Horrified Fascination

Here is a very common visual cliche that oddly doesn՚t seem to have an actual name (the title is best I could come up with):

There are hundreds of stock photos and movie stills in which someone simultanously covers their eyes and peeks through the fingers. What kind of sights can provke such a strange reaction, and what could be its function or meaning? Some prospects simultaneously draw one՚s attention and repel it, giving rise to an internal conflict. You shield yourself from the thing (but not in any truly effective way) and then undermine your own act. Who is supposed to be fooled by this looking-while-not-looking? If it was just a matter of modulating a disturbing incoming visual signal, surely the eyelids would do as good a job as the fingers?

It seems to be a clear outward form of an inner conflct, and inner conflicts are always interesting because they reveal something of the structure of the mind (a jumping off point for Freud, Tinbergen, Minsky, and Ainslie, to name only the most influential).

The conflict between fascination and horror comes up in my thinking a lot these days. I detect it in my attitude to onrushing catastrophes like climate change, or the Trump ascendency, or the aftermath of various natural or manmade calamities. And in my otherwise inexplicable fascination with neoreaction and other wingnutty emanations on the internet, which is sort of like a slow-motion trainwreck of the intellect. Or doom in general, which was a founding theme of this blog. My mind is drawn irresistably to such topics, then forced to draw back.

There՚s something almost shameful and twisted about it, although I can՚t quite say why. At least I՚m not alone in having this perverted attraction towards the repulsive. The entire US media apparatus seems to be in this kind of relationship with Trump, both horrified and addicted to the spectacle.

In my defense, I don՚t think the alternative of pretending these looming horrors don՚t exist is any better. It seems almost impossible to face them squarely, so this kind of half-assed playful attitude is probably the best I can do.

Mr. Burns

I caught a performance of Mr. Burns yesterday, and I would highly recommend it except that I think that was the last of its run in San Francisco. This was a meta enough production to satisfy any nerd — a play about the nature of memory and narrative, whose own story is about survivors of a somewhat unspecific apocalypse trying to keep their lives together by remembering and re-enacting old episodes of The Simpsons.

It occurred to me that Mr. Burns is doing for the future what Art Spiegelman's Maus did for the past. That is, both grapple with issues that are too horrible to contemplate directly by going at them through an ostensibly non-serious medium.

[update Aug 2020: there are now several videos of the play online. This one is a highschool production but looks, if I may say so, "ex-cell-ent". ]

Happy Ruination Day!

This blog is reputed to have a crush on Gillian Welch:







Nicely sandwiched between Friday the 13th and income tax day, April 14 is the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, the sinking of the Titanic, and the worst of the Dust Bowl storms...so far it's been a pleasant enough day here and now, but I'm a bit edgy.

Mismanagement and grief (nuclear power edition)

[updated below]

I'd just about gotten around to acknowledging that nuclear power seems like the least-bad option for energy generation, given that all other techniques either are massive CO2 emitters or don't work at scale. Prominent environmentalists like Stewart Brand agreed. But if Japan can't manage to build nuclear reactors that can withstand perfectly predictable natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, I may have to change my mind again. I mean, it's one thing for a plant like Chernobyl to blow up, given that it was poorly built and operated, but Japan is supposed to a wealthy, technically competent, and not-very-corrupt nation, and one with a good historical memory and functioning social system to boot.

The answer apparently is that the techniques used to design for risk are just completely broken; and do not account for the fact that a single event can cause multiple problems; they assumed independence of risks that were in fact highly correlated. This is amazing to me, but oddly the exact same mistake seems to have been made by financial risk modelers.

I don't know why I'm surprised at this kind of stunning mistake. I guess at some level you assume that people capable of constructing and running a nuclear plant would also be capable of basic probabilistic reasoning; but; but it is never safe to assume competence, especially in the face of economic pressures.

[update: hm, here's a very detailed post by someone who sounds like he knows what he's talking about that says that basically things worked according to plan; despite some failures of some stages of containment and some safety procedures, there was enough backup to ensure that minimal radiation was released. OK.]

Parasitic Liberalism

This hot-off-the-press paper by Samuel Bowles investigates the "parasitic liberalism" thesis, which is roughly the idea that liberal societies do not produce enough civic virtue to maintain themselves, and instead are parasitic on the older inherited forms of social organization (clans, eg) that they displace. If the thesis is true, then liberalism is doomed, because it will ultimately cannibalize the source of its own success.

For example, in the absence of a strong work ethic and feelings of reciprocity among employers and employees, an adequately functioning labor market would be impossible. If trust, truth-telling and other ethical behaviors were absent among borrowers and lenders, credit markets, likewise would collapse. The same is true with even greater force of other institutions, so that: "...no social system can work ...in which everyone is ...guided by nothing except his own ...utilitarian ends.." (Schumpeter).

I know academic papers are supposed to speak with an air of timelessness and not riff on current events like blogs, but it must have taken effort to write the highlighted sentence in 2010 without making explicit reference to the actual state of our society.

... the following are commonly held to be among the cultural foundations of a well functioning liberal order: willingness to help others at a cost to oneself (voluntarily paying taxes and contributing to public goods for example) and upholding social norms such as respect for private property, honesty, fair treatment, and political participation even when these do not enhance one's material benefits...

By liberal society I mean one characterized by extensive reliance on markets to allocate economic goods and services, formal equality of political rights, the rule of law, public tolerance, and attenuated ascriptive barriers to mobility... examples of liberal societies are Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, the U.S. and the U.K., while examples of non-liberal societies... are Saudi Arabia, Russia, Ukraine, and Oman as well as the small scale societies of hunter-gatherers, herders and low technology farmers...

So, to restate the idea, traditional human society develops a rich texture of human relationships, based on kinship, professional guilds, personal loyalty, etc. Liberalism (aka modernism, aka the market) comes along and sweeps most of the relational structure away and replaces it with individualised, atomistic economic transactions. But the market depends on a certain level of trust and good faith. All that stuff comes from an earlier time, and the grinding gears of the market will eventually use up the store of it that was generated from earlier times, and we're left with a harsh landscape of pure self-interest and low trust, which just won't work that well.

This is apparently an old idea but it's somewhat new to me, at least crystallized in this form. Bowles cites classic authors like Burke, Tocqueville, Hayek, Polanyi, Habermas, Rawls, Mill, and others who have touched upon it before. And there's a wide range of cited literature from behavioral economics that I'm not going to have time to read, but looks fascinating.

So then the paper presents a mathematical model for thinking about virtue and liberalism. There's a lot about this kind of thing that raises my hackles. For instance, it's not really clear that you can tell much from ultra-simplistic models in which "virtue" is represented by a single numerical variable. But it may that an ultra-simplified model is better than no model at all. Certainly much has been made before of game-theoretic models like the Prisoner's Dilemma, and this is just a slightly more complexified version of that.

This topic is related in various ways to an earlier paper by Bowles and Jayadev on guard labor.

Indirect evidence consistent with the predicted inverse relationship between virtue and the extent of markets is found in the fact that the U.S., perhaps the most market-based of the advanced economies, also excels in the fraction of its labor force devoted to what Jayadev and I call guard labor, namely, that devoted to (or the consequence of) maintaining order.

Bowles' conclusion is that while there is some general truth to the parasitic liberalism thesis, it paints too simplistic a picture:

...the parasitic liberalism thesis fails not because it misunderstands the cultural consequences of markets or the tendency of liberal institutions to erode traditional institutions and cultures, but rather because it overrates the benign contribution of tradition to the moral underpinnings of liberal institutions, and underrates the contribution of the liberal state and other non-market aspects of liberal societies to the flourishing of these values.

My own take: The US certainly seems to have consumed a large stock of its virtue, while cultures with deeper roots in tradition seem to have deeper wells of virtue to draw on (for "virtue", read "willingness to cooperate with others" or simply "fraternitié", the third and often neglected leg of the French version of liberalism). That may be why the US seems to be heading into banana republic territory while European states actually seem to use there powers to take care of their citizens. The people who do really well at small-scale, ground-level capitalism in the US are those with large family/ethnic networks to draw on.

More generally, it's just too soon to tell. Liberalism, modernism and capitalism constitute a major change to human society, and we are only part-way through the transition. Technology continues to evolve and it drives new variants of political structures (ie, print supported the rise of nationalism, radio supported the rise of fascism, and we don't really know what the Internet will do yet). Liberalism is only a few hundred years old and given its self-mutating nature it is impossible to say what its long-term prospects are.

How to prevent the apocalypse

A couple of climate change stories floated into view today, both of which indicate that global warming effects are happening faster than anybody thought they would. Glaciers are melting, and the North American forests may change from carbon sink to a carbon source. Oh, and let's check up on my favorite thing to worry about, the possible massive release of sequestered methane in permafrost and ocean hydrates: oh fuck.

It occurs to me (not for the first time) that I am not taking this seriously enough. Climate change is an active threat to my children, but what am I doing? Kvetching on a blog? Changing my lightbulbs? It seems pitifully inadequate. Organizing a mass movement? Not really in my realm of competence, and the people who actually have the temperament for something like that don't seem to be doing very well. Rioting in the streets? Ecotage? Bringing down industrial civilization may stop climate change but it will cause equivalent misery, so not really a solution. There are no good social tools to apply to solving world-scale collective action problems, and my individual actions can't do much.

Well, I am foregoing whatever theoretical riches I could make working in a Facebook gaming startup or whatever, and instead working (however indirectly) to support the kind of science that might actually be able to do something about climate change. That makes me feel a little bit better. At least I'll be able to say I went down fighting.

Keeping an eye on the exit

[[update below]]

Glenn Beck's little festival of anti-semitic propaganda last week has got me once again looking at options for living somewhere else. It's not exactly that I expect stormtroopers to be marching down the street anytime soon (on the other hand, my grandparents in Germany and Czechoslovakia didn't think things would get that bad either, and it's only that they had the prudence to send their children out to England early that I am here to write this). But the fact that a major corporation could permit such unadulterated crap to appear under its name is just a further sign of the general disfunctionalization of society. It's one thing for the world to be run by a clique of self-interested elites -- that's the norm of human history. It's quite another for the elites to be nothing but grifters, looters, and sociopaths who can't apparently even take the trouble to try to maintain the society they are sucking dry.

It's sort of the difference between a more-or-less benign parasite and virulent pathogens. Normal capitalists are tapeworms, Fox News is Ebola.

Anyway, smart rootless cosmopolitans keep a bag packed and their options open. Ironically, it looks like I may qualify for German citizenship so perhaps I can make the opposite journey that my parents did. Don't think I could really take living in Germany (although this recent book makes it sound pretty attractive) but the EU's a big place, and perhaps better equipped to go into the future with a modicum of sanity.



[[update: Here's Digby making essentially the same point at greater length. Key quote: "What's broken down is down is the institutional system that forced elites to work at least somewhat on behalf of the people. Government, clergy, journalism, high finance, the legal system, the military, all of it, has stopped functioning properly." Beck is both a symptom of this breakdown and a contributer to it. ]]

In the vortex we are all free

I need to have a tag for "semi-interesting, semi-weird things I stumble upon in downtown SF while waiting for my kids to finish their activities". Last time it was a Ron Paul rally, today it was a piece of the Bioneers Conference, which is some sort of high-end new-age green whole-earthy gathering. They were having a free film screening at the SF Library so I saw some of these visions of doom:



Here's a quite good one from the same series, in which Werner Herzog provides the voice for a plastic bag on an existential quest:


Plastic Bag Trailer (By Futurestates and narrated by Werner Herzog) from Strawberry Earth on Vimeo.


Like the Singularity Summit, there's a few things going on at Bioneers that seem interesting (like a Buckminster Fuller workshop and a session on green chemistry) but the general atmosphere would give me hives. And it seems way too much like a trade show for some shady industry.

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed

I saw a talk by Richard Rhodes last night at the Long Now. Rhodes recently published his fourth book on nuclear weapons; I've read the first two and they are great. The theme of this latest is somewhat more hopeful now that the idea of nuclear weapons seems to be in decline. A couple of highlights from the talk:

- most of the destruction of a nuclear strike comes from fire effects rather than the blast or radiation, which affect only a fairly small radius. But the heat is enough to set a whole city ablaze. One prediction is that if India and Pakistan have a "small" nuclear exchange with 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons apiece, that would be enough to cause a mini-nuclear winter effect approximately the same as a a major volcanic eruption, and with the global food system as stretched as it you might see a billion deaths from starvation.

- all world leaders quickly realized that nuclear weapons were basically unusable. He quoted Khruschev:

When I was appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee and learned all the facts of nuclear power I couldn't sleep for several days. Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons, and when I realized that I was able to sleep again.

So as a result, nuclear weapons development is basically a very expensive signalling game (7.8 trillion during the period 1948-1991 according to his estimate).

- The idea that a state would develop a nuclear capability and then hand it off to a terrorist group is just silly.

I don't know, personally I have moved on and don't give much thought to nukes any more and haven't for years. Bioterrorism is a lot more scary, because unlike nukes the development technology is accessible to non-state groups and getting more so all the time.

The short feature before the talk was this nice little visualization of all the (terrestrial) nuclear explosions since Trinity:

Too close for comfort

Feel like I ought to say something profound about the explosion in San Bruno, mere miles from where I live, that has destroyed a whole neighborhood and undoubtedly killed many people (only 4 in the official count so far, but its got to be in the tens). And on Rosh Hashanah no less. Not a good way to start the year. Random thoughts:

- I know this area and it's about as boring a place as you could imagine around here -- not poor, not rich, tucked away in a corner away from things. But it's also over a utility corridor. I wonder if the people there knew that.

- My drive home took me very close to the fire as it was going on. I saw many people on the highway pull to the shoulder to gawk. People, in a disaster you either figure out some way to help or GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY.

- I followed the story from Twitter and seemed to stay about five minutes ahead of the TV news, who ended up showing the same Google maps views and this interesting map of gas pipelines. OTOH, they had the helicopter video.

- I almost had to put a "-prayer" term in my Twitter search, so many people were posting stuff like "our hearts and prayers are with you". Not informative! But it's interesting in a way, that's what prayer is for, for communion, for making yourself feel what other people are feeling. Perhaps this is obvious to the normally spiritual person but a fascinating alien phenomenon for me. And also interesting to see social media as a vehicle for it.

- Speaking of gas pipelines, we live in an energy-intensive society, and somehow that energy has to be delivered, and that means there is always some risk involved. I guess it's fortunate in a way that this happened in a suburb rather than a more densely populated city, where there is presumably an even greater energy flux.

- There's been rumors of negligence by PG&E. If they turn out to be true, it doesn't really say anything about the evils of capitalism -- government is no stranger to irresponsible management of big technology (see: Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans). I do wonder why it took hours to shut the pipeline down though, that seems like either poor design or poor response. It's right on top of the San Andreas Fault, so you'd think that the system would have been engineered to deal with a rupture.

- It's scary to be reminded of the fragility of our existence, but also gratifying to see the resilience of the community response. People really do want to help each other.

The ship is sinking

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.

Here's an economics guru predicting hyperinflation. I have no idea how much credence to put in this. But when combined with Glenn Beck's rallying of his idiot minions for a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, in a gross parody of one of the sacred highlights of recent American history (MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech), I'm feeling kind of Weimar Republic today (as I did a year ago).

Dancing on the Edge

Today is the 65th anniversary of the Trinity test, the first successful nuclear detonation. As it says here, this did indeed change the world forever and is one of the few technologies that can legitimately make that claim (the Internet may be another). It did put a halt to direct great power wars in favor of proxy wars in third-world backwaters. Nonetheless, what soldier or statesman could resist the temptation of such awesome powers? The results of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have made nuclear war unthinkable for most, but not all. Some moments from nuclear history where we danced close to the edge:

- MacArthur wanted to use nukes on North Korea, but was restrained by Truman;

- the Cuban missile crisis, of course;

- the incident in 1983 where a Soviet officer violated protocols to avert a mistaken retaliatory strike;

- Nixon's longing to use nuclear weapons on North Vietnam, restrained by Henry Kissinger ("œA nuclear bomb? Does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ's sakes. You worry about the civilian casualties. I don't give a damn.")

- Tactical nuclear weapons were deployed in Western Europe as a defense against a possible Russian invasion (and apparently are still there);

- It's been alleged that the Bush/Cheney administration was putting plans in place for a nuclear strike on Iran.

As I said the other day, it's somewhat miraculous that we are all still here.

Also, this:

it would be so exciting
it would be so powerful
it would punish us for our sins
things wouldn't be so boring anymore
we could get back to basics
we could remember who we love
it would be so loud
it would be so hot
the mushroom clouds would rise up
we could start over
we wouldn't have to be afraid of it anymore
we wouldn't have to be afraid anymore
we would finally have done it
better than Raskolnikov
it would release our anger
in the ultimate tantrum
then we could rest

Alia Johnson, 'Why We Should Drop the Bombs', 1981

[update: stumbled on this:

"Restraint! Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards! At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!"

--Thomas Power, commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command from 1957 to 1964, quoted by Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon

]

Bombs bursting in the air

So back when I was a tot, the US tried to blow up the Van Allen Belt because "if we don't do it, the Russians will". The light show was spectacular.

You know, looking forward to dooms yet to come -- climate change, ecological devastation, economic collapse -- together with dooms of the past, I am amazed that against fantastic odds, 6 billion people and I are still alive. I can only conclude that it must be something like the anthropic computational principle at work.

I live in one of the few Bay Area towns that permits legal fireworks, so tonight like every year I'm going to set some off in the driveway to entertain the neighborhood kids. These are pretty wimpy as fireworks go. The official label is "safe and sane", that is, mostly roman candle like fountains; no aerial shells or explosions. But I don't see why I have to be safe and sane while the government gets to be the opposite. This is America, damn it!

Previous independence day thoughts here (jeremiadish) and here (philosophical).

[Update: more from Wikipedia and a blog devoted to this stuff. The Starfish blast apparently killed the original Telstar satellite and many others. And Declassified U.S. Nuclear Test Film #62 goes into some detail.

This test also revealed that the EMP effect of nuclear explosions was much more powerful than had been thought previously: streetlights were knocked out in Hawaii, 900 miles away). It is ironic (misusing the term, but I can't think of a better one) that this is the kind of thing that gave rise to the ARPANET and later the Internet, which now allows me to spend my holiday perusing enormous piles of useless information. I have to admit getting sucked into the technical coolness of this horrific stuff -- must have been fun developing the instrumentation packages for these tests, which were shot up on rockets next to the burst and were presumably destroyed in milliseconds.]

Collapse: the movie

Given this blog's interest in doom, I felt duty-bound to see the recent documentary Collapse, which has gotten some attention in the mainstream media. I was not very favorably impressed.

First, stylistically it feels like a cheap knockoff of Errol Morris. It consists entirely of a single interview interspersed with clips from stock footage, and focused entirely on one man, the doomer (and blogger) Michael Ruppert. Even the music felt like second-rate Philip Glass, also a Morris signature. But whereas Morris usually manages to make the obsessions of his subjects come to life, the camera here renders Ruppert mainly pathetic.

And he doesn't seem that interesting -- he seems like a wholly ordinary member of the American crank stratum -- a lonely, isolated, autodidact who has figured out the Grand Scheme of the World. He's not that crazy -- no really wild theories, just the kind of guy who believes you need to stockpile gold bullion. His blog/newsletter is called "From the Wilderness" and you get the feeling that he is used to being an outsider. He's got a troubled personal life, he's the subject of some sexual harrasment lawsuits which he claims are part of a conspiracy to silence him...and maybe it is, who knows. That's the thing about this type of person, he's only slightly fringy, many of his theories are plausible or better, but he also has a tendency to exaggerate and distort, and winnowing the truth out is a time-consuming chore.

Ruppert's main claim is that Peak Oil and other trends will soon converge to produce a near-total collapse of civilization. There are, to be sure, enough troubling signs on the horizon to make this somewhat plausible. But Ruppert's take on this is panicky and not illuminating.

One of the thing that leads Ruppert astray is a sort of innumeracy, or unwillingness to think in any sort of quantitative terms. For instance, the factoid that there are seven gallons of oil in every automobile tire is repeated at least three times, as evidence to support that our civilization is doomed. A moment's thought would reveal that that is a trivial amount of petroleum in the lifecycle of an automobile -- about 2 tanks of gas. Now, there is obviously a much larger total amount of oil that goes into the construction of a car, and should be figured into its total oil cost -- but one has to produce a number for that, if only a guesstimate. In a similar vein, there is a total lack of any sense of scale or magnitude, exemplified by this quote: "what I see now is the end of a paradigm that is as cataclysmic as the asteroid event that killed almost all the life on Earth, and certainly the dinosaurs."

There seems to be an unstated assumption that Ruppert and other Peak Oil theorists use, which is that the oil is going to dry up and disappear all at once. Obviously that's nonsense. At worst, Peak Oil means that petroleum products will get progressively scarcer and thus more expensive. That can certainly have serious consequences, especially given the dependency of our food supply on petroleum. But it's not like the economy suddenly falls off a cliff. Oil getting expensive has an upside of sorts -- it will reduce consumption and thus reduce carbon emissions, and it makes alternative forms of energy more cost-effective.

So all civilizations collapse eventually and ours may be due, but I am not convinced by this particular chicken little. I paradoxically came out of the movie feeling actually less doomy -- it's not a very valid form of inference, but if I can see that some doomsayers are demonstrably and obviously talking nonsense, then it lessens my own tendencies in that direction. Maybe, just maybe, things will be OK. We are intellgent and adaptable and capable of revamping our systems to meet new conditions. The era of easy motoring may indeed vanish -- there are no known substitutes for petroleum that match its energy density -- but we can live without it. Alternative sources of energy can be brought online (nuclear included, and fusion seems to have taken a step forward recently). Humanity (some of us) will get through almost any conceivable future collapse scenario.

Some more background on Ruppert here.

He who builds his house by the sea builds on sand

If California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this hotel will be standing
Until I pay my bill.
-- Warren Zevon, Desperados Under the Eaves

Here we see two brave little backhoes attempting to hold back the Pacific ocean,

which is undermining the bluffs upon which stand some typical California cheap-ass apartment buildings.

The analogy to the attempts of our weak, corrupted, and dysfunctional government to deal with its sea of troubles is too obvious. Economic collapse and climate change lap inexorably at the sandy foundations of our civilization. A line from one of the news stories could be the epitaph for the current era: They had a great view while it lasted.

Oh well, nothing abides*. Let's hope this coming decade is better than the last one and that whatever tides lap at our well-being, they do it slowly enough that the human talent for adaptation can successfully operate.

*with some exceptions

Parapolitical violence notes from all over

Here's a promising trend: domestic counterinsurgency warfare. Salinas, CA, previously best known for being John Steinbeck's hometown, apparently has a ridiculously bad gang problem. Its homicide rate is three times the national average. It's a war zone out there! So they've called upon the experts to deal with it:

Since February combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency doctrine, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city: "It'™s a little laboratory," said retired Col. Hy Rothstein, the former Army career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students (from the Naval Postgraduate School), mostly naval officers

Rothstein notes the significant overlap with how you deal with insurgencies and how you deal with cities that are under siege from gangs.

Leonard A. Ferrari, provost of the naval Postgraduate School, embraced the project from the start, hearing an opportunity for a school in transition from just a defense institution to a national homeland and even a human security institution.

Lind basically invented the notion of 4th-generation warfare. He comments further:

The Naval Postgraduate School is a DOD institution, part of the U.S. government. Its involvement in Salinas marks the federal government'™s formal recognition of Fourth Generation war on American soil, and the need for a  œnational model   to counteract it. If we must involve the U.S. military to lead counterinsurgency efforts in American cities, then it is difficult to deny that we face something like insurgencies in those same cities.

It recalls to mind an earlier flamewar I participated in, where I (in quasi-anarchist mode) tried to convince some wingers that there was no fundamental difference between General Petraeus and a Chicago gang leader. This line of argument went nowhere, despite the venue proudly proclaiming its refusal to be sentimental about the uses of political violence.

On a rather different note, Goldman-Sachs honchos are apparently stocking up on firearms in case the proles start to get any ideas (via Taibbi).

Also, Digby explains very slowly to a conservacretin why it might actually be in his self-interest to support the distribution of food stamps.

Are these signs of a more general fraying-at-the-edges of the existing order? Who knows. I don't mean to sound the least bit celebratory of this sort of stuff, but given the certainty that the US will be continuing to contribute to violence and chaos abroad for the foreseeable future, having some at home seems both just and possibly even corrective over the long term.

Jubilee

Wikipedia on the biblical rule of Jubilee:

These Babylonian kings... occasionally issued decrees for the cancellation of debts and/or the return of the people to the lands they had sold. Such "clean slate" decrees were intended to redress the tendency of debtors, in ancient societies, to become hopelessly in debt to their creditors, thus accumulating most of the arable land into the control of a wealthy few. The decrees were issued sporadically. Economist Michael Hudson has maintained that the Biblical legislation of the Jubilee and Sabbatical years addressed the same problems encountered by these Babylonian kings, but the Biblical formulation of the laws presented a significant advance in justice and the rights of the people...this legislation was also eminently practical, in contradiction to many Biblical interpreters who are not economists and who have labeled it "utopian."

My naive reaction to the financial mess was to say, in my stupid way*, that the real economy (the part that actually produces and consumes useful stuff) should be at least capable of being unaffected. Banks may close, hedge funds may evaporate, but farms and factories and their inputs and outputs don't disappear overnight. Can't the real economy of valuable production and consumption continue while Wall Street shrivels into its own black hole of debt?

But of course the mystery of depression is that a disease of the fake economy causes enormous difficulty and hardship in the real economy. The two are inextricably linked, or so it seems. But let's imagine that they could be separated. If the problem is a collapsing network of debt, why not just ignore all that and get on with the business of living? What if we declare Jubilee and make all that ridiculous network of bad debt null and void?

Well, of course, you couldn't actually do that! Civilization would crumble. Even I'm not stupid enough to think that is practical. Except some people who might actually know something about economics are thinking along the same lines:

In the past, when excessive debt burdens were accumulated by government, they tended to do one of two things: either they defaulted-”this is the Argentine solution-where you say, "œAh, I'm sorry, I'm afraid we'™re not going to be able to meet the interest payments this month, and never again will we make the interest payments."

The other scenario is inflation, where the real debt burden is eroded because the money that it's denominated in loses value.

I don'™t think we'™re really going to be out of the woods here until something of that sort happens to the huge debt burdens of the U.S. economy. Either these debts will have to be fundamentally written off in some way, or inflation will have to reduce the real burden.

Inflating our way out of the problem seems like the most likely scenario to me. Hyperinflation sounds like a lot less fun than "Jubilee", but perhaps they amount to the same thing.

*I am quite willing to admit having very little understanding of anything involving money or economics. I used to feel bad about this until I realized that what William Goldman said about Hollywood applies. You can have a (pseudo) Nobel in economics and still bring about ruin.

The other meltdown

The ongoing financial crisis may be causing some distress, but it's reallyt nothing -- a bunch of financial fictions suddenly being exposed as worthless, what a surprise -- compared to the melting of permafrost, leading perhaps to a runaway release of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent that CO₂.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats...

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

And moreL:

Yesterday, researchers on board the British research ship the James Clark Ross said they had counted about 250 methane plumes bubbling from the seabed in an area of about 30 square miles in water less than 400 metres (1,300 feet) deep off the west coast of Svalbard. They have also discovered a set of deeper plumes at depths of about 1,200 metres at a second site near by. Analysis of sediments and seawater has confirmed the rising gas is methane, said Professor Graham Westbrook of Birmingham University, the study's principal investigator.
http://cquestor.blogspot.com/2008/09/hundreds-of-methane-plumes-discovered.html

Even more scary take, with proposed solutions:

Oy, a methane clathrate melt is surmised to have caused the biggest mass extinction event in Earth's history.

Some (mild) skepticism.

Oh, the humanity!

Won't somebody think of the investment bankers?

It'™s going to be very hard psychologically for these people, Frank said. œI talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet recently. And he said of all the trials in his life, giving that up was the hardest thing he'™s ever done.
...
The chairman of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, still has his mansion in Greenwich, CT, his oceanfront estate on Jupiter Island in FL, and his Park Avenue co-op in Manhattan. Many at Lehman blame Fuld for dallying while his investment bank went bust, taking risks with other people's money while he cleared over $40 million in salary and stock in the last year alone.
...
Former Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz collected more than $38 million in salary and bonuses in the last three years for which figures are available, though he and Lehman executives also saw their net worths drastically plummet as stock values crashed.

via. Some of his commenters suggest some rather, ah, extreme measures that should be taken by ordinary people who have to work hard and will now be pushed further into poverty and financial stress by the incompetencies and thievery of the moneyed class. Like I said last post, I have some sympathy for this but it ain't going to happen. It made me recall this earlier post. There's no defending the murderous excesses of communism, but I am sympathetic to the underlying rage. In the words of Principal Skinner, "There's no justice like angry mob justice."

A trillion here, a trillion there, soon you're talking real money.

• Long-term cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion.
  
• Long-term cost of the government's bailout of the financial industry: $2 trillion. (today's figure is 1T, doubling that is probably being conservative).
  
• A president you can have a beer with: priceless
  

That's about 2 years total federal spending. Pissed down the toilet, and you and me are saddled with the bill, or about $25,000 for every adult in the US. Those numbers don't quite convey the enormous opportunity cost these liabilities represent. That is $5 trillion dollars not being spent on repairing infrastructure, fixing our health and education systems, funding alternative energy research, or even protecting us against terrorist threats.

Somebody somewhere pointed out that what we have now, clearly, is a system that could be described as "vacuum up" rather than trickle-down. Wealth is sucked out of the pockets of the working strat into the coffers of the extremely wealthy. Now the Wall Street types can go enjoy their bonuses while the ordinary taxpayer is on the hook for the downside of their fun and games.

If ever a situation called for angry mobs, this is it. Citizens should be stringing up the bankers and politicians from the lampposts. Not likey to happen in this spread-out and obese country.

Addendum: there must be a great disturbance in the force when people like Tyler Cowan are saying things like this:

You can blame lots of the crisis on government -- more than most people think -- but at the end of the day it is hard to escape the conclusion that markets simply have performed horribly in a number of important regards.

Also, one of his commenters identifies an important point that I haven't seen elsewhere:

The Secretarys authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time

This is clever and nobody in the mainstream media has figured it out.

If you think the cost of this bill is $700 billion, you're wrong. The cost is actually infinite and the entire bill constitutes a giant money-laundering scheme.

Paulson can (and presumably will) buy up to $700 billion of these "assets", then sell them. Let's say he decides to buy them at 60 cents on the dollar and sell them for 10. You, the taxpayer, will eat the fifty cents, for an immediate cost of $350 billion dollars.

Having done so, he is then authorized to do so again, since the $700 billion is no longer on the government's balance sheet.

In fact, he can do this without limit, other than possibly due to the federal debt ceiling, which of course Congress will raise any time we get close to it. Oh yeah, this bill does that right up front too. No need to bother with it the first time around.

Folks, $700 billion isn't even close to the total cost of this monster.