red dawn

As a fan of many things sci-fi, I think it’s worthwhile to sometimes take a step back and ponder the future. For instance, in 1908 cars and telephones were just beginning to make their presence felt. The US was just starting to experiment with imperialism in Central America and the Philippines. Things were very different.

It makes me re-realize that the ginormous problems we face as a species are going to be managed, if at all, through similar deltas of change. For instance, as we learn to stop digging things out of the ground and burning them to power our civilizations, things like harvesting energy from the friction of walking will be employed along with now-familiar wind and solar power. Or maybe, on the dark side, we’ll be sending the space equivalent of oil supertankers to the moon of Titan to suck up it’s hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere to be brought back here to burn.

Who knows. My gut sense is that investing outside the status quo is probably smart.

Well, I’m glad I got out of debt, but I’m also glad I didn’t do it early enough to sink any money into “the market.” While I’m sure many funds will still do well and long-term investors have little to fear, the current economic trajectory is pretty ugly. The dow is headed towards 52-week lows, and there’s more bad news to come.

This is what happens when you run things like the Soviets. It’s increasingly obvious that our economy, beyond being unsustainably debt-based, is also build on a series of consensual hallucinations that don’t map well to reality. Because our made-up-prowess is in “financial products” rather than steel and wheat production, we can get by for longer than they did in the USSR — and we get hit with mortgage defaults rather than breadlines, which is an improvement — but the books are no less cooked, and CNBC is a propaganda outlet, not a news channel.

The Big D may indeed be coming, although a new bubble/rally may emerge around alternative energy and infrastructure instead. Here are the fundamentals:

• Most major banks and financial firms are facing serious losses of capital and credibility as a result of the housing bubble. The “correction” for this will go on for several years, and though the effects will likely be mitigated by a bailout and other activity, the bottom remains a ways off.
• Consumer spending — which is to say people buying shit — has been the main thing keeping the boat floating, but has been based on second-mortgages and credit card debt.
• The falling dollar has been boosting exports, but is also driving inflation and exacerbating energy costs.
• The occupation of Iraq probably prevents any meaningful Federal action, cost-wise. It’s also not doing anything to help out with the energy cost situation.

A boom in infrastructural renewal based around a new energy policy could turn things around (possibly generating another bubble in the process), but it’s still kind of unlikely in my opinion, even with the odds favoring a Democrat as president next year.

Regular people are starting to come around — last year, the Toyota Prius outsold the Ford Explorer — but in general consumers are tapped-out, and anyway not in a position to drive significant changes just by altering day-to-day purchases.

Depending on how things shake out, a little economic slowness could be just what the doctor ordered. People work too hard for too little in this country, and the pie is really inequitably divided. Maybe this crunch will reverse that trend.

So, as you may have heard, Atlanta is running out of water, and nobody really seems to know what will happen if the unthinkable occurs and drought persists for another two months. But it’s not as if this is really a new thing.

It seems like somehow in the latter part of the 20th Century, we in the US lost track of the fact that we’re actually quite small and powerless in the face of macro-scale events. Droughts and other disasters (some of them manmade) have always happened, and will happen again, but we’ve forgotten this. We seem to believe too deeply in our exceptionalism, that we’re somehow exempt from history and the cruel twitches of fortune.

As Bukowski said, “The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed.”. We have no feel for loss. We’ve constructed massive metropolises — the fastest growing in the nation — in the middle of deserts. There were dead cities in the same places when white people first got here. It’s a failure of history and memory; hubris.

As Dick Cheney said, “The American way of life is not negotiable,” and indeed it seems literally inconceivable to our leadership class that shit might not work out. I find this baffling and sad.

Politically I think this is part and parcel with the rise of post-modern conservatism. It’s a particular blend of resource-intensive, non-scalable, non-sustainable infrastructure — think exurbs, big lawns, etc — coupled with a paradoxically anti-government philosophy (juiced with reactionary cultural backlash, of course).

It plays into the mythic trope of rugged individualism, but only really works as long as there’s sufficient plenty to give people running water in the desert. When larger-than-individual-scale forces come into play, be it a drought, a hurricane or a terrorist attack, all of a sudden people recognize the vitality and necessity of collective action and shared responsibility.

This movement reached it’s apex with the invasion of Iraq, I think; a massive and horrifically misguided collective (if not consensus) response to an individual-dwarfing event. We still don’t really know why, for sure, that happened, but those two to three years have the feeling of a historical pivot. At the time it was disorienting and frightening, but the momentum is now clearly moving away from anti-government rhetoric and narratives of oppression at the hands of the state, and towards a realization that the problems we face and the choices we make are bigger than our immediate surroundings, and that ergo the solutions must be as well.

I do fear that in the transition period there will be more systemic failures as we discover just how frayed things have become. Bridges collapse. Levies fail. Pointless wars grind on because democracy itself is sputtering. A mini dust-bowl in the Southeast would be a tragedy. I also fear that should things continue without improvement that the momentum towards collective action will take on a fascistic tone.

Conversely, the great hope seems to be for a new-New Deal with a global scope. This would never be managed effectively (or justly) though a traditional federation of nation-states though. It would require actual cooperation among human beings from all around the world. In my wildest fantasies I think the internet could allow this, but it seems a long way off, and the next steps are unclear.

In the mean time, I hope we’re able to rehabilitate the notion of governance and public service in this country, get ourselves that health care we all deserve, and shore up our social, economic and physical infrastructure so that we’re better able to deal with the trials and tribulations to come.

Stories jumping out of the news today. The undercurrent of Doom is running strong again. I preach a dark future! And the overarching theme seems to be “things are worse than we thought.”

Did you know that an area of arctic ice roughly the size of Texas and California combined has melted over the past two years? Sucks to be a polar bear:

“If there is no summer sea ice, then there will be no ice- based Arctic ecosystem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace U.K., said today in a telephone interview. “It’s the canary in the coalmine: the impacts of climate change seem to be happening faster than the scientists predicted a few years ago.”

On the upside, we can ship imported crap around much faster now, so we can get baby-killing toys and cribs and pet-killing food all that much faster and more efficiently from China, and there might even be more oil under the North Pole! Yippie!

But the melting ice could open opportunities, including a shortcut for commercial ships between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Already, some ships have breezed through the 5,100-km Northwest Passage in weeks instead of years, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

A thawing Arctic, however, may increase tension among five countries (Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway), which have competing claims to the North Pole. A quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources lie in the Arctic, according to the US Geological Survey.

That’s just peachy. You can see how this unfolds: strange arctic wargames against the Russians as millions of inhabitants of coastal North America migrate to the newly-balmy regions of Saskachewan and Manitoba. Montreal is the new Miami!

Shifting gears, “Over There” there’s an ugly scandal in an ugly war in which our faceless and unaccountable mercenary forces — Blackwater: Solders of the Free Market — are accused of murdering some Iraqi citizens without provocation:

In the first comprehensive account of the day’s events, the ministry said that security guards for Blackwater USA, a company that guards all senior American diplomats here, fired on Iraqis in their cars in midday traffic.

…

The Interior Ministry report recommends scrapping Order No. 17, the rule that was written by American administrators before Iraqis took over the running of their own government and gives private security companies immunity from Iraqi law.

Don’t call it an Empire. We been here for years.

Of course, everyone is still waiting on the American investigation, because we all know the Iraqi account of events is bound to be self-serving, and the use of mercenary forces is what St. Ronald Regan would have wanted. Market forces are self-evidently more powerful than an accountable chain of command and an ethic of Public Service, right? I mean, it’s not as if we’ve been seeing “Trophy Videos” popping up online from contract security forces in Iraq, or had massive sex-slavery scandals as part of past mercenary occupations.

These people are businessmen. They’re following the path of the righteous, clearly. Maybe we can get those people up there in the arctic to keep the Danes and Ruskies off our ice-oil stash. Someone get Bremmer on the phone.

Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled congress is proving itself to be even more deeply ineffectual than even my most pessimistic estimates, and is garnering a higher approval rating from Republicans than anyone else. Currently, they are preparing to grant retroactive blanket immunity for any lawbreaking on behalf of telecommunications companies (or government employees) who participated in Bush’s illegal wiretapping activities, and still can’t stand up to Bush on the War. The big news, of course, is that MoveOn ran an ad questioning the integrity of a General. The Senate quickly officially condemned this, which is awesome, because, you know, one of the things we certainly don’t need in ‘Merica is citizen oversight of the military.

Bleah. The babble that passes for “national discourse” among elites in our nation’s capitol grinds on oblivious to the realities of the world. Truly, we remain captivated by the theater of war.

Digby, one of my most favorite bloggers, has been writing about this phenomena under the heading of “The Village.” My own sense is that it’s really, like a lot of things in the allegedly adult world, just a depressingly familiar retread of High School. Fuck these people. “Give me the keys, dad. You’re drunk.”

I see (via Franz) that our boy Jay has moved into the game. They’ve got a first-rate operation, and I do think that barring large unforeseen changes, Ms. Clinton is going to walk up and take the nomination, then probably clobber whoever the GOP finally clusters around. But it will be slow, decisive and absolutely unexciting, like a UFC match that stays on the floor without a successful choke-out. I predict another boring year in politix.

On the upside, Paul Krugman is blogging.

Also on the upside, we’re making awesome smoked tuna with our neighbor Rippy. He’s an old hand down at the docks and we took a drive picked up a couple fresh sushi-grade albacore the other day from Russ Miller, captain of the Sunlight. Rip’s had ‘em in his native-style smoker for the past 24 hours. We got a little taste of some of the belly meat last night. Mmm Mmmm goood. So, you know, the Red Dawn won’t be all bad. Smoked fish is definitely part of the deal.

Want to know a sign that the Big D is on the way? Watch the money:

Canada’s dollar traded almost equal to the U.S. currency for a second day amid optimism economic growth will be fueled by surging demand for the commodities… The currency rose above $1 yesterday for the first time since November 1976.

Currently it’s a $0.999. Meanwhile, as atrios has noted, the Euro is closing in on a buck fiddy. Fed Chairman Bernake says the worst has yet to come:

Losses from sub-prime mortgages have far exceeded “even the most pessimistic estimates”, US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has said.

And then (via Franz) there’s this:

Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.

I’ve been following all this in my own nerdy way, and it looks like most of the bullish pushback against claims of instability are evaporating. Our debt-based economy can’t roll on much longer as currently configured.

The upside for me is that I work in an international market on a product that has a very strong European base, so all of a sudden I’m cheap labor to those people. Heck, I may be cheap labor to those socialists up in Canada soon.

I also welcome a more relaxed US economy in some ways, especially if we can avoid true big-D pains, get through some FDR-style Public Good stuff and level out some of the vast inequality we have. I mean, we don’t really need all this crap. I think we could have a much more Free society if we had more time off of work to spend sharing culture and building community…

Got to have a little power outage last night — probably wind-related — a taste of the Red Dawn to come. It was kind of fun to set up the candles, inverter, headlamps, dominos, etc.

It creates a new kind of camradre in the household, goes well with the previous car-related feelings that lean me towards feeling like Westhaven is home.

And now, some borat: