner or later people start to get it!
Rich_P, I'd be perfectly happy seeing the federal government get out of the job creation business, so long as it also gets out of the job destruction business. The federal policies that subsidize automation and offshoring, penalize employers for hiring people, and tacitly allow unlimited illegal immigration have played a huge role in creating the jobless pseudorecovery we're in. More generally, I don't disagree at all that the federal government needs to get back to the purposes established for it by the constitution as amended, and stop trying to do things that were left to the states and the people. More on this as we proceed!
Varun, thank you! Yes, York Rite Grand Sessions is always a bit of a vacation weekend; it was again at Ocean City, a good time was had, and I came back with a grandiosely titled minor office -- for the next year I'm Grand Principal Sojourner for the Grand Chapter R.A.M. of Maryland. (That and $3.30 will get you a cup of coffee.) As for the more substantive aspects of your comment, I suspect it's not just the working class that's ditching the liberal program. A lot of the lower end of the salary class is turning to something a lot more like social democracy, as exemplified by Bernie Sanders, which is just as much of a challenge to the liberal status quo. One way or another, we're in for a wild ride.
11/2/16, 4:58 PM
donalfagan said...
http://www.damemagazine.com/2016/11/01/why-i-have-no-sympathy-angry-white-men
11/2/16, 5:00 PM
Justin said...
Some days I think this is all an elaborate prank. Is Truman Syndrome a thing?
11/2/16, 5:00 PM
Armata said...
Trump definitely seems to have the momentum behind him, especially since the FBI reopened its investigation into the email issue. One possibility that I can see is that Trump wins the popular vote but Hillary wins the electoral vote because the Democrats have a built-in geographical advantage. If that turns out to be the case, its a near certainty that The Donald and his supporters will refuse to accept the results and refuse to accept Hillary as the legitimate president. This could trigger a really nasty constitutional crisis and possibly some very serious political violence. There are huge numbers of people, particularly wage class whites and inner city blacks, who are fed up with the status quo and I don't think it would take much to trigger off a conflagration.
11/2/16, 5:00 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Peter, yes, I saw that. The hubris implied in the claim that the Democratic Party owns a certain section of the electorate is impressive, in its own way.
Doug, I think there are policies that would help, and I'll be talking about them as we proceed -- but those are going to have to be accompanied by a lot of work on the part of individuals, families, and communities. More on this in an upcoming post!
Rustin, I'm coming to see a universal basic income as a relatively simple fix for one of the industrial economy's most pervasive self-destructive features. I'll be talking about that, too, in an upcoming post.
Breanna, no, I didn't see that -- thank you! That's really quite stunning, and I hope a lot of people read it and think about what the United States has become.
Dfr2010, if I had a dollar for everyone who's said much the same thing in my hearing, I could probably buy pizza for everyone who comments on this week's post.
FiftyNiner, good. Of course you're right; even if Trump wins, the real work will be waiting, and if he loses, it'll still be waiting.
Pygmycory, of course. How can they break the unions and force Canadian workers to accept starvation wages and no benefits without an ongoing influx of immigrants? That's certainly how it worked down here.
Matt, if Clinton loses this time, the Democrat nomination is going to be wide open next time, and a competent Berniecrat will be hard to beat. (She'd certainly have my vote.) If she wins, the Dems will be committed to the existing order until 2024 at least. But we'll see...
Pygmycory, many thanks! I'll make time to read it as soon as I've waded through the current round of comments. As for the cluelessness of the elites, yep. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Jordan, thank you!
Hhawhee, it'll happen from time to time, but not too often. Remember that you can always read the archive!
Ezra, fascinating. Thanks for the heads up.
Beetleswamp, when I was a kid, Cracked was the lamest humor magazine in print, a Mad wannabe that never even got halfway there. I have no idea how its online incarnation has turned into so lively, funny, and routinely thoughtful a site, but there it is. Thanks for the data points from Hawai'i -- worth knowing that the same causes are driving the same backlash there as elsewhere.
11/2/16, 5:14 PM
Armata said...
http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/02/louis-farrakhan-compares-hillary-to-black-communitys-hitler-in-fire-and-brimstone-sermon-video/
11/2/16, 5:17 PM
onething said...
And then there is the little matter of the guaranteed war that her side intends to provoke, this time with countries that can actually stand up to us!
11/2/16, 5:28 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Mister R., yep -- that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. As for Beale, hmm. Maybe, but I don't think Trump believes that.
Lordberia3, I'm kind of in the middle here; I'm no admirer of Donald Trump, and I certainly don't expect him to come through on all the promises he made, but yes, I think it's possible he could at least slow down the endless march to war in the Middle East and maybe ditch some of the policies that are getting rid of American jobs. I doubt it will be enough, but it could be something.
David, exactly. That wider perspective has to be kept in mind even, or especially, while dealing with the crises of the moment.
Professor, I see the same thing. The one point I'd make about the change of power is that it's not actually the political class that has the weapons and the power. All they do is issue orders -- and we got to see in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the former Warsaw Pact states, what happens when the people who are supposed to follow orders stop doing so.
NomadicBeer, so noted!
Shane, some major elements go back to Ronald Reagan, for that matter, but the neoconservative ascendancy really got bolted into place with George W. Bush.
John, he doesn't have to care. He simply has to recognize that if he pursues policies that discard business as usual in favor of a rebalancing that benefits the silenced majority, he's going to be reelected in a landslide. I think he's more than enough of an egotist to want that!
NomadicBeer, notice that they left out everyone in the middle. The rich have enough money to pay for coverage; the poor get subsidies, though the co-pays and deductibles are still ruinously high; it's the people in the middle who don't get the subsidies and don't have the cash to cover medical insurance bills that cost more than a mortgage.
Dale, Pence is supposed to scare you; he's a well-chosen impeachment insurance policy. Clinton's choice of Kaine was stunningly inept; if you're one of the most detested people in American political life, you don't choose a well-liked moderate with no baggage as your running mate -- not unless you basically want to pin a sign saying IMPEACH ME to your own backside.
Bill, I'm by no means sure that that's a valid generalization. As I noted in my post, a lot of Trump voters seem to be motivated by specific, concrete issues, not the sort of fantasy images you've evoked.
Patricia, I'm not saying that Trump's a good choice. As I noted quite some time ago, there are tens of thousands of Americans who would be a better president than he will. It's just that, to my mind, Hillary Clinton is not one of them.
Tolkienguy, I certainly didn't mean to present Trump as a panacea! Quite the contrary, he's nearly as problematic as his main adversary, and you're quite right that no matter who wins, we're in for a period of bitter polarization and quite probably political violence. Reconciliation, I suspect, is still a long way away -- at least as far as it was in, say, 1860...
11/2/16, 5:51 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Yup. These days people confuse money for actual wealth without realising that once the government that issues that money goes into massive debt and begins printing that money - then it is worth less with each passing year.
Yesterday morning, I passed by a bus stop in the big smoke and there was a guy - who was clearly an addict of some sort in his final days - and he was picking a few of his open sores on his leg. And he asked me if I had a smoke which I could give him. What do you say to that? Sorry mate, I don't smoke is what I said. Homelessness and mental health issues are way, way up and on the rise down here.
It is interesting, but I had a strange insight this morning that it is only possible to live in the moment if someone else is taking responsibility for your situation. And when they're not doing that, you really are up the creek without a paddle if you attempt that particular trick of outsourcing your responsibilities to someone who is no good or irresponsible. US politics - and down here too - appear to me to be a lot like that. That is why people claim that it all doesn't matter, because for them it probably doesn't. Dunno, but it seems like a confused way to get through life to me.
Cheers - and nice to have you back too. Hope you had a nice trip and weren't subjected to any television screen heavy bars this time? ;-)!!
Chris
11/2/16, 5:54 PM
pygmycory said...
11/2/16, 5:57 PM
Glenn said...
"On a different note, I have a question about Romneycare (I mean Obamacare).
I talked to some people at a Halloween party and what I gathered is that yes, if you have money the Obamacare increases healthcare costs (I see that with my work provided health insurance too!). But if you are poor, Obamacare helps by removing preconditions and providing free healthcare.
Is there any truth to this? I am not poor and I am willing to pay more to live in a more equal society, but my fear is that all the rate increases will go to the top and the poor will get screwed again".
Blogger ate my well reasoned nuanced response and gave me a 404 error. We live below the poverty line in Washington state. My brother and his wife now have free coverage, they had been paying $500 a month for catastrophic with a $10K deductible before 2014, paying for nothing essentially. I am retired military, so medical coverage is good. But Washington gives free Dental to those below the poverty line now. Untreated dental problems are a major proportion of Emergency Room visits, so this is very cost effective. We now have dental coverage for the first time since I left the Service.
In states which have accepted Medicaid from the Feds (mostly blue states) the poor do better. In red states, which haven't? Not so much. After the election I suspect a lot of red states will quietly sign on to the Medicaid aspects of the ACA, and no one will ever say the word Obamacare again.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
11/2/16, 6:07 PM
Megan Robins said...
Thank-you for another insightful Archdruid Report. I found your comparison between Russia in the 80's and 90's and the US today to be very interesting. I am interested in whether you have an opinion about who will rise to the top after this particular debacle is over? Who will be the US's Putin?
11/2/16, 6:07 PM
pygmycory said...
U
I guess I have the consolation that things that cannot continue forever don't, and the status quo will die one way or another. I can't say that the assorted right-wing populist movements impress me, though. It seems like we're offered frying pan or fire, and what I want is to go hide in the bushes.
11/2/16, 6:18 PM
Robert Tweedy said...
11/2/16, 6:38 PM
Curtis said...
As for the US election, I'm watching with interest, trepidation, and quite a bit of fatigue from here in Canada! I thought you might appreciate this election-related article from Jonathan Haidt (who's done some interesting research into the moral psychology of liberalism and conservatism). I thought it complemented some of the things you and others have had to say about the economic factors driving Trump's popularity, while also giving a different angle on the situation. It even mentions Burkean conservatism!!
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/07/10/when-and-why-nationalism-beats-globalism/
One of the things your writing has gotten me thinking about is the tension between the need for shared values and norms in a given society, as well as a certain "live and let live" attitude in regards to different values and norms across various sub-cultures. I thought your Retrotopia narrative was an interesting exploration of this tension.
11/2/16, 6:47 PM
Roy Smith said...
Visit our online forum for meeting agenda and other details.
Thank you to Mr. Greer for the inspirational blog as well as for tolerating advertising for this in the comments section.
11/2/16, 6:54 PM
Matthew Smallwood said...
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/12/invade-world-invite-world-in-nutshell.html
And you see it too. Everyone sees it, everyone that is, whose job and or Affluent Lifestyle doesn't reward them for not noticing it. The only Hillary signs in my neighborhood are on two homes where I've never seen a human occupant in the yard, checking mail, doing work, or in general, being OUTSIDE. The ruling class wants America to be one gigantic suburb, with the globe as their oyster, and people who don't or won't fit in, will live in either slums (if they'll vote for approved candidates) or No-Go Flyover country.
11/2/16, 6:56 PM
D. Mitchell said...
For my country, to turn against me and everyone I know, hurts so deeply. No matter what though, we the people will prevail. Sometimes, it's the diamond in the rough found that makes everything more tolerable. Trump isn't polished, he doesn't offer a promise that everything will be ok, but he gives us hope. Out here, hope is as rare as a unicorn. Hope is worth taking a risk on. Hope that we will not be enslaved to Washington, that we may be able to support our families, to feed ourselves, to offer our kids a chance to have something to hold on to...hope is worth fighting for. After all, it's all we have left.
Once all hope is gone, we have nothing left to lose.
11/2/16, 7:02 PM
Candace said...
This is what I received in my health insurance renewal notice.
I currently have a Bronze plan. My premium is $53. My tax credit is $350. So the total the insurance company gets is $400. (Amounts rounded)
The Bronze Plan means I have a $6,300 deductible before they cover anything.
To renew this plan: the full monthly premium will be $700. If I continue to get the same $350 tax credit my part will now be $350. The new deductible will be $6,400. I chose this plan because it was the cheapest on the exchange. (I currently gross $24,325 annually so I felt it was what I could afford.). I'll be talking to a navigator next week to find out if I will still be able to have health insurance or have to opt to pay the fine.
11/2/16, 7:05 PM
Mark Luterra said...
I had to respond to this:
"The rich have enough money to pay for coverage; the poor get subsidies, though the co-pays and deductibles are still ruinously high; it's the people in the middle who don't get the subsidies and don't have the cash to cover medical insurance bills that cost more than a mortgage."
I'm a member of the unsubsidized individual market, i.e. Obamacare's big losers. There is much that needs to be done to bring down health care costs - none of which is addressed by the law as it deals only with insurance - but in my opinion the law is a net positive with one major flaw that could be easily fixed. As written, the law allows insurance companies to create risk pools for employer group plans, with a separate risk pool for the individual market. As this group includes many previously-uninsurable people with "preexisting conditions" and high medical bills, the average cost for the individual market risk pool is proving to be untenable. This is essentially imposing a penalty on the self-employed, small local business employees, and part-time workers while privileging full-time employees of large corporations, primarily the salary class.
A simple fix to the law would require insurance companies to create universal risk pools based on a few permissible factors (age and smoking status, perhaps) and charge the same premiums to everyone in the same risk category, whether on an individual or employer-paid plan.
11/2/16, 7:25 PM
Dennis Mitchell said...
11/2/16, 7:44 PM
Tower 440 said...
We in Northeast Ohio are following Melbourne’s example by holding well-advertised monthly meetings.
The monthly joint meeting of the Green Wizards’ Benevolent and Protective Association, Tower Number 440, and Ruinmen’s Guild, Local 440 will be held at 11:30 AM on Wednesday, December 21 2016. Our location is Ruko’s Family Restaurant, 9385 Mentor Avenue, Mentor, Ohio 44060, (440) 974-1914. Shining the Green Light! Public Welcome! Tables for Failed Scholars. Look for the table topper with the Green Wizard Hat. Contact us at [email protected].
Many thanks to John for the posting space on his blog.
11/2/16, 7:44 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
More on Obamacare possibly killing Clinton's chances -- though the changes in absolute poll numbers are only a few percent, if you look at the probability models at 538 the shift is dramatic, one of the sharpest changes in the campaign so far. Yeah, that is definitely NOT happening from just one more Hillary Clinton e-mail story. The steady collapse of Obamacare represents a major failing of the Obama administration on one of its core policies and biggest promises. That is actually something worth voting a party out for, and the small but critical number of voters who remain "on the fence" feel this. More e-mail gossip rumors and leaks? Meh.
Still, there are a very small number of voters whose minds are not already firmly commited to one, the other, or neither-of-those-crooks. There might not be enough left to tip the election away from confirming Clinton's appointment to the office. We'll know in a week.
11/2/16, 8:07 PM
Ian R Orchard said...
OK, so maybe Hillary isn't going to do a Pope Francis, who bided his time for years, not rocking the boat until he got into a position where he could make a REAL difference. Hillary has been pilloried mercilessly for decades for daring to suggest that America could do better in the Health sector. In particular, Mike pointed out that while the 3000 victims of 9/11 are rightly remembered, no-one but the victims gives a snot for the 1,000,000 fellow Americans who have died as the result of the crappiest Health Service in the 1st World. One fucking Million!! It's unbelievable!!
I urge all of JMG's readers to make a point of watching that doco. Put aside your assorted hatreds for an hour or so and watch it, it will be available on the Net somewhere. You'll be doing it for America and all the downtrodden.
11/2/16, 8:20 PM
Rich_P said...
Reading these comments, it strikes me how nearly every issue could be solved or abated by taking the battle from the federal arena to the individual states. Obamacare is a disaster, but various state-level programs might be effective, based on the circumstances and preferences of that state and its citizens.
For those reading who view Trump as a white knight or way of flipping the bird to D.C.: my suggestion is to focus your political energies on getting your state legislatures to call for a constitutional convention per Article V. This is the ONLY way significant change will happen and would represent a genuine middle finger to the establishment in D.C. -- Trump is and always will be a phony, and it pains me that the Republic's justifiable anger is being channeled through a conman and not something like a constitutional convention.
11/2/16, 8:27 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Danil, well, we'll see. If I turn out to be wrong, of course, I'll admit it.
Peakfuture, I expect whoever wins to be bogged down in sixteen different kinds of trouble starting the moment they take their hand off the Bible. The next four years are going to be, well, colorful.
Richard, you could arguably do much worse.
Gabriela, back in ancient Athens, people were selected for the legislature by random, and I'm sorry to say it didn't work any better than our system -- read Thucydides sometime to get the whole story. I'm fond of Winston Churchill's famous comment: "Democracy is the worst political system, except for all the other ones."
Jay, oh, I think we've still got a ways to go before we reach peak political lunacy -- but I think we'll get there.
MawKernewek, I really should get around to reading that.
Armata, yes, I saw that. The word that came to mind was "meretricious."
Edward, well, we'll see.
Bill, exactly. It's going to be a wild ride.
Justin, fascinating. There are honestly times that I wonder if somebody in his campaign staff has been reading this blog.
Armata, thanks for the link -- and also the comment. I haven't had any problems with Blogger this time around, but of course I'm coming at it from the other side.
Repent, no, I keep premonitions, divinations, visionary experiences, and horoscopes strictly to the other blog. What guides my predictions here is history: the recognition that similar causes produce similar effects in human societies.
11/2/16, 8:44 PM
patriciaormsby said...
The third meeting of the Kanto Green Wizards will be held on Sunday Nov. 6 (that's three days from now) at the Asakawa Kompira Shrine. People start showing up at 11:00 a.m. but most come by at about noon. It is potluck, so please bring something to share.
The weather looks good, but in the case of awful weather, this will be cancelled due Ikeda-san. A little rain is no problem, because we open the shrine.
To get there, go to Takao Station on the JR or Keio line and exit through the south exit (which apparently means going through the Keio part of the station). The small mountain that Asakawa Kompira Shrine crowns is directly west of the station (in fact, the train tunnels under it). For a map, see the Green Wizards site, "Meet-Ups" page. I am told that the Google map is practically invisible on small, hand-held screens, so it would be best to confirm the location before coming out. But nearly everyone in town knows where Kompira Shrine is, so if you get lost ask. (It's not the prominent golden UFO thing --that's to the south of the station.)
If you lack confidence in directions, RSVP here or at the Green Wizards site, and I'll arrange to meet you at the station.
11/2/16, 8:53 PM
Guilherme de Baskerville said...
Just wanted to point out that the article in The Atlantic, which Breanna put up as a "damning" piece praising Washington insiders, is actually pretty good reading. I can sense echoes of JMG positions on the role of "old fashioned democratic institutions" and his assertments that the US government machine has become gridlocked by conflicting interests that have managed to "veto" anything that is disagreable to themselves, at the expense of the wider public. It is a piece about the virtues of "the establishment", but I don't see it as entirely without merit....
11/2/16, 8:56 PM
patriciaormsby said...
@JMG, I will read your article (been missing you) later.
11/2/16, 8:58 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Mark, oh, granted, but the shape and trajectory of the craziness will likely depend on who wins.
Shane, I didn't abandon it, I just didn't want to add that additional bit of complexity to this post.
Avery, exactly. If the current US government implodes, whatever government or governments replace it will have a very rough row to hoe.
Donalfagan, and notice the strident effort to shove a class issue back into the convenient categories of race and sex. Utterly typical.
Armata, well, we'll see. I wouldn't be surprised by some amount of violent unrest, whoever wins, but I don't think we're quite ready for civil war yet. Give it another five to ten years. No, I hadn't heard about Farrakhan; thanks for the heads up.
Onething, yes, there's that!
Cherokee, fortunately we stayed clear of bars this time! Your comment on "living in the moment" is astute -- and of course it's always convenient for the political status quo to convince people to do that, too, since it keeps them from noticing which way the wind is blowing over time. Hmm. I may want to bring that into a discussion of Barbara Ehrenreich's fine book Brightsided.
Pygmycory, I think you'd find a lot of takers for such a bumper sticker.
Glenn (if I may), you're still missing the existence of millions of people too poor to afford the premiums and too rich to get the subsidies. I'm one of them and I know many, many others.
Megan, you've never heard of him and neither have I. He probably holds down a midlevel job in the Pentagon right now.
Robert, I ain't arguing. The events of a century ago have been rather on my mind in recent years!
Curtis, thanks for the link. The tension between shared values and freedom is always a challenging one, but it's also critically important -- thank you for catching that in my narrative!
Matthew, exactly. Like every other policy, it benefits some people and costs others, and who benefits and who pays have been taboo subjects for too long.
11/2/16, 8:59 PM
Thomas Prentice said...
11/2/16, 9:08 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Candace, and people in some states are getting hit with much higher hikes, and get lower subsidies, higher deductibles, and higher co-pays. It really does suck.
Mark, the law has sent health care costs soaring year over year, while more and more insurance companies pull out of the market and the exchanges go broke. I think it's going to take much, much more than the bandaid you've offered to fix it.
Dennis, sounds like a plan.
Bill, this may be another regional thing, because I hear people talking about issues, not just party line votes or fantasies. As for your conclusion, though, no argument there. I think the crucial figure will simply be how many people on each side vote vs. staying at home with a muttered "frack it."
Ian, I watched the documentary, and I didn't see any particular way out of the predicament being offered -- just more of the same rhetoric the American left has been using to prevent constructive change for decades. I agree, for what it's worth, that the US has far and away the worst (and most expensive) health care in the industrial world, but Clinton's proposed solution is to keep the Obamacare fiasco in place, which has made health care here even more expensive than it was. That's not exactly going to help!
Rich, I think we're going to have an interesting conversation down the road! I'm considering proposing a series of Constitutional amendments, which might be called the Bill of Redress, to clean up the messes that 220-odd years have made of our republic.
Guilherme, I had a hard time getting past the shrill tone of the thing, but you're right that it deserves a closer read.
11/2/16, 9:11 PM
onething said...
Surely you aren't saying that she would be a two-term president?
At any rate, I do not believe her health can hold out that long.
11/2/16, 9:12 PM
Justin said...
Although I find a lot of the alt-right to simply be racists for the sake of feeling superior and therefore ignore many of them them, I still kind of like Red Ice Radio & a few other 'alt right' podcasts. They recently had Ryan Landry of Weimerica (http://www.socialmatter.net/) on. Ryan talked about the petro-dollar and the possibility of the US going to war with a competent opponent as part of a Faustian bargain to maintain the US dollar. Ryan specifically mentioned the spectre of a burning aircraft carrier with 2000 seamen dead and what that would do to the American psyche. Sound familiar?
11/2/16, 9:22 PM
Guilherme de Baskerville said...
As JMG has long said, and some other people are now catching on, the traditional labour/progressive parties have been hijacked by an upper-class urban liberal agenda, worldwide. The result has been a disenfranchisement of the ordinary working classes, specially in smaller cities, rural/semi rural areas and on the perypheries of some big cities (and by that I don't mean the geographic suburbs, which could be upper-class, but just working-class neighborhoods). Again, a worldwide phenomenon. What has been happening lately, and with increasing speed, is that this vital electorate has given up on traditional politics and have been giving the middle finger to the political establishment by electing non-traditional right wing candidates, often extremly right-wing populists.
Brexit had this undertone. Trump. Duterte in the Philipines. Several righ-wing parties gaining rapid ground in Europe. This is happening to some extent here in Brazil, etc.
These movements are NOT going to make anything better, though. They tend to do unproductive things, like scapegoating minorities of various kinds for economic problems, start nationalistic wars and promote ethnic cleasing, in the extreme. This, couple with formation of warband culture on the outskirts, may be what causes the system to finally enter it's death-kneel. It won't be pretty, though, if it goes like that. Some people seem to forget that, as intolerable as things seem to be near a collapse, the collapse itself is worse. It's faint reasurrance that things will sort themselves up in the long term. The long term can take a loooooong while.
I'm really sad by the commenter above that illustrated her dreadful economic situation and the impact that healthcare insurance has had on her family, but putting your hopes in Trump is, I'm afraid, very misguided. You're unlikely to experience any improvement if he wins, because I don't think he's sincere in the populist stuff he talks about. Electing him, though, will have a non-trivial chance of hastening the end of whatever is left os american democracy.
The solution, it seems, would be for some sort of political movement that abandons the current liberal urban upper-class interest and forms some sort of aproach with moderate political/social working and middle class conservatives to try to create some form of political movement against the financial class and corporate hegemony. It seems that Bernie Sanders was trying to create such a movement, but failed to atract enough support and was torpedoed by the Dem establishment. I hope his movement doesn't die in the US and more people like him start to crop up on the left-leaning spectrum of political life in the future, in more places. Could be too late, though. It's difficult to say.
11/2/16, 9:39 PM
onething said...
11/2/16, 9:43 PM
thenoteswhichdonotfit said...
The only southern state I've ever been to before is Florida, and it's been twenty years since I was last there. I'm from an old Florida family (more than a century in Florida), but since my Florida relatives are all dead or no longer in Florida, I don't have any reason to go back. Though my father considers himself a Floridian, he never intends to visit again since the Florida he grew up in no longer exists, and he does not like the new Florida which has replaced it.
11/2/16, 10:07 PM
Donald Hargraves said...
Second, as for Romneycare 2.0 (I'm not giving Obama credit for theft, nor am I letting Romney off the hook), I believe it was set up to fail at some point. It just happens that things are falling apart during the 2016 Election (and that may have been the plan all along...)
Third, I actually voted Socialist Party for President (Emidio Soltysik, if you need to write-in your candidate). I would have voted Communist, but they became the "Independent" radical wing of the Democratic Party in 1990.
11/2/16, 10:48 PM
Genevieve Hawkins said...
11/2/16, 10:55 PM
team10tim said...
First off, wow. I don't disagree with any particular point, but it's a more than a little bit shocking and bracing to see it all spelled out clearly and concisely in a short essay. I'll put it to you like this: Imagine that a pan galactic gargle blaster (for those who don't know look it up, it will be fun) was a fancy coffee drink instead of booze. I feel uncomfortably lucid instead of pleasantly debilitated.
Second, to JMG and Breanna, I got about halfway through the Atlantic article before I realized two interesting things. One, they also realize that politics is inescapably related to matters of competing interests, as was discussed here recently. And that cooperation, coalition, collusion, corruption, brat in Russian, guānxì in Chinese, graft, or honest graft, whatever you want to call it, is a feature not a bug. As the social mammals that we are this is something that is going to happen and there are ways to utilize it and mitigate the less desirable aspects. Two, they incorrectly, in my opinion, blame our current problems on a break down in the system of graft and political machines. I think the breakdown lies elsewhere in two related areas. The decadent, entrenched, and disconnected elite and a fracturing of the collective consensus. As you know know from Toynbee, Spengler, Gibbons, et al the entrenched elite is perennial problem for civilizations, but the fracturing of collective consensus feels more like a fourth turning, 2.5 crises, revolutionary war, civil war, great depression kinda thing that if handled well might be ok on the other side.
Normally I conclude with a 'Thanks, Tim' but thanks implies the sort of pleased gratitude one might have for the instructor after an ordinary class in Tai Chi.
Uncomfortably grateful and appreciative, altered and affected, and unpleasantly aware, almost as if my consciousness had been smacked with a highly caffeinated slice of lemon wrapped around a brick,
Tim
11/2/16, 11:35 PM
Keith Huddleston said...
Kind of a side-note, I realize, but I'll conclude by saying I have more faith in your reader's ability to revitalize the social-capital and cultural life around them on the micro-level than I have for either of these candidates's macro-policies.
I will be sitting this election out.
11/3/16, 12:11 AM
drhooves said...
As for our political system, the fact that the "Clinton Machine" has struggled against socialist Bernie and now bonehead Trump tells me our two party system is on its last legs. I believe you've blogged about that before, and perhaps the next election cycle might make way for a independent or populist candidate that proposes sensible change like converting away from a growth economy dependent on fossil fuels to "rehumanized" models relying on manual labor, a foreign policy that embraces something different than trying to hang on to the empire, and a reboot of some of the conservation movements of the 1970s.
There should be plenty of misery for the masses to rally around.
11/3/16, 12:27 AM
barry_NZ said...
So yes, fix up your electoral problems but don't grasp at straws.
I am reminded of when Homer Simpson got elected with the slogan "I'm someone else"
11/3/16, 1:10 AM
Fred said...
11/3/16, 3:34 AM
Mikep said...
11/3/16, 3:41 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thank you! Yes I would appreciate your thoughts on that matter and I have heard you refer to that particular book in podcasts, but have not read it myself. I may have to correct that lack. Is it a worthy book? The insight came this morning when I was observing the dogs running through the orchard on their important canine business in the warm spring sunshine and they were absolutely 100% in the moment and chasing reptiles, insects and phantoms. As always there was the human contrast to the canine behaviour which drummed home the insight.
The thing I'm curious to know is whether the "Left" as it is generally understood to be, actually is the "Left" anymore? A very cheeky person may suggest that they have possibly "left" the building? ;-)!
What an exciting week or two you are all in for!
Down here, the powers that be announced that the Hazelwood power station will be decommissioned in March with the loss of 900 jobs in what appears to be an already economically depressed area. Sure, the power station burnt the plentiful supplies of brown coal which are readily available in this state and the power station was enormously inefficient, but I just help shake the feeling that somehow this closure was linked to the shutdown of the vehicle manufacturing industries. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. I heard someone on the radio from a think tank suggesting that electricity security will be fine because we can rely on generation facilities in the state to the north of us (New South Wales) which burns black coal. Now, call me a Cassandra but the links between both here and South Australia (relying on Wind) and also Tasmania (relying on Hydro) both broke within the last year causing all sorts of disasters. What could possibly go wrong with this absurd plan? And I am personally very curious as to why nobody in the media seems to apply this same sort of thinking to industries such as tourism.
Back in the day those areas used to employ huge number of apprentices, but not so anymore.
I recall that many years ago the most popular Prime Minister in our recent history, faced a smear campaign in the media during the election about how he had been to a strip club. All that media smear campaign did was reinforce in the minds of the voters – who it should be pointed out are not the people setting the moral tone of the media - that this dude was just like them and his popularity soared. It was a bad thing for us when apparently a cabal of mining magnates pooled together - and this is all speculation - a $22m war fund and took him out of his job. As you quite rightly point out, nobody expects their politicians to be Saints, I certainly don't. I judge them on whether they can get a job done. And on that note, it is worthwhile mentioning that recording one and a half years of metadata at the expense of the average person down here went through parliament like a breeze – despite one notable politician who was responsible for the implementation not even being able to explain what metadata actually was – unlike their strange displays of gridlock on other matters nowadays. Oh, how they must fear your night. On that note, I’m going for an actual walk in the dark forest here and will enjoy the antics of all of the creatures of the night.
Cheers
Chris
11/3/16, 4:24 AM
donalfagan said...
https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-and-the-rise-of-white-identity-in-politics-67037
[[[Many political commentators credit Donald Trump’s rise to white voters’ antipathy toward racial and ethnic minorities. However, we believe this focus on racial resentment obscures another important aspect of racial thinking.
In a study of white Americans’ attitudes and candidate preferences, we found that Trump’s success reflects the rise of “white identity politics” – an attempt to protect the collective interests of white voters via the ballot box. Whereas racial prejudice refers to animosity toward other racial groups, white identity reflects a sense of connection to fellow white Americans.
We’re not the first to tie Trump’s candidacy to white identity politics. But our data provide some of the clearest evidence that ongoing demographic changes in the United States are increasing white racial identity. White identity, in turn, is pushing white Americans to support Trump.
When we talk about white identity, we’re not referring to the alt-right fringe, the white nationalist movement or others who espouse racist beliefs. Rather, we’re talking about everyday white Americans who, perhaps for the first time, are racially conscious.]]]
An Alternet article from last week takes class concerns at face value: We Are Ignoring the Worst Dangers of Trumpism at Our Own Peril
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/left-ignores-donald-trump-own-peril
[[[It is interesting to read bemused articles by correspondents at elite magazines like the Atlantic and the New Yorker, wondering who the Trump supporters really are (as they do after every populist upsurge), acting as though they were writing about aliens from another planet (which they are in a sense, since the elite commentators cannot understand why the Trumpists take such a dire view of the economy, since everything, from their point of view, seems pretty decent, with a 5% unemployment rate, the stock market doing well, and the evidence of their own booming urban areas).]]]
11/3/16, 6:16 AM
Dan the Farmer said...
The interesting part is that every time he's tried to throw the race (because, you know, being president would be work and no fun) it's backfired and raised his status.
I think it's a giant con job.
But how about that arctic ice volume....?
11/3/16, 6:35 AM
Brian Chadwick said...
11/3/16, 6:42 AM
David, by the lake said...
I second the motion to call for a constitutional convention. It is the best way to (hopefully) deal with our issues in a non-violent manner.
11/3/16, 6:53 AM
Tidlösa said...
In summary, this means that Trump is at best moderately better than Clinton would have been, but hardly the Savior of Western Civilization. I think you are right when you said that thousands of people are better qualified to be president than Trump - the problem is, Clinton isn´t one of them! In the future, Trump will probably be seen as a transitional figure to whatever comes next.
Which brings me to your Soviet analogy. Your comparison of Clinton to Chernenko and Kaine to Gorbachev is actually quite funny - yes, Chernenko was the poor old man who died in office after only a year or so, making a mockery of the entire Soviet leadership in the process. I´m old enough to remember him (well, dimly - I´m surprised anyone else does!). Hillary is obviously sick and might very well die in office if elected. Kaine is the young, good but weak guy who will fail to hold the Empire together if he ever becomes POTUS.
However, I doubt America will ever get its Yeltsin (unless Trump is Yeltsin?). If you´re lucky, you will transition directly from Gorbachev to Putin. If you´re less lucky...well, there´s always Ivan the Terrible...
11/3/16, 6:55 AM
Bruno Bolzon said...
11/3/16, 6:58 AM
Rita Narayanan said...
contrary to popular romantic notions religious/traditional lives are complex & not a performed version of the film Avatar. So educating girls/water/food projects easier than vocation. Scares me this trend **let girls go to school and become doctors/engineers trend.
Vocation & recreating communities would involve a **regression in modern thinking & revisiting everything that was simplistically tagged as **evil.
Mr Kunstler's work often talks about these matters with regard to America.
Thanks for another educative & unusual post.Regards :)
11/3/16, 6:59 AM
Tidlösa said...
You´re right about Kaine, of course. Hillary picked him because he´s weak, but precisely for that reason, he can be easily controlled by the Deep Government if the Democrats are elected and Hillary goes. Or if the Deep Government makes Hillary go...
Eagerly awaiting your ideas on the constitution, and how to win the workers to a Green perspective. Is there any deeper thought in wikileaking this *after* the the most hotly contested election since Lincoln-Douglas? ;-)
11/3/16, 7:06 AM
Ric K said...
11/3/16, 7:17 AM
Bobo the Dorkboy said...
11/3/16, 7:29 AM
Susan Roberts, MDiv, OTR/L said...
11/3/16, 7:33 AM
Mark said...
Firstly, there are no simple, quick fixes. It's a complex system that relies on financing growth, which requires more people getting treated for more things (some treatments of highly dubious value, some less so)and someone paying the prices necessary for everyone to get paid. The "someone" paying for it includes a mix of taxpayers, employers or individuals. And the "everyone" getting paid includes those numerous insurers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, clinicians, nurses, administration staff, software companies, shareholders, consultants, government agencies, construction companies, equipment manufacturers, retailers, and on and on, that collectively make up the system. And that system is now around 18% of US GDP. A fifth of our economy is in the business of healthcare! Since none of these players seem remotely interested in not getting paid, the system will continue to try to grow, aided and abetted by policy makers who don't want hurt this great engine of the economy. The only difference between the Trump and Clinton plans comes wrt to the balance of the "someones" who have to try to pay for it all. I'm guessing Clinton will try to taxpayer-subsidize the onboarding of more young and healthy people into the risk pool, while continuing to screw the middle segment of the population that JMG has discussed; and Trump will wave his hands about cross-state competition while figuring out how to withdraw or water down the subsidies and pre-existing condition terms of the ACA, pushing more costs back to lower income individuals. But neither of them will seriously try to cut the expense of the system. Because economic growth and jobs.
To go forward, we have to go back, retrotopia style. Which means fewer people getting fewer expensive treatments, walking away from the system. Which means taking better care of our health, using alternative treatments, using allopathic medicine more sparingly ("surgically", perhaps), knowing ourselves and our constitutions better, and coming to terms with dying rather more quickly than we might have been planning to. This is where we are heading anyway, since the system as it stands is getting decidedly crumbly. Coming to terms with this is one particularly challenging plank in the "collapse now and avoid the rush" platform. Personally I need to take a monthly shot of a medication without which I will suffer a slow decline and death. So I am reliant on the pharmaceutical system staying intact to some extent; meanwhile there are herbal things that I am trying, and making some progress. But it isn't going to be easy, especially for people who are heavily dependent, or believe themselves to be dependent, on the current system.
11/3/16, 7:38 AM
Robert Carran said...
11/3/16, 7:42 AM
eerie said...
11/3/16, 7:52 AM
Anthony Romano said...
So I see this as one way of measuring your arguments. If Trump supporters really are primarily working class folk that just want to see their lot improve then, should Trump win Colorado, both of those ballot measures should also pass. If Trump wins and those ballot measures both fail, well then something else is going on.
in the latter case, I'd say it is the result of affluent conservatives (and there are quite a lot of those) supporting Trump in great numbers while also stomping down on anything that might redistribute wealth.
11/3/16, 8:39 AM
Alex Blaidd said...
I read and shared the piece on Cracked.com the other day too - suffice to say not many people took notice of it. Over on this side of the pond the parallels with Brexit are impossible to miss. The wails of the affluent just show to me how clueless they really are - I mean how do they even pretend that Clinton is better? I'm not of the opinion that Trump will do much to improve the fate of the States, but I can see why many will vote for him, and certainly wouldn't be so presumptuous as to castigate them for it - and what do I know about their situation or Trump? He might well do what's needed to ease the collapse for many millions. It's the same here with Brexit. I didn't vote Leave in the end, not because I like the EU, but because I didn't want the Tories to gain even more power (which is how I saw it). But what do I know? I know that my hometown, Swansea, is an economic backwater, that without the life support machine (benefits) will quickly descend into crime. The once thriving city centre is now full of charity shops, and not ones that you feel terribly inclined to buy anything from - they're full of the junk of the last decade. Even the charity shops groan and wheeze. They're punctuated by kebab shops and mobile phone shops that promise to fix tour phone and sell you fancy phone covers. It couldn't be further removed from the affluence of the gentrified parts of London. Quelle surprise, The once labour stronghold of Swansea voted for Brexit and is now a stronghold of UKIP. Abandoned by the Blairites where else do they turn?
I don't like Trump, I couldn't vote for him (nor could I vote for Clinton) - I'm disappointed that Sanders isn't on the ticket, much like I'm disappointed that over here Corbyn will more than likely not get a shot either. But then I'm another middle class, liberal, affluent citizen so what do I know? But if I was one of the working class struggling for a job I'd have a punt on him - why not? What's there to lose? The fact that people don't grasp that's the motivating mentality of many shows they haven't got a clue what's going on in the world. If you asked me though, I'd rather Trump get in than Clinton. If for no other reason than Trump will help to drag out the shadow of Western society into the light and with that may save us and the 'others' around the world that we perpetrate against, some suffering. Clinton, on the other hand will only continue to suppress our collective shadow by letting us all pretend we're far more decent and civilised than we really are. Now that might be a little unfair on Trump - for he may make some important political interventions, despite his crass character - but at least he doesn't pretend to be what he's not.
I'm going to largely ignore the histrionics of the media in the next two to four weeks, because it'll just be the wailing of children upset that their toys are being taken away. The changes to Western society that are impending pale compared to the so-called 'crisis' many mainstream papers are discussing Trump and Brexit - I'll save my energy for the crises further down the line - the whole debacle of the two things reminds me of some of your earlier posts on how we must make a spectacle out of something more ordinary. Though I do also realise that Trump and perhaps Brexit is a bit of a rude awakening to many.
On a final note, I remember a friend of mine about 3 months back saying that it was 'impossible' that Trump will get in. Those were the words. He quoted some study or other - I just smiled and said that it couldn't be further from the truth, and that there's no way they could make such a proclamation. He continued that it was impossible. And 10 years ago he would have been right, but it seems we have now moved into a new territory with new rules.
11/3/16, 8:40 AM
Clay Dennis said...
11/3/16, 8:50 AM
Allie said...
Another great observation I've made is when I tell these same people that I am not going to vote for either of the candidates. I tell them that I'm not voting for either because I think they are both liars and will continue the bipartisan consensus regardless of what they say on the campaign trail. After I finish explaining my reason for not voting for either the Trump/Hillary supporter will almost verbatim say: "Well that is just a vote for [the bad candidate]" When I point out that supporters in the other camp say the exact same thing they seem totally surprised by that. A very fascinating thing to observe.
That brings me to another point specifically about Trump. I don't think it is an open question at all about him actually tackling these real issues if he wins. I think he will go right back to the bipartisan "Loot America" policies that have been in place since Reagan. My reason for thinking that is his economic policy team. It is chock full of some of the biggest billionaire looters on the planet. The same people who have pushed for the bipartisan consensus and profited handsomely from it.
His economic policy team:
John Paulson is the founder of investment firm Paulson and Co., and made billions betting against subprime mortgages in 2007 leading up to the financial crisis.
Roth is the billionaire head of Vornado Realty.
Hamm is a billionaire oilman and CEO of Continental Resources.
Lorber is the CEO of tobacco and real estate company Vector Group.
Mnuchin is Trump's national finance chairman, and the chairman and CEO of hedge fund Dune Capital Management.
Barrack served in the Reagan administration as deputy undersecretary of interior, and is founder and chairman of Colony Capital.
Calk is the chairman and CEO of The Federal Savings Bank.
Beal is the billionaire founder and chairman of Beal Bank and Beal Bank USA.
Feinberg is the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Cerberus Capital Management.
Malpass is a former Bear Stearns chief economist who has had high-ranking roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Navarro is an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Moore is a former member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board and a founder of the Club for Growth.
DiMicco is former CEO of steel company Nucor.
Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/05/trump-unveils-economic-policy-team-includes-john-paulson.html
If you want to see Larry Kudlow fawn over these vultures and corporate welfare queens, visit the CNBC link for the video.
And just a reminder for anyone who doesn't remember John Paulson, he worked with Goldman Sachs to purposely pop the housing bubble to make money on shorting it. Other hedge funders and investment banks did the same thing. Pension funds, municipalities, smaller, regional banks were all wiped out by their actions.
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/trump_campaign_economic_advisor_took_20160811
So just based on who he has brought on board to help him craft economic policy makes me think he is just running a con game on the destroyed working class Americans to get elections.
11/3/16, 9:07 AM
blackwyn said...
The media has made the mistake of conflating all recent political "surprises" as part of the same zeitgeist. I'm referring here to Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Brexit. And they are the same in a way, I guess, in the same way that Italian food, Mexican food, and Indian Food are all the same by virtue of the fact that they are "not McDonald's." This would seem to be especially true if you had eaten nothing but McDonald's your whole life (which would kill you very quickly, but anyway...).
The main difference with Brexit is that you have the U.K. *breaking away* from a centralized authority, whereas with Trump you have a political figure who seems to be *craving* the centralized authority. He paints himself as a strong man who is going to solve all our problems, and that he and he alone can accomplish this. He is not a libertarian type who is for states' rights and a non-interventionist foreign policy. Just the opposite, he appears to abhor these ideas. He seems refreshing to some because of his unorthodox style, but his policies appear to be the same old Republicrat trickle down garbage we've been seeing for decades. He makes a lot of noise about immigration but the fact is he has a long track record of hiring immigrants. In short, as you pointed out, there is a very good chance that he cares nothing about the wage class whatsoever.
Ok, so what? He can't be any worse than the Bush-Obama-Clinton dynasties, right? Well, unfortunately, I think that there is a historical precedent of authoritarian types taking advantage of the populace when they are in the kind of dire straits that you described so eloquently in your post. Is Trump that type of authoritarian? Well, that's debatable, I suppose. I happen to think he is, it seems you do not, however this is not something you have addressed in your analysis that I've seen and I think it's an important point of discussion.
11/3/16, 9:08 AM
Friction Shift said...
One commenter noted that this has been going on since the administration of Bill Clinton. I would offer it extends back to the years of Saint Ronald Reagan, although he at least had sense enough to mix it up militarily with lowly Grenada and not with Russia or China, as the current crop of loonies in the Obama/Clinton orbit seem bent on doing. As an aside, if memory serves, Reagan invaded Grenada to “save” US citizens from Grenada's Marxist government. I think many of the US nationals were in Grenada to attend medical school, no doubt because they could do so without incurring massive student loan debt. Oh, the irony.
During the Reagan years, the offshoring of American jobs picked up major steam as his administration took the muzzles off of corporations. Here in timber country, for example, the economy of family-owned and private timber companies -- which were managed for generations for sustainable harvests – was laid waste by predatory corporate raiders, who would buy companies with borrowed money, liquidate the private forests, and then completely liquidate what was left of the companies, leaving entire communities devastated. Those companies that remained furthered the pain by turning increasingly to automation. Many shipped raw logs directly to Japan and China because it was cheaper than milling timber in the US. The phrase I heard from people I knew in the industry was “cut and run.” Enter, stage left and on cue, the environmentalists, who argued that this policy should not be allowed on public lands, and we had the perfect scapegoat. It didn't hurt that they could easily be stereotyped as rich, latte-drinking Marin County liberals, and that the guvmint was seen to be implementing their policies.
Our region has never really recovered. Rural poverty in Oregon is some of the worst in the west, the people caught in it are really pissed, and 2/3 of the state (geographically, but not numerically – The populous I-5 corridor from Portland to Eugene determines Oregon's status as a Blue State) will be voting solidly for Donald Trump.
I read Orlov regularly, and I think his analysis of the parallels between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the probable collapse of the United States' empire is very powerful. But I wonder if we push the comparison a bit far in trying to figure out if Trump is our Yeltsin and Clinton is our, what? Andropov? I rather think that Trump, if elected, will more likely be our Silvio Berlusconi. Trump has channeled the former middle and working classes' anger effectively because he smells a con, and he is nothing if not an accomplished confidence man. I predict his tenure as President would be characterized by one scandal and outrage after another, by influence-peddling that puts even the Clintons to shame, by self-aggrandizing posturing, by vendettas against enemies both real and perceived, by completely inept administration, and by doing absolutely nothing to alleviate the misery of those who voted for him. Trump wouldn't destroy America, but, like Berlusconi, would advance its status as an economic basket case that threatens to pull a lot of the world down the drain with it.
Berlusconi had his media empire. There are rumors that Trump is exploring the foundation of a media empire of his own. Berlusconi was also pretty cozy with Putin. There are lots of parallels, but of course Berlusconi did not have a nuclear arsenal at his disposal.
My wife an I were traveling in Germany this past spring and were constantly asked the German equivalent of “WTF?” when it came to Donald Trump. When I explained my theory of Trump being our version of Berlusconi, they immediately got it.
11/3/16, 9:12 AM
Friction Shift said...
11/3/16, 9:14 AM
Jerome Purtzer said...
I think that The Donald has more in common with the Romanovs than Lenin and Marx. His first order of business would be to build a wall around the new improved Trump House-still white but more Trump. Melenia would redecorate with the Louis XIV flair that she is known for-solid gold toilets, bidets and accoutrements. She and The Donald would show the rabble the greatest reality show ever conceived. Our 70" flat screens have never seen such opulence and splendor. Truly, the past is prologue and it is only fitting for the greatest empire ever!
11/3/16, 9:15 AM
Raymond Duckling said...
So, here it is. The title is: LOS CANDIDATOS.
Los dos cabeza a cabeza
van los campeones odiados,
Doña Hilaria, la abadesa
y Donaldo el renegado.
Casi llegando a la meta
les sale al paso la Huesuda.
"Momentito," les espeta,
"ya se acabó la dulzura".
"A él primero, a él primero"
le grita la de Illinois.
"Quianque'l no sea caballero,
femina y hermana vos sois."
"Corrupta, cínica y loca
protectora de ilegales,
quiere a America en la boca
por sus ligas maritales".
La Muerte muy impaciente
les pone un alto a los dos.
"Ni en los infiernos ardientes
han de aguantar a vos".
Continua la Blanca Dama,
"Hágase, pues, como he dicho."
echó mano a su guadaña
y los cortó en un suspiro.
Por el Capitolio van dos,
dos fantasmas vagabundos.
Porque ni el Diablo ni Dios
quisieron a estos difuntos.
11/3/16, 9:18 AM
Geoff Krueger said...
11/3/16, 9:28 AM
Keith Hammer said...
11/3/16, 9:31 AM
Mister Roboto said...
11/3/16, 9:40 AM
Fred said...
I really appreciate it.
And I TRY to get other intelligent people to read your blog, even if most of them never do…….
11/3/16, 10:09 AM
M Smith said...
John Michael's moving essay is profound, as always, and the "Cracked" piece sat me down and shut me up with a quickness. I've never been able to express what I, too, feel is the loss of a way of life where men did indeed support and defend their families and communities. That includes old women who have no men in their households. Oh, and they'd make sure their kids shoveled my walk for me! In turn, those men could count on those old women to keep an eye out in general and care for their children if need be. No money exchanged hands and it all worked out.
Today, though, the PC powers that be declare that I must put up with a troublesome drug dealer who was already on welfare and continued to make babies (till he overdosed and died) because he was married to a black woman, therefore my objections to his antics could only have been racism on my part. Now that he's dead and the wife has abandoned the house, I breathe easier. But I certainly did remember, with the peculiar clarity that C.S. Lewis mentions in connection with souls arriving in Hell, the days when the men in the neighborhood would have learned he was bothering me, gotten together with little discussion, and taught him a lesson he'd never forget. Even in suburban Chicago with no need to provide our own food, the men accepted their role as protector, and we all looked up to them. Imagine that.
11/3/16, 11:09 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Good lord, your business cards must be as long as dinner menus. :P
A very large number of people are rethinking their allegiances that’s for sure. I don’t know how a social democratic movement can get off the ground without kicking the lefty purity tests to the curb. All the left-of-center publications I read are still obsessed with the latest race/gender/sexual politics. It is largely impossible to talk about anything substantive with these folk. Their reaction to Trump seems to come more from their fear of the unknown he represents. Well that and the ethno-nationalist elements that are supporting him. The lefty circles want a national solution, but not the possibility that the solution may come from someone outside their tribe who doesn’t care to pay lip service to their purity tests.
I agree with Chris as well, the whole “live in the moment” mantra is really indicative of a bunch of people who don’t want to be responsible for themselves. It’s hyper prevalent on the left-side of the political spectrum. I tried repeatedly to get my newspaper off the ground, and though I got a lot of lip service in support, no one actually bothered to read to paper. Keep in mind I live in a college town that considers itself very politically active. I have a grim feeling that the collapse of the bubble will be far more catastrophic for the left than for the right.
Regards,
Varun
11/3/16, 11:18 AM
whereami? said...
I have been traveling through the state with my high schooler visiting various colleges. While we were at the Eastern shore last week, I noticed Trump signs on commercial properties, large agri-business farms and Purdue chicken farm franchises. While coming home from a college visit in Baltimore, there were no Trump signs at an early voting site in Pimlico, an area which comprises mostly black working class residents.
Back home in Frederick, most Trump signs appear to be in the yards of homes in middle class housing developments. I’ve also seen Trump bumper stickers on vehicles leaving Fort Detrick at the end of the work day. Fort Detrick is the military’s biochemical warfare/research site and is one of the largest employers in Frederick County.
As for Clinton, I see even less evidence of support for her. I will be surprised if she wins the popular vote. I do find it ironic that she is actually more socially conservative than Trump. She is not divorced. She was raised in the Methodist Church. Her father was a business owner and she was a Republican until 1968. She is about as boring as Bob Dole. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why she is so unpopular, eh?
11/3/16, 11:28 AM
Steve W. said...
Clinton w/Democrats control of Congress: cries of rigged election, possible social unrest, more of the same from government.
Clinton w/Republicans control of Congress: complete government paralysis.
Trump w/Republican control of Congress: pray we don't become authoritarian or get involved in a nuclear war somewhere.
Trump w/Democrats control of Congress: complete government paralysis, or ---? Something more interesting?
C'mon, JMG and fans: I need some words of encouragement!
11/3/16, 11:40 AM
Pantagruel7 said...
11/3/16, 11:56 AM
Rita said...
I am attending local classes for retired people, the Renaissance Society. A speaker for one of the classes pointed out the ways in which government decisions dating back to the New Deal continue to shape the geography of race and poverty in the area. The decision to redline black and Latino neighborhoods from receiving government sponsored mortgages left those areas poor, poorly supplied with amenities such as hospitals and clinics, transit, shopping and so forth. Really amazing to see and think about. Sure it is true in many other areas as well.
I left my job this past January. The first Medicare insurance plan I enrolled in had $0 premium and reasonable co pays, etc. For 2017 an almost identical plan will be $29 a month. I foresee having to reshop every year. Ugh.
11/3/16, 11:56 AM
David, by the lake said...
Glancing at RCP's trending polls (the 4-way, which I think is more accurate with respect to how folks will vote this time)
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton_vs_johnson_vs_stein-5952.html
I noticed that while all the talk previously was about how Trump had a "ceiling" of support (40%, if I recall the discussion correctly), it seems that if anyone is showing a ceiling, it is HRC at ~45%. Trump, in the meantime, has blown through that 40% level and is rapidly closing. The chart is a rather dramatic in its demonstration of this.
A scenario to further fuel the flames of discontent -- HRC's electoral college firewall holds, but she narrowly loses the popular vote to Trump. (Likely neither major candidate will top 50%, but it is possible that his popular vote could top hers.) Two potential results of this: 1) HRC has no mandate and her political capital is weakened considerably, 2) the Republican establishment comes under fire by Trump supporters for its weak backing of Trump (and in some cases disavowal), being seen as having cost him the election. So HRC's presidency is hobbled and the Republican party collapses.
These last few days before the 8th will be interesting. Of course, the days after the 8th aren't exactly going to be dull, either.
11/3/16, 12:48 PM
David, by the lake said...
11/3/16, 1:42 PM
Mister Roboto said...
11/3/16, 1:55 PM
Clay Dennis said...
11/3/16, 2:23 PM
Rich_P said...
So regardless of which flavor of disaster we get on Tuesday, I hope America realizes that Congress is Article I, the executive branch is Article II, and the latter has grown too powerful at the expense of the former.
11/3/16, 2:35 PM
Gabriela Augusto said...
I also think democracy is the best government system, namely because it is the only where people can get rid of governments without having to resort to violence. I was talking about "our brand" of democracy. There must be something very wrong in a system where government attracts people like this. I do believe that 8 in 10 Americans must be more honest, trustworthy and sensible than any of yours two leading candidates. The same is valid for many of the leaders of the western democracies I am aware of.
11/3/16, 2:40 PM
RAnderson said...
11/3/16, 2:44 PM
Marc L Bernstein said...
Morris Berman is inclined to believe that a Trump presidency will accelerate the deterioration of the USA, although Berman did not spell out any detailed mechanism by which that acceleration would occur.
My sense is that a Trump presidency would be a debacle and a farce. Donald Trump has no idea how to govern, if past experience is an indication. Furthermore, his populist rhetoric is probably just empty words. After all, he lies so routinely even his own lawyers prepared for his lies in advance of their meetings. Trump could easily resign or be impeached within a year or so of being elected and then we would have Pence as president, a scientifically illiterate, sanctimonious man with neat hair, a smug manner and a cruel heart. Poor white folks are desperate and probably don't care, but Trump is not the answer, as much as they would like to think so.
11/3/16, 2:54 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Forgot to mention that I was very glad to hear that you managed to avoid those bars on your most recent trip (I do hope that you managed to score a dark ale somewhere though?). Your story of the ever multiplying television screens marauding across the landscape made for quite the gothic horror tale! Or a comedy like the story of Tribbles? The funny thing I find with those screens is that the sound is always turned down and so you see the bright flashies and the talking heads bobbing and dancing around. That practice is all very strange, but then it may make some people feel comfortable, I guess.
Cheers
Chris
11/3/16, 3:05 PM
Bill Man said...
Hillary is a slimy lawyer/politician but she has never stooped to such depravity as the Trump U scam, nor ever come close. I too find the liberal elite acting too dismissive of the real pain we are feeling, like the biggest problem facing America today is which gender bathroom to use. But, I find the Birther Right to be an existential threat. The Birther Right has no problem telling the biggest and most ridiculous lies to foment hatred and even leaders of Birther Right have threatened "ballot box or bullet box" style threats, church leaders, congressmen and talking heads. They are threatening mass murder not based on some errant policy or actual physical threat,but purely which party gets elected.
Since Trump hasn't held office, our best guess at what his leadership style might be will come from this world leaders whom Trump admires, Putin, Kim Jung Un and Assad. Trump said Assad is an "A grade" leader, a leader who barrel bombed and gassed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens and caused the worst refugee crisis since the Holocaust. And Trump's pal Putin isn't lifting a finger to help deal with the problem Putin helped create, with Putin actually preferring to destabilize the rest of the West with loads of immigrants from a country rife with Islamic terrorism. Having a president who publicly adores bloody tyrants yet insults leaders like Merkel, leaders who lead over nations with better standards of living, better healthcare, better wages and better worker protections, leaders of relatively free societies compared to Syria and North Korea.
I get that many people want to at all costs avoid being seen as biased towards liberal and try to be seen as balanced, but the difference between Clinton and Trump is the difference between a cold sore and brain cancer. I think people of conscience owe it to denounce Trump, particularly for the Trump U fraud. I could forgive Trump and maybe vote for him if Trump paid his share of taxes and compensated the victims of the Trump U scam, because then I'd know he was a changed man, unlike the Trump we see today. Who thinks Trump will do the only right thing and compensate his Trump U fraud victims?
11/3/16, 3:06 PM
dfr2010 said...
Add in almost-certain war in Syria. Clinton is a warmongering chickenhawk neocon cut from the EXACT same cloth as Shrub and Darth Cheney (no, I really don't like those two. Why do you ask?). She wants to do in Syria what they did in Iraq ... and how well has that turned out, especially for the northern part? Add in the fact that is poking the Russian bear directly in the eye, as they have been supporting the Syrian government for years.
Gridlock sounds like the best possible outcome to me. I've actually made the argument that a good reason to vote for Trump (other than the big FU to DC) is that Congress will not be inclined to play ball, and he will certainly return the favor.
11/3/16, 3:07 PM
Helix said...
"I voted... and now it burns when I pee"
"I voted... and I just threw up in my mouth"
"I voted... and now I am dead to myself"
Yep.
Down here in central Virginia, it's pretty clear that the right is arming and is looking for a fight. We're starting to hear the refrain "if you don't vote for Trump, it's a vote for Hillary", usually delivered with a steely-eyed stare that makes you think they might rather be looking at you down the barrel of an AR-15. The first time I heard this was last night. But then I heard it twice again this morning. I guess the MSM has been busy. Meanwhile, those on the left spew their usual drivel. Those in the middle are generally just depressed.
By the way, Virginia is an open-carry state, meaning that it's perfectly legal to carry a gun into the polls. I work at the polls, so I should probably consider upping my life insurance. Added to that, it is now legal here to use your cell phone in the polling centers, specifically so you can take a selfie proudly displaying your filled-in ballot. I just can't wait for the day when I start getting visits from armed gangs notifying me that they'll be back the day after the election to check my cell phone, and it's going to have a photo on it showing that I voted for -X-. Or else...
11/3/16, 3:35 PM
thenoteswhichdonotfit said...
I do not doubt what you say.
For the record, the places I visited were all in Siskiyou County, right next to where JMG used to live. I wouldn't consider it commuting distance from the Bay Area, since it almost equally distant from San Francisco and Portland.
11/3/16, 4:11 PM
Ethan La Coursiere said...
Oh, and, also, amazing post as usual, Mr. Greer. I feel the need to put this in every comment here, because this really is some of the best in blogging fare.
11/3/16, 5:19 PM
patriciaormsby said...
I am not living in the States, so I haven't pursued this beyond reading and earmarking it. This may not be the only solution to Obama Care out there, but people are motivated to come up with better solutions that can be put in practice. What downsides there may be I do not know.
I enjoyed this week's post very much. You mention Dmitry Orlov, another author who, like you, responds thoughtfully when I contact him. I enjoy his writing for the same reasons I kept travelling to Russia while I could. These folks are down-to-earth with practical nuts-and-bolts experience. You hang out with them and you learn a lot about non only survival but also how to have fun while surviving.
Thus I sincerely hope that 2017 America will be more akin to 1985 USSR and less akin to 1935 Imperial Japan than it is now.
11/3/16, 5:19 PM
Glenn said...
"Glenn (if I may), you're still missing the existence of millions of people too poor to afford the premiums and too rich to get the subsidies. I'm one of them and I know many, many others"
No, I am not missing their existance nor saying the ACA is perfect; it (as passed with many GOP amendments) did a better job of saving the Health Insurance Industry from self destruction than providing decent health care. I was not generalizing, I was being quite specific about my exact situation, in only my state. What I wrote applies to people living below the poverty line in states that accept the Medicaid subsidy from the Feds. Period. Full stop. I'm quite aware that the group immediately above the poverty line suffers the most under the ACA. I'd still like to be making enough to join that group though. And in the Medicaid states, the co-pays are not ruinous. In my particular case (military retiree below Federal Poverty level in Washington State) ACA covers the co-pay that I would otherwise have to pay to use Tricare, the Health Insurance system for military retirees.
There are definite improvements that should be made to the ACA; and the most logical would be extending Medicare to all citizens. I'm not holding my breath though. It's a possibility that if Sec. Clinton wins, and the Senate turns (likely) that Obama's proposal of a Federal option in states where the Insurance plans are too few and too expensive might get wrangled through a divided House of Representatives. Again, I'm not holding my breath, but it's more likely than expanding Medicare right now.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
11/3/16, 5:47 PM
Glenn said...
Like Armata, I receive 404 errors when trying to submit comments, and it takes multiple attempts. The primary problem seems to be from using the review function before posting.
Regarding my ACA remarks. I, like you, appreciate it when people actually read what I wrote and respond to it, rather than responding to what they think I wrote or what I didn't write. Please bear this in mind when responding to my comments.
Thank You,
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
11/3/16, 5:54 PM
Justin said...
I have no doubt that there is a large contingent of Americans of all colours who sip beers together. The Cracked article that JMG linked to alludes to that. There are also ethnic enclaves which are implicitly no-go-zones for people with the wrong skin color.
I'm perfectly happy to live in the colourblind meritocracy that I was taught about in school, and even see some special advantages given to non-whites, and the particular rights of Native Americans respected. The problem is that invariably, ethnic/racial politics comes to the fore whenever enough nonwhites are in one place.
I like the Indian (dot not feather) people I work with, and yet I'm aware the reason they were allowed into Canada was to lower Canadian wages (and prop up rents) for the benefits of the ultra-rich. And so, like many people, I'm in the position of resenting their presence without any ill-will towards the individuals. Considering that some of them have started families here, I certainly wouldn't want them deported either, but they need to stop coming.
There is a nearly 100% black gang in my city which is in the business of grooming young women of any color, getting them addicted to drugs, and selling them as strippers and/or prostitutes in another province. Every time they come up, the usual contingent of black journalists (and virtue-signalling whites) comes out to defend them and call the cops racist. If they were a white gang preying on young black women, it would be a national emergency.
I make no apologies for bad stuff white people have done before, and acknowledge that law-abiding nonwhites are typically at a disadvantage. I don't hate anyone, and certainly don't judge individuals I personally interact with due to their race. But the reality is that racial politics are already here and it's time that whites drop the myth of the colorblind meritocracy.
11/3/16, 6:02 PM
Sub said...
Thank you as always for the excellent essay that has it's finger directly on the pulse of current events.
As someone who spent the last decade working at poorly renumerated manufacturing jobs, and just recently acquired a better paying(though not by much) job as a researcher at the state university, I have gotten to see both sides of the cultural divide in the past year, and I think you have described them perfectly.
After spending so many years getting sore joints with people in manufacturing, it has been shocking to listen to my new progressive academic colleagues and the undisguised contempt with which they view the working class, despite ultra-partisan attachment to the political party which not that long ago represented working class interests. It is almost as though they support HC to spite their less well-off countrymen, and the support for Trump's version of "Hope and change" is simply a mark of stupidity which proves that the blue collars deserve the screwing which the coastal elites have given them.
That being said, there doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm on display, as I have seen more bumper stickers reading "Everybody sucks 2016" than sticker for either candidate, which is quite the contrast to 2008.
I find that I am quite stressed by the idea that no matter who is elected next Tuesday, violent conflict is right around the corner, and as a resident of a large Midwest city, that notion frankly terrifies me about the future of my family and myself.
Thanks again for all you do in getting the word out on the end of the oil age.
11/3/16, 6:06 PM
canon fodder said...
Hopium is a powerful drug, as one commentator quipped. Reagan tapped into it with his Morning in America, Obama did it in spades with his Hope and Change. Trump is now doing it with his Make America Great campaign. Hillary’s response? I’m with Her. Sounds depressing rather than hopeful. You can see the difference in the rally attendance numbers. Trump supporters mob his rallies, Clinton supporters are corralled into hers.
We voters have been served the hopium line enough times now to see it’s most likely the precursor to a bait and switch routine. Sort of like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. Which brings us to flyover country and your comment about the breakdown in our faith in the establishment and the American Dream. We seem to be at the point where “all men are created equal” has passed into the realm of farce, and invisible class structures have metastasized into tools of division and oppression.
Your parallels to the collapse of the Soviet Union are well taken. I’ve been following the events in Venezuela as closely as possible given the bias of American media, and find many parallels there as well. As you have pointed out in past blogs, many civilizations have gone down this path before, and it’s foolish to think we won’t eventually get there. Trump may forestall that, Clinton surely won’t.
We Americans do have a choice in our leaders, though I seriously doubt we actually exercise that choice to any extent. Take the US Congress for example. It consistently polls as one of the least liked, least trusted institutions in the country. So what have we done about it? For at least the last 40 years, we’ve reelected over 90% of the incumbent politicians, and much of the 10% turnover is from voluntary retirements, not voter angst. How do you reconcile near total revulsion on one hand, and near total approval on the other? It must belie a sort of cultural schizophrenia.
At this point in the national embarrassment that is this election, I feel much more kinship to Mercutio than Hamlet, with a rapier in my gut and bile on my tongue. To the Democrats and Republicans I say, “A plague a’ both your houses!”
11/3/16, 6:26 PM
ganv said...
11/3/16, 6:30 PM
latheChuck said...
David Evan McMullin (born April 2, 1976) is an American politician. He was formerly chief policy director for the House Republican Conference in the U.S. House of Representatives. He has also been a CIA operations officer, a volunteer refugee resettlement officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan, as well as an investment banker.
Forty years old - relatively young and presumably healthy.
McMullin: single, Putin: married once, divorced.
Former intelligence officer - that's a match.
"Policy Director" for the House Republican Conference suggests to me that he's socially conservative (as is Putin).
"investment banker" - well, I doubt that Putin has experience as a bank officer, but I'll bet he's been a fairly sophisticated bank customer!
11/3/16, 6:32 PM
latheChuck said...
Just a minor revelation: I had held the unchallenged belief that "trade is good", that people should specialize in those products for which they have some sort of natural advantage, so the greatest quantities are produced for the least effort. Only yesterday, did it occur to me that if "free trade" depended only on the consent of the trading parties, there would be NO NEED for trade "deals". But why would we negotiate, if not to weigh the benefits accruing to some, against the damages done to some others?
(And as a negotiator, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to ensure that the benefits accrue to the elite, educated, intellectual worthies, like, for example, trade negotiators.)
11/3/16, 6:41 PM
Justin said...
https://youtu.be/YMDz2BdEozU?t=2684
11/3/16, 6:51 PM
Justin said...
11/3/16, 6:55 PM
Armata said...
Donald Trump has been making hay out of this issue. I watched part of one of his rallies the other day on YouTube and one of things he brought up was the obscene rate hikes that so many people are facing. He pointed out that in Arizona, health insurance rates for those covered through Obamacare are rising an average of 117 percent. Think about that. Some of the commenters have pointed out that even with the government subsidies for low-income people, a growing number are reaching the point where they can no longer afford it.
Clueless Hillary meanwhile continues to defend Obamacare, talks about how wonderful it is and claims everything will be just fine with a few minor adjustments around the margins. That's cold comfort for the millions of people who are losing their healthcare because of skyrocketing insurance rates and all those people who can't use their overpirced health insurance without ending up in bankruptcy court because the co-pays and deductibles are so high. She sounds an awful lot like Marie Antoinette right before the storming of the Bastille.
Speaking of Clueless Hillary, have any of you seen the latest news coming out of the FBI?
There are rumors coming from within the FBI itself claiming that indictments are likely in the near future stemming from the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. It's also being reported that the FBI found new emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop from Hillary's private email server and it looks like senior Clinton aides including Huma Abedin lied to the FBI when they claimed they had turned over all electronic devices that had been used to receive emails from Hillary.
11/3/16, 8:08 PM
Mister Roboto said...
A Hillary Clinton victory will certainly mean a retrenchment of the "Affordable Care Act", and that's a scam that's wiping out working-class people in which the citizens of this country have no choice but to participate.
11/3/16, 8:11 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Onething, nah, if she wins this year, she’ll be the Democratic candidate in 2020, and so it’ll be 2024 at the earliest before the Dems get around to trying anything other than channeling George W. Bush.
Justin, fascinating. Sales of Twilight’s Last Gleaming remain steady, and the five part series on which it was originally based is still way up there on the alltime most-read list, so it’s not impossible that a bit of inspiration trickled that way.
Guilherme, I see Trump as a transitional figure, a lightning rod of sorts around which the mass movement of the dispossessed is taking shape in this country. If that movement embraces old-fashioned democratic process – which I think is quite possible – then it could accomplish much; if it goes for the easy totalitarian answer, then Weimar America, here we come! So I’m aware of the downside you discuss, but I also see positive potentials in all this.
Onething, that’s the big question these days, isn’t it? I’m beginning to wonder if somewhere in the thousands of pages of fine print, there’s some bit of gimmickry that rakes millions of dollars out of Obamacare and leaves everyone – patients, doctors, insurers, you name it – holding the bag.
Notes, I know the feeling. I grew up in Seattle, but that town doesn’t exist any more; these days it’s Los Angeles North, but not half as charming, a solid wall of smog, strip malls, and subdivisions from the water to the mountains. I don’t expect ever to go back.
Donald, and that’s also a choice.
Genevieve, it’s a source of wry amusement to me to watch how quickly the people who like to yell about “hate speech” resort to hate speech about the people they despise.
Tim, you’re most welcome and thank you! I’m glad the post had the effect I intended. For what it’s worth, I think your analysis is spot on, and the two factors – the collapse of collective consensus and the failure of the elite – are closely connected. More on this as we proceed.
Keith, the rural US used to have the same sort of lively culture. Gutting the countryside to feed the metastasis of the big cities is a normal part of the decadence of every civilization.
Drhooves, I think it’s quite possible that there will be two parties contending in 2024, say, and they may even have the same names, but you’re right, of course – the parties as they now exist are moribund, and will be coopted or swept aside shortly.
Barry, the US has been a third world nation for decades, and we’ve got the corrupt politics, lousy roads, and worse health care to prove it!
Fred, fascinating. If you hear any more about that, please post it.
11/3/16, 8:11 PM
jessi thompson said...
It's possible when trump was "admitting issues" you didn't catch it because they aren't issues to the affluent. (For example, building that wall, a horrible idea, is to address issues caused by illegal immigration. He also talks a lot about tariffs, which are a good idea, not that there's any guarantee he will do that. )
PS voting g for Johnson only cuz stein isn't pulling any numbers
11/3/16, 8:23 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cherokee, I liked Ehrenreich’s book and I think it has quite a bit to say about how the US in particular has ended up so batshale crazy about so many things. By all means enjoy the creatures of the night, while we’re waiting for ours to slither off to the saurian ooze from whence they sprung...
Donalfagan, it’s essential to current mainstream political rhetoric that everything has to be flattened out into the categories of race and gender, so that the impact of class and the rural-urban divide can be erased from public discussion. I see those stories as just par for the course, disinformatsia of the classic American Pravda type.
Dan, well, we’ll see, won’t we?
Brian, I just hope we haven’t been awful enough to deserve Clinton!
Tidlösa, Ivan Grozny is always a possibility. With regard to Trump and the American economy, a lot depends on what you mean by that slippery term. If you average out the kleptocratic frenzies of the very rich and the destitution of the majority, you get a “recovery;” in the same way, if the very rich take it in the shorts and the majority stabilizes and gains a bit, you could well have a “recession.”
Bruno, hmm! Fascinating. You’re quite right, of course. I may have to put some time down the road into figuring out how many other empires lasted either 140 years or some multiple thereof, perhaps with down time in between.
Rita, granted. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when nobody can afford the airdrops any more.
Tidlösa, nah, he could have picked dozens of other people if that was the deal. Pence was chosen because he gives Democrats violent nausea, and so Trump would have to go way overboard before a Democratic-controlled Congress (if that happens) would grit their collective teeth and impeach him. Clinton is practically begging for a special prosecutor followed by an impeachment trial.
Ric, thank you!
Bobo, you’re most welcome. I try!
Susan, I’m sorry to say I think it’s going to be a long hard road before most Americans grasp that. Most of us, after all, are descended from people who bailed out on their communities in the Old World to pursue their personal betterment here. That is to say, you’re right – but it’s going to be a hard, bitter lesson to learn.
Mark, that’s why I suspect that what’s going to happen is what’s already happening – more and more people on the bottom and middle of the economic pyramid are going to bail out on the mainstream health care industry, turning to alternatives, while the industry itself becomes an ever more baroque monstrosity taking care of an ever narrowing circle of rich clients, until the economic and technological basis breaks down and the alternatives are what’s left.
11/3/16, 8:29 PM
Armata said...
Hillary is a slimy lawyer/politician but she has never stooped to such depravity as the Trump U scam, nor ever come close
Really? I trust you haven't heard about the $16.5 million that Bill Clinton got paid to be the "honorary chancellor" of Laureate International Universities, a notorious online diploma mill.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/06/the-clinton-university-scandal.php
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/hillary-clinton-scandal-why-isnt-media-covering-clinton-for-profit-university-scheme/
As David Goldman aptly put it in one of his blog posts for the Asia Times, no sewer has been too stinky for the Clinton's to crawl through in search of ill-gotten pelf.
11/3/16, 8:37 PM
Ray Wharton said...
11/3/16, 8:40 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Eerie, funny.
Anthony, you're assuming that the working class has the same ideas you do about how to improve their lot. I'd suggest that this isn't a safe bet by any means.
Alex, if you ever happen to visit Cumberland, MD, you'll find identical charity shops with identical goods in them. I suspect that a good many American states would vote for USexit if they could.
Clay, yep. Nicely summed up.
Allie, so what you're saying is that he has the exact equivalent of Clinton's gang of good buddies at Goldman Sachs. Fair enough; the question is whether anybody on either side has figured out that one too many looting operations like that could destabilize the entire system and leave bankers dangling from lampposts...
Blackwyn, I haven't addressed it because I haven't seen any reason to think that either one of the candidates is any more or less authoritarian than the other. As I've pointed out in previous posts, the left likes to fling around the word "fascist" -- it's one of their favorite bits of hate speech -- though the frankly ignorant way they use it reminds me of Tom Lehrer's injunction not to write naughty words on walls if you can't spell. The "Evil Ists" are the invariable whipping boys of modern liberal rhetoric, and serve a central role in distracting attention from issues liberals don't like to address. That's why I've talked about those other issues instead.
Friction, it's quite possible that Trump will turn out to be our Berlusconi, or for that matter our Tsipras. That doesn't change the fact that the mass movement currently behind him sees him in a very different light. As for the war on drugs, no argument; prohibition never works, period. I look forward to an end to that particular insanity, the sooner the better.
Jerome, if he does win, the interior decor of the White House is going to be quite something to behold. I'll have to see if I can take a tour, and then find a taco truck for lunch. ;-)
Raymond, thank you! I wish my Spanish was better; I doubt I'm getting more than a small fraction of the jokes.
Geoff, no matter who wins, the pipeline is going through. I don't like that fact, but the majority of Americans will turn a blind eye to any abuse, so long as it gets them gas for their SUVs.
11/3/16, 8:50 PM
Amy Olles said...
I feel tension mounting as we get closer to Nov 8th. I voted, not for either of the big two, but felt like I was losing the entire time. I worry about what sort of violence might break out due to election outcomes. I am watching otherwise rational friends suddenly get all lathered up about politics on social media. This election seems to bringing out the worst in people. Thank you for opening the door on this blog to let us post about this topic for this week. Hopefully we can all get through till next week and get on with the business of collapsing for the future.
I'm glad you're back from you trip,and hope it went well.
Remember to breath everyone over these next days!
11/3/16, 9:01 PM
Ien in the Kootenays said...
11/3/16, 9:04 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Mister R., almost anything would have been better than the mess we ended up with -- and yes, if Obamacare puts the final nail in Clinton's coffin, nobody in the privileged classes will mention that for a lifetime and more.
Fred, thank you.
Varun, the American left alternates between actually trying to change things, on the one hand, and concentrating on preening itself on its moral superiority to everyone else on the planet, on the other. The purity tests come in during the latter phase. Give it time, and it'll implode.
Whereami, next time you go for a drive, head west on 70, then turn onto 68 and keep going until you get to Cumberland. We're almost twice as far west of you than you are from Baltimore, and we're well into flyover territory out here. A lot of people in your end of Maryland -- from here, everything from Hagerstown east is "downstate" -- forget about us up here!
Steve, I'm hoping for stalemate. It'll keep most of the worst case scenarios at bay.
Pantagruel7, I ain't arguing.
David, that specific possibility is one that I've considered. It's also quite possible that Trump will squeak in with a very narrow win and thus no mandate either, while the Democratic party is abandoned by its voters who, quite rightly, blame it for sidelining Sanders (who could have trounced Trump) for Clinton (who failed).
Mister R., all of the saliva-spraying, fist-pounding rants I fielded and deleted were Clintonistas screaming about how Trump eats small children for breakfast, etc. The Trump supporters who post here have been uniformly polite, even when they disagree with me.
Clay, one more irony in the fire!
Gabriela, but that's how democracy actually works! Show me a democratic society that doesn't routinely attract scoundrels and fools to high office; to my knowledge, there's never been one.
RAnderson, as I noted in the post, not everyone thinks that the election ought to be decided on the basis of the moral virtue of the candidates, you know.
Marc, as I noted in the post, working class people (notice the way you slipped in the usual insistence that they're all of one skin color; they aren't) have a choice between one candidate whom they know beyond a shadow of a doubt will pursue the policies that have destroyed their communities and plunged them into poverty and misery, and another candidate who might do something else. Their logic in voting for the latter, it seems to me, is impeccable.
11/3/16, 9:09 PM
onething said...
My daughter's family has a good middle class income and insurance with a pretty nice employer. White collar. Yet they pay, even with the employer paying whatever they pay, about 1200 per month for their insurance, and it covers very little. Due to some bad luck they have had to go to the ER a couple of times and they come out of it owing hundreds and even a couple of thousand dollars. Not a big trauma case, just a few tests or some IV fluid, that kind of thing. So even though they are not poor, they do have student loan debt and a mortgage and car payment - it really is a bit tough to get sick or even just to be afraid that something is very wrong (all three cases turned out okay) and then be socked with bills like 1700 dollars when you already pay out 1200 a month.
A lady on medicare at the hospital where I work showed me her bill for the helicopter ride, 30 thousand and some change. Medicare is an 80/20 plan, which means she owes 6000 dollars for that trip and of course probably thousands more for the rest of her stay.
So I called a helicopter service in a nearby city and asked them if they gave tours to the public. They sure did and I could hardly get the salesguy off the phone. He said we could take 4 people for 2200 dollars for a one hour flight, but if we didn't do it at the last minute and reserved it ahead of time, the price would be 1,499.
I get that Lifeflight has 2 trained personnel and some equipment and might even be a little bit bigger helicopter, but how do you square that?
11/3/16, 9:35 PM
Ray Wharton said...
An oil worker I know posted to his facebook, sarcastically, a great idea. Ribbing the protesters, he suggested that if they don't want the pipe line they should start by turning of the natural gas line into their homes. My friend certainly has little love lost over the Standing Rock protesters, but I think he has a good idea.
The only way to resist pipelines is to block demand, and the way to do that is to decrease our personal use of fuels and then to inspire others to do the same. A boycott is what I am suggesting. A retro technique. Even a small number of protesters actively working in communities around the country to decrease their areas demand for fuel, using appropriate tech, could have a disproportionate benefit.
I am trying to decrease my house holds fuel needs, but I have a long way to go. The skills to do these things is something that I am having to develop from scratch, my gardening skills have moved up a bit, but manufacture is another story still. The next project along these lines I will try is a solar dehydrator. Maybe a few more engineering capable folks could do more.
11/3/16, 9:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Bill, not at all. I'm taking Clinton at her word when she says her economic plan will focus on handing out benefits to the middle class, and when she talks about picking a fight with Russia. As for Trump University, er, you really need to check out the sleazefest that is the Clinton Foundation; selling preferential treatment at the State Department to foreign nationals for plump under-the-table donations is pretty well up there on the scale of graft, you must admit.
Helix, I know. No matter what happens, it's going to get ugly.
Ethan, thank you. Nice metaphor, by the way!
Patricia, hmm! That's a historical comparison I hadn't considered, but of course you're quite correct. Hmm and hmm again. I may need to do a post on that.
Glenn, fair enough. I simply noted that you were only talking about the people on the two ends, and that's common enough these days that I overreacted.
Sub, you're welcome and thank you. I wish I knew some way to get it through the heads of the privileged and clueless that they're cutting their own throats by supporting screw-the-majority policies with a big side dish of sneering contempt for the victims of those policies, but so far I haven't found a way.
Fodder, fortunately, yes -- I got maybe twenty saliva-flecked rants, and close to 170 comments that, even when they disagreed with me strenuously, had the grace and common sense to do so in a civil and reasoned fashion. I think that speaks very well of the readership of this blog.
Ganv, I wonder if we live in the same country. The collapse of legitimacy, as I noted in my post, is already well under way among the increasingly impoverished and silenced majority in America; the people in power are doing nothing to forestall it -- and they, not Trump, are the ones most likely to bring the system crashing down, by pursuing a set of hopelessly unsustainable economic and foreign policies in the teeth of all the evidence that those policies have already failed. What's more, people do have an example of something better to look toward; the past. Most people in middle America were a lot better off a few decades back, and they know it. That's why retrovation is already becoming a massive social force in America, and will in due time turn into a massive political force as well.
LatheChuck, it's way too early to identify our Putin, if we get one. We might get a Napoleon Buonaparte instead, you know! As for your revelation about trade, thank you. If that kind of common sense was more widespread, fewer stupid policies would be in force today.
Justin, fascinating. The sooner all the libertarian anarchocapitalists turn into something less crazy, such as flat Earthers and believers in the Great Pumpkin, the better off we'll all be.
Armata, yep. Anyone who thinks they know what's going to happen at this point is smoking their shorts.
11/3/16, 9:43 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Jessi, that's good to hear. The more people who are prepared for the impending crisis, the better off we'll all be.
Amy, you're welcome. When the politics gets too thick, I post something on a different subject -- but my posts on politics are getting a huge readership, well past what other subjects attract, and I do pay a certain amount of attention to that.
Ien, maybe it's because people appreciate his stands on certain issues, which the Greens haven't addressed...
Onething, no argument. Modern health care is pricing itself out of existence; I wonder if the MDs who love to denounce alternative health care realize that the bills they and the institutions that employ them charge have become the single most compelling reason for people to turn to alternative health care.
Ray, exactly. Exactly. Thank you; you've just earned tonight's gold star by pointing out the inescapable.
11/3/16, 9:51 PM
FiftyNiner said...
While roaming around the local big box store today--waiting for my brother to catch up to me--it seemed that everywhere I looked I saw parents and grandparents with beautiful toddlers. Since I have for weeks now been mired in the noise of this almost unbelievable campaign, it was on my mind and I had a kind of epiphany: If I had to choose between Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton to babysit a toddler for an afternoon, which would it be? It is not even close! TRUMP hands down!
If I cannot imagine leaving a child in Hillary Clinton's care, why should I entrust her with taking care of this country?
11/3/16, 9:53 PM
Dave said...
Partly because of miseducation on many levels, partly because of the rotten elites we've come to accept somehow, the country continues to flounder. We know that the ones left behind don't lack potential intelligence or energy, but their initiative and drive gets taken away. I can see it generationally here in the SF Bay area; the working class tends as a group to become less capable. Is it nutrition? Bad schools? Bad peers? All of the above? But quite a few of the workers here (I know whereof I speak as I am in the building trades) do quite well as there are many opportunities, though many of these pay poorly unless you start your own gig.
I guess I'm getting around to saying that this presidential election really doesn't matter; neither party's choice will substantially improve things. Grassroots action, State and local, have a chance to help. In Richmond we elected a Green mayor and some progressive officials, and we greatly improved the police department as well as correcting a subservient relationship with our big bad corporation, Chevron. -David M.
11/3/16, 11:42 PM
jessi thompson said...
11/4/16, 1:24 AM
donalfagan said...
11/4/16, 3:06 AM
Bogatyr said...
@Alex Blaidd I worked in Swansea up until about 3 years ago. I used to enjoy the laverbread from the market (and there's a great cheese stall there as well!). Even then, the deprivation was obvious, and it could be pretty scary at times. You're right about the town centre: charity shops, pawnbrokers, slot machine arcades, and not a great deal more. I'm not sure that I agree with you about the charity shops - I got some good furniture from the Heart Foundation shop, and the Oxfam on Wind St is a good source of old books! All that tells us, of course, is that the last generation with the taste and money for good furnishing, and the education for reading, is dying off. What was obvious was that many of the remaining thriving shops are ethnic supermarkets - I recall Chinese, Indian, Turkish/Kurdish, and Polish. Great for me as a lover of spicy foods etc, but it says a great deal about demographic change in what was until very recently a traditional white working class stronghold. IIRC, the local council declared Swansea a 'sanctuary city', and has a policy of inviting refugees I wonder what connection that might have to the UKIP vote you mentioned? I think we agree overall that both the current circus in the US and Brexit are symptoms of an ongoing, underlying, collapse.
11/4/16, 3:44 AM
Fred said...
That existing pipeline was reported in NPR but my lefty friends on Facebook pretend it doesn't exist. And not one has suggested driving less or using less home heating. But some are planning trips out to ND in support, and driving to major cities to protest. The absolute hypocrisy is astounding - protesting fossil fuels by using fossil fuels. It's like my grandfather used to say "they act like their excrement don't stink"
11/4/16, 4:01 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
Re: "Brightsided": Bummer... I thought I was the one who coined the term "smile or die"...
11/4/16, 4:10 AM
Fred said...
Trump doesn't like to look bad, and if he is president he won't want the country to look bad, so that works in our favor. He isn't going to want to govern an overweight, out of work country, so that could mean some positive changes. I could see people working to spiff up themselves and the country so Trump will come to their city. We have so little pride left as a country and to have that again, and not because we are fighting some war somewhere.
I am convinced Hillary will start a war with Russia, if not directly then in Syria, and a war with China via North Korea. Either country will take us out so quick. I just hope Trump knows that.
11/4/16, 4:30 AM
Fred said...
11/4/16, 4:50 AM
Mister Roboto said...
I also performed an interesting mental exercise yesterday. If I were legally compelled to vote, could choose between only Clinton and Trump, and my vote would not be a matter of public record, I would very reluctantly vote for Trump only because he advocates a minimal level of reconciliation with Russia. If Clinton were, instead of being the uber-hawk she is, a perfect midpoint between a hawk and a dove but absolutely everything else about her were the same, I would very reluctantly vote for Clinton. That is because I find myself just a little bit more aghast every time I learn something about the personality The Donald reliably and consistently displays, and I wouldn't want to give such a person the nuclear codes under normal circumstances. If I were to honestly describe my feelings about this election, you probably wouldn't be able to post the resulting comment!
11/4/16, 5:18 AM
Ben Johnson said...
That drew a whole round of amused groans and moans, then things got busy and we all had to leave it at that.
While it may be a bit soon to speculate, my guess is the 2020 election will feature whoever wins this current farce getting curb stomped by a real populist.
Side note, occurred to me the other day that a speculative American People's Party shortens to the APP party. The campaign adds write themselves; "Swipe right for change!" "Swipe left to throw the bums out"
11/4/16, 6:03 AM
Eric S. said...
11/4/16, 6:13 AM
Fred said...
11/4/16, 6:14 AM
Vedant said...
11/4/16, 6:15 AM
Richard Johnson said...
http://qz.com/824736/faith-in-technology-and-progress-makes-you-happier-than-religion-and-belief-in-god/
"Faith in progress has overtaken religiosity as the answer to the question of how to be happier in secular societies."
11/4/16, 6:37 AM
Allie said...
Allie, so what you're saying is that he has the exact equivalent of Clinton's gang of good buddies at Goldman Sachs. Fair enough; the question is whether anybody on either side has figured out that one too many looting operations like that could destabilize the entire system and leave bankers dangling from lampposts...
Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. I would answer your question with the following: No, no one on either side has figured out that one too many looting operations could destroy the system. To them America is exceptional and indestructible. I chalk that up to your concept of the senility of the elites.
All that said, no matter who wins on Tuesday night, America will get the President it deserves.
Looking forward to your post next week. Have a great weekend and take care.
11/4/16, 6:39 AM
David, by the lake said...
11/4/16, 7:03 AM
Chris Larkin said...
The historical analogue current events remind me the most is the Election of 1896 with Trump in the same role as William Jennings Bryan. Both are very much populists responding to the plight of the desperate rural with bombastic talk. Bryan lost in his case and it's doubtful he would have been able to save the rural farm of the time. However, we'll see what happens in the current case!
As for problems facing the US today, I am quite interested in your Bill of Redress. One thing I noticed recently is that many amendments come in decade long groupings. Ignoring the Bill of Rights, we had three between 1860-1870, four between 1909-1919, and another four between 1960-71 (yes I’m cheating a bit there). All of these were years of challenge and reform though some more than others. My hope is something similar might happen before things get too crazy in the US.
On alternative medicine, I’m reminded of a discussion in Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. One thing they note when it comes to medicine for the extreme poor (less than a dollar a day) is that they use both Western and traditional medicines, but not together for the same disease. When there's effective affordable Western treatment, they use that. When they can't, they use traditional methods.
11/4/16, 8:03 AM
Eric S. said...
The strongest historical parallel I've seen with Trump (though if he does actually beat his lag in the polls and win, the parallel would fall apart a bit), is Goldwater. It's almost the exact same story, a populist candidate with a whole lotta ugly wrapped up in his language, but ideas boiling and ready to be tossed from the fringe and the mainstream. With Goldwater, we had his ideas refined and honed and channeled through the New Right, which lobbied to bring an end to the New Deal and turn it into a neutered compromise in the form of LBJ's New Society program, and eventually found a voice fully in the mainstream with Ronald Reagan, who brought out the unspoken shadows of American thought, took up the same populist approach but with less of the rhetoric that empowered his opponents, and (for all his long term problems which we've often discussed), wound up being popular enough that his policies became the consensus that still has a hold on both parties today. The road from Trump's Goldwater to a future Fred Halliot's (or the more democratic alternative's) Reagan will probably be a much shorter road, but if Trump loses this election, I expect his place in history to be much the same.
11/4/16, 8:11 AM
Bill Ding said...
11/4/16, 8:18 AM
Nastarana said...
What I can't understand about cosmopolitan, globalist elites is why they are so comfortable with a dumbed down public school curriculum. One would think that people who identify themselves as citizens of the world would be promoting a world class education for all, emphasizing the study of world history, geography, foreign languages, and world literature along with mathematics, science and civics.
Dear Guilherme de Baskerville, What your analysis of the American election leaves out is the reality, plain and simple, that Mme. Clinton is a bloodthirsty sociopath who intends to start WWIII. I think she fancies herself as Winnie Clinton, the great war president; the sordid reality is that she gets an emotional rush from the suffering of others, or, to put it in moral terms, she sold her soul to the Dark Side. It is highly unlikely that Trump can win at this late date. The people who are claiming they have dirt to release about the Clinton ménage have waited far too long to speak up. Why did they stand back and allow her to steal the primaries from the real winner? Maybe, in Brazil, you can expect to sit out the hostilities, but I wouldn't be counting on it.
11/4/16, 8:36 AM
Owen said...
11/4/16, 8:52 AM
Phil Knight said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBVeuhXUat4
11/4/16, 9:22 AM
Matt said...
I was really impressed by Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, a damning expose of the difficulties of living in the US as a wage-worker. We are now 15 years down the track from the nightmare she describes, staring at the consequences.
Matt
11/4/16, 9:29 AM
Joe Roberts said...
A 35-year-old at the revolutionary barricades in 1917 (and many on the front lines were of course younger than 35) would have been born in 1882. His children were born circa 1905; his grandchildren circa 1931; his great-grandchildren circa 1956; and thus any great-great grandchildren were born circa 1981, and were little kids during the last years of the USSR. (Of course I'll grant that these years very much deserve their circas.)
Again, my only point in mentioning this is because an institutional and familial memory of revolution -- what it really is, how it works, what its many downsides look like -- was very much more present in the USSR than it is in today's America. That revolutionary man born in 1882 spent the rest of his life telling family and friends about his firsthand experience at the barricades. Younger 1917 revolutionaries (those born circa 1897) might have lived until the late 1970s or early 1980s.
Various parties in today's United States like to talk about revolution as if they know what it actually is. However, unless they are the children of certain diasporas, they are incredibly far removed from firsthand stories of any relatively recent example of a national revolution. That's a difference between the USSR of the late 1980s and us, and it's a difference that is not to our advantage.
11/4/16, 9:59 AM
onething said...
"Like watching a train wreck from the caboose."
Excellent.
11/4/16, 10:05 AM
David, by the lake said...
While the Spanish-American War is an obvious date, I'd suggest an earlier starting marker, the Mexican-American War at least. The latter would put us at ~170 years of active imperialism.
11/4/16, 11:33 AM
donalfagan said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4VxmAIzKCM
But both of them held their noses and voted for Clinton.
An Aeon article asserts that our Anthropocene efforts will ripple across Deep Time:
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/aeon-deep-time/505922/
11/4/16, 12:09 PM
jessi thompson said...
11/4/16, 12:43 PM
M Smith said...
Why yes, there is. It's a far-too-frequently-occuring phrase, "...at the discretion of the Director of Health and Human Services". I didn't read the whole thing to know all that's in it, but this phrase is used over and over throughout the document to give a non-elected official way too much power. This half-baked "law" wasn't even thawed when they passed it, and it shows in the way they left out lots of decisions just so they could hurry up and ram it through.
11/4/16, 12:49 PM
NomadicBeer said...
"Why do elites look down on lower class Republicans? Because they vote against their own interests over and over and over again and just get madder and madder when things don't get better. They'd rather eat glass than vote for a Democrat, and the reasons are purely reptilian."
This is exactly what I would have written some years back. But now it's surprisingly easy to see how bad this thinking is. Even as a pure logical exercise, you are saying that you look down on Republicans because they are too stupid to see their own interest and you know better. That looks suspiciously like circular logic, don't you think?
Meanwhile, in the real world, Democrats are part of the same political consensus - they do all the things that JMG mentioned with the end result that the lower class people are destitute, unhealthy, uneducated and hated. At least the Rs are all for expressing hate which is healthier than keeping it in under some pretense of political correctness.
In my limited interactions with poor Americans, I definitely find them less hypocritical than the rich. Maybe they would be just as bad if they had the choice but I will give them the benefit of the doubt.
11/4/16, 12:49 PM
David from Normandy said...
I would never have thought that our own presidential election (next spring) would seem less bleak than yours, but from what I see and read from here, you may win by a slight margin.
From my point of view, like a lot of people in the rest of the world I think, the first thing I'm concerned with is what war will the next president choose to wage?
Or not to wage.
There are a lot of possibilities, each one potentially disastrous for a lot of people.
11/4/16, 1:27 PM
RPC said...
11/4/16, 1:30 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Dave, I don't agree that the presidential election doesn't matter; it's true that neither candidate will make things significantly better, but one of them could make them considerably worse. On the other hand, you're absolutely right that any real change has to start from the ground up, beginning with the choices that each of us makes every single day of our lives.
Jessi, that's a valid point. Did you know that the average medieval peasant worked fewer hours, had more days off, and kept a larger portion of the value of his labors than most full time employees in America do today?
Bogatyr, so noted. If the beginning of Russian empire is counted as the start of its eastward expansion into Siberia, though, the beginning of US empire would have to be the beginning of westward expansion here, which puts it before the American Revolution.
Sven, I'm flattered!
Fred, well, we'll see.
Mister R., I get that. I think a lot of people are going to be holding their noses when they cast their votes on Election Day, no matter who they vote for.
Ben, if neither candidate can win a popularity contest against Obama, and among wage class people at that...sheesh.
Eric, I did indeed. It's well worth reading.
Fred, I'm still waiting to get some clear sense of what all the hullaballoo is about.
Vedant, the working classes didn't get the chance to vote for Sanders because the Democratic Party leadership used every sleazy trick in the book to hand the nomination to Clinton. If the primaries and caucuses had been conducted in a fair manner, he probably would be the Democratic nominee right now, and he'd almost certainly stomp Trump into the ground. As it is, because US politics is extremely corrupt, Clinton got the nomination.
Richard, bright and holy gods. They actually talked about faith in progress, in so many words? I'm going to check the calendar and see if it's a blue moon... ;-)
Allie, that's my take as well. It's going to be an interesting four years, whatever happens next Tuesday.
11/4/16, 1:45 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Chris, Bryan is a fascinating analogue, true. I'm still working on the Bill of Redress, but it ought to have something to offend everyone.
Eric, and that's also a workable parallel -- though as I recall, Goldwater was stomped, and of course it took four more elections before his ideas hit the big time with Reagan; I doubt the same sort of lag time will occur here.
Bill Ding, you know, if I'd set out to parody the arrogance of the privileged toward the working classes, I don't think I could have done a better job than you've just done here. When you say the working classes vote against their best interests by voting for the GOP, you're ignoring the fact that the Democrats have spent the last half century pushing exactly those policies that have destroyed the working classes in this country. The working classes, faced by one party (the Dems) that was actively hostile to their interests and full of sneering contempt for their values, and another (the GOP) that at least paid lip service to the latter, did exactly what most Clinton voters are doing now, and voted for what they thought was the lesser of two evils.
Owen, once I can find something coherent that explains exactly what everyone is yelling about, sure.
Phil, if that's true, it's all over for Clinton.
Matt, yes, I read that one also, and it was well worth the time spent.
11/4/16, 1:56 PM
Ray Wharton said...
I wish I knew enough Spanish to fully appreciate Raymond Duckling's poem :P All I can gather is that neither heaven nor hell would accept the candidates souls.
@JMG et. All
Well I voted today, the mail in voting system was surprisingly difficult, out of my family only my Mom was able to make sense of the directions, lucky for me she prevented me from making at least two mistakes which would have nulled the ballot. Hopefully we didn't miss another error. One family member wasn't so luck and I think lost his vote. A morbid sense of humor helps with the whole process.
I am glad you like the boycott idea, trying to figure out both how to spread the word and how to further reduce my energy usage. Regardless of the legality behind the Standing Rock issue I think that it has a cultural energy that reflects a potential shift against fossil fuels.
11/4/16, 1:58 PM
John Michael Greer said...
David, I could see that.
Donalfagan, what little I've seen on the leftward end of things that addresses the ongoing destruction of the American working class generally amounts to "Oh, those poor people -- what scraps can we throw them to get them to shut up and let us continue with business as usual?" Crocodile tears, and lots of 'em...
Jessi, it certainly has helped some people -- specifically the CEOs of the medical and insurance industries, who are raking in multimillion-dollar bonuses paid for by people who are going broke trying to cover their Obamacare bills.
M Smith, interesting. Yes, that would be one way to rig the thing. There needs to be a new profession -- forensic legal analyst -- to go through laws that are made deliberately hypercomplex, and figure out where they've been rigged to allow profiteering.
11/4/16, 2:05 PM
steve pearson said...
I think the American health care system is basically beyond repair, and Trump repealing the ACA will not fix it. I was impressed by the earlier commenter describing the various vested interests within the system. If the U.S. spends 20 0/0 of GNP on health care as opposed to 10 0/0 in most industrial countries and still has the the worst care in the industrial world, I don't think a pro business person like Trump is going to shake the HMOs, big pharma, etc of the tit.
His plan for child care subsidies favors the rich, where as hers favors the poor and middle class.
I suspect which ever of them gets in is going to continue BAU by whatever means they can and as much to their personal advantage as they can.
If Clinton gets in and starts WWIII, I guess you can blame me for it. What a disgusting fracking choice to have to make. I will need some very good beer and popcorn Tue. night to get the bitter taste out of my mouth. I may well be misquoting the line from the song " Mrs. Robinson" Laugh about it, talk about it, when you finally choose, any way you look at it, you lose"
I will raise one of those beers to all of you here. Cheers, Steve
11/4/16, 2:07 PM
John Michael Greer said...
RPC, I've been hearing the same thing from others -- and of course a lot of people in the tech industry who thought they were sitting pretty have now been ordered to train their own replacements, who are foreign nationals being paid a fraction the salary. The wheels may just be about to come off...
Ray, interesting. I wonder if they're using complex ballots the way Jim Crow states in the old South used to use literacy tests, to keep the poor from voting. I certainly wouldn't put it past the current government!
11/4/16, 2:09 PM
Armata said...
I've noticed your last couple of blog posts, including this one, didn't get posted on resilience.org's website. Did something happen?
11/4/16, 2:14 PM
jessi thompson said...
11/4/16, 2:24 PM
Armata said...
While the mainstream news media and the rest of the establishment rakes Donald Trump over the coals for his failings and alleged wrongdoings, they give Bill and Hillary Clinton and many of the people associated with them a free pass for doing the same things Trump has been accused of, and often to a far greater degree.
As an example that has already been brought up here, consider how liberals have excoriated Trump over his failed university and allegations by some former students that they got ripped off. But then look at Laureate International Universities, an online diploma mill that has been faced with numerous complaints and lawsuits from former students who claim they were bilked out of thousands of dollars. Guess who was one of the founders of LIU? That's right, Bill Clinton. And guess who was paid $16.5 million to be it's "honorary chancellor"?
I am not defending bad behavior on the part of either Trump or Coulter. But there are huge numbers of people out there, particularly wage class whites like myself, who are really sick and tired of the hypocrisy and double standards being peddled by the bobos, SJW's and other affluent liberals.
PS - I am still having problems with posting comments. I have been getting error messages when trying to post comments and usually have to try several times before Blogger will accept my comment. I haven't had any issues like this prior to this week and only seem to be having issues posting comments here. There definitely seems to be something wrong.
11/4/16, 2:57 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Armata, yep. On receiving the umpteenth fundraising email from the organization that runs it, begging for money for a site upgrade, I sent a crabby note saying I didn't enjoy being dunned for money and would they please unsubscribe me. The response I got back was rather petulant, and immediately thereafter my posts stopped appearing there. No loss; the site had already morphed into an online edition of Yes! Magazine, packed with the standard schlock about how "we" can save the world via fashionable green tokenism, and I used to go there and read the comments on my posts when I was in a mood to be denounced in shrill tones. I really miss Energy Bulletin -- that was a solid, thoughtful aggregator that covered the ground well and honestly.
As for Ann Coulter, even a blind mouse can find a broken clock, or something like that. ;-)
11/4/16, 3:13 PM
Armata said...
Are there any alternative sites concerning Peak Oil and related topics you would recommend?
11/4/16, 3:57 PM
Nastarana said...
As for your comments about the president of Syria, I have seen those smears repeated ad nauseum, ad infinitum across the entire MSM, from Fox to MSNBC to the NYT with never a shred of convincing evidence to be seen or heard. Mere assertion "backed up" by other people making the same assertion does not constitute evidence, much less proof. I suppose you think that if you keep repeating the assertion us dummies will eventually believe it?
And even if those slurs were true, which I do not believe, it would be for the citizens of Syria, that would be the same citizens who elected him, to remove him, not for us.
Nothing the Clintons have done is worse than TrumpU? How about literally billions denoted from all over the world to the relief of the suffering people of Haiti, and the bulk of those funds, on the order of around 80-90% diverted to Friends of Billary? Orchestrated coups in Honduras, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, which even by the lamentable standards of Anglo-American imperialism, must be some kind of record for one SoS term.
11/4/16, 4:36 PM
Guilherme de Baskerville said...
@Nastarana: Again, not a US citizen, I don't think I could even speak english fluently when Bill Clinton was president (and even if I did, I couldn't care less about US politics at that point), etc. Which means, yes, it's quite possible that I'm wrong. Having said that, the sense I get from her, specially from reading people whom I quite trust, is that she's just a very standard politician, with extra-gravy on being legally bought-for by big corporate interests. She's a sleazy, slick politician, from a very conventional background for that kind of people: ambitious, hard-working, willing to cut unsavory deals to advance, etc. The people who tend to think she's a sociopathic war monger, that enjoys the suffering of others and will plunge the world in WW-III are usually alt-right or close to it, and I don't tend to trust their judgment.
I concede it that she has an excellent chance of getting the US involved in a even more confrontational foreign policy vis-a-vis Russia. It might end going full-blown proxy war in Syria or the Ukraine. But that has happened before (Korea, Vietnam, Soviet Afghanistan, etc) and the world has not blown up yet. Putin is too shrewd of an operator to be baited into launching nuclear weapons unless actual russian soil is invaded, and I sincerely don't think HRC would do that, and if she did, I'm quite sure a gaggle of Pentagon generals would have something to say about that. So, yes, she might invade some countries in the Middle East. She might drag the world back towards full-blown Cold War again. While bad, none of these things represent WW-III.
Were I american, I would vote for her, no questions asked. Trump is not exactly fascist (which is a word that I agree with JMG is used far too loosely), but he's a vain, narcissist strongman. The comparisson to Berlusconi or, even better, to someone like Qadafi, is valid. Just the fact that he has refused to say he's going to accept an electoral defeat and his comments about "Second Ammedment people maybe doing something about Hillary" means he's a threat to whatever's left of american democracy, I don't think his populist policies are sincerely held or that he would act upon them, he stands excellent chance of doing some terrible damage to the country and/or world either by design or incompetence and despite agreeing that a majority of his support can be explained by the economic situation of working-class americans (primarily the white ones), there IS a good number of downright racists, conspiracy-theory nutcases, neo-confederate and neo-nazi types on the wings of his movement and electing him, specially if he's stymied by Congress and the career bureucrats, might kick-start the formation of some "Brownshirt Activism" a la what happened to the Weimar Republic which ended up getting our good old friend Adolf elected.
So, yeah, I would vote for Hillary and risk what I consider to be a truly insignificant risk of global armageddon, and then try my best to do whatever I could to reform the Democratic Party so they pick someone like Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary the next time. It's probably a loosing proposition, but as JMG likes to point out, the time for good outcomes has long passed us. We are stuck trying to minimize the damage. If I was living there, I would prefer any future offspring of mine to live in a graciously crumbling has-been empire, perhaps fractured into somewhat more manageable countries, kinda like the UK is these days, now that I think about it, then in some truly detestable homegrown american version of the Third Reich. With nuclear weapons. Again, not saying Trump = Hitler, not by a long shot. But I'm afraid that his victory would signal a move in that direction.
11/4/16, 4:54 PM
Bruno B. L. said...
11/4/16, 4:57 PM
Bruno B. L. said...
11/4/16, 5:09 PM
Guilherme de Baskerville said...
"Did you know that the average medieval peasant worked fewer hours, had more days off, and kept a larger portion of the value of his labors than most full time employees in America do today?"
I have a little nitpicking to do with that. Yes, all of that is true, mainly because agriculture in the Middle Age was so unproductive that you had to leave a lot of land "fallow" to recuperate and, thus, the acreage worked by each peasant was quite small and farm work tends to be very seasonal. Also, as a percentage, yes, they were less taxed then some modern-day people. But all of that does not represent quality of life.
Swedes are more taxed then americans, and I don't think they are worse off! Also, while a good GINI coefficient usually means the country in question is a great place to live, some countries with nominally good GINI coefficients, like Ethiopia and Pakistan, are not the sort of places that most people would gladly emigrate to. It doesn't matter if the pie is better divided if the pie is very small. That certainly applied to the Middle Ages! While your church tithe and your feudal obligations could, perhaps, account for only 35-40% or so of your total labour (though it could be much higher, too), which is, indeed, lower then many people pay today as a percentage, there wasn't much left!
Peasant life in the Middle Age was, as a rule, short, scant in intelectual pursuits, filled with back-breaking labour, insecure in terms of both the ability to feed yourself as well as personal safety, and not very nice, all things being told. Peasants revolts happened for good reason. While these people did the best they could under the circumstances and it's true that they had community life, folk art, etc, I'm particularly sensitive to people who try to paint too-rose-a-picture of life in medieval times, or the glory of living care-free as a hunter-gatherer (until you die from a tooth infection, gets killed in a night-time raid by the neighbouring clan looking to capture women or cattle, or simply starve to death in a bad hunting season, that is).
Not accusing you personally, mind you, it's just that I've read stuff like that far too many times, and it irks me :)
11/4/16, 5:13 PM
Justin said...
Spirit Cooking is the name of a book and performance art installation by Marina Abramovic, a performance artist that's gotten some notoriety for a combination of mental fortitude, goriness and obscenity. She's also friends with the Clintons:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/16498
All these links are some combination of NSFW and creepy, so be warned:
http://wearechange.org/spirit-cooking-disturbing-podesta-email-yet-warning-graphic-content/
This appears to be the main thing that's going around.
This is one of the more relevant wikileaks (there are others)
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15893
We can see that the usual suspects are hard at work mocking Trump people:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/marina-abramovic-donald-trump_us_581cbdb5e4b0aac62483e73e
However there's a deeper, secondary layer.
There's about twenty emails, sent between various associates of Podesta which appear to contain codewords.
Specifically the phrases pasta, cheese, hot dog (questionable IMO) pizza and dominoes. I won't speculate as to what those terms specifically mean, but I can't read the emails and interpret the terms literally.
https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/12/1223066_re-get-ready-for-chicago-hot-dog-friday-.html
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/22033
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/32795
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/30613
There are more. Now, I don't necessarily buy the story that the codewords refer to child trafficking as is popularly allegedly. However I don't believe for a second that pizza means cheesy tomato bread or that pasta means extruded wheat.
I'm not sure what to make of all of it either, but it's certainly, um, unexpected.
Pedophilia in high places isn't anything new, unfortunately. And can you imagine what you could make a politician do, if say, you had video of them molesting, say a dead pig - or a live child?
I'm going to park a couple speculations below. I don't have much basis for them:
1) There will be a significant power and/or internet outage on Monday or Tuesday, which will be blamed on the Russian hackers
2) There will be a minor terrorist attack in the United States on Monday
I am far from certain either of these things will happen, but it wouldn't surprise me.
11/4/16, 5:15 PM
Justin said...
Today my company hired yet another foreigner on a worker's visa to save money on salaries - the only reason they hire Canadians at all anymore is because of the subsidies still available to certain industries which don't apply to non-citizens (I'm sure they're working on that).
11/4/16, 5:31 PM
Jeff Thomas said...
This is a curious assertion to make, given that in the past few decades, only one of our two major political parties (the Republicans) has made mainstream practice of claiming that voter fraud is still a widespread phenomenon, and has been able to produce precious little evidence to support that claim. (And mostly they seem to be pretexting laws designed to discourage voting by traditionally Democratic-leaning groups.)
If the Republicans were engaged in large scale voter fraud, wouldn't the Democrats be incentivized to call them out for it in the same way? And if Republican claims on the subject were remotely connected to reality, why is their evidence always flimsy to non-existent? And wouldn't proving the occurrence of such fraud in a given federal or gubernatorial election pretty much make the career of any enterprising young journalist or political scientist who could manage it?
I'm not saying that voter fraud never happens, but to have it go persistently unsubstantiated and unremarked in the modern era strains credulity. It would require the same sort of vast implausible conspiracy of silence that exists in the fever dreams of folks who think global warming is a big hoax perpetrated by the scientific community at large.
11/4/16, 5:56 PM
steve pearson said...
Thanks for your consistently brilliant essays and providing this forum to discuss the ideas.
Cheers, Steve
11/4/16, 7:22 PM
David said...
11/4/16, 7:48 PM
Bob said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDct5MkZv2s
The Usual Hillary adapted from "The Usual Suspects" 1995 movie.
11/4/16, 9:13 PM
onething said...
"Despite all this Trump got nomination but not Sanders. Why?"
Partly because he's part of the leftist salary class and didn't have time to figure out how to appeal to the working class, but largely because the DNC engaged in treasonous moves to subvert the will of the people of their own party, to ensure that Hillary got it. They should be tried and hung.
+++++++++++
It occurs to me that the main reason Obamacare is such a failure is that it did exactly nothing to address the real problem in healthcare: the out-of-control costs. So it props up the system by simply making the middle class pay hugely for everyone's care.
The problem was not insurance, but costs increasing much faster than cost of living.
11/4/16, 9:22 PM
onething said...
On the contrary, I think he will win by a landslide. Hopefully by a sufficient amount that the rigging of the machines will not be enough to overturn it.
11/4/16, 9:35 PM
sandy said...
1. The Holocene interglacial
ended 700 yrs ago when the Wolf Sunspot Minimum began the Little Ice Age. This was also when the obliquity (axis tilt) dropped below 23.5 degrees.
So ... more temperature, rain, storm extremes. Plus ... solar Sunspot cycle 25, may be another Dalton Minimum starting 2020 with global cooling as we stairstep down to glacial cold for next 80,000 yrs.
And if that's not enough,
2. in 2013 Q4 the oil majors made big cuts in searching an developing new fields. They have also lied about the 'proven' reserves since 1980. And now EROEI is below 10. So the quantity extracted will be falling rapidly after 2020.
For shocks this big, I believe it's better to risk a Type I error than Type II.
Keep calm, take your meds, and carry on. If possible move to a small town less than 50k people, 100 mi. from coast, 400 mi. from nuclear power plant. Make friends with neighbors, share. Buy quality hand tools, not gold.
Sandy... Minister of Future
11/4/16, 11:36 PM
KL Cooke said...
"Blogger ate my well reasoned nuanced response and gave me a 404 error."
Suggestion for lengthy responses: Write off-line in a Word document that can be saved, then copy and paste.
11/4/16, 11:57 PM
Donald Hargraves said...
Donald Trump: Puts himself up as a business success when the only thing he's done is put himself in front of the Cameras and turned his name into a halfway-successful brand. From that, he's worked scams in investment, schooling and other things, using his name to squeeze money from others for stuff of less-than-no value. One can say the same for Mrs. Clinton, but at least she puts herself up as a politician (truth in advertising); Trump is a fraud in that area by comparison.
Hillary Clinton: She has a record of betrayal clear as day to this working-class stiff. GATT, NAFTA, Giving China "Most Favored Nation" status, Three Strikes, Ending Welfare As We Know It – All during her Husband's presidency, and everyone knew that she was VERY MUCH INVOLVED with his decisions. This is why West Virginia, once a blue island of resistance against the 1988 landslide, became the red spear aimed at Pennsylvania and New England. Not only that, but her running smells too much like the great southern tradition of wives running for Governor when their husbands run into term limits (Apologies to all Southerners for that, but I remember this VERY CLEARLY from my youth. Even if it's Northern Mythologizing, I still remember it clearly.).
Johnson: The Libertarian Party is nothing but the clear exponent of where things will be in the future if things continue as they have without any crisis to throw things off. Something, in short, that I cannot abide with.
Jill Stein: The Green Party is the party for groups that think they can take over a party and gain national exposure. It rarely works, and said groups get pushed out by someone new every so often and slink into obscurity. I expect that in a few years they'll be taken over by the worst of the Alt-Right types who'll slink away a few years afterwards, hopefully leaving behind a better, smarter alt-right to continue the fight.
The Communist Party: Became the "independent" radical wing of the Democratic Party. 'Nuff said.
Thankfully the Socialist Party still exists, and has a candidate I could write in in Indiana. Thus, my protest vote.
11/5/16, 12:15 AM
Danil Osipchuk said...
Please do keep in mind, that there were almost no direct standoffs between NATO and USSR. Cuban crisis for instance was a close call - you really shouldn't want to cast such a dice.
What HC is pushing for is a direct shooting between USA and Russia. It will be easy to start, but very difficult to deescalate.
Another thing that she is clearly clueless about such matters and will just demand to do it the way she wants. If someone disagree - i bet she'll use the same dirty tricks to get stupid yes-sayer in position of knowlegable professional. It may already started, by the way:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/army-says-2-star-general-committed-suicide/ar-AAjwbfj?li=AA4ZnC
And last but not least, it is sickening to see how people of the West easely think of starting of another war. My take is that they just don' t have a memory what does it mean - to suffer horribly from the war.
11/5/16, 12:22 AM
steve pearson said...
11/5/16, 12:42 AM
trippticket said...
"Some of the commenters have pointed out that even with the government subsidies for low-income people, a growing number are reaching the point where they can no longer afford it."
You must mean low-ISH income people. Below a certain income level, which includes my family, they just refuse coverage. And I know a lot of hard-working folks who are in the same boat.
But I, for one, will NEVER participate with Obamacare, no matter the threat, and I was a progressive Democrat a decade ago. (That's surprisingly hard to admit to, after hanging out around here for the last several years!)
11/5/16, 12:51 AM
Fred said...
I'm going to do a drive by this morning and see what else is gone. I just don't know where it went to....
11/5/16, 3:48 AM
Kevin Warner said...
Let's hope that they do not go with Operation Wag the Dog (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNo0BicRM8k)! Anybody care to guess what the American 2020 elections will be like? The campaign for it starts next week! I was going to say that the biggest loser of this election is modern journalism, which has been so biased, so contemptuous of people's views, so censuring of inconvenient facts, they they will be in serious danger of commercial flame-out as people walk away from them. I have had to revise this opinion.
What is being lost is something far more important and that is trust which is a far more deadly symptom for a society. People have lost trust in their government, in the media, in their political parties, in their fellow Americans, in being able to get ahead at all which is at the heart of the American Dream. Trust is the glue that really holds a society together and even commercial transactions need a patina of trust to work. To paraphrase Obi-Wan, "Trust is created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds society together." And now it is being recklessly broken. Damn right that we - not just America - will be moving into darkness of an uncharted night.
11/5/16, 4:01 AM
Fred said...
Although I'll take their rage over the wage of the working class. The working class rage is more visceral, and has some pre-determined action and weapons to back it up.
11/5/16, 4:08 AM
Fred said...
There are two kinds of education in the US - one for the common people and one for the elite. I don't know if you are from the US or have children, but it is easy enough to get a flavor of the education of common people through the media. What is hidden from sight is what is happening for the elite. You can't simply go to their school websites and you can't read about it in their yearbooks, or press releases. They appear to have the same sort of school subject, clubs and sports as public schools. But this is like saying people have two legs, two arms, two eyes, etc so they must all be the same.
The common people graduated to know enough to read to the news and understand the basics of how to get through life. They are trained to be passive, to compete with each other through the ugly sports programs in schools, and to work alone and against each other through classroom instruction. (Every salary employer needs people who can work in teams, but in school is you raising you hand to answer questions trying to answer first before other people. Why? The "real world" doesn't need this skill, but notice how it shows up everywhere in how we deal with each other).
Also notice how much people most people don't understand classical music, ballet and opera - that leaves these halls protected from commoners. In public school you get high school dances with a DJ playing the most popular music (which will change in a few weeks and you'll have to go out an buy that - public school students are taught to be consumers after all) and students dancing wildly and sexually assaulting each other while adults watch from the sidelines. (Or maybe that was just my school.)
11/5/16, 4:47 AM
Fred said...
What do I mean by "adults who do big work"? I mean most kids only have access to their parents (if they have both) and teachers in high school (who are some of the more boring and dull people on the planet). Elite kids have access to the top performers in industry who bring their children's class to Martha's Vineyard to teach them to sail, take them for golfing, skiing, and out to performances of ballet, opera and music. These interactions and trips are all build into the school year and summer so all year long kids are groomed by real adults, not some state certified college flunky.
Students get together in socials and dances that are formal so they are used to dressing up and behaving appropriately. Sports are truly team sports and it is the team that wins, not star players featured in local players. Class work is project work and speaking presentations, so one is used to the work at the highest corporate levels.
Students in elite school shake hands with adults, greet them, are skilled in making respectable small talk, know which fork to use when there are several displayed at a meal, and eat from a wide variety of foods on actual plates with linens at lunch time. There are no chicken nuggets and brown canned green beans served on plastic trays with little partitions so the food doesn't touch each other.
So the global elitists do want a great education for kids - theirs, not yours. If anyone wants to groom their children into being an adult and can't afford the $50,000 a year for boarding school, then homeschool them and spend your days out in the community. Any adult working a job is a better teacher than any school teacher reading from a curriculum put together by a book publisher and written by eight "experts" and approved by a state board of another eight "experts". And you'll avoid that animal nature encouraged in high schools - a nature that we are all told is a normal part of being a teenager. Why are we told that? They take children and lock them up for 12 years and claim all that behavior is normal. Its like taking an animal in a zoo cage and claiming its behavior is normal.
It takes a lot of observation and avoiding of all media discussion on education to see what is actually going on in the US.
11/5/16, 4:49 AM
David, by the lake said...
With respect, I have to disagree. When a nation is expanding at the expense of neighboring countries and peoples, I'd argue that is precisely imperialism. Manifest Destiny was our first phase of imperialism and the reach overseas was the second.
11/5/16, 4:56 AM
David, by the lake said...
OT but more Russia-China cooperation
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-eyes-unified-payment-systems-140154167.html
11/5/16, 5:13 AM
n=ro said...
A little off topic here, but possibly enjoyable between all the 'serious politics' talk :).
Tesla seems to be a promising candiate to fulfill your specific prediction #2 for 2016 with launching it's 'innovative solar roof technology'. It has been mind-boggling to watch all the hype that has been already generated, even though Tesla hasn't released A SINGLE technical detail. It looks nice, so it must solve all those annoying little technical problems, right?
best regards from Germany,
nero
11/5/16, 5:39 AM
Esn said...
"Trump said Assad is an "A grade" leader, a leader who barrel bombed and gassed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens and caused the worst refugee crisis since the Holocaust."
Actually, it seems that the famous chemical attack that almost got the US to invade Syria in 2013 was done by a faction among the anti-Assad rebels, precisely in order to get the US to invade and take out Assad on humanitarian grounds. According to MIT: http://www.globalresearch.ca/mit-study-of-ghouta-chemical-attack-challenges-us-intelligence/5365110
The rebels have also used chemical weapons against Assad's side and the Kurds numerous times since then, including in Aleppo (the most recent was last week):
http://www.almasdarnews.com/article/russian-experts-come-aleppo-collect-evidence-chemical-weapons-use/
http://www.almasdarnews.com/article/rebels-strike-kurdish-neighborhood-aleppo-chemical-gas/
http://www.almasdarnews.com/article/video-us-backed-rebels-use-chemical-weapons-aleppo-civilians/
As for the refugee crisis, saying that Assad is the main cause of that is as daft as saying that Stalin was the main reason that 20-30 mil. Soviet citizens died in WW2. It's blaming the victim. The whole war got started after Assad rejected a natural gas pipeline from the Gulf States to Turkey in favor of one from Iran. Right after that, the Gulf States, Turkey, EU and US began organizing and funding Sunni jihadists to carve out some real estate in Syria to get that pipeline built. Each had some other reasons, too - the US and EU wanted to block Iranian and Russian influence, Turkey's Erdogan wanted to annex some former Ottoman lands (a task he's managing quite well at the moment, it seems), the Saudis and Qataris wanted to spread their fanatical version of Islam to multi-confessional Syria.
It's a bit of poetic justice that the EU is now getting swamped by all the refugees from Syria and Libya, because the EU was very much responsible for helping cause the problems in these countries in the first place. The US, of course, is smugly safe behind the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but for the EU this was very much an "own-goal" (the EU seems to be doing a lot of those lately).
(continued...)
11/5/16, 8:29 AM
Esn said...
(continued...)
"And Trump's pal Putin isn't lifting a finger to help deal with the problem Putin helped create, with Putin actually preferring to destabilize the rest of the West with loads of immigrants from a country rife with Islamic terrorism."
Uh, how did Putin help create this problem? I don't get it. Putin's position has been that Syrians should make a peace agreement (perhaps in a new federal system) and choose their leaders in democratic elections in which any citizen can participate. The Gulf States', Turkey's, EU's and USA's position has been that Assad cannot be a candidate in any election (this is the reason why every single attempt at peace talks ends at an impasse). Using logical reasoning, we come to the conclusion that BOTH sides believe that Assad has a majority of Syrians supporting him, and would win if any vote were held. What other explanation is there? That his opponents believe that Assad would rig an election in which he was included? Just make it UN-organized and heavily-monitored. No, it seems that both Assad and his opponents know what the outcome of such an election would be, which is why Assad (and Putin) keep offering Syrian elections and their opponents keep rejecting them.
Also, Putin is the only one abiding by international law in Syria, while the US, Turkey, and EU are all making war illegally without a UN mandate. If the "West" wants to solve the refugee problem, the solution is simple: stop spending money on supporting an anti-Assad jihadist war, and use that money to rebuild Syria instead, so that Syrians will want to move back. Putin's been pretty good for Russia, but he can't be expected, nor has he been elected to, solve all the world's problems. Nor has the West been giving him any reasons to act nicely, what with constantly comparing him to Hitler and everything.
11/5/16, 8:30 AM
n=ro said...
I'm seeing any more of your articles on resilience.org.. Is it just me, or have they stopped publishing you?
best wishes,
nero
11/5/16, 9:39 AM
Mister Roboto said...
11/5/16, 9:42 AM
pygmycory said...
11/5/16, 10:08 AM
pygmycory said...
11/5/16, 10:34 AM
pygmycory said...
I hope Victoria will top out sooner rather than later. The higher it goes, the more damage it does to renters on the way up and home owners on the way down. Better that it doesn't go up so high in the first place.
Toronto is still going up, pricewise.
11/5/16, 11:00 AM
donalfagan said...
11/5/16, 12:38 PM
Rita said...
I have recently read _Deer Hunting With Jesus_ and reread _The Redneck Manifesto_ as well as the more recent _Listen Liberals_. I am saddened and maddened by the complete scorn for Trump supporters shown by so many liberals. Dehumanizing opponents by labeling them as dumb, not just in a metaphoric sense but literally of low IQ is no way to win an election. I pointed out on my Facebook to one poster that no one ever changed their vote in response to "Hey dumba**, how can you vote that way?"
Friday I recommended _Twilight's Last Gleaming_ to the leader of my Renaissance Society seminar on America's Top Ten Issues. We had just watched a documentary about the power of the military industrial complex, so it seemed appropriate.
11/5/16, 12:40 PM
Donald Hargraves said...
11/5/16, 1:25 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Bruno, hmm. That'll need some consideration.
Guilherme, it's an interesting detail of modern life that people either idealize the Middle Ages or they demonize them. My take tends to be more nuanced. It's worth keeping in mind, though, that in the US and many other countries as well, the lot of the people on the bottom of the heap has been getting steadily worse for many years; at a certain point -- which we haven't reached yet, but it's not completely out of sight -- a medieval existence starts looking pretty good to people who are dealing with the cascading dysfunctions of a failed civilization like ours; it may be rough but at least you aren't at the mercy of the random decisions of bureaucrats in the imperial capital a thousand miles away.
Justin, thanks for the info. Hmm.
Jeff, you're being very selective about your memories, I see. After the 2000 and 2004 elections, Democrats were loudly accusing the GOP of election fraud, and the GOP was insisting on its innocence. In 2008 and 2012, the shoe was on the other foot. As a rule, the losing party talks about election fraud -- and this basically amounts to the pot calling the kettle black. Have you read, by the way, Seymour Hersh's very thoughtful The Dark Side of Camelot, which talks at some length about how JFK's daddy bought him the 1960 election? If not, it's well worth a glance.
Steve, nah, if you'd been uncivil, I wouldn't have put your comment through!
David, I know a fair number who are already very quietly talking about that. In a few days, we'll see.
Bob, thanks for the link. I didn't see the movie, though, so it may not mean much to me.
Onething, I don't know about a landslide, but to my mind a Trump victory at this point is about as likely as a Clinton victory. It might be better to say that both candidates have a roughly equal chance of losing.
Sandy, can you give me a source on the claim that EROEI on petroleum is now below 10? That differs from what I've seen.
Donald, interesting that you said why you're going to vote against this and that and the other candidate, and never mentioned why Mr. Soltysik deserves your vote. That's very common these days, of course!
11/5/16, 5:22 PM
Nastarana said...
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=16919
I admit to having an agenda in this election. I want to see the American Empire peacefully dismantled before it is forcibly dismantled by a world which no longer chooses to tolerate outrages like the attack on Libya and the coup in Ukraine. Yes, that does imply certain consequences vis a vis foreign nations and their citizens. Tariffs. Restrictions on foreign ownership of American real property. No more easy immigration with a look the other way approach to charming eccentricities like using stolen ID. If you want to call that "alt right", go ahead. I am not sure I know what the phrase 'alt right' means, but I do know I am fed up with being threatened with rampaging "brown-shirts" if I don't fall in line behind Mme. C. Turns out that the "violence" at Trump rallies was instigated by provocateurs who had been recruited and paid by the Clinton campaign. My personal situation is that I have far more to fear from Clinton's salarycrat apparatchiks than I do from gun-toting Trumpists, however rude and crude they might be.
In any case, I doubt that Mme. C,'s dream of open borders will happen. If she thinks she can force that on us after stealing an election...if an impeachment bill can get out of the House, she is toast. Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative Catholic ideologue, loathes her and everything he thinks she stands for; he may not be much of a legal scholar, but he knows how to get the verdict he wants out of a jury.
My guess is that the days of easy immigration, diversity and multiculturalism are over with, with the unaccompanied minors being the last straw for many Americans. If any of us tried a stunt like that, sending kids hundreds of miles across an international border, we would be up in front of Family Court, being declared unfit parents and having our kids sent to foster care.
11/5/16, 5:34 PM
John Michael Greer said...
David, yep. While the US flounders and bellows, our replacements are very calmly getting the institutions of the next global hegemony in place.
N=ro, yes, I saw that! As I've noted before, Musk is a very smart man; he knows that it's not really possible to make a profit these days producing an honest good or service, and so he's gone into business to cash in on government largesse and the cravings of the American people for a future they aren't going to get. As for Resilience, as I noted to Armata earlier, yep -- I asked their parent organization to stop sending me emails begging for money, and their response was a bit petulant. No loss; they cater to the Yes! Magazine crowd these days, and I've noted before that if I ran a magazine about the future, it would probably be called Probably Not!
Mister R., among others. Some surprising places may be in play, in either direction.
Pygmycory, thanks for the data point!
Rita, that's just stunning. People are so desperate to drown out their own thoughts and perceptions!
11/5/16, 5:42 PM
John Michael Greer said...
11/5/16, 5:46 PM
steve pearson said...
11/5/16, 5:50 PM
sandy said...
Sandy ... Minister of Future
11/5/16, 6:03 PM
steve pearson said...
11/5/16, 6:11 PM
Justin said...
On 8chan this evening, there were some photos of quite a few significant celebrities attending some sort of event featuring Abramovic and some, uh, interesting performance art. I can be reached at n fcan 198 9x @ google email if you want the links, they're essentially pornographic though. I don't think they're super relevant, but if they get circulated among the broader population they might be relevant. After all, there are celebrities, with children in tow, attending a performance art event involving some interesting symbolism and naked people.
There definitely is something very rotten going on with Epstein, his airplane and his island.
Regarding Reddit, I'm amazed you read /r/collapse - I stay away from there due to a couple of very toxic individuals who mostly run the place. This week's blog post did fairly well on /r/lostgeneration, which might be where some of the (I assume) Clinton shills come from.
11/5/16, 6:25 PM
Mister Roboto said...
11/5/16, 6:26 PM
sandy said...
Sandy .. Minister of Future
11/5/16, 6:37 PM
latheChuck said...
From time to time, quite by accident, I have found myself turning away from the stew of stimulation here on the web, and simply sat down to think about upcoming activities. "What actions are expected of me in the next week?" is a good topic to start with. In only a few minutes (5-10), I realize ways to be more efficient and effective.
Another useful question "why is it so, and not otherwise?", for some "it" condition of my environment. This has led to a hypothesis that the local decline of bees may be a consequence of high populations of white-tail deer eating everything that blooms, not just in our home gardens, but throughout the land. (Of course, there are other well-known factors: habitat, pesticides, mites, and disease.)
When all else fails, try THINKING! Even better, start before all else fails.
11/5/16, 7:31 PM
Steve in Colorado said...
Neither of the major party candidates are worthy of consideration. (How does that old quip go "If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates"). And as much as some people have a real grievance with the status quo (as JMG has pointed out and the rise of Trump and Saunders has confirmed) it is important to keep in mind that neither of these candidates are really talking about the things which will matter. If by voting you mean only to give the finger to the establishment, go for it. But if you thought you were going to get someone in charge that can see the real issues and will work on them, well no such luck.
You remember those real issues, energy depletion, climate disruption, the disintegration of empire, unsustainable systems creaking to a halt, and all the things we used to speak about here before the elections took center stage. They still are at the root of our problems, and neither of the major candidates will do anything to make them better, at least based upon their past history, who they owe allegiance to, and their campaign talk.
No matter who gets elected, all this election will do is allow for a period of venting. And to a greater extent increase the divisions in our society. You might argue these are good things, but when no substantial changes are delivered, it could easily bring us closer to the boiling over point.
Actually the FBI's latest move is probably the scariest thing to come out of this whole show IMO. Not because the FBI took sides for one candidate or the other, that really doesn't matter (even if it was pro your candidate or against). What does matter is they broke the illusion of neutrality that these institutions are supposed to have. That means that the rules that these institutions play by are being torn up before our eyes. To me it signals we are much closer to a breaking point than I had ever believed.
11/5/16, 7:46 PM
Bruce The Druid said...
11/5/16, 8:23 PM
Bruce The Druid said...
11/5/16, 8:58 PM
Bruce The Druid said...
11/5/16, 9:31 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thanks for the book recommendation and I shall track down a copy. I enjoy the seaside in the off season too and the steak house and dark ale sound very appealing. There is something about the seeing the ocean in winter as it always looks more wild - of course that is from the relative safety of the shore though.
The spring sunshine down here is glorious and the sun has a strong bite, but the air is still cool. Nature is most definitely growing! I'm into maintenance this week. There is a lot of it, including a spring clean which is a very sensible thing to do at this time of year.
Cheers
Chris
11/5/16, 11:33 PM
Unknown said...
As I was reading the various sources that comprise my morning news roundup it occurred to me that any last sliver of credibility the USA might have had as "leaders of the free world" and "indispensable exemplars of democracy" has, as a result of this farce that is being passed off as an election, gone the way of the authority of a patriarch who just soiled his trousers at Christmas dinner and failed to notice he had done it.
From my perspective at the opposite corner of the Pacific, it makes no difference who wins, your nation has suffered a terminal loss of credibility, and as a result the empire is now dying.
That said, Trump seems less likely to have my neighbour's kids used as cannon fodder against Russian rockets during the death throes. (they are all in the Australian armed forces)
Are you familiar with the work of Strauss and Howe on generational cycles and the "Fourth turning" and if so, what is your view on that approach to understanding the trajectory of human affairs?
11/6/16, 12:06 AM
Esn said...
To recap quickly what I wrote: though I would vote for Trump over Clinton because he's much more anti-war, my main concern is his seemingly complete dismissal of climate change. This is almost disqualifying, IMO, and I'm surprised you didn't write about this issue at all in this week's post.
However, I noticed something interesting - in his rallies (like the Warren, Mich. one recently), he boasts that he'll cut billions from UN climate change programs, then in the next breath says that he'll instead use that money to get clean water and air locally in the US. He keeps saying that line, though it never gets a big applause.
Not that it proves anything, but if my mission was to try to convince people who think global warming is a hoax to support environmentalism, that's exactly the argument I would use (and the solutions for both seem like they could be pretty similar).
11/6/16, 12:16 AM
jessi thompson said...
11/6/16, 12:34 AM
jessi thompson said...
11/6/16, 12:47 AM
Esn said...
"It occurs to me that the main reason Obamacare is such a failure is that it did exactly nothing to address the real problem in healthcare: the out-of-control costs. So it props up the system by simply making the middle class pay hugely for everyone's care.
The problem was not insurance, but costs increasing much faster than cost of living."
You hit the nail on the head. Here in Canada, we have the same problem with out-of-control healthcare costs (though not as bad as in the US). For that matter, the same problem exists in many spheres of modern life - perhaps because we measure wealth by GDP per capita. If I get paid more but have to buy things that I used to get for free, the GDP per capita rises, but I'm no better off than I was before. There's just more inefficiency.
In the Greater Toronto Area, there is in effect a government subsidy for suburban sprawl. Developers are allowed build sprawling suburbs, and then everybody else's taxes rise to pay for the new roads and transit that now have to be built and maintained. Also, the traffic congestion gets worse and worse every year. The developers get massive profits, while all the costs are passed on to society.
If developers were forced to pay for that, maybe they would plan more efficient cities and the problem would take care of itself.
This is actually one of the things that Dmitry Orlov mentions - collapse, if it happens, will hit American/Canadian suburban neighbourhoods especially hard. When I visited Russia last year, the thing that pleasantly surprised me the most is how compact communities are and that there are good grocery stores everywhere within easy walking distance (under 5 minutes). Russia's GDP per capita is much lower than Canada's - but the expenses that people have are also much lower, with the result that from my perspective, quality of life for average folk in both places is pretty similar right now (which certainly wasn't the case when I visited 10 years ago).
11/6/16, 1:22 AM
Hubertus Hauger said...
I am still not over it, that times have changed to such an ridiculous extend. Its all changing, for sure.
11/6/16, 1:42 AM
Chevaliermalfait said...
From the 'Book of Merlin"
{merlin speaks} "we found that the political ideas of Homo Ferox were of two kinds: either that problems could be solved by force, or that they could be solved by argument. The Ant men of the future, who believe in force, consider that you can determine whether twice two is four by knocking people down who disagree with you. The democrats,who are to believe in argument, consider all men are entitled to an opinion, because all are born equal-"I am as good a man as you are,' the first instinctive ejaculation of the man who is not."
"If neither force nor argument can be relied on," said the King," I do not see what can be done."
"neither force, nor argument, nor opinion," said Merlin with the deepest sincerity," are thinking. Argument is only a display of mental force, a sort of fencing with points in order to gain a victory, not for truth. Opinions are the blind alleys of lazy or stupid men, who are unable to think. if ever a true politician really thinks out a subject dispassionately, even Homo Stultus will be compelled to accept his findings in the end. Opinion can never stand beside truth. At present, however, Homo Impoliticus is content either to argue with opinions or to fight with his fists, instead of waiting for the truth in his head. It will take a million years before the mass of men can be called political animals."
"What are we , then , at present?"
"We find that at present the human race is divided politically into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them and become 'politicians': the wise man stands out, because he know himself to be hopelessly outnumbered and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off behind the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why politicians raise their banners. it is moreover the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different except the names. The fools will still be fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated. This is an optimistic but on the whole a scientific statement of the habits of Homo Impoliticus".
11/6/16, 3:48 AM
Bruno B. L. said...
11/6/16, 3:50 AM
Shane W said...
11/6/16, 5:03 AM
David, by the lake said...
I concur with that agenda. We are facing a hard landing, regardless, but we could soften it somewhat by taking proactive steps to dismantle the empire prior to its collapse. Moreover, the time and resources we'd other expend on maintenance could be used to prepare as much as possible for a post-imperial existence in a resource-constrained world. Unfortunately, that kind of platform will not get elected. How then can we build our communities to better navigate that terrain of tomorrow while the present system still exerts its influence? That is the needle we have to thread somehow.
11/6/16, 5:22 AM
Shane W said...
I'm curious to note on here the nihilism or cynicism, if you will, amongst certain salary class individuals who have been deeply involved in various left-wing/liberal causes over the past 30-40 years. I'm thinking that it's all very much an inability to accept the implosion of progressive values-based politics in favor of interests. I'm interested in your take, JMG, on the loud proclamations of nihilism or cynicism regarding a potential Trump presidency on here. What do you make of it? As you've already mentioned, most of his supporters already grant that he may not follow through on his promises, but the movement has become bigger than the man himself. The wage class can always fall back on insurgency and civil war if this Trump thing doesn't work out.
I'm thinking back to your comment, JMG, that certain people have simply stopped talking to you when you express that you don't support Hillary. For me, this past year has been the year of "losing" people, as a former "progressive" who has totally given up on any kind of "progressive" politics. It's a strange feeling of "losing" people, of realizing that these people inhabit totally different worlds and see things totally differently, and being unable to communicate with them at all. Very surreal. Here I'm thinking of a recent exchange I had with someone spouting the "Trump's supporters are motivated by bigotry" meme. This person was projecting the shadow onto the white wage class, and was totally unaware of the hatred oozing out of them, and the fact that she totally embodies what she is projecting onto the white wage class. To me, it's so strange to see people go batshale crazy over Trump. Third world countries like the US routinely elect people like Trump (Chavez, Morales, Duterte, etc.), but most times I've brought this up to provide perspective to people, it's usually provoked an "American exceptionalism"/nuclear arms spiel (Pakistan is a nuclear armed country less stable than a Trump America). What's so odd is to see people who have focused all the preparatory efforts on the practical/Green Wizard stuff while totally neglecting the non-rational, esoteric, spiritual, magical aspects then totally lose it over something as minor as Trump.
11/6/16, 6:06 AM
Shane W said...
to me, it just seems like so much wasted effort to focus all your Green Wizardry efforts on the practical/concrete, while neglecting the non rational, if you're only going to get blindsided and go batshale crazy over the entirely predictable real world outcomes of decline and fall.
I wanted to correct someone about Sanders support among the rural wage class. He DID get support from the rural wage class. Here in KY, his largest margins of victory in the primary were in Eastern, Appalachian counties. WV, which is like Eastern KY, was the same. Not sure about the Appalachian counties of other states (VA, MD, NC, TN). Clinton carried Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington) counties by comfortable margins, which mystified the "progressive" Sanders supporters on the salary class organic farm I was on at the time.
I wanted to let you all in on a little local aspect of the class divide that you might not be aware of. I live in the wealthiest county in KY, which simply means that the class divide is that much starker than in a more "universally" poor county. I can assure you my hometown is a much poorer place than when i was growing up, and has not been spared the heroin epidemic. We're electing our local city council this election, and economic growth and development. A perennial issue here is land use and "preservation". Yes, we're talking about the world-famous thoroughbred horse farms and the wealthy elite that own and run them. American Pharoah is at stud in my home county. "Preservation" is elite code for "horse farm interests" which do not benefit the local wage class at all. Now, like most of the Eastern US, our natural ecosystem is "mixed hardwood forests", which horse farms decidedly are not. They're a bluegrass monoculture that requires tons of fossil fuels (mowing and trimming) and pesticides (including lots of Roundup) to maintain. They produce a luxury good (thoroughbred horses) which have no practical benefit. At least our other traditional products, Bourbon and tobacco, have tangible uses and benefits. The presence of so much wealthy land in the hands of a small elite runs up real estate prices, which makes our county one of the least affordable to buy land/real estate. The horse farms are notorious for paying the lowest wages in the area, and are one of the largest employers of undocumented workers. Indeed, my dad said that the horse farms were unified in their opposition to our first factory, Texas Instruments, because of the upward pressure factories would create on wages. So, needless to say, the wage class here is decidedly anti-preservation and pro-development because their interests are not at all represented by the "preservationists". If you see in the next 5-10 years horse farm elite dangling from lampposts or meeting the business end of a pitchfork, and some populist KY politician calling for land reform/redistribution for more practical purposes than thoroughbred horse farms, you'll have heard it here first.
11/6/16, 6:52 AM
Nastarana said...
http://abc7chicago.com/news/bbq-collected-for-needy-thrown-out-covered-in-bleach/1589797/
This kind of outrage, perpetrated by out of control, full of themselves apparatchiks, is what we have to fear from a Clinton presidency. IMHO.
Along with foreign wars and pay to play corruption at home.
11/6/16, 7:04 AM
pygmycory said...
11/6/16, 9:14 AM
Bruno B. L. said...
11/6/16, 9:19 AM
Glenn said...
"Yesterday I blamed Trump’s poisoning of America on two enablers: The Republican Party that’s refused to stand up to Trump, and a media that gave him all the time and attention he’s sought.
But I left out a third: America’s business, political, and media elite – most residing comfortably in Washington and New York -- who have been so out of touch with the pain of working-class America that they had no idea how much Trump’s message would resonate.
This is true of the Democratic Party as well. It had once been the party of the working class. But over the last 3 decades it’s been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, and pollsters who don’t have a clue, and, frankly, haven’t particularly cared. For years they’ve focused instead on raising big money from the executive class, and getting votes from the “swing” suburbs – upper middle-class independents who could swing Republican or Democrat. They abandoned organized labor, abandoned the working class, abandoned their roots."
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrostone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
11/6/16, 10:27 AM
. said...
Mallow
11/6/16, 11:06 AM
Guilherme de Baskerville said...
I don't think anyone is minimizing the impact of a Russo-American war. I just think that's very, very unlikely to happen. Some skirmishing where russian service members and american service members get into a scrape? Yup. That happened before. Americans and Russians were shooting each other over MiG Alley in Korea. I could see a russian SAM battery taking out an american plane over Syria. Or american dropping a few bombs on an russian artillery position or something.
All of this will be bad, no doubt about it. Increased tensions, a reversion to some of the worst years of the Cold War. I do think this is not going to result in global thermonuclear war, though, or even a serious conventional shooting war between Russia and the US/NATO. It's my opininon and you're entitled to a different one, of course, but I find the assertion that electing HC carries a major risk of serious war with Russia a partisan position against her, by people who dislike her either on a non-thinking emotional way or have another agenda in place.
As for easily considering another war, let me remind you I barely qualify as "westerner" in the sense you're using the word (Brazil being a largely neutral contry, not a member of NATO, etc), I'm also NOT saying that more war in the Middle East won't be a tragedy. Or course it will, mainly for the people living there. These stupid interventions there are creating failed states that will be prime breeding ground for the formation of warband culture and bite all of our asses (pardon my french) in the end! Vladimir Putin seems to be the only rational world leader at this point, with the position that maintaining state institutions in the region is in the best interests of everyone, while the "West" and some of their allies (Saudi Arabia, in particular) has been cluelessly trying to play a game of real-politik against Iran/Russia and risking the complete collapse of public order across vast swathes of the region.
I find THAT a credible mark against HC. Hillary is a BAD choice, no doubt about it. It's all academic for me, of course, but I lean slightly in her direction, just because I think the bad stuff about Trump is worse. But it's like JMG keeps saying, we are mostly voting AGAINST something these days, not FOR something. I just voted in municipal elections last week here in Brazil, and I had to vote for a cadidate that I'm not particularly enthusiastic for, mainly because his opponent was a police captain being bankrolled by the richest people in the state and whom I'm quite sure is involved with a local death squad responsible for the massacre of 16 people, most of them young males, in a local favela last year.
11/6/16, 11:17 AM
jessi thompson said...
11/6/16, 11:48 AM
Guilherme de Baskerville said...
I have a somewhat above-average knowledge about the Middle Ages, being interested in the period since childhood and having a degree in history. I've read some actual academic work on the period, too, including some of the most respected historians on the issue (Braudel, Duby, etc). So, yes, I agree with you that the Middle Ages tends to be seen in a very black and white manner. Which was the point of my comment. I have no doubt that you are cognisant of the facts of life in the period, as far as we can know them, since you're one of the most well-read people I know of. What I was nitpicking is that your comment could be interpreted as paiting "too-rose-a-picture" of the period, like I said in my original comment. We also didn't discuss the fac that the quality of life in the Middle Age varied wildly between time periods and regions. I don't doubt that a prosperous small farmer in north-central Italy in the XIV century lived a pretty good life, all things considered. Or a swiss free peasant. But a serf in the bad parts of Xth century France? I would prefer to live as almost anyone else in any period of history then that, the only few exception being a chattel slave or perhaps a really poor person in the early Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Also, I live in a typical large third world city, one with a pretty bad wealth inequality index to boot. While my family is in the bottom rung of the salaried class (with some relatives being better off), I live pretty close to honest-to-god "favelas" and the social situation here is such that I do have contact with people who live pretty marginal lives in such places. I think I can safely say that counts as being as bad as, or even worse, then whatever you can find in the US in terms of desperate poverty. Moreover, a mere two or three generations ago, these people's grandparents and great-grandparents were largely living as rural sharecroppers, which is pretty close to being serfs. Despite the miseries and the often crushing poverty if everyday life, I don't see them wanting to go back there, to be frank. Your experience may be different up there in rural america, but I would be curious to see if the majority of urban black people have any desire to move back South and become sharecroppers for a largely racist white landowner class again....
If you're talking about returning to the land, that's completly different. I'm 100% behind you that I think some decentralization, a more vibrant rural and small-town economy is much preferable then what we have now. But we have to also recognize that there was a LOT of bad when it comes to traditional rural societies. Specially for the people who were at the bottom of it. The ideal, in my mind, would be to move towards something that's not the past, but it's not the disfunctional system we have now. I think you tried to do that with the Retrotopia series, and I really like that, despite having a few reservations about something s that you implied there and that I thought were unrealistic, but then again, you said it yourself that it was written in the utopian tradition, and I can respect that.
11/6/16, 11:52 AM
pygmycory said...
11/6/16, 12:06 PM
Guilherme de Baskerville said...
I think we will have to agreee to disagree here. I get the sense that we come from fundamentally different positions. I'm socially very liberal in outlook, even though I'm extremely irritated with the hijack of the left, worldwide, by "identity politics" spoused by rich urban liberals worldwide. I share some traditional burkean conversative positions with JMG in a few issues, and being here in this blog obviously means that I'm more worried about environmental causes then most people. But I'm a leftist/progressive at heart, I think. I think you're far more socially conservative then I am and even if we could probably agree in a range of other issues over a beer, I think in this point we probably can't.
I agree that's whe more hakwish in foreign policy, and you're totally entitled to hold the position that this issue is of fundamental importance for you. I can respect that.
But I'm far less sympathetic to the illegal immigration issue. I agree with JMG that tacit illegal immigration has, indeed, be used by the american upper class to drive wages down, but it's also true that americans consume a quarter of the world's resources while having approximately 5% of the world population. Given the fact that you're neighbours with vastly less wealthy countries (and ones that the US had a hand, historically, in exploiting or outright stealing land in case of Mexico), it strikes me a bit as defense of privilege when wage earners in the US make these comments.
You seem to be willing to roll back the institutions of the american empire that created this imperial wealth pump, to which I applaud you. But looking from the outside, a lot of the Trump supporters want to go back to a time when american factory workers and wage-earners in general could afford a lifestyle propped by the fact that the US represented 40-50% of the world economy. This is simply not possible anymore and I'm afraid that a good proportion of them are going to dump their anger on the illegal immigrant themselves, not the upper-class which mainly beneffited from it.
Even you were more pissed off, it seems, at people sending their kids to cross the border, then at the people who hire illegal immigrants in the first place, for exemple. To some extent, this is a supply and demand issue. As long as there are people in the US hiring illegal immigrants, they will come, walls or no walls. It seems that the first step in adressing this issue would be to penalize people that hire the illegals, like the commenter before that suggested that people who are angry with that gas pipeline should perhaps start by shutting down their own spigots at the end. But the rethoric falls disproportionatelly upon the immigrants themselves, it seems.
11/6/16, 12:27 PM
jessi thompson said...
11/6/16, 1:05 PM
[email protected] said...
You may be interested in reading my latest post, which is purely a scenario building exercise, but a thought provoking read.
https://forecastingintelligence.org/2016/11/06/the-rise-of-caesar/
11/6/16, 1:07 PM
jessi thompson said...
11/6/16, 1:14 PM
Shane W said...
Regarding the Article V convention, I am on the list for the Con Con movement for a Balanced Budget, not so much because I support a Balanced Budget Amendment, but because it is the most successful vehicle for calling an Article V Con Con. My interest in an Article V Con Con is not so much in proposing actual amendments to the Constitution, because I think the country is way too divided politically and regionally to ever reach the 2/3, 3/4 requirements required to ever propose or pass amendments, but a bogged down Con Con that goes on for months on end w/out ever accomplishing anything a la Twilight's Last Gleaming is the only way to put in stark relief to most Americans that we are no longer a United States, a unified country, and brings us that much closer to Twilight's dissolution amendment (USexit) being proposed and passed.
Regarding dissolution, I'm noticing amongst the wage class that their faith in Americanism (i.e. a representative Constitutional democratically elected Republic on the American model) has not wavered in the least, but that their belief that the government in DC actually embodies those ideals has collapsed. This is a very good sign as the insurgency goes forward, because it demonstrates that this revolution has the potential to be as small-c, Burkean conservative as the initial American revolution and the Confederacy in the last Civil War. People still very much believe in the American democratic Republic, they just don't have any faith that DC embodies those ideals. This bodes very well going forward.
11/6/16, 1:58 PM
David, by the lake said...
11/6/16, 2:03 PM
Shane W said...
11/6/16, 2:11 PM
onething said...
You say the FBI took sides. I find myself wondering if you think they took Hillary's side or if you think they are against her unfairly. I don't see this as a Trump issue one way or the other, although apparently most of them are negative toward Hillary personally, which is not surprising given the allegations and the evidence. They've been on her tail for a while, but in my opinion took her side until they just couldn't anymore, by playing softball and not recommending legal action. Apparently the DOJ though, has taken her side very aggressively.
Is it taking sides when you pursue the law?
11/6/16, 3:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Sandy, likewise. If petroleum as a whole has dropped below 10:1, we're neck deep in kim chee and sinking fast.
Justin, I don't read the comments on /r/collapse, just the news stories. Generally speaking, I don't bother with comments on sites that don't have a courtesy code in place and enforced by moderators -- the signal-to-noise ratio is just too low, and I get plenty of trolling right here.
LatheChuck, exactly. I've noticed that with 24/7 media saturation and the rest of it, most people these days don't seem to have any kind of inner life that's separate from the yelling of the collective consciousness. Making a space for one's own thoughts, one's own reflections, one's own inner life -- that's utterly essential these days, though it's also very, very strongly discouraged by popular culture and peer pressure. One of these weeks, when I want to field even more saliva-spattered diatribes than I get when I mention that humanity isn't going to the stars, I'll probably do a post on that.
Steve, I ain't arguing. As I hope to show in upcoming posts, the descent of politics into its current incoherence is one of the main factors that's keeping the US from addressing any of its deeper problems; it's also the case, I'd argue, that some of the other issues I've raised recently, such as the impact of the bipartisan consensus of the last few decades on working Americans, are worth some attention in their own right. That said, as I've noted before, there is no bright future ahead; if we're smart, lucky, and get a move on, we may be able to get through the next round of crises in less than totally devastated condition, and make the most of the period of stabilization and partial recovery that will follow -- but industrial civilization is going down, and nothing you or I, or Trump or Clinton, or anyone else can do will change that.
Bruce, notice the way you're trying to drag the conversation back to the racial and sexual stereotypes that dominate the officially approved discourse on politics. It's not about "white males." It's about class issues -- but those are taboo now, and so it's not surprising you and so many others refuse to talk about them.
Cherokee, glad to hear that spring has arrived! Here we're in the middle of a crisp and gorgeous autumn, with the first frost on its way.
Unknown Aussie, that's a very pungent metaphor! I'm not a great fan of Strauss and Howe, but that's mostly because their system seems rather too rigid to me, and has to be defended with a certain amount of cherrypicking. The broad cycle they trace isn't unique to them, and it does seem to be there in the data.
Esn, Blogger apparently ate it -- I saw it and approved it, but I don't see it in the comments field now. That's a fascinating point about Trump's rhetoric, and it feeds into something I'll be discussing in an upcoming post.
Hubertus, "Lügenpresse" is my new word for the day -- typical Deutsche precision. Thank you.
Chevalier, excellent. You and LatheChuck are both onto one of the keys to America's terminal political dysfunction: the replacement of thought with argument. More on this in that troll-attractant post I mentioned above.
Shane, this happens whenever I talk about the election! Do you recall the stampede of earlier articles on Trump and Clinton fielded -- 524 and 604 comments respectively? Compared to that, this is tame. ;-)
11/6/16, 3:37 PM
onething said...
"From my perspective at the opposite corner of the Pacific, it makes no difference who wins, your nation has suffered a terminal loss of credibility, and as a result the empire is now dying."
Rather than causing our nation to die, I see it as a symptom of the decay. I agree that this election has turned into a Jerry Springer show and is utterly without dignity, but I already thought that during Bill Clinton's presidency when they tried to impeach him for getting a blow job and dragged the stained dress through the world.
11/6/16, 3:43 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Nastarana, I'm by no means sure it's fair to credit that one to Clinton's side of the line alone. Punitive austerity for the poor has bipartisan support these days.
Pygmycory, I got a lot of readers by way of Energy Bulletin, and a fair number back before Resilience really started pandering to the privileged. Since then its share of my trackbacks declined steadily -- so I think you're quite correct.
Bruno, thank you! I think it's time we start considering Cracked.com a news medium and the New York Times a really campy humor magazine...
Glenn, excellent! The more often that gets said, the harder it'll be for the defenders of privilege to insist that all those who disagree with them are just nasty people, blah blah blah.
.Mallow, changes in the laws to shield the media from harassment lawsuits would be a good start. It would be tolerably easy to lobby for those, and a lot of wealthy and influential interests could get behind that.
Guilherme, oh, I get that. I simply like using the statistic about work hours and days off to rattle true believers in progress who like to think that every single statistic must have gotten better since the Middle Ages. As for our current situation here in the US, did you know that a significant number of African-Americans are in fact leaving northern cities and moving back to the rural South? They may not be taking on jobs as sharecroppers, but conditions in the big cities are ghastly by US standards -- not yet to favela conditions, but headed that way pretty obviously -- and as the US unravels further, I expect conditions here to get rather worse than they are in your country.
Lordberia3, if there turns out to be serious evidence of massive vote fraud, I could see that. The logical fig leaf would be to have the election thrown into the House, as happened in 1876, and then have the House elect Trump. That way a facade of constitutional government would be maintained -- and I suspect that maintaining that facade will be on a lot of minds, if things go pear-shaped.
Shane, I hope to the gods we can avoid another civil war. Dissolution via constitutional convention would be far less traumatic, and there's also the possibility of returning the US to what it was originally -- a federal republic in which social issues in particular are decided by each state individually. That's the possibility I'll be exploring in upcoming posts, via the Bill of Redress.
David, given some serious statesmanship on both sides, it might work.
Shane, oh, they know that if Trump gets in a lot of the deals that keep the puppet governments of our near abroad propped up are going to come unraveled in a hurry. I don't doubt the screaming will be on an epic scale.
11/6/16, 3:54 PM
onething said...
I'd really appreciate it if you would mention at least the name of the person you are responding to. There is enough of a time delay in posts getting posted, that it becomes confusing what you are talking about. Communication takes effort.
11/6/16, 4:18 PM
jessi thompson said...
11/6/16, 4:28 PM
Justin said...
It's expressly verboten, in a company which has nothing to do with the media, to even suggest that Trump supporters are anything other than uneducated racist misogynists xenophobes who've 'lost' at something (even as my company hires foreign workers to save money). I can only imagine how bad it is in the media to actually discuss the issues facing those who will show up on Tuesday and vote for the Orange One (I don't mean to mock - I like the guy even though I don't think he will fix anything. And if I were eligible I'd be voting for him, although not for the reasons that Trump says I should).
Things are very close to the breaking point around the world. I'm not sure what's really going on in Korea, but something is rotten - something I know about SK is that the hypercapitalism they've been practicing is pretty hellish for most and I can imagine that they want change. Whatever the truth or popular fiction about the present scandal is likely just the excuse, not the motivation.
http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000004751016/large-protests-in-south-korea.html
Meanwhile, in France there is massive anger within the police forces at the French government, apparently sparked when officers in one of Paris' many no-go-zones were attacked with molotov cocktails. I don't have a link for this one.
Meanwhile in Sweden,
480,000 million women reported sexual assaults in 2016. This is in a country of 9 million, or 4.5 million women. This is actually approaching the imagined statistics about sexual assault on college campuses in the United States.
http://speisa.com/modules/articles/index.php/item.3326/480-000-sexual-assaults-of-women-in-sweden-in-a-year.html?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork
I don't need to link to what Duterte is doing over in the Philippines, and although I disagree with the methodology I agree philosophically. Anger over opioid addiction is a big Trump issue in a couple states. And of course, there's also the little-discussed issue of the amount of pharmaceutical lobbying money that was spent keeping pseudoephedrine (the only methamphetamine precursor it would be practical to ban or regulate) in stores. Ephedrine, which is legal in Canada is similarly effective (I take it when I need to and like it) and cannot be used to make drugs. It's banned (supposedly) because bodybuilders take silly amounts of it as a stimulant and appetite suppression (the horror).
Things are coming apart fast.
JMG, you'll be interested (if you don't know already) to know that Golden Dawn is starting soup kitchens:
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/neo-nazis-homeless-outreach-race-hate
11/6/16, 4:44 PM
steve pearson said...
cheers, Steve
11/6/16, 4:45 PM
rapier said...
Of course in a way the neo central castings did come up with Trump because any and every 'reasonable' opponent of the status quo is by definition a nobody with zero chance of nomination for president much less town counsel person in Peoria. One is either a linkedin member of the institutional world be it corporate, government, or NGO or your an outsider.
It would be all well and good if Trumps ill defined and unexamined opposition to the status quo came to power if just to blow things up except that he is deeply authoritarian as are a large portion of the insiders coalescing around him. When the devolution of the financial economy takes place with the real people economy to soon follow authoritarians will certainly come to the fore but to invite them in now is a mistake. So say I.
Besides if you think a Trump administration would not be all in for QE infinity the next time stocks correct 20% your wrong. Or think he won't bomb somebody soon after election like all presidents do just to show they are 'tough' your wrong too. Any hint that America is weak or being make a fool of by anyone is going to see the wrath of Trump as his entire life revolves around domination and humiliation. The slightest slight aimed at him is answered by nuclear grade payback.
Many W voters thought W a fool but figured he had "good advisers". Trump has a few not total wack job advisers but the majority are just that.
It disturbs me that most alt economic thinkers have entered this game in favor of Trump. JMG knows and most others do as well as anyone that the system is not going to reform and make things happily ever after. Trump isn't about reform. Among other things he is about bringing new levels of authoritarian police power to new heights in America. That may[ likely come in many places but to invite that in is madness.
11/6/16, 4:49 PM
Bruno B. L. said...
11/6/16, 4:49 PM
avalterra said...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/06/politics/comey-tells-congress-fbi-has-not-changed-conclusions/index.html
I think this stalls Trump's momentum and Clinton takes it. The democrats likely squeak out a narrow majority in the Senate and makes small gains in the House. But it ultimately may not make any difference. The die is cast. The Republic may have finally reached a turning point.
AV
11/6/16, 5:02 PM
Nastarana said...
Mme. Clinton directed her maid to copy classified materials.
http://nypost.com/2016/11/06/clinton-directed-her-maid-to-print-out-classified-materials/
I think I remember reading somewhere that low level State Dept. employees get fired for breaches of security? No telling whom else might have been reading the "classified" materials, with or without the knowledge of Ms. Santos.
I have been thinking all along that the unfolding Clinton scandals look a lot like Watergate.
11/6/16, 5:27 PM
donalfagan said...
11/6/16, 5:34 PM
Ray Wharton said...
I have been watching an old BBC production of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. All too topical, it seems so much like the deals and betrayals of today's power politics, but the play's case is so simple.
11/6/16, 5:35 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Nice to read of your pleasant autumn. Hey, do you normally hold elections in autumn? There is a metaphor in there somewhere. ;-)! Spring here has delivered the first few tentative signs of quince fruit on the trees. Those trees have not produced fruit before so it is very exciting.
I do worry for you sometimes, but I'm sure that you've polished and practiced your anti-troll-attractant spell? At least I hope you have.
I'm planning a side trip into the wide world of clear thinking later today.
There is a storm coming here this afternoon.
Cheers
Chris
11/6/16, 6:48 PM
Justin said...
11/6/16, 7:21 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Justin, that shows that they know the playbook. That was standard practice for fascist parties in Europe between the wars, and it won them an immense amount of goodwill, votes, and supporters.
Steve, many thanks.
Rapier, you know, several times now when people have insisted that Trump is more authoritarian than Clinton, I've asked them to show me some evidence for that claim. So far nobody has provided it. I'm coming to think that labels such as "authoritarian" -- not to mention "fruitcake" -- are simply ways of saying "I hate him" -- which may be true, of course, but doesn't offer anyone else any reason to agree with you. Instead of flinging around insults, perhaps you could try to offer reasons...
Avalterra, well, we'll see, won't we?
Nastarana, by the time this whole thing is finished I bet we'll see considerably worse than that.
Ray, power politics hasn't changed since our ancestors were still swinging through the trees. Shakespeare's a good guide!
Cherokee, yep -- the US election is always, by constitutional mandate, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. That was just after the end of the harvest in colonial times, when people had the spare time to have an election. As for trolls, why, yes -- I either delete their rants and deny them the attention which, like spoiled two-year-olds, they crave, or when I'm in need of amusement, I put a bit of trollery through, critique it, and then refuse to allow the troll to respond. They really lose their cool when you do that; I highly recommend it as an occasional habit, as they don't come back.
There's a storm coming here, too, but it's a little further off...
11/6/16, 7:30 PM
Justin said...
In my mind fascism is simply 'less right' rather than incorrect - if more humane political structures cannot or will not be maintained, then something that looks a lot like fascism is inevitable. To be clear, this isn't an apology for fascism, but rather an acknowledgement of it's status as a viable ideology which is well-adapted to certain circumstances. Complaining about fascists in Greece or America is a little like denouncing wolves as one devours you.
Golden Dawn running soup kitchens is exactly why I would cast a ballot for Trump, in the hope that some sort of middle ground can be reached.
11/6/16, 7:45 PM
Nancy Sutton said...
11/6/16, 9:06 PM
KL Cooke said...
11/7/16, 12:44 AM
Unknown said...
JMG, yep, pungent is what it is meant to be, in accordance with what is being described. I have acquired over my life a very special contempt for those who claim a leadership role and then behave in a manner that spits in the face of those they would claim to be leading. The USA has raised hoiking great gobs of bilious puke to an art form, and I would be less than honest if I did not point it out. That said I do realize that a nation's leaders conduct is not often representative of its citizens and I do really have considerable empathy for those Americans who are actively trying to turn their national representation on the global stage into something the rest of us can observe without wanting to cast very powerful spells for a plague of galloping knob rot to prevent the reproduction of such venality. Your efforts in this regard are exemplary, and certainly have informed and encouraged my fledgling efforts to improve the conduct of our political processes and the quality of the leaders that are created here in Australia.
Congratulations on one hell of a good blog, and my very best to all the commenters.
Best wishes and condolences for tomorrow.
Cheers
eagle eye
ps sorry to not posting my name on the first comment, fat finger syndrome!
11/7/16, 1:00 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thank you for the reply and explanation and of course that makes perfect sense. Out of curiosity were your campaigns always this long? Down here, the people get a bit grumpy if the election campaigns extend beyond about 12 weeks. The last one went for 13 weeks (I believe) and it was definitely an lucky number for the incumbents. I really like your anti-troll-attractant spell. Very good stuff (he says as he takes notes in the background...)!
Oh, don't be too hard on Jessi. Jessi is replying on a mobile interweb thingee device which gives slightly different options in blogger and from her perspective her replies appear exactly underneath the original comment to which she is responding to. It all looks very normal to her. It is just that for everyone else using other interweb browsing devices, it doesn't make any sense at all, and so your advice about including the handle of the person to which she is replying should solve the whole problem.
Cheers
Chris
11/7/16, 2:47 AM
Alex Blaidd said...
11/7/16, 2:58 AM
Shane W said...
11/7/16, 3:21 AM
Robert Mathiesen said...
Bruno, this is some fracked shale you've written here. The North American territory in quesion was in fact heavily populated, in some areas very heavily populated, by various peoples. They weren't people of European ancestry or US citizens, and where they farmed the land, they did so less intensively than US citizens would come to do. But they were there, they occupied the land, and they used it well. The US came fracking close to wiping them out altogether. Under the -- admittedly later -- definition of genocide, the US has committed genocide against several hundred distinct peoples during its existence, far more of them than any of the Axis states did during WW2.
11/7/16, 3:28 AM
Fred said...
11/7/16, 5:30 AM
Initial Assessment said...
Probably one of the best explanations of why Trump might win comes from Michael Moore. Please see link to you tube clip below. Please note that Moore does not support Trump, he is just playing devils advocate to explain why Trump is so popular. His basic take is that the working class have been Fracked by the elite, so they are voting Trump to say Frack you to the elite. To put it at its most basic, people who have been Fracked want to Frack the Frackers who Fracked them. This is basic Frackchology. Unfortunately the middle and upper classes don’t understand Frackchology because they have never been Fracked. They can’t see that it might be their turn soon to be Fracked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKeYbEOSqYc
PS: Apologies for the amount of Fracking in this comment, but sometimes things just need to be put in this simplistic way. I just wish more people understood basic frackchology.
11/7/16, 5:40 AM
Fred said...
The Keys are statements that favor the re-election of the incumbent party. When five or fewer statements are false, the incumbent party is predicted to win; when six or more are false, the challenging party is predicted to win.[5]
Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
Short term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
Long term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.
11/7/16, 5:43 AM
Scotlyn said...
11/7/16, 6:08 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
"[T]hey know that if Trump gets in a lot of the deals that keep the puppet governments of our near abroad propped up are going to come unraveled in a hurry. I don't doubt the screaming will be on an epic scale."
The amount of effort the European media has put into making sure we would have voted against D.T. (note that it's always against D.T., not for H.C.) had we but had U.S. voting rights has been epic enough, thank you. Walked by a screen covered wall downtown the other day, and the talking heads on it were doing the Remain routine, insisting that if D.T. wins, we are going to have what is happening already anyway (specific examples included unstable stock markets, trouble in the Middle East and *ahem* "slower growth"...)
The buildup of desperation and rage in the liberosphere is reaching ghastly levels. When that thing pops in few days, it's gonna get ugly.
11/7/16, 6:23 AM
Bogatyr said...
11/7/16, 6:37 AM
David, by the lake said...
More notes from the field re technical feasibility vs economic viability
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/carlyle-group-sees-u-s-nuclear-industry-s-end-without-subsidies-iupx27u9
Of course, these shut-downs come with associated impacts for the area economies -- jobs lost, local incomes hit, etc. We had a (smaller) nuke plant get shut down nearby a few years ago and the impacts are still being felt from that.
Also in the energy field, more news re CCS: the Kemper County PP is on track to come close to a $7B price tag and faces another delay; also the "decarbonization" strategies being discussed world-wide all seem to focus on CCS, which seems to me to be akin to saying that I need to lose weight, but I'll keep eating triple cheeseburgers b/c I can take this diet pill over here and block the weight-gain chemically. Not eating triple cheeseburgers doesn't seem to enter into the equation...
And thank goodness tomorrow is Election day. I thought this thing would never end. (Of course, I shouldn't speak too soon, either.) Hopefully, in another 36 hours it'll be over with. I'm looking forward to your initial read of whatever results come out of this mess.
11/7/16, 6:51 AM
Tidlösa said...
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/6/malik-obama-donald-trump-supporter-gets-curse-from/
;-)
11/7/16, 6:56 AM
Danil Osipchuk said...
I wish I could wholeheartedly agree with you, to have less worries.
Or I could try to further expand the topic saying that we are already well into the proxy war and further escalation means direct fighting between regular army formations which most certainly will include attacking bases and carriers with missiles tipped with who knows what, etc.
But I'm backing off from the discussion. Probably sunny climate and living far from the possible main theater make you more optimistic than me :-) I see quite a lot of luck in that the nuclear war hasn't happen already. I look how people interact in daily life and organizations/businesses - it is a mess and in the same time a miracle that it works somehow most of the time, but disasters still happen. This particular disaster we are talking about is a very nasty one.
wishing everyone everything good
11/7/16, 7:04 AM
Matthias Gralle said...
The Roman empire only made all of its free inhabitants citizens in 212 AD/CE under Caracalla. In fact, until the Italian War in the closing years of the Roman republic, not even Italians outside Latium were Roman citizens. Which is to say, the Romans did act like a true Imperial expansionist power, controlling far-off countries without incorporating (most of) their inhabitants into the Roman civitas (citizenry). I therefore tend to think American imperialism should be dated from 1898. There might be counter-examples from other empires, though, e.g. China under Qing, Han and Tang.
11/7/16, 7:22 AM
NomadicBeer said...
@Fred, thanks for the amazing description of education for the elites. I am surrounded at work by people with kids and it's so hard to say nothing when they talk about their kids' education. I just don't want to bring them down, but it's scary. Even for daycare they pay ridiculous amounts of money, they already worry about college (and given the rate of increase for tuition they will never be able to afford it) and of course they buy their toddlers IPads... And these are upper middle class people! I can only imagine how bad things are for wage class people.
11/7/16, 8:07 AM
Glenn said...
"Glenn, Seems that the Thomas Frank meme is spreading. Do you have a link to the Reich piece?"
No, I copied it off my Facebook feed. Google Robert Reich, it's one of his most recent essays. It's probably on his FB page.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
11/7/16, 9:22 AM
Bruno B. L. said...
11/7/16, 10:12 AM
Bruno B. L. said...
11/7/16, 10:18 AM
David, by the lake said...
I guess my take is that if a polity is absorbing lands and peoples outside of itself by force (explicit or implied), then that is imperialist expansion. I will concur that there are differing kinds of imperialism (e.g. recent US methods versus historical British methods) and that the same polity might go through a number of phases of imperial expansion with differing characteristics. I'd agree that such is the case of the US. But at the end of the day, we took lands from native peoples at the point of a gun; we took lands from Mexico in a similar manner. We pursued policies which encouraged migration and encroachment onto those lands by settlers so that these could be "saved" later. The US had no claim to its current borders other than the one in our minds. We ourselves were a fragment broken off from British imperialism that decided to become an empire itself.
Perhaps we are splitting hairs. The point, which I think we all agree on, is that we've been an empire for a long time, much longer than people realize.
11/7/16, 10:34 AM
donalfagan said...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_enablers_who_helped_donald_trump_incalculable_damage_america_20161106
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/07/trumps-three-enablers-gop-media-and-establishment-democrats
Of course, Reich is still telling us to vote for Clinton. The standard liberal claim is that once she is elected the left will (somehow) pressure her to stick to her platform. At the Young Turks, they expect that she will claim a mandate to do exactly what she wants to do: pass the TPP, privatize social security, etc.
11/7/16, 10:46 AM
pygmycory said...
Even by your definition 1898 is much too late for the start of US Imperialism. First off, the continent was not empty when the USA was expanding at the expense of various first nations. When their territory was stolen/conquored, the first nations peoples were not integrated with the rest of the US citizenry. They got pushed onto reservations, and still aren't treated equally today. The US has been an imperial power all along.
Interestingly, by that argument, so was Canada.
As for the Roman Empire, significant numbers of people were becoming roman citizens well before Caracalla's edict, which in any case occurs well before the fall of the roman empire. For examples of earlier roman citizens who weren't from near Rome, take St. Paul's conversation with the roman centurion, where Paul tells him he's a roman citizan, and the centurion says he (the centurion) became one by paying a large sum of money. Paul is one by birth, and he was born in Tarsus in Cilicia to a jewish family somewhere in the vicinity of 10BC-10AD. Cilicia was conquored by Pompey in the 60s BC, and is in Asia minor. Paul's conversation with the centurion was in the middle(ish) the first century AD.
11/7/16, 10:50 AM
David, by the lake said...
Taking the notion of American imperialism further back helps me to see that our present form was inherently founded on imperialistic structures (resource flows, cost-benefit, wealth pumps, etc) and that the later phases we see more clearly were layers added on top of that. The earlier layers are almost so far back that they are not seen as imperial expansion at all (kind of how the Italian peninsula is seen as "naturally" Roman, even though the city-state of Rome had to conquer and absorb those peoples and lands in the early phases). The reason I think that this is important to recognize is that I am inclined to believe that our current structure in not tenable in the absence of our empire and that we will, quite naturally, break into the 7 or so cultural entities which comprise the present-day US.
In other words, it is the present order, and not the future fragmentation, which is the artificial construct. Just my nascent theory.
11/7/16, 10:53 AM
Juhana said...
After the incident officers of law held huge, unauthorized protests at least five night in the row at the center of Paris, using police cars with flashing lights in their demonstration. Top brass police chief denounced demonstrating officers, to no avail. Officers in the field didn't care about orders of top brass to disband protests. They say that situation in immigrant ghettos has spiraled totally out of control, and that they cannot maintain order with weaponry and manpower they have now. They are demanding heavier weapons and much, much more manpower, and larger policing rights. There is also some amount of "Ferguson effect" going on, as officers are apparently very reluctant to respond for calls from Moslem ghettos, or to patrol there. Police strikes and menonstrations have also spread to other big cities from Paris. Feudal fiefdoms of Mohammedan crime warlords are being carved out from the flesh of French republic right now. Native French seems to be, in growing numbers, quite tired of being "openminded" towards "vibrant diversity".
War is coming.
11/7/16, 12:34 PM
Nastarana said...
Some evangelical and fundamentalist churches do some of the things you describe, such as formal events and sports leagues for young people. In particular, the Mormons, perhaps the most successful minority group in the USA, have a host of church activities for their children, including formal dress up events. There are Mormons represented at the highest levels of government and business and those persons are expected to promote and bring along promising young Mormons.
11/7/16, 12:56 PM
latheChuck said...
"Why do elites look down on lower class Republicans? Because they vote against their own interests over and over and over again and just get madder and madder when things don't get better. They'd rather eat glass than vote for a Democrat, and the reasons are purely reptilian."
Another way of looking at this is that lower-class Republicans are voting their values, at the expense of their interests. Rather than write a redundant post on the difference between value and interests, for the moment I'll point out that a bribe is an appeal to interest, and that acceptance of bribes is contrary to most public codes of values. When I'm offered a program that claims to advance my interests, the first question in my mind is "What's the catch? Why are you favoring my interests over his?". When I'm offered a program that is consistent with my values (honesty, transparency, public welfare, liberty, security, economy, ecology, and so on), I'm more likely to accept that the program is better for all.
If you, Mr/Mrs Politician, tell me that I'm your favorite voter today, and I accept your favors, I implicitly allow that your favors may be directed elsewhere at some future date. I'd prefer to live in a world without favors.
11/7/16, 3:56 PM
latheChuck said...
11/7/16, 4:00 PM
latheChuck said...
A local charitable foundation has provided funds for the purchase of sheet music and rental of rehearsal space.
So, my list of cheap entertainment for a post-oil society now includes group singing, as well as the social cultivation of flowers, herbs, and vegetables, amateur radio, and competitive slide-rule calculation. (Well, maybe...)
11/7/16, 4:08 PM
Armata said...
But if I am wrong and we end up with Hillary, Trump will still have won. This election will show that tens of millions of Americans are almost desperately eager to vote against the Establishment and its ideology of cultural Marxism. Individuals more politically skilled than Mr. Trump, who is after all not a politician, will see this potential. They will tap into it, get nominated as Trump did, and run a campaign with sufficient skill to attract votes beyond those cast by Mr. Trump’s base.
11/7/16, 4:19 PM
Shane W said...
Guilherme,
I'm very aware of the need not to focus energy on immigrants. For one, I'm very envious--they have very strong, tight, traditional families, strong social bonds and reciprocity, a strong sense of etiquette, and they're very resourceful and consume a lot less than the average American and make do w/much less. I see Mexico as an up-and-coming power, and probably the most powerful country in North America once the US is done w/this round of collapse. I think that relations w/Latin America will be paramount for my part of the US, the Confederacy, which is why I'm only partly tongue in cheek when I say that I'd like to be one of the first Confederate ambassadors to Mexico (though, truth be told, I'd accept an ambassadorship to any Latin American country)
11/7/16, 4:22 PM
Shane W said...
11/7/16, 4:25 PM
patriciaormsby said...
11/7/16, 4:30 PM
Shane W said...
I'd like to coin a new phrase, "internet dementia". "Internet dementia" or "internet schizophrenia" can strike people of any age, and its primary characteristics are a couplete break w/reality facilitated by the total, or almost total, immersion of oneself in a cyberworld, to the point where the cyberworld becomes the person's reality instead of the actual world around them.
11/7/16, 4:35 PM
patriciaormsby said...
Also off-topic, but every other day or so I read of more economic cooperation between Japan and Russia too.
11/7/16, 4:59 PM
Indian Blogger said...
1) I wonder how big is the white working class male demographic of the total ? Trump has managed to offend women, latinos, asians, blacks etc.
2) Trump may be talking about establishment and wanting to bring it down or radically change it, but it seems he benefited from the same system, do his supporters see this hypocrisy or not ? and I think mostly even if they see this hypocrisy, his supporters still want to try him out.
11/7/16, 5:23 PM
patriciaormsby said...
Epitaph for America: "Don't let them eat cake!"
11/7/16, 5:23 PM
onething said...
You said that Pence was impeachment insurance because he would give the democrats the willies, but have you forgotten that there is a bipartisan rejection of Trump and that neocons of both parties would be happy to have Pence?
11/7/16, 5:48 PM
Guilherme de Baskerville said...
https://youtu.be/I1z3lHCSgjE?t=5m15s
This Democrat guy is saying stuff very similar to what we discuss here, or what was in the Cracked artile JMG posted.
11/7/16, 6:00 PM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
I have just uploaded a piece on American affairs, at my blog http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/, under the heading "USA Election, and Government Generally...". Among other things, I discuss the old school-or-college debating club resolution, That America is a Good Thing, and ought to be kept.
One of course has some trouble devising arguments for the Affirmative, in one's hypothetical role of debate-team captain. But I do in the end come up with something - to find it, do a text search, in that posting, for the word 'Dostoyevsky'. Further, I have put into tonight's posting something singable, a "Peace Hymn of the Republic". In this same posting, I dissent politely from a couple of JMG's views here at TADR, highlighting special dangers inherent in The Donald.
Stay safe tomorrow, everybody!
PS: In a pair of postings on radiotelegraphy, from last week and the week before, flagged with my callsign (VA3KMZ), I amplify some radio points that have come up here, quoting helpful TADR sentences from LatheChuck. I will assume, unless advised otherwise, that LatheChuck does not mind being quoted.
Sitting here a little worried about tomorrow's polling,
and about to view patriotic American music on YouTube,
Tom (in Estonian diaspora, near Toronto)
11/7/16, 8:06 PM
chola3 said...
For me in Malaysia, Clinton means at least a few more years of muddling along and preparing. (As long as the next county to be "liberated" on her watch is not us). The underclass in America would have more misery piled up on them in the meantime.
Trump might just be a positive for the underclass in America. However I expect breaks and cracks for the rest of the well-to-do parts of the world; unless he is bought over. (I think he is genuine though)
Just have to wait. This is the second most important election for me, the first being the 2008 Malaysian election. (After 2000 all American elections were boring and predictable.)
11/7/16, 8:39 PM
Steve in Colorado said...
Perhaps I am just old fashion (I'm certainly old enough to be ;-) but there was a time when things such as this, potential crimes of people in high places being investigated just prior to an election were not spoken of in public. Not because the highly placed criminals deserve protection, but the system or the illusion of the system does.
Releasing that letter gave Trump a boost in the polls, for a while. The later statement clearing Clinton gave her a boost. Neither should have happened. It was meddling in the election process. In an earlier day, proven crimes would have been addressed in private, people would have resigned "for health reasons" or whatever, but allegations with implied wrong-doing would not be made public, not close to an election and certainly not with a undeniable smoking gun of a crime.
There was a code of honor that our institutions were neutral, or at least presented a public face of neutrality towards politics. That line has been crossed. It indicates to me that one of the pillars of our social/political institutions has crumbled. Doesn't matter if it help your candidate or the opposite, if you like Clinton or hated her, it was never supposed to happen. It's a sign of the decay of our society (yet another).
11/7/16, 8:45 PM
Jason Butler said...
11/7/16, 11:44 PM
Bruno Bolzon said...
I think dividing the goal of the power projection is necessary: thus, if a country is expanding because it wants to get bigger, it's not imperialism. If wants to project power to exploit other countries for the benefit of the mainland, even without formally expanding its own borders, its imperialism. There must be a wealth pump in order to be imperialism...
11/8/16, 12:53 AM
Bruno Bolzon said...
11/8/16, 1:03 AM
Robert Mathiesen said...
11/8/16, 2:02 AM
Fred said...
So an LDS family raises their children that they are "saved" and others not in LDS are condemned as must be converted to LDS. (Substitute any of the above faiths in this argument.) But the elite of this country are not like that. They are not looking to make more people elite. They see there is a distinct difference in what I call their "breeding stock" between them and us. The elite rely heavily on family lines and family relationships and intermarry with each other like royalty does in England. The elite does not mix with the commoners. The LDS church adopts children of all races and does missionary work all over the world and looks to recruit from all nations.
I totally agree with you the LDS church owns a lot of businesses - Marriott Hotels is the most public that comes to mind - and their church is growing and spreading. I wonder if Romney running was more to accomplish the spread of that church more than anything else. There is a new Temple in Center City Philadelphia, built on some of the most expensive real estate in the city. Shiny and white like a beacon of hope. There is also a huge temple that rises high above the tree lines of the 495 beltway near DC. Here's a quick youtube video of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vgMUJZRhCc LDS church members believe that the more money they make, the better for the kingdom, the more people they can save, and the more prepared they are for what's next. The have preparedness trainings and canneries where people can can their own food in the large #10 cans. Each LDS family is expected to have a one year's supply of food stored in their home.
Mormons aren't THE elite, but given conditions coming they likely will be. Our elite will move out of the country to save their own skins, but Mormons aren't going anywhere. After all, they think the 13th tribe of Israel is the Native Americans.
11/8/16, 4:37 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
Popcorn, says you. Ixnay that, says I. I'm breaking out the hot wings and the beer...
11/8/16, 4:39 AM
David, by the lake said...
That makes complete sense on Japan's part. Russia is a lot closer. I suspect that Japan, like the Philippines, is looking to shift alliances, but is doing so much more subtly. I wonder what other nations are making similar moves?
11/8/16, 4:55 AM
Nestorian said...
Why does the "illusion of the system" deserve protection? Truth is a sovereign accompaniment to justice, and thus power structures based on illusions must be exposed.
Regarding the Comey affair, the real travesty is that he declined to indict Clinton months ago. He very easily could - and should - have done so without in any way violating the political customs you speak of.
11/8/16, 5:01 AM
latefall said...
I find myself less generally be less drawn to peruse the comment section on your more current politics related posts. I assume they do rank among your more popular ones, but I am not surprised the level of discourse suffers to a degree. Here is an extreme example of a similar dynamic: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/facebook-clickbait-political-news-sites-us-election-trump - "The town of Veles, Macedonia (population 44,000), is the unlikely home for dozens of avowedly pro-Trump political news sites, featuring headlines like Hillary’s Illegal Email Just Killed Its First American Spy and This is How Liberals Destroyed America, This Is Why We Need Trump in the White House. [...] All of them exist primarily for one reason – to cash in on the seemingly endless appetite for news about Donald Trump. And they’re getting a big boost from Facebook."
@Juahna: I think you refer to this incident: http://www.france24.com/en/20161026-france-police-protests-unions-terrorism-work / http://www.france24.com/en/20161009-french-police-injured-molotov-cocktail-attack-paris-suburb
No deaths I know of.
But I agree the situation is bad. I know people who have recently signed up for police in Marseille, and I've had some opportunity to observe their conduct down here. Generally speaking I would say it is abysmal on several fronts (not exclusively their fault! Funding, training, citizens relationships play a role, and I can't look much behind the scenes).
Have you heard of the right wing "equivalent" incident happening in Germany? http://www.dw.com/en/german-police-find-weapons-cache-linked-to-right-wing-reichsb%C3%BCrger-group/a-36189098 Of course it is not really equivalent, but there are some parallels like "turf", etc. I think the French case is probably a more "casual" use of violence, which I think is more unsettling. Also the "Reichsbürger" (and similar) are probably significantly less numerous than the nastier end of the "vibrant diversity" (which is to a large degree French born, and looked down upon from NA).
Regarding call for heavier weapons it is a little complicated. I see lots of FAMAS assault rifles, and grenade throwers in very inopportune places down here. Sometimes I half wonder if the squads (military) get sent out as bait.
The "regular" police usually carries semi-auto pistols only. After the Nice attack they broke out some ancient looking MPs in public which I can't believe they've trained on very much.
Provided they get adequate training and discipline I'd imagine an MP5 in the squad car would not hurt on some tours. But it wouldn't have saved the day in this instance either.
11/8/16, 5:12 AM
trippticket said...
I like your idea of a cyber disorder, and tender the term "anti-social media immersion disorder" for the commentariat's review. The acronym of course would be AMID, as in AMID the ruins of sanity or reality.
11/8/16, 5:31 AM
trippticket said...
I love your epitaph for America, "Don't let them eat cake!"
Hilarious. Thank you for that.
11/8/16, 5:36 AM
Fred said...
11/8/16, 5:36 AM
Fred said...
And the postings from the people on the left saying how Trump is a racist and sexist are so condescending. 18 months of thought pieces talking about how his misogynist and racist attitudes will ruin this country. Words isn't what is ruining us. We have watched the country be sold off bit by bit to foreign powers, traded for favors, turned over to corporate conglomerates, while we plunge into greater and greater debt that will never be repaid. The greed is what is ruining us.
The media avoids this greed issue and the math behind it. Just this morning NPR did a story on child care and how it is family's greatest expense and at the same time child care workers are the lowest paid workers, often receiving food stamps and Medicare. But NPR does not do the math and call out the corporate shills running this child care centers. A college degree worker is paid $11/hour to be in a toddler child care classroom taking care of 8 children (what's allowed as max number varies by state). The worker makes $440 per week gross, so more like $300 after taxes, SSI. The parents pay $250 a week for child care so those 8 children bring $2,000 into the center in tuition. Where does the other $1,560 go??? Sure there is overhead, materials and food costs, but not to that extent. But the journalist don't dig deep and we allow these corporate child care centers to profit and thrive while its workers live in poverty.
Well lets see if the votes defy the polling data and we have a Dewey moment.
11/8/16, 6:11 AM
Nastarana said...
Dear Guilherme, I seriously doubt that you know any more about my personal political views than I know about yours. I would caution you about believing all or even very much you might read or hear about American politics from the well known sources, what many of us call the Lame Stream Media. As for Americans enjoying an outsized share of the world's resources, that is quite true. I would point out, however, that those riches are not at all evenly distributed among Americans, and not a single one of our immigrant communities, with the honorable exceptions of a few individuals, shows any more willingness to make do with less than do our own upper and upper middle classes.
Furthermore the resources which support the heavy industry of the past have all been used up. The American working or formerly working class has no money left. None. Anyone whose plan for getting rich is to sell crap to dummies has waited too long. The dummies are flat broke.
11/8/16, 6:16 AM
dfr2010 said...
I'm probably not the only one motivated by utter disgust.
11/8/16, 6:30 AM
latefall said...
Interesting to see masked police demonstrate in public spaces in France. That would get many people into trouble under normal circumstances. https://youtu.be/BO4jUkEXZ7s?t=94
This is part of what I meant with abysmal performance. But I can give significantly more anecdotal evidence.
I rarely see police on foot (or on their toys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J31dl3lZ0Xc) anywhere close to the difficult places. You often see more than 5 patrol cars in less than a minute heading out of town to some mission at the seaside. Traffic rules are extremely flexible for them, and if in doubt you just put on the siren to get around a little quicker (heading towards their station, 500m away).
Reporting a simple bike accident took me 6 hours in a virtually empty police station. They apparently didn't want to degrade their statistics.
When they do train, they lose the their explosives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/02/french-police-lose-explosives-marseille-airport
When they patrol the city (military) their base gets robbed: https://www.rt.com/news/272143-france-munitions-theft-explosives/
You may remember the raid in St Denis to apprehend some of the Bataclan perpetrators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ3inuOMgNQ
The police/military fired over 5000 bullets (and grenades) and took more than 3 hours before evacuating non-combatants from the building (7h in total). The majority of the fire that the police/military took was their own (last paragraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Saint-Denis_raid#Aftermath). The terrorists fired 11 bullets and 1 suicide bomber (which killed most of them).
I wonder if there is a lesson in there somewhere.
Re Senile Elites
This is already a couple of years old and Dr. Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation would probably qualify as elite.
https://youtu.be/OAYsSMO4xY8?t=17
I've actually heard this kind of talk more from the elite than from "middle management".
Narratives are sorta nice (and more often than not emotionally satisfying). I've said before on here that I had a hard time imagining how we'd lose scientific method. The last couple of months fixed that for me. Now I'm pretty scared about that prospect.
11/8/16, 7:00 AM
onething said...
I agree and thus feel perplexed that the FBI on one hand declared this investigation and then twice backed off. If they were not serious, then you are right that it should not have been made into a public disturbance. This indicates to me something...but what? A fatal decay of our code of honor before the world, fatal as the Unknown Australian said because our reputation won't recover.
I suppose that if we had had a charge of the light brigade and routed corruption and restored some semblance of the rule of law, that would have been something.
May God have mercy on us all.
11/8/16, 8:09 AM
pygmycory said...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-07/seismic-shift-mid-east-regional-power-saudis-halt-egypt-oil-supplies-cairo-turns-ira
It looks like Egypt is having an economic spat with Saudi Arabia, and has done something that amounts to 'If you are stopping selling me oil, I'll take my ball and see if Iran wants to play instead'. There's some official denying going on that is a bit confusing, but I think this space is worth watching. That's on top of planning for joint military exercises with Russia, and planning to buy attack helicopters from Russia.
11/8/16, 10:36 AM
Elmo said...
11/8/16, 12:04 PM
David from Normandy said...
no officer died, but 2 were grievously wounded. One of them, a woman, has returned home. The other one was in a worse state, but he should survive too.
As for war, it is not for that time. Yet. Protests have stopped 2 weeks ago, there was no mass movement to join them.
That said, you are absolutely right that it is significant.
Social tensions here are steadily growing. To what end precisely, damned if I know.
We too live f.. interesting times.
11/8/16, 1:58 PM
Shane W said...
11/8/16, 2:04 PM
Shane W said...
makes perfect sense for the Japanese to cozy up to Russia as a foil against the Chinese. Kinda like Scotland's pro-EU vote...
11/8/16, 3:00 PM
latheChuck said...
11/8/16, 3:34 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
Tonight I break out the hot dogs and wine (no beer, alas.)
11/8/16, 3:36 PM
Armata said...
"The Truth About Hillary Clinton: She's honest and trustworthy. Donald Trump is not. That voters believe otherwise is a triumph of branding over facts."
This is in defense of one of the most spectacularly corrupt politicians in American history, a candidate who makes Tammany Hall look like a model of honesty and good governance by comparison. A woman who has gotten caught repeatedly lying and obfuscating about a wide range of subjects, from Benghazi and her private email server to supposedly being in New York City when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened and supposedly coming under sniper fire at the Sarajevo Airport. The later two claims have been exposed as bald-faced lies.
Of course Trump has often been less than candid and has made plenty of exaggerated claims. But this sort of blatant shilling and bending the truth on behalf of someone who is as egregiously corrupt and dishonest as Clinton is one of the reasons why the reputation and credibility of the mainstream press is in the toilet.
11/8/16, 4:55 PM
jessi thompson said...
11/8/16, 7:11 PM
Tony said...
"How to think about this election: white working class voters just decided to vote like a minority group. They're >40% of the electorate."
11/8/16, 8:56 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
I believe you called it! Well done.
Cheers
Chris
11/8/16, 9:12 PM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
Is this really happening?!?!
;-)
11/8/16, 9:51 PM
Starhammer said...
Wtf
All of Australia
11/8/16, 11:04 PM
Justin said...
I do think it's kind of funny that CNN et al tried to ignore Trump's victory for as long as possible even after it became a statistical certainty.
11/8/16, 11:10 PM
tolkienguy said...
11/9/16, 12:31 AM
Unknown said...
Well done, sir. A magnificent effort.
The mainstream media here have just put on one of the most disgusting displays of petulance I have seen in many a long year. With a single exception not one of the commentators gets that having ones head up ones behind is no way to get any sort of perspective that will allow reality to reveal itself.
to Tony, very concisely summed up!
Best regards
eagle eye.
11/9/16, 12:50 AM
Unknown said...
Well done, sir. A magnificent effort.
The mainstream media here have just put on one of the most disgusting displays of petulance I have seen in many a long year. With a single exception not one of the commentators gets that having ones head up ones behind is no way to get any sort of perspective that will allow reality to reveal itself.
to Tony, very concisely summed up!
Best regards
eagle eye.
11/9/16, 12:58 AM
Dan said...
But for the past two weeks he had Clinton at a 90% chance of winning and re-iterated the same position last night.
11/9/16, 1:12 AM
Synthase said...
11/9/16, 1:39 AM
Shane W said...
11/9/16, 2:59 AM
Doctor Westchester said...
I found myself, to my surprise, at the local Democratic town “victory party” at the Elks club last night. It was a victory party at least for the local officials since they were running unopposed in their races. My wife and I needed to leave just as the national results were turning ominous. Since I’ve wondering for while what last night would be like if the guess I had for a year (thanks to your previous work, I didn’t find your January prediction surprising at all) was correct. The whole thing felt really like Deja vu, except on a very slightly grander scale.
Thank you very much John. Your column has been a beacon of sanity in what has otherwise been am incredibly insane year. Today I look to continuing what I’ve been doing for a while – working within the local Lions Club and Grange, fighting to get keeping chickens allowed in my village and the like, but with more urgency and hopefully more support. Thank goodness, we got the house totally insulated last month.
Again thank you and I look forward to your next column later today.
11/9/16, 3:18 AM
Shane W said...
11/9/16, 3:25 AM
Phitio said...
11/9/16, 3:39 AM
Fred said...
11/9/16, 4:07 AM
Kfish said...
What an odd coincidence.
11/9/16, 5:08 AM
dfr2010 said...
This is a lot more hopeful than most previous elections.
11/9/16, 5:27 AM
avalterra said...
11/9/16, 6:07 AM
John said...
I guess I'm simply grateful for your writing, and I want you to know that your words have made a big difference in my own adventure of sorting through the noise of our current times. -John in Montana
11/9/16, 6:26 AM
Nastarana said...
Our media studiously ignored three factors which contributed to the election results.
1. I believe the vote last night was an antiwar vote. The American public is done, finished, over with the pretension that we can police the globe.
2. The winner's initial, and for a long time, only, issue was hostility to continuing immigration. I think it is fair to say that the public wants a moratorium on further mass immigration. The losing party met this sentiment with accusations of "racism", "bias", "basket of deplorables" and so on.
3. The losing party, in their invincible arrogance and hubris, chose a nominee who was revealed as both corrupt to an unbelievable degree, and terminally incompetent. Remember that most of us are practical people who have a fairly high tolerance for corruption and chicanery. But, here, the more one learned, the worse she appeared. To add insult to injury, we were being accused of racism and worse for declining to support an aging white female from a comfortable background, serial enabler of her husband's infidelities, no small number of which were honored with the title of assault, merely because some members of some minority groups had chosen to support her in hopes of largess and patronage.
Then came the wikileaks releases. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip, like the celebrated water torture--one wondered when would this end and what was coming next. Next turned out to be that HER HOUSEKEEPER was trusted with sensitive documents. I don't know if you understand how parents over the last generation have sweated blood and tears to get promising children through college and started in the world, knowing that those children, no matter how clean their record nor how brilliant their academic careers are never going to be offered lucrative positions in the higher echelons of government or business.
In addition, there are various causes which are supported passionately by small but significant numbers of citizens who vote, such as stopping the Keystone pipeline, anti GMO, anti fracking, and banning the ivory trade. The democratic nominee was on the wrong side of just about every issue which folks care about this year, this decade. A simple statement in support of banning the trade in ivory amounts to free merit points for politicians, for heaven's sake.
The elites may despise leaders like Mr. Putin, General Sissi, and President Duarte, but what we deplorables see is leadership in the interests of the citizens of those men's respective countries, rather than allegiance to some amorphous "globalism", a globalism which topples foreign governments for no good reason and sets refugees adrift across the world.
Then, always in the background but by no means forgotten by the electorate were the various up coming trade deals, and what many are thinking is NAFTA and the WTO weren't bad enough now more are coming?
BTW, I voted Green party, for which vote I make no apology.
11/9/16, 6:33 AM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Jeepers, here I sit, eating crow, like so many in Canada and Europe. JMG is to be congratulated on having accurately predicted the election outcome.
Last night was a replay of Brexit: the mild apprehension beforehand, as one entertains the possibility that the voters will take the less prudent of the two possible decisions; the brief groping around the Internet, with the resolve to do the rather safe, if unimaginative, thing and stick to the BBC; the repeated refreshing of the BBC "Live" page, with its incoming tweet-style bulletins; the realization (as BBC bulletin follows BBC bulletin, over the course of an hour or so) that the bad scenario is indeed at hand; and then the final resolve to do the one sane thing possible, namely to crawl into bed. 2016 has so far been been a worrying year.
If (if) I understand this TADR blog correctly, JMG still believes Mr Trump an acceptable ballot choice, given the undeniable problems with Mrs Clinton. I for my part still think (as I remarked this week at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/) the following: (1) USA Presidents normally wield little power, with the actual decisions taken by a tight unseen group of people who grasp the (enormously complex) facts, and who manipulate the President-of-the-day by writing up "Policy Options" for her or him; (2) this normalcy is set aside only rarely, when some unusually gifted leader such as FDR occupies the Oval Office; (3) in the USA, as in all other national, regional, or municipal governments, a conspicuously eccentric figurehead, while lacking the power to do good, retains the power to do harm.
As evidence for proposition (1), I would cite Mr Obama's failure to achieve much, despite his being in office for two terms.
My evidence for proposition (3) comprises the points I bring up in my http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/ essay. There I list, without aiming for completeness, several kinds of damage inflicted by Mr Trump on the American community or on the world community in the course of his odd campaign.
In grief and worry,
Tom (Estonian diaspora, near Toronto)
PS: LatheChuck: Thanks for your kind words over timestamp "11/8/16, 3:34 PM".
11/9/16, 6:52 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
But a word to those who would gloat - a close friend of mine just emailed me that if Obamacare - a Byzantine mess, I grant you, "a horse designed by a committee", us abolished, her husband will die. Aggressive chemo for his lymphoma, which is not being treated successfully by other means, trashed his kidneys.
He is - was - a well liked and respected high school chemistry teacher in a high desert blue-collar town of 17,000 people, active in the Jaycees for a long time, and in the local Republican Party. She is an Air Force veteran, a bookkeeper for the town's one big industry, and active in the local Democratic Party. They are both from blue collar roots. The very people who have narrowly escaped being pushed to the wall by the presence of that industry, by Oregon's laws, and by her veteran status. Not, by any means, the arrogant insular elite educated people are supposed to be these days.
They are both, of course, Boomers, and I have heard enough Boomer-bashing on this blog that more, in this case, would be setting fire to an open wound.
BTW, I will not panic over Trump's victory. I had my spell of Stupid Liberal Chicken Little Panic when Dubya was elected and the sky did not fall. Got full of blowing dust and garbage in my view, but did not fall.
But if anyone is in a mood to gloat, before they do, remember the schoolteacher for whom at least one of the stated policy changes in the wind will be a death sentence.
And may the gods bless us all.
11/9/16, 7:40 AM
Naked Environmentalist said...
11/9/16, 10:06 AM
pygmycory said...
11/9/16, 10:27 AM
pygmycory said...
11/9/16, 10:28 AM
Jeff Dean said...
11/9/16, 1:23 PM
nuku said...
Respectfully, here’s a suggestion to help you navigate.
If you look closely at the top of this comments page, you will find the “collaspe comments” line just under “Show Original Post”. If you click on that, all the actual comments disappear and you are left with just the list of the names of the commentators in the order of their comments from oldest to newest. Clicking on “said” just after the name (not the name itself), will reveal that person’s comments. If you do this, its easy to find particular comments from particular people names without having to scroll though all the comments. This is also a good tactic if you want to see comments that JMG is replying to since they are usually NOT just immediately above his comment. Collapse all the comments, expand just his comment and then look above for the names of the people he’s replying to.
As suggested by others, it helps us all if you at least mention the name of the person you’re replying to. It also helps if you summarize what person said that you are commenting on. Clear communication takes a bit more time and thought...
11/9/16, 2:30 PM
Vesta said...
A couple of generations ago America was a mostly middle-class country, and middle-class polsters worked a population that was mostly familiar to them. Today that broad middle class is gone, and polsters work upper class jobs at elite institutions, tweaking abstract models of Americans who are mostly lower class, poor, worried, and almost invisible to the privelaged. It's unsurprisig polsters do a poor job with a population that so unfamiliar to them.
11/9/16, 2:53 PM
RAnderson said...
11/9/16, 2:58 PM
streamfortyseven said...
11/9/16, 3:07 PM
Jen said...
11/9/16, 4:16 PM
Guilherme de Baskerville said...
I thought he had about a one in three chance of winning, mainly because I read JMG and some other figures outside mainstream media, but I thought it was more likely then not she would win, for good or bad.
Despite my worry that Trump will be bad for the US and the world, I'm kinda excited that he won. At least there's a chance some things will change. If the change will be for good or for bad, it remains to be seen, but it was clear that if Hillary had won, it would be BAU for another 4-8 years. Anyway, like I said, kinda excited to see what will come out of it, though definetly aprehensive.
One thing that I read in a local blog here in Brazil caught my attention and I decided to share: Both the UK and the USA, the two contries that spearheaded the push for "globalization" in the early 80's and put the alternative/sustainable economic experimentation of the 70's to death have now explicitly cast votes for a non-globalist agenda. With the revitalization of alternative centers of power to western neo-liberal orthodoxy in Russia/China, this may represent the beginning of the end of this tragedy of an economic policy that has plagued the world for the last 35 years. I'm afraid this might be a repetition of the last time the world revolted against laissez-faire capitalism, which ended up with two World Wars, large swathes of the world falling into pretty bad communist dictatorships and a few genocides to boot, but there's always hope that we can be more construtive this time around.
Here's to hope!
11/9/16, 4:49 PM
trippticket said...
Make sure you're on the 'Counties' map in the left column.
Notice how the arc of blue counties in the southeastern U.S. follows the fall line, the geographic transition from piedmont to coastal plain around the South. What? Why? Why would that occur? Seems odd, doesn't it? Could it be some sort of common mineral deficiency or something?? ;o) oink, oink!
Full disclosure: Johnson/Weld voter, and disappointed they didn't get the required 5% nationally to assure them a place in the conversation next time around.
11/9/16, 4:58 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
Later, she researched it more thoroughly, and I am relieved to report she said "Not so bad after all--his Medicare gap policy was established under Bush, so won't go down when Obama care does. Now I need to figure out what to do for me--may end up asking JELD-WEN how many hours I need to work per week to get insurance for the next three years, and make sure I stay as healthy as I can till 65. Jean"
And the thing is, the infusion isn't just a stopgap. it's a *cure*. Very new, but working.
11/9/16, 4:58 PM
John Roth said...
No, Nate Silver did not have Clinton at a 90% chance of winning for the last two weeks. I don't believe he has ever had her chances of winning in the 90% range. He had her in the high to middle 60% chance for most of that time. Someone else had her in the high 90s, and boy, does that someone else have a plate of crow to eat - especially since he was ragging on Silver for using too many low quality polls in his model.
The thing to remember is that Silver is not a pollster. He's a poll aggregator. He uses other people's polls as input, and as the saying goes: garbage in, garbage out. It's the actual pollsters that have some process examination and explaining to do, not Nate Silver, who was very conscious that this race was like no other, so he was factoring in a high degree of uncertainty.
11/9/16, 7:41 PM
Unknown said...
Gee, who would have thought that ;-)
eagle eye
11/9/16, 8:41 PM
Robert Honeybourne said...
As in the EU Brexit, the left failed for too long and the populist far right prevailed. The populist far right - I'm not a historian - have historically been good at road building programmes and making trains run on time, but have been somewhat lacking in other areas
A brash bash at business as usual may well make a positive difference, but the hate rhetoric has to stop immediately and efforts made to reverse it. Speaking from the UK, if nothing else, an endless news cycle of Brexit hysteria is REALLY boring
11/10/16, 10:11 AM
Maria Rigel said...
Dear Americans, I don't know how to put this gently, so I won't. Your new president couldn't be described as good news for anyone even with the most generous interpretation of "good news". I'm Spanish, I've heard all the stories about Franco from my family, and yes, Trump sounds just like a fascist. And it isn't just me that thinks that. Pablo Iglesias, leader of one of the major parties in Spain, has said the same. Many other people have said it. You've had all the warning signs you could possibly wish for.
And I see most people saying that it will probably be OK. That it's unlikely that he will take control (covertly, of course) of the media, or make sure that the armed forces and police do exactly his bidding, or start by straightening out the Republican party and make sure that they all toe the new party line, which is going to be that they all must agree with him, immediately, on everything he says, even if he changes his mind on it the next week. Maybe you are right, and things will continue as usual. I hope so, for the sake of the whole planet.
But, please, don't count on it. I know many of you are preppers. If you prepare for hurricanes and other things, you might as well prepare for living in a country where saying the wrong thing could make you disappear, and for war. Just in case.
11/10/16, 10:28 AM
Nature Creek Farm said...
11/11/16, 4:58 AM
Unknown said...
11/12/16, 11:26 AM
Jen said...
I am hoping for your friend's improved health and continued solvency!
11/12/16, 4:46 PM
NicoleB said...
found something that I think you will enjoy: A perfect example of "technofilia" to the point of self-destruction
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/09/clintons-data-driven-campaign-relied-heavily-on-an-algorithm-named-ada-what-didnt-she-see/
How right you are about appropriate technologies and the importance of the human contact!
Again: Many thanks and congratulations on your forecasting abilities (it seems that your forecast about Saudi Arabia will also be soon fulfilled)
11/14/16, 12:04 AM
Chris Okum said...
11/17/16, 12:46 PM
DoubtingThomas said...
1/15/17, 2:17 PM