Mismanaging Contraction
Lesson of the Macondo: Blowout preventers don’t prevent blowouts. This comes as a shock to people attuned to the on-schedule arrival of techno-miracles. Now, all the acronym-studded invocations of techno-mastery by men wearing interesting hats will not avail to put the schnitz on an epic horror show in the Gulf of Mexico.
President Obama’s speech to the nation a week ago was designed as a kind of blowout preventer for the legitimacy of the federal government. It did little to stop the hemorrhaging of confidence in political leadership. A nation foundering in a crippled vessel in the horse latitudes of collective purpose on a sea of red ink looks to its captain — who puffs a few platitudes into the tattered sails and retreats belowdecks to pace and stew. This is a society truly lost at sea, where even the friendly dolphins are turning belly-up and the dying seabirds stare accusingly under their cloaks of crude oil. The feeling grows that we can’t do anything right. Will someone please turn off the TV?
In 2008, the voters turned to a lanky newcomer from Illinois to rescue itself from just the sort of technocrat jerkoffs who had run the nation into a ditch with their invocations of “mission accomplished” and “Good job, Brownie.” Change was in the air. Alas, consistent with the apparent fact that history rhymes but doesn’t repeat, Barack Obama proved to be the reincarnation of Millard Fillmore, not Abe Lincoln. Sometimes history works in free verse and this stanza was off by a few syllables. It turns out that change was exactly the one thing not really in the air. America does not want change, except from the cash register at WalMart.
The last time America faced a convulsion as profound as the present one was the late 1850s. The internal contradiction of slavery was driving the nation crazy. The Whig party had been running things for a couple of decades. The Whigs were the party of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. They tried everything possible to finesse the expansion of US territory around the inflammatory issue of slavery. Fillmore came along just in time for the Compromise of 1850, which was intended to settle things and did absolutely nothing to settle things. By the time the election of 1852 happened, Both Webster and Clay were old men preparing to meet their maker and the Whig party absolutely fell apart. Scroll forward a few years and we’re in the slaughterhouse of The Civil War.
A hundred and sixty years later now, and the USA faces a new and very different set of internal contradictions. We’ve ramped up a living arrangement that has no future, just as slavery had no future. We’re uncomfortable with the mandates of reality, which is trying to tell us we have to live differently. The American people don’t want to hear this. The president doesn’t want to tell them. It’s possible that he is not tuned into the reality radio station that is broadcasting its mandates. You’d think the Macondo Blowout horror show was coming across loud and clear.
Right after President Obama gave his vapid speech last week, he traveled to Ohio to brag about how much federal stimulus money was going into “shovel-ready” highway projects there. I sincerely believe that the last thing we need right now in this country is more and better highways. Every president since Jimmy Carter has acknowledged that there’s a problem with our extreme oil dependency, but none of them have made the short leap to understand that we have a more fundamental problem with car dependency. Someone paying attention to the mandates of reality would get the choo-choo trains running from Dayton to Columbus to Cincinnati to Cleveland — and he would tell General Motors to get into the business of making railroad cars so we don’t have to import them from Canada.
Reality is telling us to downscale and get different fast. Quit doing everything possible to prop up the drive-in false utopia and all its accessories. Get local. Tighten up. We have no intention of doing that. The idiocy that passes as informed opinion wants the US money managers to kick out the jambs handing out more money created out of thin air to promote a fantasy called “recovery.” To what purpose? To keep the tailgate parties going down at the NASCAR ovals? Over at The New York Times Monday morning, the fatuous Paul Krugman says that “stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery.” Earth to Krugman: we’re mismanaging contraction. Further expansion is just not in the cards right now for the human race. We don’t need more people on the planet and we don’t have the means to accommodate them. There will be no ‘recovery” to “growth” — especially by means of pumping more oil into the system. There is no techno-miracle alt-fuel panoply waiting in the wings to take over from oil. And there is no res
earch-and-development program that will make it happen, no matter how many acronym-studded incantations we drone out.
I admit that contraction is a hard reality — but so is the recognition that we don’t get to live forever, something every child begins to grapple with around age seven. The inability to face comprehensive contraction will only insure that its side effects are more debilitating.
Regards,
James Howard Kunstler
Whiskey & Gunpowder
June 23, 2010
James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler is perhaps best known for The Long Emergency, which predicted the financial meltdown and the implications of the peak oil problem. The Geography of Nowhere , about the fiasco of suburbia, is a campus cult classic among the architecture and urban planning students. It was followed by a sequel, Home From Nowhere and The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition . Mr. Kunstler has also authored 10 novels including World Made By Hand, a story set in America's post-oil future. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly.
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Excellent substance and outstanding prose. James missed a potential reference to the albatross in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But this can await the next column.
The cause of this crisis is not the car, or oil, it is Government. Government that has overstepped it’s constitutional limits for years, confiscating more and more of the wealth of individuals to redistribute that wealth to those that they see fit to purchase their votes, and to expand the influence and control of Government through the tool of dependence. The contraction must first come from government, government employment rolls must be reduced, bloated government salaries for jobs that do not produce their own revenue stream must be cut, ridiculous government pensions and benefits must be cut. Entitlements of all types must be rolled back. Government expenditures must be reduced to defense. The private sector must be encouraged to seek energy solution that work through tax incentives to build Dams, Nuclear reactors, and mining coal, and yes developing domestic oil reserves. Take the government shackles off the private sector. As we are painfully seeing the “educated” political class that has been running the country, are incredibly inept. The better idea of centralized planning of society and the economy by this class of people and their Keynesian economics has resulted in another failure, just like every other time it has been done the world over. We are allowing this group of ignorant I know what is best for you liberals to destroy the best place ever conceived by man because of lazyness and complacency and class envy, to allow the government to steal the fruits of other citizens labor in hopes that we might get a few of the scraps left over after they waste the majority of it on the SEIU, NEA, ACORN, and the ACLU, is pathetic. We have allowed the Marxist educated Ivy league academics to run amok and lie to us creating phony environmental crisies to try to bend us to their will. I would guess that Mr. Kunstler falls into this group blaming the fall of Western society on the automobile instead of where it belongs squarely on the shoulders of Big Goernment and Liberalism, the faster we banish these people from running anything in our society or government and roll back their destructive agenda the faster we can return to being a prosperous nation and not debtor nation.
Same old sh-substance. A good writer is a terrible thing to waste. He attacks everyone’s technical solutions except his own. He proposes non-market driven impositions of politically correct infrastructure and lifestyle. He scorns and derides current American culture because of its purported evils and inherent contradictions which he claims are leading to its near-term collapse yet rarely credits its unparalleled success and underlying strength. Totalitarian and geezer-smokin’ apocalyptic hogwash. Yeah, let’s just abandon our efficient network of roads, highways and interstates. Let them grow up in trees of heaven. It’ll be kinda hard to ride our bikes around the cracks and roots, though, but hey, we can get mountain bikes or horses.
James, tell me, why can’t we have a future with both trains and bikes and walking trails and sidewalks and cars and trucks? Why can’t oil and coal and natural gas and nukes and wind and hydropower and solar sufficiently fuel our efficiently managed energy needs? Why can’t electric vehicles in the near future pull power from lithium-air batteries with carbon nanotube or graphene connections for 500 miles trips between quick recharges? Why can’t nanotechnology and A.I. and robotics improve manufacturing and materials driving costs of everything down? Why can’t biotechnology and selfcare training and nanomedicine and real-time continual diagnosic monitoring and stemcell organ replacement and cryogenics allow us to extend our healthy lifespans beyond conventional timeframes? Aren’t many of these technologies already beginning to offer groundbreaking solutions to economic problems, and don’t at least a few of them hold great promise for the long term?
I don’t know that much about what the future holds, but I do know it will, in many ways, surprise me.
[...] forward a few years and we’re in the slaughterhouse of The Civil War. The above is from Mismanaging Contraction I fear we are heading right into another Civil War, I pray and hope that we fight this one with the [...]
Yet another Obama lover is going to have his baby.
Living within our means will come soon enough, no one will lend us a dime.
We have also killed the wealth creators, the real origin of the nations riches.
The Universities must pay the price of their misdeeds, on view everywhere.
Yes, what goes around means the chickens are coming home to roost.
Dear Bill: Did you just dash that vivid prose off lightly, or did you wordsmith it a bit? Either way, I enjoyed it. A good writer is, indeed, a terrible thing to waste, so drop me a line over at http://www.thetexasring.com, because if you can turn stuff like that out easily ’cause I’ve got a use for you.
Regards, Linda Brady Traynham
Bill…if you knew the sort of day I’ve had, you’d understand how I managed to mangle a simple sentence so badly. It was the sort to make a calm follower of Epictetus, known for saying blandly, “You’re a filthy external and you’re nothing to me,” turn to thoughts of wielding cold steel. I opted for horses and diesel, myself, since one of my goals in life is to go as few places as possible, as infrequently as possible. The bottom has dropped out of the horse market, and supposing one can find a stallion occasionally for stud service, a sustainable remuda of fine-quality horses can be put together for a couple of thousand dollars these days! In our case that means three riding horses in their early prime, two in training, and a pretty bit being socialized. Horses frequently last 30 years and can be ridden or bred until well into their twenties. They can carry packs and pull carriages, a travois, or farm equipment. No, we aren’t Amish, but it takes three to work the cattle and ride fences, so it made sense at ten cents on the dollar to go ahead and buy the next generation while the price is so great. We probably won’t have to play “Red Dawn,” but if we do I’m prepared. I am also very bored with the eco-whackos and all of their hysteria. My only interest in cities is urging my friends to get out of them. Let’s drop out and not even watch the carnage. As Robert Heinlein noted, “When a society has grown big enough to need ID’s it’s time to emigrate.” There isn’t any place practical and affordable much left to go, so let us pull gently back into the boondocks and pretend the rest of them don’t exist–at least until I get over the feeling that open carry of swords is a good idea…
Bill Simmons, outstanding riposte, thanks for putting things in perspective. I look forward to reading Kunstler because I enjoy the cranky spirit of his rants but I certainly don’t want to start believing him.
Aw, Kunstler did a reasonable job of analysis about energy in his book, “The Long Emergency” but he gets carried away with self-righteousness in his elitist view of flyover country and people who do manual work for a living.
As far as fiscal matters and monetary policy, I don’t think anybody can bottom reality.
But, blowout preventers work, and like anything which does work, 100.00% ain’t gonna happen. Murphy never goes on vacation, no matter how many regulations are written by government.
‘Rat
Linda and all,
JHK gets my tea party outrage brewing. Sorry for the rant. That rural life sounds pretty good today as our car window was shattered and our CD radio ripped out right in our driveway last night, and to top that off, the same day the front door on one of our rentals in a fine neighborhood twenty miles out from the city where we live was kicked in by home invaders who found two young girls home alone. Fortunately, the scum ran away upon seeing someone at home. Kuntsler’s probably right about a long season of troubles ahead. Trouble is a long emergency is made up of lots of short emergencies, and they’re the ones that get ya.
Bill thanks for the optimism, its in short supply nowadays. We would all do better with more of it.
The main thing about Kunstler’s notions, though, is that changes are coming; they’re already beginning. I see no way that gas/diesel won’t go up in price, so whence cometh “Happy Motoring” as we now know it?
Given the monetary policies of TPTB, whence cometh a return to consumeritis? Jobless folks can’t shop ’til they drop, and savers don’t want to.
Granted, the lad has his nose stuck up so high that if it rained he’d drown, but that doesn’t mean he’s all eat up with the terminal stoopid. On some things, anyway.
Thanks, Bil, and write some more. You can send it to us over at http://www.thetexasring.com. Rat, love, whadda we care about “happy motoring” anyway? Comes TEOTWAWKI you get yo’ se’f over here ’cause you have skills that make you well worth feeding! Hugs, Linda
Folks,
I know nothing about physics, I am a dreamer.
I wonder why it is not possible to find some old ship of the right size, install a number of connector tubes on the top, modify the bottom so it digs into the ocean floor and surrounds the oil leaking tube. Lower it with the required number of ships, then use the lowering lines to drop heavy circular weights that weigh more than the well pressure.
I am now going back to bed to dream.
Ocos
oco, tubes = steel pipes of fairly large diameter. 5,000 feet per tube. Think availability and time. Stipulate that your idea would work: It’s not a matter of just a few days or even of a few weeks.
i haven’t read jhk yet, but i’ve done the comments, twice.
linda: yet off yer glutes, publish something here, yourself, and stop trying to entice innocent men to write to you!
there! this pirate feels better, already!
hugs?
Joyous laughter, Steverino. If you check my archives you’ll discover I’ve been writing for W&G regularly for a year and a half, and I have new articles up at http://www.thetexasring.com and http://www.hezikiahwyman.com. Better (or worse?) I’m a gen-u-wine South’n Belle and what I do professionally as such is entice men to their betterment, not ruin. Sure, all the hugs you want. Hugs are therapeutic. My dear Charles is totally secure in my admiration and affection and accustomed to me hugging men sincerely while he stands there with the sort of humorously serene John Wayne expression that says, “NOBODY in this room is tough enough to take ANYTHING that belongs to me, and that fabulous li’l gal is MINE.” As she is. A basic rule is that there are far more superior men per capita than there are superior females, so it is our duty to to love and inspire several of you. Besides which, I don’t want you to write TO me, I want you to write FOR me. You, too, have good things to say and deserve to be published, and the Ring is where I can do that immediately. Excuse me while I allow Charles to demonstrate that he can now get into the boot of my new toy, an ’87 Jaguar Vanden Plas, the Mark X of its year. ROFLMgluteus maximus off…I could have told him immediately how to do it, but he had so much fun researching and experimenting and feeling smug solving the problem that no South’n Belle fit to rustle her bustle would have told him that you don’t turn the key and lift like mortal cars, as should be obvious from the fact that the keyhole is below, not in, the cover. The key gives you a choice of unlocking the boot (turn to the right and back to centre) or having the boot unlock automatically with the doors (turn to the left and back to centre.) To OPEN the trunk, depending upon the model, either (a) push the button with the snarling Jag-u-ar’s head or (b) lift up on the chrome bar. Ladies, pay attention, although my readers tend to know such things: If you tell a 5’8″ man (Charles is over six feet, as all “my” men are) that he is eight feet tall frequently enough it won’t be long before he is ducking to go through standard 76″ door…and be your devoted slave. “Fess up, Steverino: you adore me. BIG lengthy hug, Linda
You know how to tell Steverino is one of “mine?” He didn’t bother to read JHK, he went straight to the comments!
I don’t suppose there are any NOW types in the audience, but one of life’s basic choices is whether to burn your bra, leading to back strain, or learn to work with what IS and be superior in your own right and still inspire men to buy you Jaguars frequently because they like you to be happy. (In return, I encourage MDC every time he has an urge to get another Jeep or anything from the Fifties. Fair’s fair.) How many Jaguars is “enough?” I don’t know; I don’t own them yet, although this makes at least seven or eight. I think. Canada North–haven’t heard from you lately, Babe–will probably pitch a fit, but how could Charles resist a motor car of the quality, in that condition, that would please me that much, with only 68,000 miles on her, when he found her for $1800 only fifty miles away? Besides, I didn’t own an ’87. Mark my words: if you aren’t prepping, and aren’t turning “extra” cash into toys, the day will come, not far off, when you will regret it. Hugs to all, Linda
i just read the We’re All Racists Now, but the other link didn’t work.
funny, you do all that work, and i like the para that queries: Do stray cats get along politely?
which then develops into a truly linda-esque goat breeding rant, w/out another single word about cats!!!
then: quarter horses. i owned a mare; she fell in love with a Tennessee Walker Stud who lived less than two miles along the prevailing westerlies away. poncha wasn’t too bad until the sun came up; then she would hear his croon, don her white kamikaze scarf and fly into the rising sun. nothing could stop her, linda. nothing.
she coulda made it outta Jurassic Park. she DID make it out! and it wasn’t sex; it was romance! OK, foreplay, maybe, but they just wanted to talk and nuzzle and kiss. she just wanted to visit him and he would dance and prance for her, and she would act demure and bat her lashes. i felt so privileged to know them, both. other than the fact that this was on tap after sunrise along a rural 2-lane, and i would hafta bring her home with school busses, commuters and truckers going freaking bonkers, and the county signs along my property were getting machine-gunned on a regular basis, everything was just wonderful. racism aside, i had to board her out to stay sane.
i recall hearing that quarter horses got named because they are 1/4 thoroughbred, which may be accurate and incomplete, too. not because they are fast in the quarter mile. and other parts may be arabian, appy, and so on. 1/4 this, 1/4 that…quarter horse!
well, this is fun! not to be fickle towards you, linda, but i like the agora sites. so i’m not agora-phobic. maybe i’m counter-agora-phobic. i did check your archives, before i made my first comment. you haven’t posted on W & G since June 2. now, did you go to vancouver?
either way, i want to hear the scuttlebutt; rumors will be fine. howzabouta Hollywood Confidential about who was there, what the HELL happened, and how much CC whiskey went down? how much did they pay the mogambo to stay in the US and write, or was it moot because he couldn’t get back into the US & florida any more with the passport from a different world? maybe i missed something, but i’m wondering if they cancelled it and i just didn’t get the memo. i haven’t heard one word! all i can figure is that the married people may be concerned about divorce attorneys, and the unattached are not talkin’. or there was some perceived problem about the ownership of “rights”, like with phil jackson and “threepeat”. hopefully, they just trashed the hotel so thoroughly they got arrested and their lawyers have gagged them.
let’s try: did anything about vancouver interest you, linda?
the thing about the little button w/ the snarling jag-u-ar’s head took me out, though. especially after the glute-shaking riff on the boot, which i really do hope is the trunk. at the risk of being alarmist, i was wondering why the key didn’t snap off!
i’ll admit it! when i come to W & G i want to read something of yours. i went straight to the comments.
i’m glad you’re well. me too!
i responded last nite and got trapped, i think.
thank you for the Jag episode! my glutes were shaking, too!
i was hoping to hear more about vancouver.
any low-down from you, linda?
you seem well.
me too!
Joyous laughter, Steverino. If you check my archives you’ll discover I’ve been writing for W&G regularly for a year and a half, and I have new articles up at http://www.thetexasring.com and http://www.hezikiahwyman.com. Better (or worse?) I’m a gen-u-wine South’n Belle and what I do professionally as such is entice men to their betterment, not ruin. Sure, all the hugs you want. Hugs are therapeutic. My dear Charles is totally secure in my admiration and affection and accustomed to me hugging men sincerely while he stands there with the sort of humorously serene John Wayne expression that says, “NOBODY in this room is tough enough to take ANYTHING that belongs to me, and that fabulous li’l gal is MINE.” As she is. A basic rule is that there are far more superior men per capita than there are superior females, so it is our duty to to love and inspire several of you. Besides which, I don’t want you to write TO me, I want you to write FOR me. You, too, have good things to say and deserve to be published, and the Ring is where I can do that immediately. Excuse me while I allow Charles to demonstrate that he can now get into the boot of my new toy, an ’87 Jaguar Vanden Plas, the Mark X of its year. ROFLMgluteus maximus off…I could have told him immediately how to do it, but he had so much fun researching and experimenting and feeling smug solving the problem that no South’n Belle fit to rustle her bustle would have told him that you don’t turn the key and lift like mortal cars, as should be obvious from the fact that the keyhole is below, not in, the cover. The key gives you a choice of unlocking the boot (turn to the right and back to centre) or having the boot unlock automatically with the doors (turn to the left and back to centre.) To OPEN the trunk, depending upon the model, either (a) push the button with the snarling Jag-u-ar’s head or (b) lift up on the chrome bar. Ladies, pay attention, although my readers tend to know such things: If you tell a 5’8″ man (Charles is over six feet, as all “my” men are) that he is eight feet tall frequently enough it won’t be long before he is ducking to go through standard 76″ door…and be your devoted slave. “Fess up, Steverino: you adore me. BIG lengthy hug, Linda
lol
no wonder!
i just read addison saying less that 3 weeks to vancouver!
LOL, indeed, and a glum bunch I expect them to be. Taxes and expenses are going up, and everything else is headed South or poised to crash, while the Obamaites plot to swipe your 401(K) and are going to charge you income tax on the value of your “free” medical plan at work as of Jan 1.
Dear Steverino: MDC and I laughed uproariously over the tale of Poncha and th’ Tennessee Walkin’ stud. Why didn’t you just buy him? Quarter horses are fast over the quarter mile, but fade fast. Over at http://www.thetexasring.com, which Gary Gibson and I spun off W&G like the Jeffersons, we’re a little more relaxed and not focused entirely on macro economics. We take time to be friends and get off on life on the ranch and anything else that catches our fancy, although there is plenty of raw, red meat over there, too. That’s why Gary and I started it, because he had more good articles than he could fit on “Morning Whiskey,” as we call this site..
Now for the hard part. It is not MY fault that I haven’t been “up” on W&G since 2 June, and no, I haven’t become lazy as another regular asked. I haven’t lost my touch, either. There appears to have been a change in policy, although no one has apprised me of it. I am sure you Shooters have noticed that we only see a new article two or three times a week, instead of at least one new one daily, and those of you who get “the send” (where the articles are published first; it goes only to subscribers to the newsletters which are paid for) have noticed that there is virtually never a Parting Shot any more, either. For over a year all I had to do was send an article to the gentleman who actually posts such things and it was put up pretty promptly. Adam still has my last article, written in late May or early June, #1 of a two-parter on why small, particularly non-manufacturing, corporations should consider transferring their operations to Texas. I will write one tonight on what’s going on in China, including SUBPAC, and we will see what happens. Other than that, I can only suggest that all of you who prefer the old days write to either W&G Editor Gary Gibson or to such other contacts as you may have at Agora.
speaking of glum: well, first, t.y. & YDC for the feedback and the good humor. now, the gloom: i read yest. that, in 2012, there is gonna be reporting from commercial enterprises (coin dealers & stores, e.g.) on coin and bullion sales or any purchases
over $600…to the feds. steverino sold a booked set of silver eagles for $650—better fill out a 1099!!!
buy a kruger, go to tax court. freaking revnooers! 80% of all transactions now go thru the banksters, already.
got cash? up against the wall, mofo!
perhaps the revolution will begin with federal reserve notes.
you know, linda, after that donnybrook about israel and all the great name-calling and cross-referencing to higher authorities, even powers, perhaps you have landed in the cooler, along with the rest of hogan’s heroes.
There appears to have been a change in policy, although no one has apprised me of it.
nuf sed?
now, guess who wrote this:
We used to enjoy reading Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. Whenever he wrote about anything even remotely connected to economics we were assured a good chuckle. But he’s moved on to geo-politics. Israel this… Palestine that… It’s probably just as funny, but it’s not our field. The only thing we know about the subject is that it shouldn’t exist.
give up? Mr. Bonner, 7.9.10 via Daily Wreckingball. he commands my highest esteem, and i agree with him. that’s why i stayed out of that damned food fight. but still, it was only a food fight. and i enjoyed the hell out of it! hot women flinging soft-boiled eggs, rice pudding, and gelatinous cubes, with an occasional inept, extra-planetary male caught in the cross-fire…what FUN!!! perhaps some theatre chain under Saudi control
reneged on the scheduled showings of IOUSA, and Mr. B. will have to curtail his time in paris and head to the chateau a week early this year, to paint the shutters. you know how provincial those media tycoons can be if their morning coffee is a little too cold. i’m hoping he gets over it, soon. why don’t you let him know our desire for re-establishing the first amendment, here? right here on W & G!!! yup!!! you have my permission to threaten him, as well. tell him steverino is already loading up poisoned quills and we might turn the mogambo against him, too, if doesn’t relent. after all, what is cough syrup for?
hugs, and how about net.an.yahoo at the white house earlier this week? chrysalis reported to me that cindy sheehan, magaphone in sweaty hand, was told to back away after blaring that Prez0 should arrest Net’h00 for war crimes. then, N should arrest O for was crimes. then, they should both be arrested, by federal marshalls, for failing to comply with the lawful order. chrysalis wants cindy to be invited to the W.H. by O, for her birthday! maybe we could go, too….
more hugs!