Scum

Suspending my FTFNYT boycott for five minutes, only to say that I literally cringe to think about the many awful things that could happen to these plague profiteers, and it would only amuse me. If his house burned down tomorrow with his "investment" and all his worldly possessions in it, and it turned out he had no fire insurance or family to fall back on, I'd actually laugh out loud. I don't know what the hell happens to people that they turn out like that, where every crisis is an opportunity to screw over your neighbors.

I didn't used to be this way, wishing real misery on idiots, but then we didn't used to be this way, at least not so easily and publicly. The panic-buying of toilet paper is beyond stupid, but there has been a concomitant rash of stories like this across the country, these little weasels hitting all the Costcos and Dollar Trees in their area, buying up all the cleaning supplies, and sticking them in the garage, in order to jack up the price several hundred percent for their neighbors.

However, to be (a bit) fair to Matt Colvin and his ilk, how is what they are doing any different that what the various collusive legs of the health care stool do? Every facet of that filthy industry -- HMOs, insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations -- all engage in the very same type of "disaster arbitrage" Colvin is trying to pull. You think those COVID-19 tests are going to be free? You think treatment is going to be fully covered, even if you have insurance? Really?

Don't get me wrong, these jerkoffs are messing with the well-being of their communities, trying to turn a quick buck off of other people's panic and pain. They've earned your scorn, and it would serve them right if all they get out of it is a lifetime supply of Clorox wipes and Charmin. Just keep in mind that they're pikers and amateurs compared to the companies that profit mightily every single day from extorting money out of a captive market, all so their CEOs can rake in twenty million a year or so. As bad as Matt Colvin is, the people who gouge $500/month for insulin or $600 for a pair of Epipens that cost one-tenth of that to produce are a thousand times worse.

Or the people in the federal government whose job it is to protect the population from a pandemic, absolving themselves from responsibility and fawning over Dear Leader's stellar planning and astute stewardship, this heedless clown who literally claimed the disease was just a hoax right up to two weeks ago.

You think I'm indifferent to the fate of these Amazon arbitrage weasels, don't get me started on the health care execs and Trump's bootlickers. If every single one of them suffered and dropped dead from the bug it would seem like a fair exchange. Their conduct has been at best a complete dereliction of duty, their silence nothing more than complicity with a scheming, chiseling lunatic who would nuke Omaha tomorrow if he thought there was a few bucks or a few poll approval points in it for him.

Maybe it's time we all take stock of ourselves, and each other, and decide what kind of society we really want to be. Because if this is what we've fallen to, these chumps who are so out of options that they think that hustling a garage or pickup bed full of household goods at inflated prices is going to change their lives for the better, we're in deeper trouble than we think.

The Devil In Miss Jones

If our ongoing cold civil war ever goes hot, be sure to send Alex Jones a thank you card. Not that it will matter, since he'll have gotten his fondest wish.

Wondering Where the Lions Are

While the spontaneous outrage over the senseless murder of a magnificent, endangered animal is heartening, it's not enough to even scratch the surface. Some 600 lions (out of about 30,000 total, so 2%)are killed by hunters every year; some two-thirds of those hunters are American. Finally the US Fish and Wildlife Service, after declining the opportunity last year, is looking into reclassifying lions from "threatened" to "endangered" status. This would ban the importation of "trophies" and other such totems for over-compensating douchebags with too much money and not enough penis.

Fuck Walter Palmer, right in the fucking eye socket with a rusty corkscrew. I respect hunters who stock their freezers for the winter, and work with wildlife ecosystems. There is a legitimate role for deer and duck hunters. But I have no respect for rich cocksuckers who just enjoy killing shit. So I'm sincerely joyful that, at least for the time being, Palmer's practice and life appear to be ruined. He's a liar and a poacher and a piece of shit. He spends more money than most hard-working people earn in a goddamned year for the cheap thrill of killing an increasingly scarce animal. Seems like Viagra or enlargement surgery would be more cost-effective.

It's been impressive to see how quickly the popular tide was turned against the currently pre-eminent symbol of division and hate, the confederate flag. The only thing good about that flag is that it comes in two-ply. If I wasn't such a lazy bastard I'd get a full-sized flag, make a video of myself taking a massive, steaming, soupy, vodka-and-beef-jerky dump on it, then wiping my ass with it, and driving to some "sacred" traitor loser monument and leaving it on Nathan Bedford Fucking Forrest Gump's bronzed fool head.

Fuck that flag and everything it stands for. But what it took for the tide to take a righteous turn was a tragic catalyzing event. Since that event and the righteous shitstorm, there has been some pushback, but mostly of the useless-white-noise ('scuse the pun) variety on Facebook. The only ones getting out there on the issue are the lunatic racist fringe, the knuckle-dragging shitbags that even hardcore teabaggers can't defend.

Maybe the same thing can happen here, with trophy hunting. The trophy hunters are bad enough, but they are at least technically legal, so they can be kept track of. Illegal hunters and poachers are worse, lurking in the shadows, waiting opportunistically, uncaring about the destruction they cause. Habitat encroachment is a huge problem as well, but one that could be managed, theoretically.

Most of us wonder from time to time what we might do if somehow awarded with what I would call "walking away" money, the kind of eight- or nine-figure windfall that would enable you to either be like some clichéd Powerball loser, or make a real difference. I shit you not that in such an event, I'd put some serious money toward rounding up a team of mercenaries, real Delta Force / Soldier of Fortune types, and just give them a hefty year's wages to go find every poaching gang or individual within 500 miles of a nature preserve, and skull-fuck the lot of them with Kalashnikovs.

I don't even care if they're poor villagers with families to feed; it is not the role of endangered animals to go extinct in order to support overpopulation of the human virus. That too is the fault of wealthier countries, though, since they pay dearly to either kill the animals or to harvest their parts for trophies or aphrodisiacs. Vicariously it'd be wonderful to hunt those fuckers down as well.

Realistically, I think we're at an impasse. Tigers are already nearly gone -- there are more tigers in Texas than in the rest of the world combined, and that has been the case for some time -- and elephants, lions, and rhinos are not that far behind. The fucking Chinese, who are almost solely responsible for the use of tiger parts, need to start cracking down on their gluttonous idiots, the way they control everything else in their citizens' lives.

I'd happily send my big-money Delta team to the tiger ranches as well, tune up those motherfuckers and their shitbird customers. These are people who add nothing to the world, they just take and kill and destroy. Fuck them. Let them find honest work. Seriously, is every dick broken over there or something, is there that much of a need to send everything into extinction because they can't get a fucking boner?

But China won't crack down on them, won't do anything about any of this. The tigers will be gone soon enough, followed by the other species mentioned, but there will be ever more humans, breeding, greeding, grasping, killing, fucking, sucking their way to oblivion. Most humans do not hate the earth and its wondrous creations, but those that do, that vile minority, do so with impunity, and have scaled their heedless destruction to the point of no return. We do not need an infinite supply of eaters in those already over-supplied areas, we need more of our precious wildlife resources and ecosystems. And we don't need any more assholes who self-actualize by destroying the rare and the beautiful.

The fucking meteor can't hit soon enough.

The Audacity of Pope

It's interesting to watch liberals and environmentalists make common cause with the pope on the subject of climate change, since chances are they profoundly disagree with him on many other issues -- not the least of which would be the proximal causes of said environmental shift. I guess you take support where you can get it, but this a pretty tough one to get around.

Don't get me wrong, compared to his predecessors, the current pope is relatively (dare I say it?) progressive. He has made overtures to other faiths, gays, even atheists. Credit where it's due and all.

But I don't see how you can logically separate the acknowledgement of an ongoing climate crisis, and the worsening problem of overpopulation. Consumerism is certainly a substantial part of global warming and environmental degradation, but it doesn't account for, to name one egregious example, the mass extinction we're now in the middle of.

Somewhat oddly, the major areas that are and will be experiencing continued population increases are India and Africa, regions which are not necessarily attuned to what the head of the Catholic Church has to say about much of anything. China has some responsibility to bear as well, not just for the sheer scale of their population, but because they are the primary consumers of these endangered species that are being poached. Americans are obese and vulgar, but they're not buying ivory and eating tiger penis soup.

It is sickening to think that within another generation or so, we will almost certainly be without any tigers, rhinos, lions, elephants, lemurs, and many other amazing graceful creatures that used to share the planet with us. But we'll have somewhere between nine and ten billion humans by 2050, many of them scavenging and poaching and pillaging and overbreeding their way through what passes for a life, each putting toxic drops into an ocean of impending catastrophe (I defy you to find a more purple metaphor in the next, say, 24 hours).

His Holiness has very little to say about all that; in fact, he's taken the opposite tack. It's as if he recognizes that we are falling off a cliff, on the verge of a perilous precipice, and yet would rather ignore that whole pesky gravity thing.

This is not a small point. The church is never going to budge from condemning abortion, and one assumes that even the most ardent atheist or pro-choice advocate can at least understand that stance. But a smart -- and truly progressive (ugh) -- pontiff would strike a creative and useful balance by moving the dial on contraception. Again, the parts of the world most in need of that are not Catholic in the first place. But it can't hurt, and you have to start somewhere.

There's a phrase I've oft repeated in this here venue, and I sincerely believe it should be the motto or operational guideline for virtually every governing body of any size or importance:  People (in the collective, aggregate sense) will not change their behavior until they understand that the cost of not changing is greater than the cost of changing. This is as true and axiomatic as noting that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. The corollary to this is that it usually takes some sort of catalyzing event to get them to realize this; life has to break one off in their asses before the light bulb finally goes on and they see that their current path is unsustainable.

You used to be able to at least count on the basic principle that individuals wanted to leave the world as good or better than they found it, for future generations, that they wouldn't want to leave a toxic shithole for their children and grandchildren. The boomers squashed that long-held precept; those motherfuckers refuse to compromise on a goddamned thing as they dodder off into senescence. They fucked us, and they're entirely cool with it. Very well then, at least own the damage you've wrought. Consider yourselves lucky we don't shut off the payout valve the second you've recouped exactly what you paid in, and then set you out on a fucking ice floe with a crate of Matlock and Murder She Wrote DVDs.

This groaning, overburdened planet cannot take much more of what we're giving it. A deity that wants countless individual souls to be actualized, only to perish early in an impending mass die-off if we continue down this road, is no friend to its believers. Like any politician, a pope has a balance to strike between the intellectual, the spiritual, and the practical. (Yeah, I know.) But time gets shorter, and the practical must start taking precedence.

Cities of Salt

By now no doubt most people who are interested in geopolitical goings-on, beyond the usual "the Middle East is burning while Obammy fiddles" Chicken Little plaints, have read this exhaustive analysis of the ISIS movement. It's a valuable take on a subject that is simply too complex for a teevee -- or even most print outlets -- summary of the situation.

It takes some doing to go to London and Melbourne and sit down and listen to these cold-blooded psychopaths, who are using their religion as an excuse to fuel their apocalyptic fantasies, and address grievances that are legitimate, but are really the grievances of their parents and grandparents.

That said, I think the freshest thinking and writing on the subject is from John Robb at Global Guerrillas. Graeme Wood postulates in his Atlantic article that a theological movement whose doctrinal weight must eventually place it in a situation where it can no longer operate in the way it intends. Robb, on the other hand, sees these "open jihad" things as stigmergic, constantly iterative, with a clear short-term goal of taking down the Saudis, at which point they obviously are in a real position to write their own rules.

(Not that the Saudis have been great friends or anything.)

It should be clear by now that where the US has failed in its war on terror is in more or less the same mode as the Soviets failed in Afghanistan:  the approach has been rooted in ideology, rather than in a practical application of systems theory, as Robb approaches it. The Islamic State actors embrace both things almost equally well, which is another clear indication that a good part of their success is attributable to the Iraqi Army regulars who have defected to that cause, since we managed to fuck the dog so thoroughly in putting a corrupt Shiite gubmint in charge of what had been a mostly Sunni command infrastructure.

In other words, our obsession with de-Ba'athification post-Saddam worked in perfect congruence with the destabilization of Syria in the wake of a record drought (and please don't ask about who controls all the water that flows into Syria and Iraq). When people ask whence ISIS sprung and gathered momentum, those are the two big conditions that fed the beast.

In hindsight, it would have been wise to temper our expectations about the "Arab Spring" of a few years ago, so it would be wise now to carefully consider our viable options now that that false promise has faded into a haze of chaos, violence, recrimination. The usual right-wing armchair tough guys want to blame Obama for all that, and they're right insofar as geopolitics doesn't seem to be Obama's strong suit.

But, uh, it wasn't Fredo's strong suit either. I don't think anyone has the right answer, because the foreign policy of the hegemon is mostly all or nothing, especially since you can't use checkbook diplomacy with these Islamic State creeps. At the same time, you can't just let them overrun the Saudis either (and yes, all the precious oil). Iran and Saudi are mortal enemies, of course, which makes the dynamics of all this so much more compelling -- and dangerous.

The US has obviously had no talent for knowing which corrupt petro-douche to throw its support behind, and how (or how much). Strangely, it may turn out in retrospect that the biggest missed opportunity was to not have gotten the Russians involved to help strike a balance of great powers to assist in stabilizing the region (which again has not worked out too great so far, but look what's happened with no presence at all).

Putin did us a solid in helping dial down Bashar Assad's chemical assaults on his own people (not that that's stopped the Syrians from just dropping barrel bombs on "rebel" entities, who of course are hiding among civilians). And while the Russians' actions in Ukraine over the last year have been contentious, to say the least, there's been zero effort on our part to work any of it out, no acknowledgment of the fact that Russia considers a NATO state on its borders as unacceptable as we would consider Mexico becoming a Chinese or Russian satellite.

So what do you do about this region, and how? Our previous bungling empowered and cleared the way for these psychopaths, we have some moral obligation to at least think about options to help the captive populace. Forget the idiots from western countries who are going over there for jihad; no one will miss them if they get droned.

But more practically, maybe it's time to get serious about renewable energy sources, to dump Marshall Plan money into a Great Project -- akin to landing on the moon or Mars -- to make those sources viable and scalable. What powers the Middle East is oil revenues, and the second those are gone, the wealthy Saudis and Kuwaitis will get out one step ahead of the surging mobs, escape to their Greek island hideaways, and those places will sort themselves out. There will be voices calling for us to jump in, and again perhaps we have a moral obligation to do that in some respect. But it has to be done with the knowledge that innocent people will die, regardless of our good intentions, no matter how careful we try to be.

And it has to be done with a systems outlook that is responsive and agile, that adjusts as quickly as they do. It could all end up in another decade of chasing shadows in a miserable moonscape regardless, but that approach is the only way you stand a chance against a faceless, implacable foe.

News of the Whirled

It's odd, yet somehow fitting, that Brian Williams gets caught "conflating" his war stories at almost the exact same time as Jon Stewart announces that he's leaving The Daily Show. Who knows, maybe the impending demise of Williams' career played a part in Stewart's decision. Obviously the two are good friends, and Stewart walked a fine line in lampooning Williams' gaffe, and presenting a greater context for it.

Williams seems like a nice enough guy, and with his appearances on 30 Rock and Daily Show and such like, he's cemented that perception in the public mind. Given his position as corporate news reader, making such appearances is more crucial to career stability and advancement than, say, actual journalistic research. Stewart, on the other hand, may literally be the closest thing to an actual journalist this country has on television, though John Oliver has jumped in impressively and taken it up a notch, with deeper digging and no filters at all. And David Carr's recent untimely passing is a reminder of what real journalists do.

What we've become accustomed to thinking of as "journalism" most often involves video, rather than audio or (god forbid) print. Judicious editing and tight narrative replace nuance and context. The corporate logo, by definition, requires hewing to an establishment line. No doubt Brian Williams considers himself a serious journalist, and even though the helicopter he was riding in did not get hit, he still rode in a helicopter in a combat zone. Not that it matters; the most important subtext of a combat embed is that you're not showing a thing without the approval of the military and the government.

And it's not a minor detail that the conservatools bleating the loudest about Williams' typical lamestream perfidy are mum about the many prevarications of their latest and greatest totem, Chris Kyle. They do not care that Kyle almost certainly fabricated several image-building war anecdotes (one of which ended in a fat judgment against Kyle's estate in the favor of Jesse Ventura), and likely at least embellished some parts of his combat record.

To that point, actually I don't much care about Kyle's lies all that much either, insofar as they don't negate the things that Kyle did that are verifiable. And that's part of the point about Brian Williams. He's merely a product of the machine he works for, a machine that by design employs and promotes team players such as Williams, affable faces to provide a semblance of information between commercials for a tired, bored populace that wasn't going to rise up anyway. This is how consent is manufactured, and pharmaceuticals and automobiles are moved. It's not rocket science.

Nor is the cable commentary circus anything approaching rocket science either. So when a toxic dickhead like Rudy Giuliani starts running his filthy cakehole one more goddamned time, it's tough to get mad at Giuliani, any more than you can get mad at your dog when you leave him in the house and he shits on the floor and chews up your couch pillows. He's a fucking dog, you're the dumbass for not understanding that dogs do what they do when given the opportunity.

Giuliani is just one of countless professional buffoons whose stock in trade is ventriloquizing the moronic delusions of a demographic that deserves everything they're getting -- aggrieved maroons who, in between collecting their gubmint checks, begrudge everyone and everything else, and scribe fanciful tales about the Black Satan in the White House. The idea that Obama is a closet Muslim is ludicrous; the idea that he's a closet atheist, and understands exactly how shit would blow up on him were he to even hint at such a thing, makes much more sense. But we'll never know, because these coddled, cosseted dipshits literally would not be able to handle the truth.

It's unfortunate that the only barrier to entry in becoming a political meme or talking point these days is simply being something that can be described, digested, and shat out in under ten seconds, just long enough to get someone riled up about some nonsense. They would much rather send other people to fight and kill an enemy they know nothing about, make an awful situation even worse, so they can go back to what they were doing, which was absolving themselves from their ongoing fuck-ups.

Network and cable teevee news is all just marketing and public relations, properly diluted and vetted for mass consumption, something to keep people placid yet attentive enough to listen to the words from the sponsors, whether it's the Koch Brothers or Big Pharma.

Irresistible Force, Immovable Object

While worldwide overpopulation is an obvious concern as this century progresses, this article only captures part of the most likely effects and viable solutions. Even more than supplying various free methods of birth control in Third World countries, it's been demonstrated over and over again, virtually everywhere it's been observed, that educating and empowering women are by far the most important factors to reducing birth rates.

A corollary to that rule -- one that sounds good but turns out to be tremendously inconvenient in the medium to long run -- is that upward mobility for women and families will lock that lower birth rate into place. The thing is, most scientists agree that the majority of observable climate change issues are caused by the resource consumption rates of industrialized nations, and the two massive countries -- China and India, obviously -- who make our stuff for us.

The countries with the highest birth rates are the least developed, the least industrialized, and (most importantly) consume the fewest resources per capita. China and India contribute through the pollution generated by their massive manufacturing capacity, but the other end of that Faustian bargain was that these two gigantic countries would have a rising consumer class. In fact, even a 100% successful, completely benign project to lower the birth rates and improve quality of life in sub-Saharan Africa would simply result in even more people wanting to consume resources at the same rate as the US and Europe. And our level of consumption is simply not scalable on this planet.

Humans are really great at two things, both of which are in play here. The first thing, of course, is adaptability -- we don't have fur or fangs or claws, but we have opposable thumbs and the ability to reason and build. Those enable us to live in just about any climate -- and in just about any condition. Life in a Soweto shantytown, a Rocinha favela, or an unfinished skyscraper would be unthinkable and unacceptable to all but the very poorest American or European. We have each adapted, in seemingly different directions, but as the American suburbanites who got shoved out of their homes and into tent cities found out the hard way, people can find a way to adapt to just about any situation, pushed hard enough.

The second thing, more problematic, is providential thinking, the ongoing assumption that something will come along, because something always has. In the more mystical past, steeped in religion and unquestioned belief, priests of various cultures communed with their versions of god and assured that he/she/it would provide. These days, our modern priests -- futurists and technocrats -- place their faith in technology to solve everything, so that we can continue to consume blindly.

Various conclaves of power-brokers and shot-callers at Davos or the Bohemian Grove filter their talking points down to TED talks and corporate media, and eventually to the masses, who want nothing more than to be placated by what they need to hear. We'll get you cheap gas by fracking in someone else's backyard, poisoning someone else's aquifer, so you can drive your Excursion to the post office, alone. We'll truck your NAFTA berries 1500 miles to you in the middle of winter, so you don't have to think about eating seasonally or locally. We'll build enormous tunnels to move millions of acre-feet of water 500 miles away, so you can wash your cars and play golf.

Two other major factors are rapidly kicking in to affect all of these environmental issues:  longevity and productivity. Crazy, right? Those should be good things, and intrinsically they are. But when you have finite resources, they become problems. We can automate many processes and jobs, with no doubt many more to come. So what do we propose all these humans who are coming, with or without dedicated efforts at population control, going to do? How do they stay busy and productive during their prolonged lives? How many people will still be needed to work and produce, and for how long, to help maintain the systems that prolong those lives?

More importantly, as our Great Society continues its run toward economic stratification, who will those people be? As we return to a feudal system, albeit a technologically empowered, corporatized one, we can easily see how a permanent underclass gets utilized to do all the heavy lifting, and an upwardly ambitious supervisor class oversees them, chasing a non-existent carrot, all for the benefit of a much smaller leisure class. Same as it ever was, just with more toys and distractions, more extreme weather, and less wildlife.

Curbing population growth is still a worthy goal, don't get me wrong. But too many people, with their adaptability and providential thinking, would take any gains gleaned by such efforts as a license to consume and waste more, because they can, because the powers-that-be know just how to placate them.

Bot World

I'm glad to see the estimable John Robb back on regularly at Global Guerrillas, as he frequently has that futuristic take on things. Case in point:  the steadily increasing presence of bots in the routine tasks that affect our lives and perceptions of the world. Most of us are probably aware to at least some extent of the proliferation of automated algorithms in financial trading, or article "spinners" used by internet marketers.

But it's becoming more and more prevalent; the notion that a bot could be used to spin a million Wikipedia articles is staggering. The idea that the same tech could be used to generate more conventional content -- books, magazines, movie scripts -- is annoying. That bots are doing most Wall Street trading should be a cause of concern. The possibility that bots may, sooner rather than later, be driving us around -- and that there may be insurance ramifications that necessitate having them drive us around -- should be alarming.

Even setting aside the sci-fi Skynet scenario of AI taking over, or the already problematic issue of near-constant government surveillance, think of how many jobs are lost just in the four proposed uses for bots (and of course there are and will be many more uses). In a groaning, increasingly overcrowded planet, with resource scarcity issues looming on all fronts, with any and every function automated, what exactly are all those unemployed people supposed to do?

I Got Your Stimulus Package Right Here

On the fifth anniversary of the "stimulus," it's not unfair to ask what precisely it stimulated. You can see pretty effective breakdowns of ARRA funds here and here, itemized and tabulated six ways from Sunday. There are descriptions of plenty of beneficial projects.

But it's also important to look at results, to ask why, for example, if over $98 billion was spent on transportation and infrastructure, so many of our bridges and highways are on the verge of collapsing. Why, after spending nearly $19 bn on health care, is the health care system still such a monumental clusterfuck, an issue that essentially works out to a 20% productivity tax, where wealth is extracted and siphoned upward for shareholders and exec bonuses.

Speaking of extracting and siphoning, how is it that after putting over $41 bn in stimulus money toward "energy," presumably at least some token efforts toward conservation and efficiency, the best this administration can point to is fracking, and pipelining tar sand bitumen? Does this sound like a tremendous bang for your hard-earned tax dollar?

Surely jobs were created and preserved by these and other efforts, so even as a stopgap there is some efficacy. But I said it at the start, and nothing has happened to change my mind -- at least some of the stimulus should have gone to households, rich and poor alike, some flat amount across the board, say $50,000 per household. You would have seen an aggregation of activities centered around three main goals -- spending, saving, and eliminating debt.

That last one is the killer, as our debt ratio has skyrocketed, with no way to get it back down to where the average person can save, or even have discretionary income to put back into the economy. This is a situation that I strongly and sincerely believe is not accidental or coincidental. It is by design -- the owners continue their accrual without missing a beat, while the rest barely manage to hang on, making them even more desperate to cling to whatever straws are left, to accept the few crumbs that still fall from the table.

It's a patronage system, so the stimulus pelf was going to patrons regardless of which party supported what policy. But imagine for just a second how much more successful it would have been to have at least part of that money go directly to taxpayers and consumers, rather than finance weasels who pulled the money at 0%, hoarded most and lent the rest to the peons at interest -- or just rigging the interest rates in the first place. Nice racket you got there.

{Update 2/21/14 20:00 PST:  Looks like The Krugster had the same bright idea there.]

The Great Unwinding

The question of when the Fed stops handing money to rentier kajillionaires to prop up the smoke-and-mirrors casino economy (instead of to working people who would -- I shit you not, podna -- spend the money instead of hoarding it, buy things instead of making book) is less about the when and more about how hard it will hit the peons when it happens.

Since the Masters of the Universe assume that all unrich people are another, dumber form of life who were just too fucking stoopid to get out of their own way, the one thing they can agree upon with zero discussion is that their own bottom line should not be affected by so much as a tenth of a penny or a hundredth of a percentage point. After all, it's hard goddamn work to pick the right parents and diddle spreadsheets and knock off American companies, so get bent, dummies who work with your hands and backs!

In other words, they were more than happy to cause this mess on the backs of the proles, so it stands to reason that they'll be equally jake with letting us take the hit when the house of financial cards finally collapses (again). Because they know you won't do jack shit about it, you'll either sit home and grumble or Get Out And Vote like it actually means anything. And then go back to the weekly freak show of sex dungeons and sharknados and gropey mayors.

Which might be the most sensible response; again, aside from keeping an eye on higher ground for when the shit does come down, there's not much you can do. Get out of debt if you can, learn to grow your own food regardless, learn a new skill or refine an existing one, so at least you can barter for sex and gasoline. Other than that, they own your ass, you know it and they know it.

High-Tech Mugging

Cyprus is an outlier, but it is also a test case and a bellwether. The extent of the story presented in the MSM is that of economically rigorous Germany imposing austerity measures on their more profligate southern brethren. There may even be an element of truth to all that.

But those are mere principles, and here we are talking about money, and who gets to take it from whom, by muscle and gall if need be, for the benefit of those who already have more than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes. The central banking system is mightily overextended, with unsecured derivative obligations estimated between $600 trillion and $1.5 quadrillion. (Read that again: the low estimate is over half a quadrillion U.S. dollars of debt.)

The financial brain surgeons were only just barely able to slap enough duct tape and baling wire on their little perpetual-motion machine to keep things going, the last time they monkey-fucked it. Since then, they've had their run of things, been essentially told by the Attorney General of the United States that they're above prosecution for their laughably obvious patterns of malfeasance and corruption.

And now the problem is bigger and badder, because European austerity hasn't worked (as predicted -- but then again, "hasn't worked" for whom?), and Cyprus may just be the thread that, when pulled, unravels the whole cheap web of lies and casino trickery. It will take a while; first in Europe, as Putin decides whether or not to yank the natural gas chain on his Euro customers next winter, then next year we'll see some form of economic malaise metastasize its way over here.

Inventory orders abroad are dropping, though supposedly domestic housing starts are on the uptick, which will be accompanied by rising interest rates. Couple that with the ongoing economic fearmongering over the impending Affordable Care Act, and the continuing racketization of America in general, and you have a pretty solid recipe for deep shit.

This isn't zombie apocalypse, asteroid-extinction massive event stuff, this is frog-in-a-pot-of-gradually-boiling water action. But let's not beat around the bush about exactly what this is -- a very small percentage of financially strong people in financially strong countries shaking down the weak and unrepresented, over smoke and mirrors and spreadsheet-generated meta-debt.

I'm not saying you need to pack your bunker and go-bag or move to Patagonia, but as always, divesting from the system as much as possible, becoming self-sufficient, will absolutely lessen the blow, whenever it occurs. Solar panels and rain catchers, greenhouse gardening, seasonality and locavorism. Get a 3D printer and learn how to use it. Get a gun or two, and learn how to use them, just in case; the next corrective economic slump will likely set off another spasm of desperate people doing desparate things. Even an empty shotgun will do -- who doesn't instinctively clench their sphincter at the sound of a shotgun being racked?

Getting out of debt is another animal altogether; it should be apparent by now that the few true beneficiaries of the upward wealth transfer system make their bones primarily through massive amounts of debt peonage and rentierism, getting you on a financial tenthook and keeping you there. I don't really have an answer for that. Either pay the absolute bare minimum to avoid getting everything repoed, or get rid of it all as soon as you can, if that's possible. Not really many other options, which is sort of the point from the creditors POV.

I think the main thing to realize is that there's not much point into going into full-on Doomsday Prepper mode, but there is benefit to understanding that the game is truly rigged, that it's a small club that runs things and you ain't in it, and that no politician of any stripe is ever going to fix it. Either there's a massive jubilee on all this imaginary debt the Masters of the Universe rolled up on our backs, or you sign on for multi-generational obligations and rentierism for all the techtoys you need in order to get by or to forget your daily drudgery.

Maybe there'll be some sort of mass riot or conflagration to force some rethought on all this before things turn completely sideways, but it's doubtful. People are too cowed, too willing to believe that something or someone will come along to set things right, not wanting to believe what is right in front of them -- that none of this is an accident, that it was all preventable, that in fact it's a feature, and not a flaw.

....And I Feel Fine

You know, I'm as glad as the next schmuck that the buffoonish radio dickhead predicting world apocamalypse was proven wrong yet again, as thus far they have always been. These jokers are a dime a score, always have been and always will be.

But what rings weird to me is how much press this particular joker got, both in the run-up to the magick date, and now the aftermath, everyone having a big grin that this old cheese-smelling cuss had a very public senior moment.

Don't get me wrong -- we've had our share of the billboards up this neck o' the woods, and the stupid doesn't just burn, it emanates. I guess I'm just glad that though my daughter is young enough to wonder about the provenance of this nonsense, she is at least astute enough to be skeptical about them. Not everyone, I'm wagering, is as lucky, and shame on Harold Camping for scaring the shit out of kids for no damned reason.

The adults, on the other hand, deserve precisely what they get. As we've always acknowledged, it really is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

But I'm curious as to what to ascribe this wave of coverage to, for a "story" that would in earlier times been relegated to the one-and-done bin of most marginal players. It seems that there is no such thing anymore as a marginal player -- a supreme assclown like Donald Trump can get slavish coverage for two full months to pimp his piece-of-shit teevee show in the guise of political aspiration, and pull out with the assurance that he could win this if he rilly wanted ta, and they just fucking stenograph it, like it ain't no thing. Sarah Palin has choked up the media cloaca for a full two years and counting now. Every network stentorously announced the withdrawal of Serious Player Mitch Daniels, without remembering to mention that he was Dubya's budget director for a few years, and thus had at least a thumb in how things ran for some time. And so forth.

So it goes with Harold Camping, and his happy if woefully misguided campers. The question is not "why is this a story" -- of course a nutjob radio preacher predicting global cataclysm is "a story" -- the question is "how did this story persist for a couple weeks". It's gone on and on like this for quite some time, seemingly more and more so as time goes on. Each news cycle seems more nonsensical, more relentlessly stupid than the last.

With this "story", one could play devil's advocate for a second, if one were so inclined. Consider not only the scope, scale, and frequency of natural disasters just his year so far, but the intractability of man-made catastrophes the world over. The destruction of the American economy and way of life continues apace, with no foreseeable respite. Your elected officials have been bought and paid for by the very people they need to prosecute, and who continue to drive the entire economy -- and thus, your way of life and that of your neighbors -- into the dirt. And the rest of the world, so much of it post-colonial, has suffered far worse for far longer, much of it at our hands.

Maybe the people who die in these natural disasters, or who take themselves and their families out as a response to creatively engineered desitution from afar, are actually being raptured. I hold it as no serious philosophical construct, nor do I want to disrespect the memories of those unfortunate souls. But if one believes in such outlandish ideas, one just never knows for sure.