Krugmania: Zombie Economics

Feeling Weak in Denise and Somewhat Leary.

 In an article in the LRB, entitled The Gatekeeper, Adam Tooze describes the "radicalization" of Krugmanomix, citing Paula Krugman's Slate-published column, In Praise of Cheap Labor, an essay that surely bears all the Hallmarks of Krugmanesque intolerance of anyone not onboard with his rationalizations, couched in economic esoteric jargon, for handing over to the last major Communist country in the world the technological knowhow without which it could not have become the worldwide military and hegemonic threat it has grown into today. 

And that is just one example of the result of the adoption of Krugmaniacal econoNazism. His neoliberal response to any criticism of his badly flawed economic model is a mode of response which set the tone for the collegiate attitudes which prompted Limbaugh's coining of the term "femiNazis" from which he derived such baleful piles of political hay. And one that had as its descendant the Clintonian knee-jerk reaction  to the former failed ex-president's supporters as "Deplorables. That's pure Krugmania scold-speech there.

Krugman was the first to don the Guys of a Liberal in order to press his atavistic onslaught on the economic stability of the middle class, turning it into the muddled class, as the US populace was used as a pawn in an ivory-tower experiment to turn hard-working stiffs into a leisure class of tattooed, nail-saloned, spa-pampered ne'er do-wells with no future for their offspring and no retirement in their future, their jobs methodically transferred to a totalitarian Communist-ruled one-Party Regime. And should you raise any objection to the cynicism inherent in simultaneously collecting enormous premiums from the US taxpayers, the justification for which was the War on Communism, while promulgating a plan to bring "Bad jobs at bad wages" to prop up a failed political system via American transfer of taxpayer-funded technology to the technically backward business class of Communist Red China, you would become the target of a Krugmaniacal supercilious sardonic barrage of sarcasm and pseudoscientific diatribes.

The genesis of Trumpism lies at the heart of Krugmanomics and its insistence that the America working class was displaying how "muddled its thinking is" for not whole-heartedly supporting his Princeton  ivory-tower concocted vision of a Totalitarian Communist country becoming democratized by bringing "development", as though it were an innocuous roll of film you could later pickup at a Fotomat kiosk, at the cost of their own livelihoods and pensions, calling any opposition to his ideas "an intellectual and moral failure", what amounts to shutting down debate by calling those who objected deplorable, stupid, and well, basically evil. That's what intellectual and  moral failures are, after all.  Hillary Clinton's more succinct "basket of deplorables", is pure re-packaged Krugmania.

Tooze describes Krugman as someone who has stopped being the gatekeeper of the status quo and instead become its critic. Well how nice, that.

But of what good is it without a tour of the country, without a lecture series, perhaps in contretemps to his fellow Princetonian, Bernanke, who was collecting his $250,000/per for those lunchtime chats after he brought the world economy to its knees by letting Lehman's collapse (They both probably had accounts under fictitious names at Michael Burry's Scion Capital), to explain to the American public that you were instrumental in their being hoodwinked, and are responsible for the rapid industrialization of an agrarian economy, turning a backward undeveloped (it now boasts the world's #2 economy, yet is still, somehow, "undeveloped") nation into a Communist Superpower with an economy second only to the US, that has accelerated the pace of climate change, muscled up its military, which it now uses to threaten Taiwan, protect its fellow totalitarian Communist regime of North Korea, and bully the Philippines; created a class of Crazy-rich in both their country and our own, and sown the seeds for the corona virus to become a worldwide pandemic in the process, for it is China's US-enabled rise that turned it into the center of world trade and facilitated both its agricultural industrial-scale mono-cropping and human/wild interaction that ushered Covid into mainstream life, wherein Chinese tourists, an unheard-of class until Krugmanomics, being the main vector of transmission to the rest of the world. 

In other words, far from admitting there was "an intellectual and moral failure" at the heart of darkness beating in Krugmanomic's deliberate creation of a Zombieland from the nation's industrialized heartland, he retains his sinecure at the NYT from which he now acts as scold emeritus as though somehow destroying mid-America and turning it into a fly-over zone of economic despair bestows upon him some kind of igNoble prize in Zombie Economics. 

Tooze continues:

"the fact that a comprehensive financial crisis could hit the US itself shook his confidence deeply – and all the more so because he hadn’t seen it coming. ‘What I sometimes berate myself for,’ he wrote, is that like other mainstream economists he had failed to see that a crisis of the 2008 type was a ‘fairly likely event’. The rise of shadow banking and unstable funding like repurchasing agreements or ‘repo’ (short-term financing for dealers in mortgage backed securities and other bonds), should have set off alarm bells."

What Tooze doesn't care to mention is that, "The rise of shadow banking and unstable funding like ‘repo's’" did set off alarm bells, only not with that cabal of self-satisfied, sanctimonious navel-gazing men's club of gatekeepers called MSM, which including his employer the NYT, preferred to publish his narrative, along with that of the Killer Clown from Outer Space of the economic profession, Ben Stein's. But the online community at the time was rife with prognostications of spine-tingling accuracy that deftly illustrated the mechanism of the collapse as though they had pro-actively written the Jenga scene from The Big Short. Mike Shedlock, aka Mish, Susan Weber, aka Yves Smith, Doug Noland, Peter Schiff, Agora Financial's staff of rogue traders, Zerohedge, Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb,and a whole raft of other analysts ringing the alarm bells of incipient collapse, and outlining the strategies needed to be taken to escape the liquidity trap being set up by complacent know-it-alls. The know-it-alls like Krugman who have the nerve to call others "zombies" after he's eaten their brains; the elites who turned the country against elites are ensconced in the economics profession and sitting on the board of the FOMC collecting millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded salaries, yet who couldn't see what, I, a home-bound miscreant could, and who to this day collect those millions from the American taxpayer while working for a private institution that sets monetary policy for the commodity in which all other commodities are valued: money. And yet call it a free market, when everything that is valued in that market is dependent for its assessed worth on a commodity whose price is, by virtue of the manipulation of the very asset used to quantify it, shamelessly rigged to create what they still bald-facedly refer to as the "Wealth Effect": the deliberately manipulated illusion that your assets are worth far more than what they actually are so that you will be blind to Risk.

Taking Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools, the true story of  how Enron cooked its books, as a Dummy's Guide to Financial Fraud on a Global Scale, the financial sector was allowed, nay, encouraged, to run rampant over the real economy so as to squeeze out of an economy benighted by the eviscerations of Krugmanomics the semblance of growth by using the exact same mechanisms employed by the crook Kenneth Lay and his coterie of rehypothecating wizards, having pored over their Grimoire of Defalcations to concoct quant-like formulae and off-book entities with which to hoodwink investors and deceive the public. If that sounds familiar, it's because it had in its black heart the same legerdemain that the Fed's member institutions used to make investors believe the Banks were worth more than they in actuality were, having, as they did, trillions in undisclosed liabilities hidden in sham companies created so as to move them off their books and out of the purview of the public. The exact same strategy Enron employed, the Maestro of which was still languishing in jail. 

All while highly-paid federal officials collected their salaries and sat on their hands knowing that their jobs were safe no matter what should ensue from their negligence; that is, after all, what laissez-faire means: do-nothing and get paid handsomely for it, replete with benefits that no actual job in the private sector can ever hope to receive. You know, the jobs for those that the Krugmaniac calls zombies, jobs where there are metrics, and you have to actually perform or you lose them.

A fact not lost on Tooze ... here he is on Summers' talk role in our Long Dazed Journey into Blight:

While Summers, clinging to his generation’s assumptions about the proper balance between politics and technocratic judgment, wants to drag the conversation back to inflation and ‘output gaps’, what is actually at stake is the future of the republic. In 2020 America came through something close to an existential social and political crisis. That crisis is now understood by large parts of the Democratic Party not as an unforeseeable shock, but as enabled by the forty years of ‘responsibility’ that Summers invokes as the gold standard: successive Democratic administrations failing to address inequality and handing the game to the utterly unscrupulous Republicans. 

This is the closest thing I  have seen to an admission by any Democrat that a Trumpelstiltskin-style shake-up wasn't only a foreseeable shock, but that it had as its impetus successive Democratic administrations, and by proxy, their "conscience of a Liberal" mentality that you can continue to expect the middle class, whose standard of living was intentionally knee-capped specifically to create jobs in a single-party Communist-ruled economy, should be expected to carry on paying for a liberal agenda with their now conservative valued paychecks with which they can barely stay housed and fed, let alone worry about their trans-gendered, drug-addled, tattooed and ballyhooed neighbors.

It is for this reason that, although I agree with the impetus and sentiments behind the Green New Deal, I don't for a second believe in any of the actions it has proposed to "Save the Planet". Like Globalization, there lies at its heart their lies. In the exact same vein as Food for Fuel, Fuel for Fools employs similar dynamics of demanding an immense increase  in the creation of CO2 in order to reap the unfounded claims of a net-zero energy economy, by playing on the same desire: that there be no change to my "lifestyle".  Food for Fuel made no demands on drivers to obtain high mpg vehicles, and in fact, judging by the surge in SUV sales since, has had the exact opposite effect. The same is true for Fuel for Fools. It not only discourages conservation of energy resources and energy use in our everyday lives, but by promulgating the fantasy that our increased mobilization of electrons to do the most effortless of tasks will cost us nothing, actually encourages the reckless and wasteful use of energy by promising that it will be "offset" by CSS, carbon taxes, and "green" technology.   

As the hapless, ridiculous, and unscrupulous GW once tried to say, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" ... but when you try to fool me three times, it is a bridge too far. Rather than deflect my objections by calling me names and claiming that my "thinking is muddled", or characterizing my insistence that you explain exactly how stoking the economic growth of the most energy-intensive economy in the world to a red-hot intensity in an atmosphere already bearing a load of CO2 of 420ppm as "misplaced fastidiousness", it is incumbent upon you to detail the mechanism by which you intend to cope with the resultant catastrophe of atmospheric CO2 of at least 460ppm by the end of the decade that will result should your "road forward" actually get laid.   

For those of us who saw neither the financial debacle of 2008, nor the disastrous result that would ensue by shoving a Clinton candidacy down the throats of stalwart Democrats in 2016, as unforeseeable shocks, but instead saw them as the inevitable result of Liberal hubris every bit as arrogant as GW's, you need to actually make a case for the anti-science, pi-in-the-sky claims you are asking us to believe when it comes to these disastrous steps you have outlined to mitigate climate change, none of which - not a single one - have the slightest possibility of doing anything other than add billions more tons of additional CO2 into the atmosphere at an even more accelerated rate. They are corporate boondoggles every one, providing megaBillions for the manufacture of the very entities at the heart of industrialized civilization's dilemma: the personalized automobile. But in exact parallel to Trump's cowardice in not insisting his faithful don a mask for their own and their fellow citizens' protection, neither will any Party that wishes to remain in power in the USA dare point out the all-too-obvious fact that a world run over by cars is one marred by scars, a nation  of cabs leaves a workforce of scabs, an economy of commuters means a country of polluters; try as one might, the physics is compellingly against the atomization from auto-mobilization. Not to split hairs, but splitting molecules has turned out to be more deadly than splitting atoms. The pollution it causes killing annually more people than the corona virus; millions every year, like a ‘pandemic in slow motion’, dirty air is a plague on our health, causing 7 million deaths and many more preventable illnesses worldwide each year, and it occurs whenever and howsoever electricity is produced, so as the blanket of CO2 and methane gets thicker with each passing year, the waste heat produced by splitting molecules to marshal their electrons to do our bidding, has an increasingly difficult time radiating into space through a thickening layer of CO2 keeping it earth-bound.

You have lost the benefit of the doubt, yet still wish us to blindly put our faith in you, just as the Trumpettes place their faith in him. But you have thus far proven to be as much of a charlatan as ever he was, and that is the reason, although you will never see it, never  mind admit it, that trumpery is still the underlying force driving both US political parties in this ramshackle jalopy that putting faith in an ersatz Krugmanomics has turned our Democracy into.

Beware the Savage Jaws of 2024

Diamond Bits

The Drilling Fields.

Balancing Act on a Bowie Knife's Edge

(Reprised from Diamond Dogs' 1984)

Now that fracking's over, by passage of decree

All the oil is gotten, it's damage still to be

You've burned it for your autos, I-phones and A/C 

So

Beware the savage jaws of 2024.

They've split your empty cranium, and filled it with hot air 

 And just like 1980, you think there's time to spare,

 You're still shooting up on anything, Big Pharma's everywhere

But

 Beware the savage jaws of 2024.

You'll see, you'll be, "Where's my EV?"

We've fracked all the oil and mined the coal

You said it would last, then we'll drill at the Pole

By 2024 (we'll still drill for more)

2024 (we'll drill drill drill for mor-or-or-or-ore)

(Mor-or-or-or-ore)

I need to fill my vehicle, I need to fuel my ride

I'll support whichever Party will frack the countryside

I'll be grooving on the frisson of one last jeremiad

So

Beware the savage jaws of 2024!

You'll see, you'll be, "Where's my EV?"

We've fracked the oil, flared all the gas

You said it would last, but the Peak has passed

By 2024 (we'll still drill for more)

In 2024 (we'll drill drill drill for mor-or-or-or-ore)

(Mor-or-or-or-ore).

Oh kneel: The Fireman Cometh

BioMassIncineration: Flaring the Forests.
Bye-bye, Oh Diversity.

The Scourge of the Surge: On a Volt Tear to "Fight Climate Change".

Increase Transmissions = Increased Emissions.

 As the slime of the green wash being liberally poured over the body politic leaves us as green in the gills as one-dollar bills, a garish tint is accentuating the ghoulish hue already tainting our lives in the time of Corona. It is the color of money, other people's money, OPM for our new dance, the Oxicontinental, a sad Sackler tune of betrayal and profiting from pain, apt for our moderna times, when those who are wiser would rather try Pfizer. Now the energy paradigm has plans to spread that pain, multiplied, all through the body politic as it plays the music while we dance the Oxicontinental. This time in a more concentrated form, so there is no escaping the pain. 

Seductive promise

Dangerous addiction

It's nothing daring, oxiContinental 

An allure that's really nothing new.

Not very subtle, oxiContinental

Because it does exactly what you want it to 

Without compassion, oxiContinental

An invitation to addiction and despair. 

It's quite the fashion, oxiContinental

Because you surf upon the sea of "I don't Care" 

While you kiss your life good-bye. 

Oxicontinental, ooh, Oxicontinental

You sing while you're dancing

It's voice is gentle and so assuring

You'll never know until its gotten you

That you're addicted with its claws deep into you.

You'll find while necromancin'

That there's something missing in your heart and soul

A certain aching that you can't control

And soon you're doing OxiContinental all the time

Seductive promise

Dangerous rhythm

The OxiContinental

A like tune is being played by the green zero emission renewable energy sirens (they seemed to have dropped the zero NET emissions as too cumbersome; who'll notice anyways? ... it all being nonsense and all). And just like oxycontin,  the pain will come only after it's too late, after the patient is addicted and other treatment options have been discarded. But in a sense that's almost beside the point. This month's federal deficit hit a milestone, only the second time it has been so high, at $660 billion and change, but that's not the milestone. I'm unaware of any other time in our economic past that the government and the trade deficits have been so nearly equal in value, as the trade deficit last month also came in at $660 billion or so, leaving the American people in hock for close to $1.5 trillion dollars in a single month. Perhaps you're not alarmed by this, but there are rather large flies in the ointment, one of which is the collapse of the fracking output, which is to say, of the US energy picture. With the US no longer able to act as the swing oil producer, and therefore control the price of oil, OPEC is once again in the driver's seat, and the price of oil, which now has to be imported in larger amounts, (not for industrial production, so not a fulcrum on which  to leverage productivity, but as a consumable item), pure expense. The ramifications are already being seen at the pump, but the rise in electricity prices we have already seen in California, and that Germany and the more well-heeled Euro countries have experienced, a rise their citizens are better able to countenance than their poorer US counterparts, is like yeast rising in a solar oven. It'll bubble up throughout the economy and make everything that is electric, which is everything now ... even getting passed your front door ... more costly.

Moving electrons around to do our bidding, without the luxury of poisoning ourselves and everything around us in the process, is, as we are already finding out, not cheap. As the USA starts to ramp up to build the gleaming eco-nomy of the future, the demand for oil may be zero by 2035 (yeah right), but in the meantime there's 2025 to think about, and electric rates will be astronomical by then. So whether or not the renewable future is one that is pie-in-the-sky or not, it will take a rapid increase in the burning of the remaining fossil fuels to get there, and those fuels, sans fracking, are not available in nearly the quantity the USA will need them domestically. In order to get them, it must increase its imports, putting pressure on the world oil supply so the cost of living for those in developing nations, is going to increase. But as Texas has so aptly demonstrated, the USA is now close to being one of those developing nations itself, having used the profits of labor to voluntarily export its industrial base to an unfriendly communist regime.  A regime that just happens to control the supply of rare earth elements we need to implement our grand plan of exponentially increasing our dependence on electrical generation, storage, and transmission, and storage again, to fuel the economy (the only way forward for the US, as Texas and California, our two largest, most populous, and most energy-intensive States have obligingly demonstrated, without storage at the termini, customers are left at the mercy of energy companies' cuts in power, affected by rolling blackouts at the roll of the dice, so you must have installed storage capacity onsite. Using your cell phone battery to provide light simply won't cut it; you'll just lose power AND communication).

This translates into an escalation of the cost of living, usually referred to as inflation, in the USA, sparked by the deliberate implementation of an infrastructure that will leave us a future of Expensive Electricity (Just ask the Germans). Which on one hand, is a good thing. The fastest route to energy conservation is price escalation. A fact one would think would be obvious in a capitalistic consumer-driven economy. Which it is, of course ... obvious, that is. Instead they are suing the fossil fuels companies yet again, despite the inevitable failure of such frivolous lawsuits (how can a company that produces a product that everybody wants, which they themselves don't incinerate (why would they, when you'll pay them dearly for the privilege of doing it yourself?) be held liable, when gun manufacturers have made it more than clear that the manufacturer holds no liability for the use of a product whose manufacture has one use and one use only: to murder other human beings?):  

"Various suits attempt to rein in carbon emissions and hold oil companies financially liable for the damage their products have wrought as the climate crisis worsens."

As they remind us that,

"Biden has promised to hold polluters accountable for the damage they knowingly caused" (But not the people who actually incinerated the fuel? That is insane).

So let's get this straight; the only companies in the world that can provide the vast energy resources needed to build the all-electric infrastructure envisioned and to provide fuel to build the fleet of 250,000,000 EV's needed to replace the current fleet of ICE machines, is being sued to stop them from enabling us to burn those fuels in order to accomplish our goal of zero net emissions? How are we then to build the EV fleet now mandated? Then, once that fleet is built (Lol ... it never will be), "to hold oil companies financially liable for the damage their products have wrought", to pave the roads over which those electrified vehicles must drive, roads constructed of asphalt, a product of fossil fuel companies as well. And how to manufacture the oil-based tires on which they roll? Or mine the copper for the transmission lines across which the juice must jump? What rot.

                                                                             OilPrice.com 

Before a single barrel is cracked,
the earth's crust must first be fracked.

Note that the trajectory of growth of the rig count at the beginning of the Biden presidency strongly parallels that of the previous failed administration's trajectory. One president pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accords, the other signed us back up again. So much for the relevancy of the Paris Climate Accords. When we then recall that the reason the former failed president started out with a rig count so much higher than what Biden is starting out with was that the Obama administration used the expansion of hydraulic fracturing to power the economic recovery from the Bush/Cheney-engineered financial imbroglio, it must be remembered that our current President was a part of that administration. So one is left to wonder, does Biden plan to hold Biden and the Obama administration "accountable for the damage they knowingly caused"? Somehow, I suspect not. Additionally, how does one reconcile holding a private company responsible "for the damage they knowingly caused", when those private companies are the largest recipients of the government's corporate subsidies? Subsidies larded out for the express purpose of offering incentives for oil companies to produce a product that said government knows, "Worsens the climate crisis?" (At a time when we were signatories of the afore-mentioned Accords).

The path forward from where we find ourselves at present is as obscure to me as it is to everyone else. What I do know, is that when the world as a whole acknowledges, as it did by signing the Kyoto Protocols in the nineties, that the burning of fossil fuels is at the heart of the increasing rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, and then initiates one scheme after the other the result of which is to increase the amount of energy every single household must use simply to, let's say, make a phone call, or drive to work, the probability that more than a generation later any new schemes, which must then provide, somehow, that juice at the now much higher per household amounts, while eliminating the emissions of the fuel necessary to power it, methinks a bit of skepticism is called for. 

That phone you clutch in your hands and refer to obsessively is only a phone because we have opted to call it that. It is actually a mini-computer with telephony components. But more accurately, it's a camera, a calculator, a game console, funds transfer interface, etc. In other words, hundreds of millions of people have been forced (Yes forced. I watched Brokeback Mountain on Netflix the other night, and Ennis calls from Wyoming to Texas on a humble public payphone. A device made available to the general public such that for one thin dime, anyone, no matter their state of indigence, could access the best telephone network in the world ... this network was targeted for destruction by our War Department, to be replaced with the spy network everyone must now sign-in to to do the most trivial of tasks, but which is completely unavailable to anyone without the means to purchase, at the cost of hundreds of dollars, the terminal necessary, and then pay the fees demanded by the ISP's, to access this once public now privately monopolized network ... whew!) to invest in the Universal Remote Control devise you have in your pocket. That is the more accurate description of the gadget everyone carries around with them. The network of old that I partially described above required no electricity be provided by the end user in order to maintain your connection with it. Only when you lifted the receiver and got a dial-tone from your Central Office was any energy used. Now, of course, your "phone" burns energy just to exist, and then must burn energy to transmit. But that's just the start. When I watched Netflix the other night, I initiated the transmission of a stream of bits from a Netflix server. In other words, just as your TV remote actuates your set, your phone now actuates servers and a multitude of other devices in multiple locations around the globe, to send a stream of electrons down a PVC to your device of choice. That means billions of people have a Universal Remote Control doing their bidding, actuating devices, all of which must be powered up and biased to receive commands from your Universal Remote Control.
 (Siri-ously: think of coal-fired power plants in Mongolia providing juice for a Supercomputer in Beijing that's been actuated by a user's App to "mine" some 2-Bitcoins to be deposited in their off-shore account in Nassau, and the electricity demanded by the host of servers, routers, ATM switches, and other ancillary devices whose services are enabled by the simple push of  your "send" button).

Ergo, what you may still call your phone bill is an addendum to your electric bill. As is the bill you pay for your wireless device for your home entertainment center. By fracturing consumers' electric bill in to disparate elements the escalating per capita costs of energy, and specifically electricity, have been made palatable, and easier to disguise. But that doesn't change, it only obscures, the fact that we have been paying an ever growing price for electricity, and bound ourselves to its burgeoning use and associated environmental costs, all the while knowing "the damage (these) products have wrought as the climate crisis worsens." Should not Apple be included in the suit against the Oil majors, then?   
 

As the costs of electricity continue to escalate beyond the capacity of the public to bear them, a trajectory that will be quickened by the plan to make renewable that which is not, perhaps local solutions will be creatively instituted, such that you can once again have available a local exchange, since that's where you place the vast majority of your calls, paid for with local currency, using phones that didn't get trashed by the millions, even though they were replete with the necessary electronic intelligence to do the simple task of connecting two endpoints so as to establish communications between them. A technology President Lincoln was able to take advantage of but that is unavailable to us today. Probably not. But what seems apparent to me is that an infrastructure built in order to facilitate the interoperability across the globe of a vast information network for the express purpose of maintaining instant communication between the Empire's War Department and the various bases, research labs, Universities and TranNational Corponations it consists of, and then offered to the masses as an afterthought (so as to charge them for its onerous costs of operation, which they were paying for anyway ... so might as well give them something for their money) won't simply fade away because of any Green New Deal, unless perhaps that deal includes the interoperability of local businesses and concerns (which currently, it doesn't), such that, for example, the composting of materials from local backyards is done locally, not transported for more than a hundred miles by a diesel-powered caravan of Decology trucks. Such Panglossian fantasies are impossible in the restructured monetized environment that has been foisted upon us, wherein the relationship between energy consumption and generation is as disconnected in urbanites' minds as agriculture has been, one that parallels the age-old schism between urban dwellers and the rural economy on which they rely for their very sustenance. 

As it becomes increasingly obvious that a return to normal, a normal that included cheap air travel for the masses in a rapidly heating world where the main culprit is cheap air travel for the masses, is not going to happen ... ever. Voltaire's elegiac philosophy behind Professor Pangloss's dictum of "tending ones own garden" as a means to a happier, or at least more content, existence, would do far more to achieving a kind of equilibrium with nature than any major government-subsidized manufacturing extravaganza that ladles out subsidies to privately-owned "enterprises", and therefore whose profits are privately allocated only to shareholders via dividend distributions, while the rest of us bear the burden of costs and risks associated with such a gargantuan undertaking. So naturally, given the bills an overarching world-wide Military force consisting of a trillion dollars worth of nuclear arms that must never be used, but must be expensively maintained and "refreshed" must incur, we are trapped in a worldwide web of the Pentagon's design and "private" Industry's construction. Meaning that nothing that can't be taxed by the central government, will ever be actively encouraged. And expansion of the central government is one of the effects of implementing the green new deal; but expanding the outlay of the federal and state governments while contracting the profits, via frivolous lawsuits intent on confiscating their wealth,  on which they exercise taxing authority, is a strategy with its own failure baked in. 

Your Bill is Ready to View.

Brazil's Bolsonaro demonstrates to the world how to use Scroogenomics to cut down on the excess population. Following the USA's example, it used a Presidential election campaign to fan the flames of a raging pandemic. Its contribution to the conflagration is easily seen : 

The failed former President, with his usual flair for predicting disasters his own actions contribute to   bringing about, announced in November that once his ability to spread the deadly microbe everywhere he went was curtailed, only then would the news media's unrelenting coverage of it ebb. Which, quite naturally, once his campaign of Super Spreader events stopped parading across the continent, it did. Sans a Chief Executive spreading disinformation, a fancy words for lies, the results are there for anyone to see. As soon as he got over his own bout, he took to the campaign trail, along with his Covid-infected Secret Service staff, and brought the largest spike in the infection rate that the nation had until then experienced. An exponential spike, in fact. A spike the evangelical leaders of the nations cheered, as they were, and are, fully behind the decimation of the US population, as can be seen by their continuing cheering of their avatar of the Christ's second coming. But as long as a holocaust isn't directed at any one specific religious group, but is instead championed by one specific religious group, it doesn't deserve airplay by our famously free press.

As vaccinations now threaten to end the pandemic, and the death toll dramatically collapses, the Religious Wars that we prefer to call "culture" wars are now inciting the "faithful" to violently, (that is the only option so-called people of faith have, reason being rejected, since they have nothing reasonable to say to counter scientific arguments against their handed-down views) oppose both vaccinations and vaccine ID's, as they will stop what they consider their god-given Freedom to spread misery and suffering among the rest of the population; misery and suffering being the religionists' bread and butter. Claiming to be the experts on death's aftermath, they gather like vultures around the corpses of Covid casualties bemoaning their passage, comforting those whose anguish they have deliberately engineered, while simultaneously strenuously fighting against any precautions the government and scientific community puts forward to reduce the numbers by not attending services that will sicken and kill them, and facilitate their spreading a virus to those outside their death cult's suicide pact with the devil. 

Genocidal Bolsonaro is so enchanted with this idea that he has not only copied it, but taken it up a notch, deliberately targeting indigenous communities in the Amazon to not only infect, but utterly destroy, by encouraging the criminals who are burning their habitat to cinders. A kind of General Custer meets General Sherman. Knee-capping an already Wounded Knee. Soy beans for China's insatiable demand and sugar cane to process into fuel are far more important to the Brazilian economy than any tribe of natives living as their ancestors have for millennia. Like the US, they have decided the Natives must be eliminated without reservation. Just like the orangutans of Borneo, who at least get a little attention from the world as they face their extermination. But Native populations of humans? Not so much. 

The ultimate goal is to supplant the entire rainforest with industrially grown sugarcane fields to fuel the vehicles of the future, only a small percentage of which, despite the Green economy's most fervent dreams, will be electric. The inconvenient truth being, that fuel-from-food crops was, and is still, considered to be a green solution, crops being, you know, green and all. Despite the fact that crops, whether of rice, or cattle, are known to be large emitters of methane. But growing crops to actually eat, not being destructive enough for mankind's twisted aims, is simply too old school. Why not increase the ravaging of the environment and the wanton destruction of species by an exponential amount by razing the land to plant food crops to feed to our beloved automobiles and really kick it up a notch? WHAM!

This deliberate geoengineering of the environment, which is what, since at least the eighties, Industrial Capitalism run amok  has been frenetically engaged in all over the globe, it is now being suggested, should be augmented by more deliberate geoengineering of the environment to, this time, dim the sunlight. Yet it is not Bill Gates, the proponent of this cock-eyed schemes, who is castigated all over the liberal media, but an, until now, unknown yahoo from Florida, Congress critter Matt Gaetz, who has become the favorite whipping boy of the self-righteous.

Suddenly, it becomes apparent why the supernaturalists are so adamant about their insistence that their god is good and that your science is bad. Sure people suffer more when the church runs the show, but at least the faithful are so mentally cowed they can be manipulated into accepting a life that condemns them and their offspring to living in mud huts and straw dwellings on a starvation diet while their clergy and royalty live off the proceeds of their labor. But at least, given the blight it brings down onto their collective heads, their numbers are kept correspondingly low, no matter how much they may reproduce. Like the balance in nature between predator and prey, the dynamism being the same, the number of humans in such an arrangement are, by its nature, kept in check. There is a balance to their existence. One that Malthus perceived and from which he made his dire predictions. Predictions that are ballyhooed nowadays, but that have been completely borne out. 

Magical thinking: Bio-diesel = Renewable Green energy

The green revolution that brought us industrialized agriculture, at the cost of agricultural jobs for  millions, is impossible without the eventually disastrous application of fossil-fuel derived pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and the combustion of Tractor and Combine fuel. There is no balance with nature in this enterprise, it being free of the energy constraints which were an integral part of Malthus' calculations. Its externalities, like those of all capitalist enterprises, are never considered, and they are never mentioned, the reason being that those who benefit, not only nutritionally, but in terms of their possible standard of living (as a parallel, the vast majority of people much prefer to purchase what a non-gambling mind would consider an onerous number of State Lottery tickets than bear a far less burdensome rate of taxation) believe themselves to be advantageously situated, which, temporarily, they often are. But the balance between consumption and energy inputs has been irreversibly skewed. In economics, when the dollar of profit per unit of debt is eroded by the payment of high interest and inflation, if the situation is not redressed, the economic collapse that must result is, as it so proved in 2008, only a matter of time. The bottom line of which is that for every dollar of profit earned, it requires increasing dollars of investment be made. The same is true of fossil-fueled ag, not surprisingly, as the dynamic of exogenous energy inputs is equivalent, such that the acreage cultivated to attain the same level of output (profits) grows at first, but once it reaches a peak, it declines, and then it it takes the application of more and more fertilizer (investment) be added to exhausted soils, more herbicides and pesticides to control rapidly mutating pests, or the reengineering of those inputs, such as GMO's, a re-engineering that is, again, exogenous to the system, but a large and growing part of the energy uptake of the industry, and as such reflects a larger input to maintain the, by now, decreased output. 

The Roaring Twenties. 

Why it matters: This summer will mark one year since the West Coast, where in 2020, 4.2 million acres burned in California alone, experienced its spate of  historically destructive wildfires. It is now, in early April, already seeing the onset of what is very likely to be an even more severe fire season; one where an already parched landscape with diminished water reserves is, in parts of Utah, already in flames. 

With soil moisture content during the month of March at its lowest level across the West in at least 120 years, Marin county has decided to be pro-active and asked its citizens to decrease their use of this vital resource. Same ole, same ole. As someone from the East coast, the unnerving numbers of consecutive days without a drop of water is quite disconcerting, so, as a lover of gardening and turning a scorched brown landscape in to one that is green and flourishing all year, I am an avid water conservationist. Using grey water that would go down the drain to supply a yard now bursting with plant life (but no lawn ... they're boring anyway). Why I mention that is to attest to the fact that I have seen how those who habitually, or, as in Marin, in the case of looming shortages, curtail their usage, are punished. What has happened in the past, and there's no reason to assume it won't again, is that anyone who INcreases their water usage is blessed with additional allocations once water restrictions are imposed. This is how it works:

Suppose a citizen in Marin who complies with the request and reduces their usage by 10% lives right next door to a user who, it now being dryer and hotter, increases his own usage to water a lawn, for example. Hence, when mandatory 10% cuts in allocations are imposed, the people who curtailed their usage by 10% have their supply cut by a further 10%, while those who increased the amount they use by 10% when the county asked for a voluntary reduction, will now receive their normal allocation. This could be easily resolved by allocating a given volume of water to each user and then charging a premium for any additional quantities the customer extracts from the system. PG&E uses pretty much that exact formula when computing the bill for usage during peak hours. But, judging by what Marin is doing and what has been done in the past, this will not be the case for water, not the least of reasons is that, even during the last drought, toward the end of it when the stress of water shortages were obvious to anyone who took a gander at the natural environment, Californians here in the oh-so-enlightened Bay Area, were still claiming that it was a government conspiracy, there was plenty of water, because, oh the humanity, there always had been in the past. Wow. But not to be outdone, the weather reports given on the air by the television networks when they were at last able to predict rain, did so as though it were a catastrophic event, as though not inconveniencing someone's plan for a picnic took precedence over having the resources to sustain life. Oh the calamity, Jane!

This is the exactly parallel situation that prevails in both the corona pandemic and the ongoing derangement of our climate, and it's why it is quite obvious that neither situation will be resolved by any voluntary reduction of a few well-intentioned individuals. Because, like the drought and the resultant lack of water it imposes, reality is not what a modern population, ensconced as we are in our own little mental Disneyland, is capable of coming to grips with, especially not if it entails the least inconvenience to our so-called "lifestyle", not the least of reasons being, as is evidenced by the campaign to recall Governor Nuisance for airing his French Laundry in public, when the perception is that those calling for a sacrifice from the rest of us, indulge in exactly the behavior they are calling on us to refrain from.

So the preview that we've been made privy to, of temperatures in various countries around the world, in not only the bone-Sawdi Arabian peninsula, but in Thailand and India, in Europe and Minneapolis, in Mexico and Japan, South Korea and Brazil, Australia and Kiwi, all experiencing record-breaking heat in not only March, but continuing into April, in a time when the globe is still in a La Niña ENSO cycle, so is running cooler than it otherwise would, the apocalyptic summer that we see blazing on the horizon is not a mere chimera: it is Your bill ready to view. And it is way overdue; so the penalty that may be extracted from us for neglecting it past all reasonable expectations, could easily be more than we will be able to afford. 

"Brazil's overall death toll trails only the U.S. outbreak, with nearly 333,000 killed, according to Health Ministry data, compared with more than 555,000 dead in the United States."

"It's a nuclear reactor that has set off a chain reaction and is out of control. It's a biological Fukushima," said Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian doctor and professor at Duke University, who is closely tracking the virus.

That is the situation the entire world is now in regarding the ongoing and uncurtailed release of CO2 into the atmosphere, with, at ~418 ppm, CO2 levels now higher than at anytime in the last 3.5 million years. Yet the fanning of the flames driving the temperature of the earth to one not seen in 3.5 million years has only increased. Just this year alone, thanks to a completely unhinged, richboy plaything, Bitcoin, a new CO2 burden, equivalent to that of a highly industrialized country, Italy, to be exact, has been added to the already billions of tons of the GNG output of the world. Of what point, one may well ask, is it to needlessly burn jet fuel for thousands to attend the COPout27?, uselessly burning jet fuel to ... well, to do what is anyone's guess ... when the equivalent of an entire extra country's output is simply added, practically overnight, to the CO2 burden? And for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than for the entertainment of a small coterie of rich brats trying to fuel yet another scheme to funnel the world's earnings into their own pockets, while burdening the rest of humanity with the bill. And they still have the bald-faced audacity to call it "Capitalism".

What's the point indeed ... NONE. In fact, less than none, since the CO2 cost of their little expedition in futility will only add to the burden while, more ominously, pretending that the world is Concerned, that it is doing something, when in fact quite the opposite is occurring; so much so that, we may as well face up to the fact, the more the OECD nations do keep pretending to do something, the more the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere accelerates. It is as though all their hand-wringing, even as their own personal energy use inexorably rises year after year, is somehow squeezing CO2 right out of their hands and into our air.

Idiot'S Avant-garde: DuhDuhism.

"We're all in this together."
 (Exactly why, can you elaborate, is that supposedly a good thing?)

From a Good Friday to an Easter Mourning.

Dances With Toadies in Wolves' Clothing

The Greens and Their Dancing Partner: The Fossil Fuel Industry

We stand on the lip of a precipice playing the flute, hoping to skip out of the way of the rat-race we have luridly lured to join in our Pride Parade just before it plummets over the cliff into the abyss.  Having decided that the crush of humanity has become too onerous to support, we have dressed ourselves in the musky pelts of the bison of the West and dance in the moonlight while the mavericks have already formulated their plans on how to stampede us to our own destruction in a mad, blind rush of panic. Immunity from the herd is unheard of. 

 Death stalks us everywhere, as does science, not coincidentally.

 Thatcher knew what she was saying when she claimed there is no such thing as society. An avid reader, she knew of Henry Adams' statement that, "Society is immortal but people are not"; thus did her statement reflect the politico-class' dance with doom, for if there is no such thing as society, surely humanity, or at least what we have come to refer to as civilization, has no future. 

In such a context, mankind's somnambulant march over the cliffs of Dover into the Dead Sea it has created has the ring of inevitability to it. The East's thirst for Democracy is a cruel prank, the adoption of a corpse on life support, the electrical juice for which comes from the very nations wishing to join the death cult. Who could have guessed that fulfilling our deepest, darkest desires while ignoring our real needs could propel us to self immolation? Hoisted on our own petard, strapped to the mast by our own design, we have entrusted our lives to forces of our own creation but over which we have ceded control. Like Texans frozen in their homes, we paid our bills, and now pay with our lives for the faith we placed in known criminals; we put our trust in entities that never experience suffering, that formulate dark plans to profit just-in-time from ours. Instead of a gold watch, at your forced retirement you get a personalized body bag.

There is no such thing as society: There is only the economy.

 Adams got it wrong. Capital is immortal but government is not.

The Greens' Ills:  Ultimate Insolvency:

With Greensill Bank's collapse, hundreds of German municipalities have seen their savings evaporate, savings they allocated to a regional bank to escape the onerous payments levied on their "savings" by the ECB's negative interest rates. 

I peruse my bank statement from a "savings" account in which I have six thousand dollars. I've earned not one red cent. I then pay my credit card account balance of a comparable amount. The cash bonus is $100.00. 

Seeking the safety of Savings is punished, your funds confiscated; taking on the risk of unsecured debt is rewarded ... by the entity holding the loan. Banks that once rewarded its depositors with toasters for opening an account now lure them into debt traps with cash. Yet the more you borrow the greater your sorrow, but not ‘til tomorrow. 

Forbearance merely pushes the day of insolvency a few more months into the dark future.

When a pandemic strikes, you have no savings, why would you? So you're left with no resources, hence no way to pay the debt, and the well-oiled trap springs shut. The Mouse Trap for the Rat race. The big rigs are lining up to toss the body bags into. Crematoria burn corpses to heat the hospitals; Like mummies stoking locomotives, the dead can dance as hot coals; re-open the schools so that minors instead of miners can provide the renewable fuel of the future; as Tsar Nicholas II infamously claimed, the one thing you can depend on the peasants to do is reproduce themselves in unsustainable numbers. E=MC squared means that Black Lives’ Matter is transformed via the green new deal into the Black Deaths' Energy. 

So let's go on vacation while we still can:

There have been 60 to 70 full German vacation flights a day to the Spanish island of Mallorca, which will host an estimated 40,000 Germans over Easter alone. While in the US, as case numbers and variants rise, so too do the number of flights. Not content with the multiplicity of deadly variants of a viral microbe, the most advanced nations of the world still insist on their right to Chase freedom, while the places they will fly away from after a few sun-drenched, alcohol-fueled daze, will be left, like denizens of America's favorite warzone, enduring Freedom ... just not their own.

  Liberté et égalité 

The Spic and Spandemic: No Child Left Behind

This is not so surprising as it seems. Mankind soon celebrates Easter Sunday, a celebration of folly. Left to decide whether a man was buried alive or rose from the dead, it has decided to opt for what it knows is nonsense, and ignore the explanation that is actually possible.

Spinoza was right, there is no such thing as the immortality of the soul. He proved it mathematically. For which endeavor he was excommunicated. 

Science tells us that not only our star, but even the universe itself is mortal; so the only mystery remains the ethereal dark matter that is non-interchangeable with dark energy since E=MC squared is inoperative, there being no light in the dark, leaving utter darkness as the only infinite state in the unknown universe.

Gogol this String Theory:

Dead Souls trapped for eternity in the confining bonds of Dark Matter are in hell, while the alternative,  being free to traverse the endless realms of space-time, skipping through the multiverse as Dark Energy, is Heaven.

We have read of time and the river in a western journal; explored the far and the near to uncover the story of a novel somewhere in the hills beyond both the Web and the Rock of Gibraltar; traveled from death to morning to find out if only the dead know Brooklyn; but all we've learned is that we can't look homeward again, Angel, as the lost boy in Wolfe's clothing has swallowed everything whole.