Norway lemming (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Somewhere, in the midst of a frenzied and furry stampede, is one very contrary creature. For the smallest fraction of a second he can manage, a lemming twitches his neck opposite the direction in which he is running and thinks, “Wait, this is all wrong.” In the next instant, he wonders why is he doing this. Why am I alone in realizing this…? Who in the Hell benefits from this run? He is totally unable to reverse course against this tide of his brothers and cousins and nieces—the sheer force of this rush prevents reversal and escape. Just as suddenly as he twitched, the firmament tilts and the stampede disperses in four dimensions. His extended family, his tribe, is in suspended animation, seemingly locked in place at points in the air.
He is in irreversible flight. To pulverize his body on the rocks below.
I feel like this lemming.
I admit to watching to a lot of Vlad TV videos on YouTube lately, and I’m staving off my internet addiction from graduating to a steady diet of Worldstarhiphop in the process. In the middle of this video, early this morning a good friend of mine asked me through an Instant Messenger, “Everything you said would happen with the government is occurring. How does it feel to be right?”
I replied, “I get no joy from it. None at all.”
For me, living with a Cassandra Syndrome next to all the other far less abstract anxieties I deal with on an intermittent basis isn’t fun. Especially since, I study the historical precedents in the Weimar Republic and Robespierre’s France and the Roman Empire to see where the United States is progressing toward.
Nearly a decade ago, I forced myself to become a student of the American and the global financial and economic systems as a result of a girlfriend asking me to hunt down a home in Brooklyn for the both of us to live in. I had an intuitive sense of roughly how much money my friends and associates earned versus the amount necessary to secure a decent mortgage. Still, it baffled me where did so many of my contemporaries get the money to buy a home in New York City and what were the empirical parameters that determined housing prices against whatever the real estate agents thought the local market could bear. In the midst of parabolically rising housing prices, the picture coalesced for me that the entire financial system was a house of cards built on debt and it stood to be collapsed virtually anytime. My close friends can tell you I’ve been that canary in the mine since at least 2006, to no avail. 2008’s financial crisis came and past and I estimated that yet still a deeper collapse was coming. Subsequently, I left the United States several years ago to avoid being in the middle of the potential dilemma we are experiencing now.
This crisis has several names: “the debt ceiling”, “the fiscal cliff”, “the sequester”, “the debt limit” and several others. The drama of these crises often mimic the escalation of tension of a Hollywood movie bomb, with the LEDs of the detonator leading dangerously to “00:00”. All those names point towards the same central dilemma. This country is technically broke and has been for very long time. In 2010, I calculated that every man, woman, and child in the US (regardless of infirmity or no) would have to work a full-time job for a full year while living in the wilderness to zero out the total debt owed by our government, with much of it to the very private bank we’ve entrusted to control our currency. Now in 2013, that estimate is closer to a year and four months.
I find most people’s passions on Obamacare (especially the slavish notion that it will save us all) as utterly absurd. We also have to understand that notion that the shutdown was caused by one party’s intransigence over the issue is a smokescreen. How many of us have actually read the law, much less know what the official name for the legislation is? Most of us do not even know what is in the language of the current bill. Besides gun control, abortion, and gay rights, no other issue—not even the fact we have US troops on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, and other places—inflames more passions than a law that most across the political spectrum, have never taken the time to read. So ostensibly, this issue warrants pushing the entire planet to the brink of an indescribable pandemic financial collapse. This is a dangerous absurdity.
Vonnegut would be dismayed that Reality is aping his books.
There is a permanent miasma of “hyperreality”, as described by Jean Baudrillard, in which we Americans exist. We can consciously deduce from the empirical facts that we’re in deep shit. For some of us, we can intuit that we’re in deep shit. We know from our major media outlets by now, that if we’re not in deep shit yet, we shall be by latest 2030. However, we have a collective inability to reconcile the logical progression of events against the reality that is quietly being tailored for each of us. Our sense of what is real is continually subverted and flipped to the next channel by a universal remote control by things like TMZ and whichever housewife show is on at the moment, we aren’t able to lease enough personal mental real estate to consider the ramifications of what these facts will mean.
I’ve often said that the Occupy Movement was the greatest collection of talent toward a single cause since the Manhattan Project. Paradoxically, it was also the greatest misallocation of intellectual resources ever since the Project. It seems to this writer, that Occupy was perhaps a positive microcosm of the society that made its birth possible. I write this, because we need to pool our intellectual resources along the lines of Occupy to brainstorm with our collective creativity, to source a viable alternative to the current paradigm where we all depend on a central government to be unwaveringly judicious in our best interests. This crisis, even if averted for now, should be pushing this fact into the collective forebrain that Power ultimately looks out for itself above all.
Here are our alternatives that I can personally think of. Firstly, we can raise the debt limit, a.k.a. “let’s kick the can down the road—and make our children pay for it, at interest”, thus worsening the mathematical certainty of a future default. Secondly, we can fall victim to this dance of dunces called Congress*, and not pass any kind of spending (or debt creation bill) at all in spite of the unreported hardships faced by those employed or otherwise supported by the government. The result is immediate default. At present, if we allow them to continue on their present trajectory, we will likely default; our currency will be almost totally devalued, hyperinflation ensues and the end result will be a worldwide impenetrable and an in-disentangleable and unpayble nettle of debts—not to mention, martial law and. Adding insult to injury, this club of millionaires decided to keep paying themselves for this horrendous farce of debate all the while the American public is too inebriated to consider there might be a need for a Marie Antoinette moment for them all.
OR… we can consider a solution equal to the order of magnitude of the consequences of inaction: A universal debt jubilee.
We must and we have the collective capacity to explore the possibility and the feasibility of a total System Reset.
* When I think about how stupid and venal the American Congress is, I always watch this clip. It is inspiring for its total rhetorical demolition of our legislature.
Conceit Journal
13
Oct
The Lone Lemming.
Norway lemming (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Somewhere, in the midst of a frenzied and furry stampede, is one very contrary creature. For the smallest fraction of a second he can manage, a lemming twitches his neck opposite the direction in which he is running and thinks, “Wait, this is all wrong.” In the next instant, he wonders why is he doing this. Why am I alone in realizing this…? Who in the Hell benefits from this run? He is totally unable to reverse course against this tide of his brothers and cousins and nieces—the sheer force of this rush prevents reversal and escape. Just as suddenly as he twitched, the firmament tilts and the stampede disperses in four dimensions. His extended family, his tribe, is in suspended animation, seemingly locked in place at points in the air.
He is in irreversible flight. To pulverize his body on the rocks below.
I feel like this lemming.
I admit to watching to a lot of Vlad TV videos on YouTube lately, and I’m staving off my internet addiction from graduating to a steady diet of Worldstarhiphop in the process. In the middle of this video, early this morning a good friend of mine asked me through an Instant Messenger, “Everything you said would happen with the government is occurring. How does it feel to be right?”
I replied, “I get no joy from it. None at all.”
For me, living with a Cassandra Syndrome next to all the other far less abstract anxieties I deal with on an intermittent basis isn’t fun. Especially since, I study the historical precedents in the Weimar Republic and Robespierre’s France and the Roman Empire to see where the United States is progressing toward.
Nearly a decade ago, I forced myself to become a student of the American and the global financial and economic systems as a result of a girlfriend asking me to hunt down a home in Brooklyn for the both of us to live in. I had an intuitive sense of roughly how much money my friends and associates earned versus the amount necessary to secure a decent mortgage. Still, it baffled me where did so many of my contemporaries get the money to buy a home in New York City and what were the empirical parameters that determined housing prices against whatever the real estate agents thought the local market could bear. In the midst of parabolically rising housing prices, the picture coalesced for me that the entire financial system was a house of cards built on debt and it stood to be collapsed virtually anytime. My close friends can tell you I’ve been that canary in the mine since at least 2006, to no avail. 2008’s financial crisis came and past and I estimated that yet still a deeper collapse was coming. Subsequently, I left the United States several years ago to avoid being in the middle of the potential dilemma we are experiencing now.
This crisis has several names: “the debt ceiling”, “the fiscal cliff”, “the sequester”, “the debt limit” and several others. The drama of these crises often mimic the escalation of tension of a Hollywood movie bomb, with the LEDs of the detonator leading dangerously to “00:00”. All those names point towards the same central dilemma. This country is technically broke and has been for very long time. In 2010, I calculated that every man, woman, and child in the US (regardless of infirmity or no) would have to work a full-time job for a full year while living in the wilderness to zero out the total debt owed by our government, with much of it to the very private bank we’ve entrusted to control our currency. Now in 2013, that estimate is closer to a year and four months.
I find most people’s passions on Obamacare (especially the slavish notion that it will save us all) as utterly absurd. We also have to understand that notion that the shutdown was caused by one party’s intransigence over the issue is a smokescreen. How many of us have actually read the law, much less know what the official name for the legislation is? Most of us do not even know what is in the language of the current bill. Besides gun control, abortion, and gay rights, no other issue—not even the fact we have US troops on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, and other places—inflames more passions than a law that most across the political spectrum, have never taken the time to read. So ostensibly, this issue warrants pushing the entire planet to the brink of an indescribable pandemic financial collapse. This is a dangerous absurdity.
Vonnegut would be dismayed that Reality is aping his books.
There is a permanent miasma of “hyperreality”, as described by Jean Baudrillard, in which we Americans exist. We can consciously deduce from the empirical facts that we’re in deep shit. For some of us, we can intuit that we’re in deep shit. We know from our major media outlets by now, that if we’re not in deep shit yet, we shall be by latest 2030. However, we have a collective inability to reconcile the logical progression of events against the reality that is quietly being tailored for each of us. Our sense of what is real is continually subverted and flipped to the next channel by a universal remote control by things like TMZ and whichever housewife show is on at the moment, we aren’t able to lease enough personal mental real estate to consider the ramifications of what these facts will mean.
I’ve often said that the Occupy Movement was the greatest collection of talent toward a single cause since the Manhattan Project. Paradoxically, it was also the greatest misallocation of intellectual resources ever since the Project. It seems to this writer, that Occupy was perhaps a positive microcosm of the society that made its birth possible. I write this, because we need to pool our intellectual resources along the lines of Occupy to brainstorm with our collective creativity, to source a viable alternative to the current paradigm where we all depend on a central government to be unwaveringly judicious in our best interests. This crisis, even if averted for now, should be pushing this fact into the collective forebrain that Power ultimately looks out for itself above all.
Here are our alternatives that I can personally think of. Firstly, we can raise the debt limit, a.k.a. “let’s kick the can down the road—and make our children pay for it, at interest”, thus worsening the mathematical certainty of a future default. Secondly, we can fall victim to this dance of dunces called Congress*, and not pass any kind of spending (or debt creation bill) at all in spite of the unreported hardships faced by those employed or otherwise supported by the government. The result is immediate default. At present, if we allow them to continue on their present trajectory, we will likely default; our currency will be almost totally devalued, hyperinflation ensues and the end result will be a worldwide impenetrable and an in-disentangleable and unpayble nettle of debts—not to mention, martial law and. Adding insult to injury, this club of millionaires decided to keep paying themselves for this horrendous farce of debate all the while the American public is too inebriated to consider there might be a need for a Marie Antoinette moment for them all.
OR… we can consider a solution equal to the order of magnitude of the consequences of inaction: A universal debt jubilee.
We must and we have the collective capacity to explore the possibility and the feasibility of a total System Reset.
* When I think about how stupid and venal the American Congress is, I always watch this clip. It is inspiring for its total rhetorical demolition of our legislature.
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Philosophy/Social Commentary
Continuing resolution/debt/debt ceiling/debt limit/fiscal cliff/Government shutdown/Jean Baudrillard/John Boehner/jubilee/legislation/marie antoinette/Obamacare/Occupy Movement/Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act/Republican Party United States/sequester/United States/Weimar Republic