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2009, April 13, Monday.

Ha! Yesterday I linked to a book about grammar, "The Elements of Style" (1918). Kudos to Nanbullen for sending me this article debunking said textbook. Close call.

Amazing find from Ireland: A Stonehenge made of wood. A woodhenge, that is.

The Exile voyages in the epicenter of America's foreclosure nightmare.

Victorville is what they call an “exurb,” one of thousands of new sub-suburban sprawls all around the country built for poor Americans. To flocking homeowners, Victorville must have seemed like a glorious reaffirmation about everything good and right about American values, a place where the poor could finally afford a home of their own. Instead, it turned into just one more slaughtering ground in the the biggest scam of the century, a place where tens of thousands were lured to be ripped off and set adrift.

Kunstler: The Coming Siege of Austerity

So many forces are arrayed against a return to the previous "normal" that we will be lucky, in another eighteen months, to still find ourselves speaking English and celebrating Christmas. What's "out there" is a panorama of mutually reinforcing critical problems pertaining to how we live on this continent. Like the obesity, heart disease, and diabetes that plague the public, these problems are disorders of lifestyle habits and the only possible "cure" is a comprehensive revision of lifestyle. With the onset of spring weather and the cheez doodles and monster truck rallies and Nascar tailgate barbeques and the drive-in beer emporiums all beckoning, can the public public shift its attention from these infantile preoccupations to saving its own ass?

UK insanity watch: Schools hire bouncers instead of subsitute teachers.

Schools are recruiting nightclub bouncers, prison officers and ex- soldiers to stand in for absent teachers.

Classroom supervisors with military or law enforcement backgrounds are being hired instead of supply teachers to administer 'crowd control'.

One secondary school in North London employed two permanent teacher stand-ins through an agency for professional doormen, the National Union of Teachers annual conference heard.

They were chosen as they were 'stern and loud', said Andrew Baisley, a delegate from North London.

The bouncers were checked for criminal records but given no training. Within weeks, one was dismissed after breaching disciplinary codes.

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2009, April 10, Friday.

The spate of murder suicides continues...and they're getting weirder. A mother shoots her son at the shooting range, then puts the gun in her mouth and kills herself. Prior to the deed, both were acting normally. Don't expect the MSM to draw any lines between this spate of violence and the unfolding financial meltdown. That would mean that they were, like, doing their jobs.

4 off-beat links:

A book about writing proper: "The Elements of Style" (1918). Mea culpa...

Tom Whipple: The Peak Oil Crisis: priorities

If you are one of the millions who have lost their jobs or homes in the last year then you already know that something is happening. Returning to the way we have lived for the last 100 years simply is not in the cards. The world is entering a great paradigm shift and our place in it will be markedly different 10 or 20 years from now. The most alarming thing to remember is that 95 percent of us have not discovered that major changes are underway and are waiting for economic recovery and new jobs to open up.

A professor out in California just published a paper concluding that the current economic downturn was caused as much by the $147 oil we saw last summer as it was by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. It doesn't much matter if he is right or not. What is important, however, is that hardly a day goes by without another major oil production project being delayed or cancelled due to low prices. The death spiral for the oil age has begun.

Why the end of America is closer than you think.

it is not difficult to predict the demise of America as we know it. The U.S. dollar will eventually collapse or be abandoned. This could happen literally overnight, or it could take years, but make no mistake: The American people will not be forewarned of the collapse of the dollar. It will be a sudden, surprise announcement, and all the politicians and banking elitists who engineered the whole thing will pronounce their "shock" that such a thing could happen! "We could never have predicted this," they will insist, even while the whole thing was actually engineered by the very same people.

One day, Americans will wake up and discover that all banks are on "bank holidays" (which means that someone in Washington is taking a holiday with your money while YOU can't access it).

Within hours, the National Guard will roll into the cities of the United States, and Americans will find themselves penniless prisoners in their own country. Anyone who protests will be arrested or shot. Law will be dispensed at the end of military rifles, and the President will get on television and explain how this is all being done for YOUR benefit! It's for your own safety and protection, didn't you know?

We've hit bottom...uhm...Global economic shock worse than Great Depression:

The charts Eichengreen and O'Rourke compile are striking: world output, world stock prices and trade volume have all fallen faster during this collapse than during the last. Several economists wrote Eichengreen to note that because of price deflation after the '29 collapse -- which has yet to happen again -- the stock market decline this time around is that much greater in real terms.

The reason the decline is worse today than during the Great Depression, says Eichengreen, is that in 1929 the United States and Germany both collapsed, but other nations managed to stumble along.

Dmitri Orlov: Burning our Bridges to the XXI Century

As modernity runs out of resources (those photons sequestered eons ago in fossil form, now released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere) patterns of life naturally retreat to their pre-modern forms. If there are no more sneakers from China, we sew moccasins or whittle clogs. If we are resource-poor but resourceful, we can still weave basket-like shoes out of birch bark, stuffed with straw for insulation, called lapti. If we are truly destitute and feckless to boot, then we go barefoot.

It seems commonsense to accept this reversion to norm as natural, and to strive to have enough of whatever we are going to need, be it tools for working leather, a stock of paraffin, seeds, fishing tackle, and a myriad of other similar items that comprised the pre-industrial survival kit. The last thing we should want to do is to throw these things away at first sign of economic distress and for trivial reasons. And yet that seems to be the prevailing pattern.

Bad stuff from the UK: It's worse than 1974.

Output from factories has fallen for 12 months in a row and is now 13.8% lower than a year ago. That represents the steepest pace of decline since the wipeout of manufacturing in 1981 – a period that saw the UK's industrial capacity shrink by one sixth. The collapse in production since last autumn has been so rapid that the quarterly fall in manufacturing output is the worst since modern records began, in 1968. Put into context, that means we are currently performing even worse than we were in early 1974, when the miners were on strike, the lights went out and the country was put on a three-day week.

Twelve years down the drain.

The market has lost a dozen years worth of wealth in a matter of months. Millions of hours of manpower put in by investment bankers on Wall Street and the lawyers who enabled them -- the kind that brought home those bright shiny bonuses that are now causing a populist uprising in the hinterlands -- have been wasted away by what is kindly called the credit crisis. And whatever lessons the powers that be might learn from this adjustment -- that salary structure should change, or that the billable hour is an anachronism -- it seems no one has stated the obvious: The whole system is warped.

Archdruid: Advice from German Poets.

one of the lessons the past offers is that the fall of civilizations is a slow, uneven process. None of us are going to wake up one morning a few weeks, or months, or years from now and find ourselves living in the Dark Ages, much less the Stone Age. Thus trying to leap in a single bound to some imagined future is unlikely to work very well; rather, the most effective strategy will be a matter of muddling through, trying to deal with each stage of the descent as it comes into sight, and being prepared to make plenty of midcourse corrections. Flexibility will be more useful than ideology, and making do will be an essential survival skill.

Third, another of the lessons offered by the past is that the long road down is not going to be easy. Like every human society in every age, the future ahead of us will have opportunities for happiness and achievement, of course, and there will doubtless be significant gains to set in the balance against the inevitable losses, especially for those who long for simpler lives at a slower pace. Still, the losses will be terrible; it’s crucial not to sugar-coat them, despite the very real temptation to do so, or to ignore the immense human tragedy that is an inevitable part of the slow death of any civilization.

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2009, April 9, Thursday.

The recent lack of posts has many reasons: busy with (paid) work; doom-fatigue; health; personal. I'll try to keep the posting up to twice a week at least - but it's not easy sometimes. That said:

As bad as the US may be somedays, the rest of the world is trying to catch up with the march to neo-Feudalism (or neo-Fascism, whichever you prefer). In any event, being an underling in either system will be pretty much the same - you and your family will be chattel. Irish employers now demand to know their employees private medical history before paying them sick leave. The mindset of Irish bosses hasn't changed by a gnat's testicle since I left that swamp in the early 90s. Employees are still seen as little more than indentured serfs, who should tug their forelocks before the Almighty Boss:

EMPLOYERS are rejecting the generic "off due to medical illness" sick note and demanding that employees divulge the exact nature of their illness, the Irish Independent has learned.

The Irish Medical Organisation has confirmed that it is increasingly aware of the problem, and is concerned that certain employers could misuse highly-sensitive medical information they receive.

It added that employers have no legal right to know what illness an employee may be suffering...

...The Irish Independent is aware of a number of cases where human resources units have demanded sick notes from employees containing "the reason for the absence" and not simply 'medical illness'.

And it is understood that a number of firms have made "specific" sick notes a part of the employment contract.

A fantastic piece from Joe Bageant: Escape from the Zombie Food Court. Do read the whole thing. Joe's a Titan amongst pygmies.

This financialization of our consciousness under American style capitalism has become all we know. That's why we fear its loss. Hence the bailouts of the thousands of "zombie banks," dead but still walking, thanks to the people's taxpayer offerings to the money god so that banks will not die. We believe that we dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed us. They entertain us. Corporations occupy one full half of our waking hours of our lives, through employment, either directly or indirectly. They heal us when we are sick. So it's easy to see why the corporations feel like a friendly benevolent entity in the larger American consciousness. Corporations are, of course, deathless and faceless machines, and have no soul or human emotions. That we look to them for so much makes us a corporate cult, and makes corporations a fetish of our culture. Yet to us, they are like the weather just there.

All of us live together in this corporate fetish cult. We agree upon and consent to its reality, just as the Aztecs agreed upon Quetzalcoatl and the lost people of Easter Island agreed that the great stone effigies of their remote island had significance.

Another interesting piece on local currencies. These were very common during the depression (a fact that isn't discussed, for reasons that should be obvious). George Monbiot wrote about this at length a few weeks ago. You can bitch and gripe about the system (which I do), but you can also do something about it (which I do). Begin the process of extracting your support from The System.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans about to exhaust unemployment benefits.

Congress extended unemployment aid twice last year, allowing people to draw a total of up to 59 weeks of benefits. Now, as the recession drags on, a rolling wave of people who were laid off early last year will lose them.

Precise figures are hard to determine, but Wayne Vroman, an economist at the Urban Institute, estimates that up to 700,000 people could exhaust their extended benefits by the second half of this year.

Some will find new jobs, but prospects will be grim: Layoffs are projected to go on, and many economists expect the jobless rate, already at 8.5 percent, to hit 10 percent by year’s end.

Back to the future: Californians panhandle for gold. Two words: resource depletions. The old timers beat you to it - a long time ago. Good luck with the dregs of Industrial Civilisation, boys.

More than 150 years after the great Gold Rush that propelled California's development, the prospect of striking it rich prospecting for gold remains very much alive.

Panners are appearing at streambeds due to the price of gold, the poor economy, and a 10.5% statewide unemployment rate that leaves a lot of people with time on their hands, officials say.

"There's quite a bit of new activity," says Mark Springer, a geologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Sacramento. "A lot of people are out prospecting for gold in particular because the price is pretty high right now."

Kunster: Strange Days.

Sooner or later the daisy chain of credibility in the fundamental transactions of business lose legitimacy and something's got to give.

My guess is it will first take the form, sometime after Memorial Day (but maybe sooner) of wholesale liquidations of everything under the North American sun: companies, households, chattels, US Treasury paper of all kinds, and, of course, the S & P 500. We'll soon find out whether an organism the size of the United States can run an economy based on one family selling the contents of its garage to the family next door. My guess is that this type of economy won't support the standards of living previously enjoyed in places like Dallas and Minneapolis.

The socio-political fallout from the inherent anger and disappointment in all this is liable to be severe. The public is already warming up for it, with cheerleaders such as Glen Beck on Fox TV News calling for the formation of militias, and gun sales moving out-of-sight. One mistake that the banking elite and their lawyer paladins made the past decade was their show of conspicuous acquisition -- of houses especially -- in easy-to-get-to places where anyone can see them, for instance an angry mob in Fairfield County, Connecticut, or Easthampton, New York. Unlike the beleaguered elites of South Africa (where I visited recently), who live behind layers of fortification, the executives of Citibank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and a long list of hedge funds, will be found cringing in their wine-lockers behind a measly layer of privet hedge when the tattooed minions of Glen Beck come a'calling.

Mark Ames: Class War 101 - Meet the Reptiles

If we’d cared to look around us at any time since the Reagan Revolution, we’d realize that the CEOs, billionaires and finance stars are behaving no differently today than they have been for nearly three decades. When we look back, what will pain us most is the way we admired the billionaires even as they brought about our ruin, turning them into TV celebrities and magazine-cover heroes, worshipping them like rock stars right up to the end.

A perfect example of the kind of person who benefited from the Reagan Revolution is Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap, a corporate superstar during the peak Clinton years, when Reaganomics accelerated under the guiding hands of Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin. It was during Clinton’s centrist pro-business presidency that innovations like the like mass-layoff (rebranded as “downsizing”) became a regular feature of economicbooms, rather than of economic busts, as they had been in the past. Layoffs expanded right with the economy for the simple reason that each mass firing freed up millions or billions of dollars that had gone to workers, but now could be divided up between executives and major shareholders. The problem was finding people cold-blooded enough to do the job—which is to say, there was no problem whatsoever.