A Journal of the Plague Year

Seattle has been dubbed the coronavirus capital of the United States because of the number of deaths at a nursing home in Kirkland, a suburb northeast and across Lake Washington from the city.

Last Thursday afternoon I noticed that streets usually choked with traffic for the homeward-bound commute were mostly empty. They have remained that way. Apparently the large employers who occupy the office towers in the northern part of downtown, what's known as the Denny Triangle, instructed their workers to stay home. This has made for a much more pleasant commute to and from work.

I would guess that area shops and restaurants are operating at about one-fifth of their usual clientele. I have one entire section of the cafe where I usually get a lunchtime espresso all to myself.

Deliverymen are still making the rounds. Gallows humor sprinkled with a touch of awe is common. Yesterday morning on my way into work I noticed that the enormous commercial construction sites that line Denny Way have gone mostly silent. A race I've run every March since 2011, the St. Patrick's Day Dash, has been cancelled.

My memory of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year is pretty much like what's happening now, except I am the one wandering around an abandoned city. Fortunately, COVID-19 is not the bubonic plague.

The Lounge by AT&T: A Clear Sign of End Times

Recently something called "The Lounge by AT&T" opened up in my neighborhood. It is an attempt to marry boutique urban chic, in the form of an espresso bar, with an outlet of a corporate behemoth, AT&T. (I have noticed watching football on Sundays that Capital One is advertising  a similar experiment, Capitol One Cafes.)

The Lounge by AT&T is on the ground floor of a brand new residential high-rise, the Vertex Off Broadway, which was built on land recently occupied by a semi-dilapidated Lorraine Motelesque apartment building (a structure I have been told was built for tourists attending the 1962 World's Fair).

In the dim autumnal light of my AM work-bound walk, The Lounge by AT&T looks like any department store window display. Everything spotless and airtight. All that is missing are the manikins. "No one in tres chic Seattle will ever be caught dead in that place," I thought. 

But then last night, on my way back from the doomed anti-Kavanaugh rally downtown, I passed The Lounge by AT&T again, and it was chock full. At nearly every table a young couple sat with laptops and textbooks, cramming for midterms perhaps. Shoppers happily inspected the various flat screens and other digital devices on offer. 

This morning I passed The Lounge by AT&T once again. Just on the other side of street, due west, is a blue-tarp-shopping-cart-and-refrigerator-box shanty that sits beneath an evergreen on the road verge. Two people live there. One was wrapped tight in a blanket against the morning chill.

I feel the need to recite another prayer: "O Great Satan. May your mammon-engorged children tear down your plastic citadels and drown themselves in the sea to be reborn again far away and long ago."

Iron Curtain is being Drawn Again

An iron curtain is being drawn again, and it's the United States that is doing the drawing. New U.S. sanctions on Russia for poisoning the Skripals; sanctions on Iran and anyone who trades with her, with more to come in November targeting oil; sanctions on Turkey; a trade war with China; a trade war with Europe; a bloody war on civilians in Yemen; Afghanistan imploding; the Saudis goading Canada

I'd say a GOP rout in November would be a good place to start, but the Democrats are only mildly less hawkish than Republicans. So the iron curtain it is.

A Bit Larger than Tweet-Sized Chunks of Apocalyptica

People lend me books to read all the time. It's hard to say no. I have a backlog of three loaners right now. I'll be reading these books probably for the next month, which means that I won't be getting to any of my own reading.

Why, I ask myself, Must people always lend me their books? And I think the answer is that most people don't read books anymore. So when someone finishes a book, he feels an immense amount of pride and joy, and he wants to share that with another person. The problem is that since hardly anyone reads books anymore, nor do many people from what I can tell pick up a newspaper and read actual newsprint -- now people look at their phones as they chew on the morning bagel, a truly dispiriting sight, like something out of Woody Allen's Sleeper -- I, because I read books and have decided to remain single and self-isolated so I can read as much as possible, become a book dump.

People would much rather read tweets.

Here are some little-bit-larger-than-tweet-sized chunks of apocalyptica gleaned from the news over the last week:

About 4 in 10 American adults – or nearly 40 percent – are obese, according to the latest federal government data published last week. Obesity (defined as a body mass index of 30 or more) significantly increases an individual's risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and various cancers, making the condition a major public health concern.

"About 4 in 10 American adults are obese — and it's only getting worse" 

****

There's an 80,000-ton monster lurking in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California and it's still getting bigger.

Arguably more frightening than any shark, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a rapidly growing hot spot for ocean plastic, carrying 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in what is now the largest accumulation of ocean debris in the world, according to a new report Thursday in Scientific Reports.

The patch is now two times larger than the size of Texas, with bits of plastic and debris spread over more than 600,000 square miles of water, according to the three-year mapping effort from eight different organizations.

Meanwhile, the annual consumption of plastic is on the rise around the world and currently totals more than 320 million tons, according to the report. 

"The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, full of ocean plastic, keeps growing"

****

Bacteria resistant to antibiotics turn up in turkey, pork chops and ground beef in the United States; in grocery store chickens in Britain; and at poultry farms in China. Antibiotic residues are found in groundwater, drinking water and streams, and in feedlot manure used as fertilizer.

Some 70 percent to 80 percent of American antibiotic sales go to livestock. In addition to the emergence of resistant disease strains, some microbiologists worry that the proliferation of antibiotics, despite their miraculous health benefits, is having a chaotic impact on microbes in the human gut.

"At Hamburger Central, Antibiotics for Cattle That Aren’t Sick"

**** 

This is the key point made in Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the 21st Century. Here, two things come into play: wealth from the past, and wealth from the future. The former takes the form of inheritance (hence all of the noise we hear about the evils of the "death tax"), and the latter in financial investments and speculations. Combine the power of the two, and you have, by Piketty's law, the tendency for the capital itself to grow much faster than the economy itself. This law is: r > g (the return on private capital is greater than growth of the economy).

When the rate of growth of capital as capital is terribly high—meaning, when cash as cash grows at double or even triple the rate of actual surplus value creation, or the creation of new capital/cash—then expect the size of the middle-income group to contract and the low-income one to expand. And this can happen even without a crisis (though it's certainly accelerated by such events). If not checked by regulations in banking and finance, the r > g law will assert greater and greater downward pressure on those just above or in or just below the middle-income group. Channeling G. W. F. Hegel's bad infinity, Piketty calls this the “endless inegalitarian spiral.” (As Marxist geographer David Harvey has explained in a number of lectures: Hegel's good infinity is like a cycle, or recycling, where a bad infinity is like spiral—as in, spiraling out of control.)

And indeed, the Pew Research Center analysis of government data shows that this is indeed the case. The US is in a bad infinity. Its "middle class lost ground in the vast majority of metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2014..."

"You Need to Make $148,000 to Be Rich in Seattle, and Soon Even That May Not Be Enough"

Tech Feudalism: Another Sign of End Times

Last week Naked Capitalism posted a terrific piece, "Notes From an Emergency: Tech Feudalism," by Maciej Cegłowski. Ceglowski defines "the feudal internet" as follows:

The status quo in May 2017 looks like this:

There are five Internet companies—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Together they have a market capitalization just under 3 trillion dollars.

Bruce Schneier has called this arrangement the feudal Internet. Part of this concentration is due to network effects, but a lot of it is driven by the problem of security. If you want to work online with any measure of convenience and safety, you must choose a feudal lord who is big enough to protect you.

These five companies compete and coexist in complex ways.

Apple and Google have a duopoly in smartphone operating systems. Android has 82% of the handset market, iOS has 18%.

Google and Facebook are on their way to a duopoly in online advertising. Over half of the revenue in that lucrative ($70B+) industry goes to them, and the two companies between them are capturing all of the growth (16% a year).

Apple and Microsoft have a duopoly in desktop operating systems. The balance is something like nine to one in favor of Windows, not counting the three or four people who use Linux on the desktop, all of whom are probably at this conference.

Three companies, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, dominate cloud computing. AWS has 57% adoption, Azure has 34%. Google has 15%.

Outside of China and Russia, Facebook and LinkedIn are the only social networks at scale. LinkedIn has been able to survive by selling itself to Microsoft.

And outside of Russia and China, Google is the world’s search engine.

That is the state of the feudal Internet, leaving aside the court jester, Twitter, who plays an important but ancillary role as a kind of worldwide chat room.

 As China is donning the mantle of global leadership with its One Belt, One Road Initiative and Made in China 2025, the U.S. is looking to expand perpetual war to more parts of the planet. On the one hand you have China which is looking to build, on the other hand you have the United States which is looking to destroy. Most would dismiss this as an oversimplification, but what other conclusion can we draw?

The only thing the United States has in the way of an industrial policy is to be found in Silicon Valley where a mad dash is underway to corner the market with the first commercially successful self-driving vehicle. The masters of the tech universe, as Ceglowski explains, are also enraptured with space travel and immortality:

Given this scary state of the world, with ecological collapse just over the horizon, and a population sharpening its pitchforks, an important question is how this globalized, unaccountable tech industry sees its goals. What does it want? What will all the profits be invested in?

What is the plan?

The honest answer is: rocket ships and immortality.

I wish I was kidding.

The best minds in Silicon Valley are preoccupied with a science fiction future they consider it their manifest destiny to build. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are racing each other to Mars. Musk gets most of the press, but Bezos now sells $1B in Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin. Investors have put over $8 billion into space companies over the past five years, as part of a push to export our problems here on Earth into the rest of the Solar System.

As happy as I am to see Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fired into space, this does not seem to be worth the collapse of representative government.

Our cohort of tech founders is feeling the chill breath of mortality as they drift into middle age. And so part of what is driving this push into space is a more general preoccupation with ‘existential risk’.

Musk is persuaded that we’re living in a simulation, and he or a fellow true believer has hired programmers to try to hack it.

Peter Thiel, our most unfortunate German import, has built a survival retreat for himself in New Zealand.

Sam Altman hoards gold in Big Sur.

OpenAI, a religious cult thinly disguised as a research institution, has received $1B in funding to forestall the robot rebellion.

The biggest existential risk, of course, is death, so a lot of money is going to make sure that our big idea men don’t expire before the world has been received the full measure of their genius.

Google Ventures founded the very secretive life extension startup Calico, with $1.5B dollars in funding. Google loses $4B a year on its various “moon shots”, which include life extension. They employ Ray Kurzweil, who believes we’re still on track for immortality by 2045. Larry Ellison has put $370M to anti-aging research, as anybody would want to live in a world with an immortal Larry Ellison. Our plutocrats are eager to make death an opt-out experience.

Now, I’m no fan of death. I don’t like the time commitment, or the permanence. A number of people I love are dead and it has strained our relationship.

But at the same time, I’m not convinced that a civilization that is struggling to cure male-pattern baldness is ready to take on the Grim Reaper. If we’re going to worry about existential risk, I would rather we start by addressing the two existential risks that are indisputably real—nuclear war and global climate change—and working our way up from there.

But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.

The tech industry enjoys tearing down flawed institutions, but refuses to put work into mending them. Their runaway apparatus of surveillance and manipulation earns them a fortune while damaging everything it touches. And all they can think about is the cool toys they’ll get to spend the profits on.

The message that’s not getting through to Silicon Valley is one that your mother taught you when you were two: you don’t get to play with the new toys until you clean up the mess you made.

The circumstances that have given the tech industry all this power will not last long. There is a limited time in which our small caste of tech nerds will have the power to make decisions that shape the world. By wasting the talents and the energies of our brightest people on fantasy role play, we are ceding the future to a more practical group of successors, some truly scary people who will take our tools and use them to advance a very different agenda.

To recap: the Internet has centralized into a very few hands. We have an extremely lucrative apparatus of social control, and it’s being run by chuckleheads.

The American government is also being run by chuckleheads.

The question everybody worries about is, what happens when these two groups of chuckleheads join forces?

I think the answer is that end times are upon us.

"Become Ungovernable"

The image below comes from the U.C. Berkeley protest of a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos. I think it perfectly accompanies the re-post of Ilargi's "Unrest Is The Only Growth Industry Left" by Yves Smith.

What Ilargi says I think is unassailable and worth reading: Our outrage at Trump should be contextualized within a broad-based acquiescence of the last decade's centrist peak neoliberalism.

The planet and its human systems are in crisis. That crisis is here to stay. Get used to it.

Ilargi: Unrest Is The Only Growth Industry Left

Posted on February 2, 2017 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This otherwise fine post is marred by an outbreak of debt fear-mongering at the end. A fiat currency issuer like the US can never go bankrupt. It can create too much inflation but we are nowhere near that happening. General inflation leads to more brisk demand, as people stockpile goods or accelerate the purchase of services because if they buy them later, they will cost more in real terms. That in turn increases demand, which leads to higher employment and more labor bargaining power…which can increase prices more (demand-pull inflation).

Call me when we have tight labor conditions. Until then, the inflationistas are still fighting the last war.

And even though we are seeing some ugly price increases in certain sectors, like healthcare and higher education, neither is due to too many Treasury/central bank created dollars bidding up prices. As regular readers know well, health care cost increases are due to it not being a market good. You get driven to an emergency room and you have no control over what they will do to you, let alone what it will cost. The pricing of operations is totally opaque. Even if you go for an office visit, the doctor may add procedures, making the visit more costly than expected. And how many patients say “no” to unnecessary tests, like EKGs for people at low risk of a heart attack?

Similarly, the explosion in college costs is due to the perceived necessity of getting a degree, combined with colleges who are hardly neutral parties effectively selling loans to students who are ill-equipped to evaluate them and too often misrepresenting the earning potential of graduates.

And as more and more economists are finally acknowledging, decades of weak to non-existant anti-trust enforcement means more and more industries have become oligopolies, which means companies can set their prices artificially high.

By Ilargi, editor at Automatic Earth. Originally published at Automatic Earth

Benoît Hamon won the run-off for the presidential nomination of the Socialist party in France last weekend. The party that still, lest we forget, runs the country; current president François Hollande is a Socialist, even if only in name, but he did win the previous election. Hamon ran on a platform of shortening the workweek from 35 to 32 hours, legalizing cannabis and ‘easing’ the country into a universal basic income of €750/month per capita. He’s way left of Hollande, who has a hilariously low approval rating of 4%.

Hamon doesn’t appear to have much chance of winning the presidency in the two voting rounds taking place on April 23 and May 7, but we all know how reliable election predictions are these days, and in that regard France is as volatile as the next country. With conservative runaway favorite François Fillon accused of having paid his wife $1 million for doing nothing and Marine Le Pen, already desperately short on funds, targeted by the EU over money, who knows what and who will decide the election? Hamon may simply be the only one left standing on the day after the vote.

I bring up Hamon, about whom I know very little, not least because he was more or less a late minute addition to the field that was supposed to have been an easy win for his former boss Manuel Valls, I bring up Hamon because he confirms something I’ve been talking about for a while. That is, the fact that ‘leftist France’ chooses to go even more left than expected, goes a way towards proving my ‘theory’ that voters in many if not most western countries will move away from their respective political centers, and towards extremes.

This is an inevitable consequence of traditional, less extreme, politicians and parties having all become clustered together in shapeless and colorless blobs in the center, both in the US and in most European countries, combined with the fact that all of their policies -especially economic ones- have spectacularly failed vast amounts of people (or voters, if you will).

The failure of their policies has been hidden from sight by interest rates squashed like bugs, ballooning central bank balance sheets, real estate bubbles, fabricated economic data, and fantasy stories in their media that seem(ed) to affirm the ‘recovery’ tales, but they all ‘forgot’ to -eventually- line up reality with the fantasies. They never made 99% of people actually more comfortable. The entire politics-economics-media deus ex machina has failed because it was/is based on lies and fake news, meant to hide economic reality (i.e. negative growth), and this will have grave consequences.

People have started noticing this despite the official and media-promoted data. And they’re not going to “un-notice”. Not only don’t people -once they find out- like having been lied to for years, they dislike worsening living conditions even more. And that’s all they get; the only people who get it better are the rich, because without that the machinery can’t continue pumping up the ‘official’ numbers.

And what do you get? People complain about Trump. And they focus on one of his -seemingly- crazy ideas: temporarily closing US borders to refugees from nations with large Muslim populations. Which is a fine thing to resist, because yes, it’s a pretty silly idea, but why haven’t they paid similar attention to how they’ve been lied to for years on both the economy and on Syria, on how Obama became the Drone King and how many innocent people lost their lives because of that?!

To how favorite all-American gal Hillary screwed up Northern Africa when she declared We Came We Saw He Died and the death of Libya’s Gaddafi, who gave his country the highest living standards in the region, free education and free health care, but was murdered by Hillary’s US troops, co-created the chaos that led to so many people wanting to flee their homelands in the first place?

Why is that? Why are there protests when people are halted at an American border crossing but not when American and British and French and Australian forces blow the very same people’s homes to smithereens? Could that have something to do with where the protesters get their information? With how much they know about what’s happening in the world before it reaches their doorsteps?

Yes, people are suffering, and it’s very unfair what’s happening to many caught in the Trump Ban, but does anyone really believe that that’s where it started, that this is the first time (or even a unique time) that protest is warranted, or more so? And if not, why is it happening? Because people only notice stuff when it hits them in the face, I would presume, but who among the protesters would volunteer to agree they live their lives with blinders on? Not many, I would venture. So why do we see what we do? Where were you when Obama ordered yet another child, a family, which hadn’t yet made it to a US airport but might as well have, to be collateral damage?

I get why you’re protesting the Trump ban, but I don’t get why that’s your prime focus. I am guessing that most of the protesters would not have voted Trump in the first place, and would have been much happier -to put it mildly- for Hillary to be president right now. But if you would have paid attention in history class, you would know that it was Hillary who brought the refugees to your welcome mats to begin with.

Take it a step further, like to the January 21 women’s march, and you would realize that the vast majority of the refugees would have much preferred to stay where they grew up, where the women in their families, their sisters and aunts and daughters used to live. Most of whom are gone now, they’re either dead or diaspora-ed to Jordan, Turkey, Alberta, Sweden, Greece. All on account of Obama and his crew. Who of course blamed it on Assad and Putin. “I killed 1000 children, but I had to because those guys are so dangerous….”

This generation of refugees, of the huddled masses that the Statue of Liberty is supposed to teach you about, didn’t come to America because it’s the promised land; they came because America turned their homeland into a giant pile of rubble surrounded by garbage heaps and minefields. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures of Aleppo before it was destroyed, but I dare you to tell me there is even one existing American city today that’s more beautiful than Aleppo was before Americans and their allies reduced it to dust. Here you go. This is Aleppo before America got involved in Syria:

There’s very little left of that beautiful city, with its highly educated people and their lovely happy children. And none of that has anything at all to do with Donald Trump! I don’t want to give you pics of what Aleppo looks like now. I want you to remember how lovely it was before ‘we’ moved in, years go. Sure, what you hear and see in the west is that Assad and Putin are the bad guys in this story. But now that the US/EU supported ‘rebels’ are gone, dozens of schools are reopening, and medical centers, hospitals. Who are the bad guys now?

And yeah, Trump is an elephant, and elephants are always awkward and they’re messy and they tend to kick things over and when they make mistakes those tend to be huge, but how much valuable china does the US really have left anyway? Isn’t it all perhaps just a sliver off target, the demos, the outrage and indignation? Is the idea that your army can destroy people’s living environments with impunity without you protesting in anything approaching a serious way, and that then you get to demand, through protest, that those same people are allowed entry into your country? That’s way too late to do the right thing.

I started out making the point that as our politico-economic systems are failing, voters will move away from the center that devised and promoted those systems, and that this will happen in many countries. The US could have had Bernie Sanders as president, but the remaining powers in the center made that impossible. Likewise, many European countries will see a move towards either further left or further right.

Since the former is mostly dormant at best, while the latter has long been preparing for just such a moment, many nations will follow the American example and elect a right wing figurehead. This will cause a lot of chaos, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. People need to wake up and become active. The recent US demonstrations may be a first sign of that, even though they look largely out of focus. More than anything else, people need a mirror, they need to acknowledge that because they’ve been in a state of mindless self-centered slumber for so long, they have work to do now.

And that work needs to consist of more than yelling at the top of your lungs that Trump and Le Pen and Wilders are such terribly bad people. For one thing because that will only help them, for another because they were not the people who put you to sleep or were supporting mindless slaughter in faraway nations or were making up ‘official’ numbers as your economies were dumped into handbaskets on their way to hell. So ask yourselves, why did you believe what Obama was saying, or Merkel, or Cameron, Sarkozy, Rutte, you name them, while you could have known they were just making it all up, if only you had paid attention?

Why? What happened? Why did the term ‘fake news’ only recently become a hot potato, even though you’ve been bombarded with fake and false news for years? Is it because you were/are so eager to believe that your economy is recovering that any evidence to the contrary didn’t stand a chance? If so, do realize that for many people that was not true; it’s why they voted for the people you now so despise. Is it perhaps also because you’re so eager to believe your ‘leaders’ do the right thing that you completely miss out on the fact that they’re not? And whose fault is that?

In yet another angle, people claim that the planet’s in great peril because Trump doesn’t ‘believe’ in climate change. But it’s not Trump’s who’s the danger when it comes to climate change, you are, because you’re foolish enough to believe that things like last year’s infinitely bally-hood Paris Agreement (CON21) will actually ‘save’ something. That belief is more dangerous than a flat-out denial, because it lulls people into sleep, while denial keeps them awake.

It’s the idea that there’s still time to rescue the planet that’s dangerous, because it’s the perfect excuse to keep on doing what you were doing without having to feel too much guilt or remorse. You’re not going to save a single species with your electric car or whatever next green fad there is, the only way to do that is through drastic changes to your society and your own behavior.

That’s not only true with respect to the climate, it’s just as valid with respect to the refugees on your doorstep. If you want to rescue them, and those who will come after them, the only thing that makes any difference is making sure the bombing stops, that the US and European war machines are silenced. If you don’t do that, none of these protests are of any use. So sure, yeah, by all means, protest, but make sure you protest the real issues, not just a symptom.

That doesn’t mean you should shut the door in the face of these frail forms fainting at the door, that’s just insane, but it does mean that after welcoming your guests, you will also have to make sure what brought them there must stop. If you stop killing and maiming these people, and help rebuild Aleppo and a thousand other places, they won’t need to come to your door anymore.

As for the political field, unrest will continue and grow because the end of economic growth means the end of centralization, and our entire world, politically, economically, what have you, is based on these two things. Today, unrest is the only growth industry left. And it’s not going away anytime soon. It’s a new day, a new dawn, it’s just that unfortunately this is not going to be a pretty one.

Still, none of it is unexpected. The Automatic Earth has been saying for years, and with us quite a few others, that this was and is inevitable. Of course there are those who say that we cried wolf, but we’ll take that risk any day. Saw a nice very short video of Mike Maloney saying in 2011 that Obama would have to double US debt between 2008 and 2016 just to keep the entire system from starting to collapse, running to stand still, Alice, Red Queen and all. And guess what?

There’s the recovery as it’s been sold to you. It’s all been borrowed, to the last penny. Will Donald Trump double US debt once again? Will the EU countries do the same? How about Japan and China? And to think that federal debt isn’t even the worst threat, personal debt is, and so many of us carry so much of that, and try to pass off our mortgaged homes as assets, not debt. An increasingly desperate game on all fronts.

Trump Will Go the Way of Nixon

I've been telling people since before the inaugural that it can't be sustained, that Trump will flame out. My epiphany yesterday was that what we are are dealing with here is a convoluted backward reanimation of Nixon.

Nixon came to power after winning a squeaker in 1968 because the Democratic Party had imploded. A shrewd campaigner and a dirty tricks magician, Nixon colluded with the South Vietnamese to upend LBJ's peace initiative, dooming Humphrey's chances of victory; then, in 1972, thanks to Kevin Phillips' Southern Strategy and the assassination attempt and crippling of George Wallace, Nixon reaped the whirlwind and smoked McGovern, remaking the GOP as the party of the cracker working man.

After that '72 landslide there was Watergate, and it was the GOP's turn to wander in the wilderness. Until the Reagan messiah appeared to cleanse the body politic six years later.

But Trump, who fancies himself a Reagan, is no Reagan. Trump is a Nixon, a deluded, brooding, grudge junkie without any of Nixon's Deep State sophistication, on foreign policy, on the labyrinthine federal bureaucracy, etc. Rather than recording himself on mountains of magnetic audio tape, Trump mainlines himself into the global noosphere via Twitter.

Nixon's election was a river flowing backward against the zeitgeist. The country continued to get freakier as Nixon welcomed Billy Graham to the White House. The same thing is going to happen now. Western society is now solidly feminist and multicultural and pantheistic. The old time dysfunctional cracker monotheistic patriarchal order is broken beyond repair. It can appear from the corner of the eye, like a ghost encountered on the staircase of the Winchester Mystery House, as majority sentiment, but it is not. Trump's 45% approval rating is probably his maximum level of support. We'll see tomorrow when a Right-to-Life march stacks up against last week's women's march.

Trump is headed full speed for the cliff. If I had to bet I would say that his goading of the Dragon is an almost certain path to destruction. To understand why read "Trump Injects High Risk Into Relations With China" by Jane Perlez and Chris Buckley. Trump's scrapping of the TPP convinced the Chinese that he might do the same thing with Nixon's One China policy. The Chinese are now preparing for a trade war; they will target Boeing aircraft and U.S. agricultural bounty. The Trump administration has also been hinting at a blockade of the islands China has recently constructed in the South China Sea. According to Perlez and Buckley,

Mr. Trump has also threatened China on control of territory it claims in the South China Sea. The comments by Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, on Monday echoed those made by his nominee for secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, at his Senate confirmation hearing.

While Mr. Trump has not explained how he will keep China off islands where it has built airstrips and installed weapons, the comments by his appointees suggest the possibility of an American blockade. While Mr. Obama tried unsuccessfully to leverage American allies in the region to compel China to back down, Mr. Trump seems willing to abandon them and face China on his own.

That go-it-alone attitude has raised alarms at the Pentagon and among American Navy experts, who said such a blockade would be tantamount to war. The idea has also alarmed America’s allies.

Australia, Washington’s staunchest ally in the Asia Pacific region, would not participate in such a venture, its defense officials said, adding that a blockade could not be successful and could serve to persuade disenchanted American friends in the Asia Pacific to pivot toward China.

A scenario where the Pentagon refuses orders of the commander in chief and then works with allies in Congress to remove him is not far-fetched.

One thing is certain, the Masters of the Universe, the 0.1%, are nervous. "Elites Eying the Exits Signals America's Crisis," by Robert Johnson, was posted yesterday on Naked Capitalism:

Yves here. A former private equity partner mentioned the New Yorker story on 0.1% bunkering. He noticed how they focused on the private jet pilot as a point of vulnerability, that he might fly his family out and leave them stranded. So the approach is to assure him that his relatives get seats on the plane too.

Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

Interviewed as part of an extraordinary New Yorker investigation into growing anxiety among America’s corporate elite over the potential for anarchic social collapse, Institute President Robert Johnson saw his peers’ talk of bolt-holes in New Zealand as reflecting a deeper crisis.

Johnson told writer Evan Osnos of the mounting anxiety he had encountered among hedge-fund managers and other wealthy Americans he knew. “More and more were saying, ‘You’ve got to have a private plane,” Johnson said. “You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ”

Osnos writes: “By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, ‘I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.’ ”

Johnson bemoaned the lack of a “spirit of stewardship” and openness to more aggressively redistributive tax policy among the wealthy.

“Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he told the New Yorker. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”

If anything, Osnos wrote, inequality is widening, noting recent statistics from the National Bureau of Economic Research that showed that while incomes for the top 1 percent of Americans have nearly tripled, half of the population was earning at the same level they did in 1980, comparing America’s wealth gap to that seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society,” Johnson said. “We’ve largely dismantled those things.”

He saw elite anxiety as an indicator America’s social crisis.

“Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson said. “What does that really tell us about our system? It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”

Trump is a manifestation of end times. When it becomes apparent that he is a lens magnifying end times, hastening their arrival, rather than punting them downfield for another decade or two, the GOP in Congress will abandon him. But by that time it will be too late.

The Rapture + Disappearing Monarchs

Yesterday I discussed "the Rapture" with a coworker. He believes that the new pope could be the false prophet mentioned in the Book of Revelation, though he incorrectly predicted his name to be "Peter the Roman." I don't know if it's a mark of end times; but, according to an article today by Michael Wines, "Monarch Migration Plunges to Lowest Levels in Decades," maybe we should assign Monsanto the role of false prophet, the beast from the earth. According to Wines,

The latest decline was hastened by drought and record-breaking heat in North America when the monarchs arrived last spring to reproduce. Warmer than usual conditions led the insects to arrive early and to nest farther north than is typical, Chip Taylor, director of the conservation group Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas, said in an interview. The early arrival disrupted the monarchs’ breeding cycle, he said, and the hot weather dried insect eggs and lowered the nectar content of the milkweed on which they feed. 

That in turn weakened the butterflies and lowered the number of eggs laid. 

But an equally alarming source of the decline, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Vidal said, is the explosive increase in American farmland planted in soybean and corn genetically modified to tolerate herbicides. 

The American Midwest’s corn belt is a critical feeding ground for monarchs, which once found a ready source of milkweed growing between the rows of millions of acres of soybean and corn. But the ubiquitous use of herbicide-tolerant crops has enabled farmers to wipe out the milkweed, and with it much of the butterflies’ food supply. 

“That habitat is virtually gone. We’ve lost well over 120 million acres, and probably closer to 150 million acres,” Mr. Taylor said. 

A rapid expansion of farmland — more than 25 million new acres in the United States since 2007 — has eaten away grasslands and conservation reserves that supplied the monarchs with milkweed, he said. 

The monarchs’ migration is seen as a natural marvel and, for Mexico, a huge tourist attraction. But naturalists regard the butterflies as a forward indicator of the health of the food chain. Fewer butterflies probably means there are fewer other insects that are food for birds, and fewer birds for larger predators.

I dreamed a disturbing dream this morning. I was being interviewed for a job at a financial consulting firm owned by a husband and wife. Apparently I had done some volunteer work with the wife years before -- phone banking for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. They put me up in a private suite with bed and bath and provided me with new slacks, shirts and ties. The waist size of the pants was 34; this concerned me that they would be an inch or two too big. I was unsure if they wanted me to change right there in front of them while they conducted the interview. I decided against it. My problem was that I couldn't keep my eyes open; I kept falling asleep in the middle of their questions; then I'd wake up and apologize. It was stressful.