consensual surreality

It's the Official Narrative.

...I honestly don't understand how anyone is able to sustain this fairy tale in their brain, pleasurable though it might be. Is Roger Cohen even aware that, as his own newspaper put it today, "many of the deposed [Arab] leaders were close American allies and partners in counterterrorism operations"? And even that understates the case: these tyrants weren't merely U.S. allies, but stayed in power for decades largely because the U.S. fed them with money, weapons, and training to maintain their grip on their own citizenries -- and continued to do so until their demise became inevitable.

It's one thing for the U.S. Government to "leave unsaid" these uncomfortable facts (and they are facts): that's just standard government propagandizing. And it's another thing for people to defend such conduct on "realist" grounds: that it's wise or at least necessary to keep dictators in place to serve American interests. But it's just extraordinary for a political columnist to proclaim that the same country which has spent decades propping up many of the world's most heinous dictators -- whom we agree not to hate until it's time to wage war on them and then righteous condemnation is suddenly unleashed against all their alleged sins (Saddam pulled babies from incubators, gassed his own people and had rape rooms!; Gadaffi's son abused his domestic servant!!) -- is devoted to freedom-spreading as a core "value." In light of this long and overwhelming history, in what conceivable sense can it be said that removing dictators is a "value" of the U.S. or that it is "dedicated" to a "universalist idea of freedom"?

The world is as flat as a Mobius strip, and as free as the Company.

dirty deeds and they're done dirt cheap. not.

Chris Floyd tells you exactly what he thinks of our bipartisan Endless War on Terra, as the Laureate makes beautiful speeches to those who run the slaughterhouse in the name of 9-11.

Not only will they be killing far more people than can kill them, they will be killing far more of themselves than anyone else can, too.

welcome to the new Dark Age

While we're hearing how they're evacuating the space station, for your consideration, Paul Krugman:

...According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge...

One of these years, eh? How about 2000? How about in 2009?

If the Republicans are vocally against science, the DINOcrats are tacitly against it. After all, who helped turn NASA into a private contractor cash cow where the alledged science had no outside peer review? Of course, now the Companies take in 40% of the Pentagon budget- the non-black budget, that is- as no-bid contracts. Who needs the space station when you're don't even have the facade of oversight?

He's away on Business

Like the best explanation of it all I've heard.



Why does the Laureate do this? Because he wants to do it.

...I’m no genius, I just listened to what these people actually said and did. Obama mocks the idea that he is an honest politician, overtly, lying about NAFTA and FISA very early on in power. Miller lied to activists about being willing to put bankers in jail, and then said he was negotiating with banks in secret. It was overt. For Miller, as with Obama, few people really picked up on the lies until recently. Iowa activists who heckled Miller got it, as did Naked Capitalism readers. Now it’s becoming more and more obvious. That’s just how it is, I suppose, people in the establishment are paid to not notice corruption until the harsh glare is too bright.

The crazy thing is that robosigning is apparently still going on. Right now, the “settlement” talks are the equivalent of law enforcement negotiating with a serial killer over whether he’ll get a parking ticket, even as he continually sprays bullets into the neighborhood. Even having these “settlement” talks when the actual crimes haven’t been investigated or a complaint hasn’t been registered should be example enough that this process is rigged as badly as Dodd-Frank. It should not be a surprise that the administration is putting pressure on Eric Schneiderman, that Tom Miller is kicking him out of the club house. That’s who these people are. It’s what they believe in. Just as it should not be a surprise, though it is laudable, that Schneiderman isn’t knuckling under to the administration. I suspect he probably is laughing at the idiocy of Miller’s pressure tactic. I mean, this is a guy going up some of the most powerful entities in the United States: Bank of New York Mellon, Bank of America, the New York Fed, etc. And the Iowa Attorney General isn’t going let him on conference calls? Mmmkay.

When you look closely at most significant areas of government, it becomes clear that the President and his administration are enormously powerful actors who get a lot done. Handing over our national wealth to the banks and to China is not nothing. These people are reorganizing the economy and the political system so that there are no constraints on the oligarchical interests that fund and pay them. That is their goal, it has been their goal from day one (or even before that), and anyone who says otherwise is just wrong or deluding him or herself. Obama spoke at the founding of Robert Rubin’s Hamilton Institute, and his first, and most important by far policy initiative, was his whipping for TARP, a policy that was signed by Bush but could not have passed without Obama getting his party in line. That was his goal, and he’s still pursuing it. The numerous “what happened to Obama” wailing editorials overlook the consistency of his policy agenda, which stretches back years at this point.

If someone worked or works for the Obama administration, or the Department of Justice, or any other executive branch agency, they need to remember their service as a mark of shame for the rest of their lives. Remembering how they participated in this example of how to govern is literally the least they could do for the damage they have caused. I would leave out the small number of people who are there to overtly prevent as much damage as possible, and those who resign or are fired in protest.

For the rest of the Democratic Party, well, reality is just beginning to intrude into the fantasy-land of partisans, even though the 2010 loss should have delivered a searing wake-up call to the failure Obama’s policy agenda. From 2006-2008, the Bush administration’s failures crashed down upon conservatives, and they in many ways could not cope. But their intellectual collapse was bailed out by Obama. Faux liberals are seeing their grand experiment in tatters, though right now they can only admit to feeling disappointed because the recognition that they have been swindled is far too painful. And the recognition for many of the professionals is even more difficult, because they must recognize that they have helped swindle many others and acknowledge the debt they have incurred to their victims. The signs of coming betrayal were there, but in the end it all comes down to judging people based on what they do and who they choose as opponents. And this Democratic partisans did not do, choosing instead a comfortable delusional fantasy-land where foreclosures don’t matter and theft enabled by Obama (and Clinton before him) doesn’t matter.

So typical of it all, we give you the Martin Luther King Memorial, built using Chinese slave labor.

I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby
For a buck, for a buck
If you're looking for someone
To pull you out of that ditch
You're out of luck, you're out of luck

The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
There's leak, there's leak,
In the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers

God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business. Business.
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business. Business.

Digging up the dead with
A shovel and a pick
It's a job, it's a job
Bloody moon rising with
A plague and a flood
Join the mob, join the mob
It's all over, it's all over, it's all over
There's a leak, there's a leak,
In the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers
God's away, God's away, God's away
On Business. Business.
God's away, God's away,
On Business. Business.

Goddamn there's always such
A big temptation
To be good, To be good
There's always free cheddar in
A mousetrap, baby
It's a deal, it's a deal
God's away, God's away, God's away
On Business. Business.
God's away, God's away, God's away
On Business. Business.
I narrow my eyes like a coin slot baby,
Let her ring, let her ring
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
Business...

simple answers to leading questions

"Why won't 'Merika embrace the Left? (itself a disinformation hit-piece, like the main$tream was mainstream and the whole counterculture that gave rise to the civil rights and antiwar movement wasn't)

Because the Company wants it that way.

late summer cyclone

stormy nights ahead

take care, beloveds

good bye international space station

No Apollo, no shuttle, no supplies, no chance.

MOSCOW — A Russian cargo rocket ferrying three tons of food and fuel to the International Space Station broke down about five minutes after it blasted off on Wednesday, completing its flight by arcing into a Siberian forest rather than achieving orbit...

The Company realized it could plunder more money like bank$ters instead of pretending to run a space program.

End of story.

didn't something like this happen in Numenor?

It seems real wrath of Valar stuff. Just sayin.'

it's a good thing we don't have a weak Precedent

Did I hear someone say "we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again..."

Aside from supporting the Endless War on Terra, covering up for Big Oil in the Gulf, the Laureate flexes his muscles to make sure the BoA, the Chase, and Goldman-$acks get away with usury and worse.

A power play is underway in the foreclosure arena, according to the New York Times.

On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general.

This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.

The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space...

It's a good thing no one kept any records, isn't it?

Why is this? Robert Scheer:

...They will get away with it, at least in this life. “They” are the Wall Street usurers ...who have brought more misery to this nation than we have known since the Great Depression. “They” will not suffer for their crimes because they have a majority ownership position in our political system. That is the meaning of the banking plea bargain that the Obama administration is pressuring state attorneys general to negotiate with the titans of the financial world.

It is a sellout deal that, in return for a pittance of compensation by banks to ripped-off mortgage holders, would grant the banks blanket immunity from any prosecution. That is intended to short-circuit investigations by a score of aggressive state officials, inquiries that offer the public a last best hope to get to the bottom of the housing scandal that has cost U.S. homeowners $6.6 trillion in home equity in the past five years and left 14.6 million Americans owing more than their homes are worth...

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan

...has good reason not to want an exploration of the origins of the housing meltdown: He has been a big-time player in the housing racket for decades. Back in the Clinton administration, when government-supported housing became a fig leaf for bundling suspect mortgages into what turned out to be toxic securities, Donovan was a deputy assistant secretary at HUD and acting Federal Housing Administration commissioner. He was up to his eyeballs in this business when the Clinton administration pushed through legislation banning any regulation of the market in derivatives based on home mortgages.

Armed with his insider connections, Donovan then went to work for the Prudential conglomerate (no surprise there), working deals with the same government housing agencies that he had helped run. As The New York Times reported in 2008 after President Barack Obama picked him to be secretary of HUD, “Mr. Donovan was a managing director at Prudential Mortgage Capital Co., in charge of its portfolio of investments in affordable housing loans, including Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration debt.”

The HUD website boasts in its bio of Donovan that “under Secretary Donovan’s leadership, HUD has helped stabilize the housing market and worked to keep responsible families in their homes.” If that is so, we have to assume that the tens of millions savaged by an out-of-control banking industry were not “responsible.” And if the housing market has in any way been “stabilized,” why did the Commerce Department report Tuesday that new home sales have dropped for the third month in a row?

Shifting the blame from the swindlers to the victims is the cynical rot at the core of the response of both the Bush and Obama administrations to the housing collapse. It is a response that aims to forgive and forget the crimes of Wall Street while allowing ordinary folks to sink deeper into the pit of debt and despair. It infects Donovan and many others who claim to be concerned for the very homeowners they are betraying by undermining the few officials such as Schneiderman who seek to hold the bankers accountable.

helping out the RIght sort of people

It's not just that the Fed gave out $1.2 trillion in interest-free loans above and beyond the bailout, it's that about half of them went outside the country.

...It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees.

The largest borrowers also included Dexia SA (DEXB), Belgium’s biggest bank by assets, and Societe Generale SA, based in Paris, whose bond-insurance prices have surged in the past month as investors speculated that the spreading sovereign debt crisis in Europe might increase their chances of default.

The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 -- the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg -- was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg...

Not marked down as part of the deficit in those final days of Bu$hCo because among friend$ who'$ counting?

They don't call it the black budget for nothing.

open water in the time of the sun

link

One suspects soon it will be green in Greenland again.

"...an unnecessary distraction,"

like the Fairness Doctrine, impinging on their right to lie as much as they want.

The Zoo Hypothesis

I suspect the Cosmic Cathouse scenario holds to explain the Great Silence.

From Seth D. Baum, Jacob D. Haqq-Misra, and Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman:

...A third response to the Fermi paradox suggests that ETI are actually already widespread throughout the galaxy but are somehow invisible to us. The ETI could be unintentionally invisible, if it just happens to take some form that is undetectable to or otherwise undetected by humans. Alternatively, the ETI could be intentionally invisible. The intentional form of this solution is sometimes known as the Zoo Hypothesis [22] because it implies that ETI are treating Earth like a wildlife preserve to be observed but not fully incorporated into the Galactic Club...

Preserve? Or resource?

In any event, there is a potential explanation why we never got to the Tomorrowland of the Kennedy era. You just don't let the big predators loose in the neighborhood. You keep them behind the moat.

oil in the water

Again, although "officially" not.

I bet the Coast Guard tries to stop them from taking pics, next time.

For now, a slideshow.

a season of salt

Expect a dislocation of 17 million people soon:

...The vast, humid expanse of the delta is home to more than 17 million people, who have relied for generations on its thousands of river arteries. But rising sea water caused by global warming is now increasing the salt content of the river water and threatening the livelihoods of millions of poor farmers and fishermen.

Vietnam is listed by the World Bank among the countries most threatened by rising waters brought about by higher global temperatures, with only the Bahamas more vulnerable to a one-metre rise in sea levels. Such a rise could leave a third of the Mekong Delta underwater and lead to mass internal migration and devastation in a region that produces nearly half of Vietnam's rice.

"If there was a one-metre rise, we estimate 40% of the delta will be submerged," says Tran Thuc, director general of the Vietnam Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment. "There is also the threat of cyclones and storms linked to climate change. The people in this area are not prepared for any of this."

Already affected by regular flooding, those who live in the low-lying delta are focusing on the rising salt content of water in land that has for thousands of years been used for rice paddies, coconut groves and other crops which locals rely on for their livelihood.

According to the Ben Tre department of agriculture and rural development, salt water at four parts per thousand has, as of April, reached as far as 35 miles inland, causing significant damage to crops and livestock, with rice production particularly affected.

"Salination will become higher and higher and the salt season will last longer and be worse," predicts Thuc...

The dislocation is slow now, but an event precipitating a sudden rise will trigger a movement of peoples and a cascade of violence that civilization has never before seen. Because it won't only be the Mekong. It will be Shanghai, it will be Bangladesh, it will the Egypt and Louisiana. It will be the low warm fertile coastal areas around the world where the greater proportion of humanity lives.

Of course, we know how Grover Norquist and the Tea Partiers will deal with that.

recurrent themes in a very old song

Paul Krugman: "...what we’re seeing now is what happens when influential people exploit a crisis rather than try to solve it."

A commenter, John Emerson, at Brad DeLong:

"...shouldn't we be asking whether some of the people who seem so stupid have an agenda that they're not sharing with the rest of us? They know that Social Security isn't bankrupt. They know that spending isn't out of control. They know that taxes aren't high. There's something else going on.

Arguing with their explicit public statements, or critiquing these statement, is a waste of time. Their public statements are meant to get today's political job done by scaring the bejesus out of a sufficient number of people. These statements will be inoperative very soon and no one will acknowledge that they were ever made.

The players I'm talking about include Democrats and some of them in the Obama administration.

Technocracy has always been the mask of power politics. The economic questions have never been as decidable as the technocrats claimed. The deficiencies were compensated for with ideology and mystification.

The corollary of this is the technocrats aren't really advocates of using the technology for anything other than personal gain.

Then there's the inescapable conclusion that if the economy's being taken to the cleaner's someone's making money off of the laundry.

The Economy could be settled if the SEC wasn't owned by the bank$ters.

Then there's the small matter of tax-free highly profitable mega corporations, the effectively untaxed 1% of us who own 90% of everything, and the cost of Endless War for the sake of Endless War.

The energy crisis could be solved by bacterial hydrocarbon production, but the foxes own a piece of that henhouse too. It won't go anywhere as long as the Company has a controlling interest.

And then there's NASA. A huge cash cow for the Company for decades, if there was ever an organization that existed for purely political reasons, it's NASA. The very last thing they ever wanted to do was put people on the moon or into the solar system in viable, independent colonies. After all, look how that turned out here in the Americas.

It's almost as if it existed to prove unequivocally that technology was futile, and all the hope and dreams of space and new frontiers were pointless.



They did and continue to do that pretty well.

the foxes run the henhouse

Matt Taibbi

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back...

Yes, but these are the Right Sort of People, to suggest otherwise would be class warfare.

their kind of boy

The BoA throws its coils around one of its own kind.

And this particular viper is a DINOcrat, too.

It must have something to do with Perry's avowed desire to re-write the Constitution by executive order, no doubt, if the states refuse to ratify his amendments.

fireball

Herschel's Cocoon

In this remarkable infrared skyscape of interstellar clouds adrift in the high flying constellation Cygnus, the eye is drawn to the Cocoon Nebula. Also known as IC5146, the dusty star forming region is shown in blue hues in the Herschel Space Observatory false color image, at wavelengths more than 100 times longer than visible red light. And while visible light images show the Cocoon nebula at the end of long dark nebula Barnard 168, Hershel's infrared view finds the cosmic Cocoon punctuating a trail of filamentary clouds of glowing dust. The dusty filaments have widths that suggest they are formed as shockwaves from exploding stars travel through the medium, sweeping up and compressing the interstellar dust and gas. Herschel data also indicate stars are forming along the dusty filaments. The Cocoon Nebula itself is about 15 light-years wide and 4,000 light-years away.

the 11-dimensional check bounce

Methinks the Laureate has finally out-thunk himself, impaling his chances on his own pointy ears.

One speculates he thinks he can ignore his electoral base, do that Chicago School Horatio Alger thing, and pull himself up by his own bootstraps with a little help from his Ba$e.

It could be suggested he's been drinking his own Kool-Aid.

Whose purposes does this- among other things- serve? Who will profit from the nation's loss? You can't help but wonder...

But not for long, if you've been paying attention.