The Surlyzone

“The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty but to have a slave of his own.”

― Sir Richard Francis Burton

Earlier this month, I had lunch with a friend and former colleague. It has been a while since we’ve seen one another and caught up, and we reminisced about the “good old days,” for some time. Over our Pad Thai, he asked what advice I might have given to a 30-year-old version of myself.

I heard myself say,

“I would’ve told my younger self to not be such a grinder. I used to think that I was what I did, and my worth was as good as what I made. And that even if I weren’t the most talented person, I would outwork your ass to succeed. What a crock. All the worship of work does is make other people successful or make money for someone else.”

My friend asked me what I wished I had done instead.

“Take risks. Follow dreams. Err on the side of passion. Life is too short to spend it in service to The Man.”

I thought back to this exchange when I read an article about Chinese millennials giving up the rat race to ‘Lie Flat.’

Tang Ping, or “Lying flat,” is a growing movement in China where young people reject traditional Chinese competitiveness to take a more relaxed, less stressed approach. Instead of striving for ever-higher pay and social status, younger workers simply ‘lie down and give the bare minimum.’ This flies in the face of traditional Chinese values, which embrace hard work, the purchase of apartments or cars, marriage with children — what Chinese society expects a responsible, functional adult to do. But they all seem to reflect one attitude, defined by an op-ed in the South China Morning Post, that represents “a silent protest to unfairness, often the result of structural and institutional factors that can no longer be altered by personal efforts.”

Not surprisingly, the Chinese Communist Party is not amused.

Official media took notice shortly after the concept of lying flat became a hit on China’s social media. Guangming Daily, a house organ of the Communist Party’s propaganda department, published an article criticizing the lifestyle as an avoidance of stress, saying that it “obviously is not beneficial for economic and social development.” Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily, another government mouthpiece, also chastised the attitude as “not only unjustified, but also shameful. Such ‘toxic chicken soup’ has no value whatsoever.”

Predictably the Chinese government has banned “lie down” and “lie flat” as search terms.

Despite criticisms from official media, many Chinese see the trend as a natural reaction to the unrelenting pressure of modern life. And it has caught on in this country as more and more people realize the casino is rigged.

Charles Hugh Smith noted in a recent blog post, Now That the American Dream Is Reserved for the Wealthy, The Smart Crowd Is Opting Out, how a new generation of Americans, recognizing that their American dreams are unattainable, are choosing not to play.

The Smart Crowd is opting out of the conventional workforce’s debt-overwork-dead-end-treadmill. What clueless economists, pundits, and politicos don’t dare acknowledge is that credentials and hard work are not a ticket to middle-class security; they’re a ticket to impossible workloads demanded by global corporations and high-cost lifestyles anchored by student-loan debt, high rents, and out-of-reach real estate.

“Lie-flat” has come here.

People worldwide are spitting out the bit. Restaurant owners post self-pitying signs about “how nobody wants to work anymore” for their $7.25 an hour. Costs rise faster than your income no matter how hard you work, and corporations are ruthlessly extractive despite the bogus PR of “we value our employees,” which is so much corporate happy-talk.

As in China, the slaveowners and other arbitrageurs of labor aren’t going to take this, uh, lying down, per corporate media mouthpiece Bloomberg:

The labor market is behaving strangely. Quit rates are at their highest level in more than 20 years. Normally that would be welcome news because Americans have been changing jobs less frequently over the years, which was contributing to wage stagnation. Wages often increase when people change jobs. But the high quit rates could signal a less dynamic economy this time. Unemployment is high, and many jobs are unfilled.

There was a time when ambition was admired; now, opting out of a career garners 400,000 likes on Twitter.

Some labor economists speculate that many out-of-work Americans are taking their time to find new, better careers. They’ve been enabled by high unemployment benefits and stimulus payments that left them flush with savings and nowhere to spend it.

Note to Bloomberg: anyone who thinks that unemployment benefits leave you “flush with savings” should climb down from the penthouse once in a while.

In some ways it’s surprising to see Americans rising up against the cult of work… But, unlike Chinese factory workers, people in the developed world have never worked so little. One study estimates that between 1965 and 2003, American men gained an extra six to eight hours of leisure time a week; women gained four to eight. And since 2003, leisure time has increased further.

Fall back in line, you curs…

Unlike the world as seen from the Bloomberg penthouse, and even amidst a degraded and broken educational system, young Americans have the wit to see that the ladders of advancement have been pulled up. That there is simply no point anymore to 60- and 80-hour weeks in pursuit of unattainable goals. And the most personally satisfying move is to opt out.

In his article, CH Smith noted that

Clueless economists are wringing their hands about the labor shortage without looking at the underlying causes, one of which is painfully obvious: the American economy now only works for the top 10%; the American Dream of turning labor into capital is now reserved for the already-wealthy.

My problem is that I remember the society that has been stolen from them. People owned their own homes. They took family vacations every summer. They had a boat or a cottage on a lake. They had great insurance; their kids got new glasses every year. Braces for their teeth. College at a state school was cheap, such that kids could work the summers to pay for it. Even without college, there was good money to be made. Factory jobs with pensions and retirement plans. Show up, punch a clock for 30 years, and you were set.

It’s time for us to look more closely at the class divide in our own country, which is actually a matter of state policy set by a property-first legal code and a tax system that transfers wealth from workers into the pockets of the top 10 percent. And a corporate media that inculcates our own hidden beliefs about people thought to be worthless because they earn less, people criminalized by city ordinances for being poor. In America, the only unforgivable crime is to be poor. Or homeless. And if you’re born poor, likely you’ll stay that way, running the treadmill of “trying to save up a down payment as housing prices accelerate away from the hapless savers.”

We are told that our happy future is in an “ownerless society” unburdened by property: note that Uber has no cars, Airbnb has no real estate, Alibaba has no inventory, and Evergrande has no money. And pretty soon neither will you.

And here we are: the country is racist, the economy rigged, the health care system broken, the government captured by corporations and the billionaires who own them, and the corporate media utterly servile. And if you protest the status quo, you are labeled “divisive.” Or Facebook puts you in jail for 30 days. Perhaps the most potent weapon of a population held captive is to “lie flat” and fail to cooperate with the profit-generating machine.

Anthony Freda

Newsreaders who pay the merest attention to the various collapse threads mentioned in the mainstream press have a growing sense of worry, as nothing seems to work anymore.

Even mainstream corporate media interrupts its narcotizing narrative supporting the status quo to include terms like “spot shortages,” “supply chain problems,” “climate change,” “firenados,” “runaway inflation,” and others. And now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have “land war in Europe” and the threat of nuclear escalation. You’ll have to leave the paved interstates of the MSM and range far afield on the blue highways of independent writers to discover the underlying causes.

What links all the above-listed terms is the end of cheap energy. And that’s a story no one wants to hear.

You need no further evidence about the coming climate catastrophe if you’re scoring at home. Reasons include habitat loss, environmental degradation, fragmentation, overgrazing, soil degradation, human industrial growth and overpopulation, climate change, ocean acidification, pollution, and invasive species. To say nothing of mankind’s self-inflicted wounds, such as mining, fracking, and other extractive industries, each of which leads to widespread overexploitation and poisoning of ecosystems.

There’s an economic dimension to collapse as well. Persistent wealth inequality, trade deficits, wars, revolutions, famines, resource depletion, and hyperinflation are all factors. Also, economic sanctions, blockades, and embargoes cause severe shortages and induce hardships that are indeed perceived as collapse if you are on the receiving end.

We’re seeing the end of industrial everything in real-time. “Collapse” begins with entire sections of your grocery store being empty. When hospitals and schools can’t staff up fully. When trucks don’t make timely deliveries. When the drugstore runs short of medications. Or when you call 911, and no one answers. These underscore the folly and misfortune of our waste-based society, made possible by cheap energy.

Shortages stem from ever-cheapening dollars chasing too few goods in our “landfill economy” (thanks, Charles Hugh Smith).

The notion of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is an idea I encountered years ago when investigating the collapse of society. EROEI is the ratio of the amount of usable energy delivered from a particular energy resource to the energy used to obtain it. To be considered viable as a source, a fuel must have an EROEI ratio of at least 3:1, with 1 being the breakeven point. Before you extract energy, such as oil, you have to build a well, which means you need heavy equipment, which requires prior mining, manufacturing, and labor. As a reference, the EROEI of gasoline has ranged from 60:1 to 40:1 in recent years and is declining as oil becomes more expensive to pump. Understanding EROEI is essential to realize why dreams of energy “too cheap to meter” are so much useless hopium. The cheap energy is gone, and what is left is more challenging and more expensive to extract.

Our conundrum is that even as energy is more expensive to obtain, it becomes imperative that we don’t burn it. We’re consuming so much we are in severe overshoot while poisoning our ecosphere. All of our indicators are leading to ecosystem collapse. We’re flying past tipping points, and sudden and radical disruption occurs when we do.

As the most pampered, cosseted people on the planet, fat on inherited, unearned privilege, Americans have lost sight of the fact that, seen through the other end of the telescope, inflation is actually currency depreciation of the dollar.

The dollar has lost over 96% of its value since 1913. $1 in 1800 is equivalent in purchasing power to around $22.13 today. Now confronted by an age of limits defined by no real economic growth, corporations must profit from consumers and debt-serfs. Ever-cheaper dollars are chasing a finite number of goods.

This expresses itself as shortages. At least it does before it expresses itself as food riots.

We couldn’t stop driving, flying, or using plastic when times were GOOD. Now that times are turning bad, we’re not about to allow people to take our cars, guns, big houses, vacations, hamburgers, and personal freedoms, away from us. We’ll fight tooth and nail to hold onto these talismans of “the American Way of Life.”

Recent studies show the 20 warmest years on recordhave been in the past 22 years and the top four in the past four years. Scientists advise that climate action must be increased fivefoldto limit warming to 1.5C.

The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, addressed last year’s COP24summit:

“Climate change is running faster than we are, and we must catch up sooner rather than later before it is too late,” he said. “For many people, regions, and even countries, this is already a matter of life or death.”

Americans increasingly believe climate change is real, that humanity is primarily responsible, and that somebody somewhere needs to do something to fix the problem.

Two reasonably recent Yale and George Masonsurveys confirm the public’s growing awareness of global warming. However, they also indicate that the issue is still not a front-burner and that taxpayers don’t want to pay much to rein in greenhouse gases.

The attitude seems to be, “Sure, I’m in favor of saving the environment, as long as it doesn’t cost me anything or I don’t have to change anything about my behavior.

An AP-NORC surveyfinds that 68% of Americans wouldn’t be willing to pay even $10 more a month in higher electric bills even if the money were used to combat climate change.

The survey asked people if they would be willing to pay a fee in their electric bill every month that would be used to combat climate change. Then the survey asked about different potential fee amounts. The survey found overwhelming majorities of Americans opposed paying the fee to combat climate change if it cost:

$10 a month, 68% opposed

$20 a month, 69% opposed

$40 a month, 76% opposed

$75 a month, 83% opposed

$100 a month, 82% opposed

The sad fact is that even though we want to hear ourselves say the appropriate syllables in response to a survey question, the majority of us have absolutely no intention of lifting a finger or changing our behavior in any way.

There is some amount that Americans say they’d be willing to sacrifice to defend the planet. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Americans said they would be willing to pay a $1 a month fee in their electric bills to combat climate change. One buck. Less than a cup of Starbucks.

The survey was of a representative sample and was conducted in 2018, before the pandemic, runaway inflation, the most active hurricane season on record, out-of-control wildfires and “firenados,” heat domes in Canada and Siberia, alarmingly low amounts of ice in the Arctic, intense flash floods, and more. But you already know the drill.

We live at a time when a sizable minority choose to believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen (in the face of all evidence), that public health measures are an affront to personal liberty, when life-saving vaccines are avoided to duck The MaRk oF tHe BeAsT. Our neighbors are eager to line up behind an armed phalanx of neck-tattooed brownshirts to preserve minority white rule for a thousand years.

We are doomed because we can’t be bothered to change our behavior. A writer whose page is The Honest Sorcerer, puts it succinctly:

The wealthy part of the planet must learn to live with much less energy to avert the worst of the ecological crisis. At the same time, the global south must also give up their dreams to live like Americans. No one on this planet can afford this lifestyle anymore.

And no one wants to hear it.

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier." 

-Rudyard Kipling, The Young British Soldier

Saigon, 1975.

Afghanistan is famously known as the "Graveyard of Empires," primarily due to British meddling during its empire days. In the first Afghan war, the British Crown saw fit to intervene in a succession argument, and a British occupation army was almost completely annihilated during its 1842 retreat from Kabul. The British retaliated the following year, wrought destruction and recovered a handful of prisoners, and then withdrew once again. The war was one of the first significant conflicts during "The Great Game," the 19th-century competition for power and influence between Britain and Russia in Central Asia.

The restored ruler of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammad, is reported to have said:

“I have been struck by the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals, but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of so vast and flourishing an empire should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country.”

200 years of history, and we have learned nothing. And 20 years of training and funding, and the Afghan Defense Force does its best ARVN imitation, as reports from Kabul read like the last days of Saigon.  

I'm having a severe deja vu. No one alive and paying attention will forget the images of people battling for space on the last helicopters out of the US Embassy in Saigon.

How did we get here? In the wake of 9-11, when we learned that the Taliban had supported an Al Qaeda training site in Afghanistan, most Americans endorsed the country going to war in Afghanistan. That level of support didn't last long, but the war on terror did. And as that war dragged on and lost focus (but the checks continued to clear), the mission crept until it seemed that no one could exactly explain what it was supposed to be.

Chinook over US Embassy Kabul, 8/15/2021

Now we have the images of the last hangers-on scrapping for helicopter space of their own as the Taliban enter Kabul. After every significant Afghan town fell like dominoes, they are at the gates. If not already inside:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's embattled president left the country Sunday, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.

The Taliban, who for hours had been on the outskirts of Kabul, announced soon after they would move further into a city gripped by panic where helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the US Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out.

Ever since Viet Nam, when the US can't win a war, we just pack up and leave. The lesson taught is that you will win if you are prepared to take some licks and wait out the Americans. The Taliban's comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a guerrilla war of attrition waged successfully.

As Jon Lee Anderson writes in The New Yorker, 

In that regard, the United States joins a line of notable predecessors, including Great Britain, in the nineteenth century, and the Soviet Union, in the twentieth. Those historic precedents don't make the American experience any more palatable. In Afghanistan—and, for that matter, in Iraq, as well—the Americans did not merely not learn from the mistakes of others; they did not learn from their own mistakes, committed a generation earlier, in Vietnam.

Hence the deja vu.

Some will ask, "How do you explain this?" And, "What was it all for?" As to "explaining it," the point of this foreign war, as well as most of our overseas bases and defense budget, is profits for war manufacturers and associated cronies, lobbyists, and profiteers. Cue the Super Bowl Blue Angels overflights and the commercials valorizing broken veterans recovering from grievous wounds, but who need your support because the promises made to our veterans are never entirely redeemable.

And the loudest "support the troops" types never catch on to the fact that it is their sons and daughters used for cannon fodder and who will be doing the important business of dying or being retrofitted for artificial limbs. This while the children of hedge fund types snort cocaine off the backs of hookers at their leisure or who plan their own missions into near-space as the planet burns.

What do we do now? My advice is the same now as it has been since 1977: "Support the troops: Bring them home." Indeed: "What was it all for?"

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” -Milan Kundera

What is it that we remember? And what memories do we leave behind?

Last week I had the opportunity to listen to Rocky Bleier speak at a breakfast meeting. Bleier was a hero of my young adulthood, part of a backfield tandem with Franco Harris on Pittsburgh's best 70s Steeler teams. During that talk, he touched on the frangibility of memory as he quoted author William Least Heat-Moon in "River Horse:"

"Our physical components change every seven years, so our brains are continuously passing along memories to a stranger; who we have been is only a ghostly fellow traveler. Were human memory total and perfect, perhaps I'd be only one person from start to finish, but forgetfulness cuts me off from who I've been so that hourly I am reborn."

Since our bodies refurbish our cells every seven years, we have at least this excuse. Which I will use. I've been embarrassed by having friends ask me if I recall an event and coming up with nothing. Inexplicable lacunas appear everywhere. So episodes, places, people as part of a life, all of who played a greater or lesser role, disappear into the mists. Then the mind skips, thinking of the shards of impressions we leave with others as we pass through their lives, partial, imperfect. Have we left behind flowers or broken crockery?

My wife and I had the opportunity with members of our extended family this past week. We enjoyed a day of sharing stories and hearing others for the first time in a day filled with laughter. I surprised myself by how much I looked forward to it, enjoyed it while happening, and look back on it fondly now.  I don't think I realized how much we thirsted for family contact after 14 months of enforced isolation, thanks to Covid quarantine.

Bleier's story is well worth hearing. ESPN's Tom Rinaldi recorded a deeply moving recollection. Bleier went back to Vietnam to revisit the spot where he was ambushed and wounded.  He recalls his journey from a hospital bed in Tokyo to overcome injuries and ultimately play for the Steelers. This story has been told in the book and movie "Fighting Back" and needs no further embellishment.

But Bleier was poignant on that morning, and his words resonated with a group of mostly older men:

"As I think back on the words of Heat-Moon, I am not that 23-year-old kid any longer. Although the highlights of my life are vivid, the retelling of the story is now gospel. Who I was, the emotions I had then, unfortunately, have faded with time. The story here is what I have learned over these 40 years. Maybe that's the question we end up asking ourselves. What have we learned? What have we done? Have we made a difference?"

There is memory, and there is intentional forgetting.

The world was shocked at the discovery of the remains of more than 200 children at a former native school in Canada last week. The Kamloops Indian residential school was the largest of several such schools, whose mission was to take the next generation of Native American children away from family and tribe and indoctrinate them for "assimilation." The net result was to sever them irrevocably from their culture. Such schools existed in both Canada and the US generally dressed up in some sort of soggy, whitebread do-gooderism.  Today we call that "cultural genocide."

Charles Pierce notes:

The revelations in Canada came just as President Joe Biden flew to Tulsa to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the destruction of the Greenwood section of the city and the race massacre that ensued. The standard response over much of the mainstream media was a surprise that these events had been disappeared from history. Of course, there was a concerted effort in Tulsa to cover up the crimes, up to and including removing stories from newspaper archives. But there was more to it than that. Imperial power, as somebody once said to Ron Suskind, creates its own reality, and imperial power can be exercised domestically as well as overseas… Events are made to disappear as a kind of historical getaway car.

Not for nothing has Gore Vidal called this country "The United States of Amnesia." The Tulsa Black Wall Street massacre is just one of many that have been papered over in our Great Forgetting. Look up New Orleans in 1866, Wilmington in 1898, Wounded Knee, or just click this link here. Most "white" people in this country are sore aggrieved at being confronted with the US's blood-soaked history of slavery and genocide. See the recent backlash against the 1619 project and the teaching of "critical race theory," a construct its critics would be hard-pressed to explain. Except that they know that the long-deferred confrontation with its racist past will cause children to ask questions their parents would rather not answer.

American "personhood" is conditional. Anyone who doubts that has not been called "a god-damned dago” to his face, as I have. [It amuses me that so many Italian-Americans are hyper-partisan "patriots" of the red-white-and bluest sort. It's almost as if they intuit that the American Racial Contract recently conferring Italians full Personhood can be revoked at any time.] That Racial Contract means that nonwhite sub-personhood is enshrined alongside white personhood. The rules do not apply to nonwhites in the same way that they apply to whites, and promises made to "all citizens" are clearly negotiable depending on the claimant's race. In 1857, Rover Taney issued the worst Supreme Court decision of all time, the Dred Scott decision. He wrote that "[African Americans] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect..."

First published in the Doomstead Diner May 28, 2012.

Memorial Day is a fitting day to reflect upon the exploits and heroism of a long-gone and all-but-forgotten American hero, Smedley Darlington Butler[1] (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940). Butler was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps, an outspoken critic of U.S. military adventurism. At the time of his death, he was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.

After he retired from the Marine Corps, Gen. Butler made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s speaking on the theme, "War is a Racket." The speech was so well received that he wrote a more extended version as a small book with the same title published in 1935. He described the workings of the military-industrial complex and, after retiring from service, became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists, and church groups in the 1930s.

From Wikipedia:

The forces of fascism approached Butler when they were plotting a coup against FDR and American democracy in 1934. They had the wrong man. Butler reported the controversy known as the Business Plot  to a congressional committee when he told that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt. The purported plot would have had Butler leading a mass of armed veterans in a march on Washington. The individuals identified denied the existence of a plot, and the media ridiculed the allegations. The committee's final report stated that there was evidence that such a plot existed, but no charges were ever filed. The opinion of most historians is that while planning for a coup was not very advanced, wild schemes were discussed. Clearly, "deniability" has had a long and ignoble history, was not hatched by the operatives of Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate days.

At the end of his book, Butler makes three recommendations, which then, as now, fell on deaf ears. The disregarding of which has led us to the economic and moral bankruptcy that is now our inheritance:

At the end of his book, Butler makes three recommendations, which then, as now, fell on deaf ears. The disregarding of which has led us to the economic and moral bankruptcy that is now our inheritance:

1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the owners of capital should be "conscripted" before other citizens are: "It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation's manhood can be conscripted. 

Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in wartime as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get"

2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it. He also suggests a limited plebiscite to determine if the war is to be fought. Eligible to vote would be those who risk death on the front lines.

3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense. For the United States, Butler recommends that the navy be limited, by law, to within 200 miles of the coastline. Likewise, the army restricted to the country's territorial limits, ensuring that war, if fought, can never be one of aggression.

On this Memorial Day, I can think of no more remarkable tribute to the men and women in uniform than to recall the memory of Smedley Darlington Butler. Support the troops: Bring them home.

“When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.” --Rudyard Kipling

At the Collapse Chronicle, we keep track of collapse-related stories, especially as they touch upon the series of inter-related feedback loops, spurring one another in a domino effect of crises including extreme climate, economic, societal events. With each week, the pace quickens and seems to be cascading out of control.

Dept. of Lose-lose

Biden announces all US and NATO troops to leave Afghanistan by September 11

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced the US will withdraw the 2500 or so troops remaining in Afghanistan after a 20-year a military mission. To date, the U.S. has lost nearly 2500 troops and personnel, with more than 20,000 wounded in action and tens of thousands of dead Afghan civilians. Plus the $1 to 2.5 trillion dollars spent on a no-win war with a murky mission.

To make this decision, Biden has had to overrule the advice of those who insist that the U.S. needed to maintain a permanent garrison force. We've been in Afghanistan for so long in the "forever war" that's it's easy to forget why we were there in the first place.

After the Twin Towers attacks on September 11, 2001, The U.S. invaded Afghanistan a month later. The Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist group controlling Afghanistan since 1996, was sheltering Osama bin Laden, who claimed credit for the attack. The U.S. drove the Taliban from power in short order, but its members regrouped as an insurgency that attacked the US-installed Afghan puppet government. By 2018, the Taliban controlled more than two-thirds of Afghanistan, fighting the kind of war against foreign invaders that has made Afghanistan the "Graveyard of Empires."

Afghanistan sits astride the crossroads between Iran, Central Asia, and India and has been invaded many times. It is comprised of many tribes who share little aside from a mutual hostility. The Persians, Alexander, the Mongols, the Mughals, the British, Russians, and now the U.S. have all learned a bitter lesson-- that while an invader can conquer Afghan territory, it is virtually impossible to hold the region, filled as it is with guerrillas, tribes, and defensible redoubts. The people of Afghanistan aren't going anywhere and are happy to fight their whole lives to prove the point. The Soviets learned this in the 80s, but we Americans learn nothing.

Observers noted years ago that the Taliban were unlikely to cut a deal because they merely had to wait it out until the United States decided to leave, and time was always on their side. This has proven correct.

Supposedly we initially invaded Afghanistan to guarantee that it would not again be used as a terrorist base. The U.S. accomplished that goal quickly, and Osama bin Laden was killed ten years ago. What our mission has been since that time is hard to say, but many successful military contracting companies love the sweet, sweet taste of taxpayer dollars.

Deciding that enough was enough in Afghanistan was perhaps the only decision made by the abundantly-disgraced, twice-impeached Former Guy that I agreed with. Biden cut his deal with the Taliban in negotiating the U.S. departure and omitted the current junta of Afghan puppets. The smart money would agree with the Pentagon's inspector general:

“The Taliban intends to stall the negotiations until U.S. and coalition forces withdraw so that it can seek a decisive military victory over the Afghan government.”

Expect to see news pictures from Afghanistan of bodies dragged behind white pickup trucks starting in October.

The Rich Get Richer

I Now Track the Most Important Measure of the Fed’s Economy: the “Wealth Effect” and How it Impacts Americans Individually

If you are like me, you find the topics of finance obfuscatory and written by self-dealing swells eager to keep the unwashed from the altars of mystery. This article is the best illustration of how fiscal policy creates income inequality that I have found: Wolf Richter says, "The Federal Reserve is pursuing monetary policies that are explicitly designed to inflate asset prices. The rationalization is that ballooning asset prices will create the 'wealth effect.'" Hey. We're all paper-rich! Woo-hoo!

Richter measures the per-capita progress of that wealth effect, as follows: The 1% = $11.7 million per person (green); The next 9% = $1.6 million per person (blue); The 50% to 90% = $42,083 per person (red line at the bottom). The bottom 50% = $15,027 per person.

That amount of wealth is so small that it doesn't show up on this per-capita chart on a scale of wealth that accommodates the 1%. Meaning, if you got it, the Fed is insuring the value of your assets, and if you don't, well, it sucks to be you. And none of this analysis factors in the impact of inflation. Your money doesn't go as far as it used to, because its value is being inflated away.

Richter: “The wealth effect was designed for the top 10%. At the bottom 50%, their financial well-being got intentionally gutted by the higher costs of living that the Fed’s asset price inflation has caused.”

Another Week, Another Mass Shooting

FBI says it interviewed FedEx mass shooter last year

The former FedEx employee who shot and killed eight people at a facility in Indianapolis legally purchased the two assault rifles used in the attack despite red flag laws designed to prevent that.

I am old enough to recall the outrage—OUTRAGE, I say—among white Americans when H. Rap Brown famously noted that "Violence is as American as cherry pie." Of course, Brown said that in the context of a self-defense strategy for American blacks, which was as much anathema then as now, in a rapidly failing America which has declared open season on Black men with no bag limit.

Umair Haque notesthat the US has had 1.4 massacres per day in 2021.If I told you those numbers about any other country, you'd immediately think failed state. A predatory state has given rise to a generation of predators, who, taught by a corporate-captured Supreme Court that money is speech, now equate gunfire with speech.

Why should the coming generation not view us as cynical and depraved, when we allow people to murder others every week but won't lift a finger to stop the carnage?

Violence has defined American foreign policy as surely as it has defined the American soul. This predation ensures that the basics — adequate food, water, medicine, healthcare, housing, money —are kept artificially scarce as a means of control via "work."  And "work" is a means of extracting value from labor to keep billionaires abundantly supplied in surplus land, homes, and yachts. Medical bankruptcy is as violent an act as a mass shooting: it's just slower and garners fewer headlines.

Bernie Madoff Kicks the Bucket

Ponzi scheme mastermind, reviled symbol of Wall Street greed dies at 82

For years, "Bernie" Madoff was regarded as an investment sage. He had clients, homes, and boats strewn about exclusive enclaves around the world. Leveraging the clout he had amassed as a legitimate trader, he lured — and eventually fleeced — thousands of investors who entrusted to him their retirement savings, their children's college funds, and their financial security.

His clients included luminaries from politics, Hollywood, banks, hedge funds, foundations, universities, and charities. People lobbied him to take their money, the better to enjoy his improbable never-lose-money returns. He turned down many, which just enhanced the Madoff mystique. The 2008 economic meltdown ironically led to a run on his fund and thus to his undoing.  

One More Thing Bernie Madoff Helped Ruin: The Mets

Besides the trail of waste and ruin Madoff left behind, never let it be forgotten that he helped create "Bobby Bonilla Day." Every July 1 is Bobby Bonilla Day, so named because former Mets owner Fred Wilpon had his money tied up with Madoff. Wilpon negotiated a 2000 buyout of Bonilla's contract that included deferred payouts (to be supposedly paid from Madoff profits.) (Each July 1, and through 2035, Bonilla still receives $1.2 million from the Mets.)

Quick takes:

The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun-- Scientists disagree on the timeline of collapse and whether it's imminent. But can we afford to be wrong? And what comes after?

Afghanistan became the graveyard of American hubris

“There are many who loudly insist that diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S. military presence to stand as leverage,” Biden said during his Wednesday speech, in which he emphasized the need for the country to pivot and face new challenges, from China to cyberwarfare to reckoning with the pandemic. “We gave that argument a decade. It’s never proved effective. … Our diplomacy does not hinge on having boots in harm’s way.”

The Coming Water Wars-- Water wars loom amid climate collapse & plans for unprecedented imperialist destruction

“It appears to now be common sense among the imperialist technocrats that for capital to be preserved in the face of the climate crisis, wars are going to need to be waged for increasingly scarce resources like water, and that these wars will need to be tied into the near-future economic developments within the imperial center.” They sold us war for oil; they’ll sell us war for water.

American Insurrection, Sedition and Treason

Capitol Police Told to Hold Back on Riot Response on Jan. 6, Report Finds.

Despite being tipped that “Congress itself is the target” on Jan. 6, Capitol Police were ordered not to use their most powerful crowd-control weapons, according to a scathing new watchdog report.

"A majority of the public's attention has been focused on the hundreds of people who have been charged for their role on Jan. 6. But the night before, someone committed a different crime: The person placed two explosive devices near the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and that person is still at large."

It’s Pristine. Time to Pave It

Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth's EcosystemsOnly 3% of land on Earth still qualifies as “ecologically intact,” with undisturbed habitats and healthy populations of its original animal species, grim new research shows.

Dept. of What Could Possible Go Wrong?

Scientists Create Early Embryos That Are Part Human, Part Monkey

Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. Depending on your point of view, the creation of an embryo that is part-human and part-monkey is either a great opportunity for medical experts to create organs and tissues for human transplantation; or, the starting point of a horror movie. Either way, we’ve crossed the line of creating human-monkey “chimeras.”

"Give me bacon, or give me death!" ~Shaneka Torres, February 9, 2014

If you believe, as we do, that environmental and social collapse is already well underway, the news of the week provided a cornucopia of data points in confirmation. Next week will mark the sixth anniversary of the conviction and sentencing of Shaneka Torres for storming a Michigan McDonald's upon discovering her baconless burger. The frustration Torres felt is now mirrored in all of us as we consume each day's headlines in similar frustration.

But hostility, like violence, is as American as cherry pie. Did you know that members of the starving Donner party were offered assistance by local natives, only to be shot at for their troubles?

Washoe scouts brought the stranded migrants food — including a deer carcass, fish, and wild potatoes — but were met with hostility. On one occasion, an offering of fish was refused. On at least three others, the Washoe approached the Donner camps with food only to be met by gunshots, leaving one man dead…

When a scout saw the white people cannibalizing their dead, the tribe was said to retreat, afraid they too might be killed and eaten. From then on, the Washoe referred to the migrants as “not people.”

Today this hostility toward others, even those trying to help you, pervades most of American society. Many look back upon their high school years as an American version of "Lord of the Flies." Similar put-downs, one-upsmanship, and attack behavior can also be seen in our popular entertainments. This framing our headlong retreat from the natural world and from one another as we immerse ourselves in our phones. To say nothing of our political divisions, best characterized by objectification (of the other, making them “not people”) and derision, and where any attempt to find common ground is met by the back of the hand of friendship. Little wonder that the rising generations find our current set of arrangements hopeless.

But this week's headlines suggest that for a variety of reasons, that set of arrangements won't last indefinitely.

Who could forget the recent Suez Canal flap with the large container ship stuck like a throat lozenge? Not Egypt, who has said to Ever Given’s Owners: Pay Us $1 Billion Or You Aren't Getting Your Big Boat Back. If you thought the Egyptian government would be thrilled to see it go, think again. Nice boat you have here… be a shame if anything happened to it…

“The vessel will remain here until investigations are complete and compensation is paid,” Osama Rabie, chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, told state television in Egypt on Thursday.

“We hope for a speedy agreement,” he said. “The minute they agree to compensation, the vessel will be allowed to move.”

A country filled with people traumatized by the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 paid full attention to the threat of supply chain collapse. Why you should expect more Suez-like supply chain disruptions and shortages at your local grocery store  In one short week, the price of oil went up, and companies fretted as hundreds of ships carrying everything from coffee and cattle to toys and furniture were delayed. Just-in-time delivery means low to nonexistent inventories. Experts estimated that every hour traffic remained stuck cost the global economy over US$400 million in lost trade.

The pandemic revealed that even simple supply chains, such as that of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, can easily break in the face of disruptions. The same was true with food, personal protective equipment, pharmaceuticals and ordinary household items, which all suffered from severe shortages that lasted for months into the pandemic.

Pandemic-strained supply chains are now creating a global shortage of semiconductors, a component used in a wide variety of consumer goods, from Samsung smartphones and Apple laptops to Ford Explorers and Sony PlayStations. Virtually every piece of electronics needs a chip, and the supply chain is much more complex than for toilet paper.

All coming to a supply-chain chokepoint near you. Read more in The Conversation.

The weekly economic news is not good, but economic news is never good.  How does a country deal with climate disasters when it’s drowning in debt? Not very well, it turns out. Especially not when a global pandemic clobbers its economy.

Today, the debt that Belize owes its foreign creditors is equal to 85 percent of its entire national economy. The private credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has downgraded its creditworthiness, making it tougher to get loans on the private market. The International Monetary Fund calls its debt levels “unsustainable.”  Many other smaller countries are in a similar bind. It's a house of cards.

Government Admits Zimbabwe Dollar Collapse, Pegs Passport Fees In US$. Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa said the senior government officials had acknowledged Zimbabwean currency was no longer a viable option for offshore purchases. That's weaselspeak for “our money is officially toilet paper.”

“Foreign currency is required for the off-shore procurement of consumables. However, the current fees payable in the local currency are no longer viable…”

And that is just one domino. Africa offers others.

Collapse often follows insurgencies. Hunger spreads as Mozambique crisis reaches tipping point.

Insurgents from a group known as Al Shebab attacked Palma, a town in Mozambique’s far northern Cabo Delgado province. They launched an attack on the coastal town, firing indiscriminately, setting fire to buildings and killing dozens, according to local officials. Residents there did what people do: scattering in a desperate attempt to reach safety by whatever means possible: on foot, by road and boat fleeing with the clothes they were wearing and a few things for their children. To hide in the bush for the smoke to clear.

Townspeople joined thousands of others sheltering in displacement camps with limited food supplies across Cabo Delgado.

Much of the strife in the Global South stems from the stresses unleashed by climate change. The climate news this week was as ugly as the economic news.

Despite pandemic shutdowns, carbon dioxide and methane surged in 2020

NOAA announced last week that levels of the two most important anthropogenic greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the Covid-driven economic slowdown. Carbon dioxide levels are now higher than at anytime in the past 3.6 million years. The last time atmospheric CO2 was this high, sea level was about 78 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees F higher than in pre-industrial times, and forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.

Methane Has Never Risen This Fast in the Atmosphere

There’s more methane in the atmosphere than any other time since record keeping began. Levels really spiked last year, despite the fact that we were all inside for most of the time. Methane shattering records is one of those things that seems to happen every year. But what’s really troubling is that last year’s rise in methane levels was the biggest rise in a single year since record-keeping began. Methane is over 80 times more potent as a warming agent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

Short takes and highlights from the week:

'A biological Fukushima': Brazil COVID-19 deaths on track to pass worst of U.S. wave

Brazil’s coronavirus death toll passes 4,000 a day for first time

Bolsonaro a 'Threat to the Planet,' Says Lula as Brazil's Daily Covid Death Toll Hits All-Time High

New 'Double Mutant' Coronavirus Variant Found In California

Americans' Worry About Catching COVID-19 Drops to Record Low

A record-low 35% of Americans worry about catching COVID-19. At the same time, 77% say the coronavirus situation is improving.

Ecocide: Should Destruction of the Planet Be a Crime?

Atmospheric CO2 Passes 420 PPM for First Time Ever

Scientists: Mass Extinction Is Coming as Organisms Flee the Equator-- Oceanic life is fleeing the increasingly-hot equator for more hospitable water, and a mass extinction event is likely to follow.

The Coming Antibiotic-Resistance Pandemic that Could Make COVID Look Like the Flu

America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses

Another Day, Another Far-Right Fantast: Texas Man Tried to Blow Up the Internet-- Federal Investigators allege that a Texas man wanted to use C-4 to blow up around 70% of the internet.

Easter week unfolded, and we keep spinning down the drain of collapse. The week registered news of another attempted breach of the Capitol building with scandals, political corruption, massacres from Myanmar to Ethiopia, foolish US foreign policy moves, plus the unstoppable self-destruction that we have come to expect from America.

Not that there isn't good news: the Biden administration has reversed the Former Guy's "herd immunity" death-for-everyone coronavirus strategy and gotten a record number of vaccinations in arms. The giant tanker blocking the Suez Canal was floated and freed, punting the prospect of empty shelves at your local Wal-Mart into the indefinite future. Most of the major market indices were up this week, even amidst the implosion of Archegos, a house-of-cards derivatives scam that has hung multi-billion-dollar losses on prime brokers tied to secretive stock derivative positions. This last for those who enjoy the global kabuki known as finance.

Every week that goes by, On the Collapse Chronicle, we note the studies and news stories that document the real-time evidence of climate change, as well as other harbingers of collapse. Each headline is a small tile in a mosaic that can be seen and read, but more effectively at a distance. And each week, the tiles in the wall display the ratcheting up of climate threats and the clarity of the fact that mitigation strategies are so much happy talk. By now, it is clear that the owner class who directly benefits from the status quo will never voluntarily change. So it will take external pressure to change the status quo. That change may come from the insurance industry. In Australia, they are facing the forces that we've already seen in the US:

Fire and flood: 'Whole areas of Australia will be uninsurable'

Extreme weather events caused by climate are an existential threat to homeowners and industry alike. As in the western US and eastern coastal cities, the question of what is going to happen with insurance is proving increasingly significant for entire communities. And for the insurance industry as they confront a climate-shocked future and changing risks.

An Australian doctor observed,

"This is not just the floods, it's the smoke and the heat and Covid and everything else," she says. "Every single disaster, we seem to be on the pointy end of it. We already hit two degrees above average during the black summer. We had the hailstorms in eastern Sydney. Now, with this, I imagine whole areas will be uninsurable."

Big data and analysis has enabled insurers to move from neighborhood pricing to individualized pricing, as they get a better handle on risk. As homeowners become more directly exposed to climate risk, they may be more likely to move, but in reality, sellers without buyers can't afford to move their house, and they get stuck. Meaning people that owners will face paying ridiculous rates or have no coverage at all.

***

Pentagon could open itself to costly litigation from contractors if US pulls out of Afghanistan this year

Did you ever wonder why, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we never realized a "peace dividend?" The sad truth of the matter is that war is big business, and business is good for a small handful of vampires eager to fight the next war down to your last son or daughter… whatever it takes to secure those sweet, sweet year-end bonuses. After the Project for a New American Century, and after Bush the Lesser and Rumsfeld invented the global War on Terror, they made sure that not a penny of your tax dollars would be pissed away on health care, schools, or better cops on the beat.

"Privatization," otherwise known as the redirection of public resources into private hands, makes the books look better while enriching a handful of well-connected war pimps. And in the spirit of predators everywhere, who say, "what I do not make I lose," they stand prepared to screw the government (meaning you and me, since we guarantee the IOUs) in a display of patriotic righteousness:

Despite the signing of the Doha agreement last February that called for a full drawdown of US troops and personnel from Afghanistan by May 1, the Department of Defense issued nearly a billion dollars in contracts to 17 different companies related to work in Afghanistan past the withdrawal date. There are currently some 18,000 contractors in the country, of which 6,350 are American citizens.

With the deadline rapidly approaching and no formal decision from the White House, the future of the contracts, some of which have completion dates in 2023 and beyond, remains unclear, but the Pentagon could potentially have to pay hundreds of millions in settlements or face years of litigation if the US pulls out of the country on schedule or by the end of the year as President Joe Biden suggested is likely.

"If they have a billion dollars worth of contracts, they're going to have a barrel full of lawsuits on their hands unless they're willing to settle for whatever amount the contractors can ask for," said Dov Zakheim, the former Chief Financial Officer for the Defense Department.

No one knows when we leave Afghanistan. But what is well know is that more contractors than American soldiers have died there. This expensive horror has been enabled by the privatizers, who have made billionaires of scum like Eric Prince with his mercenary armies. But there are plenty more. The blame should be directed less at the contractors, who can be counted on to behave rationally, and directly on Reagan, Bush, Clinton, et al., who build a rationale and a foreign policy around their new religion of neoliberalism.

Remember that when the last American troops and contractors leave Afghanistan, and the current Afghan National Army and Police members are dragged through the streets of Kabul behind pickup trucks driven by the Taliban. Which is inevitable as sunrise.

Collapse in real time-- Lebanon: Closed supermarkets and empty shelves as crisis hits food supplies

What collapse looks like in real-time is documented in this essential video produced by France 24. Supermarket shelves empty in Lebanon as panic buyers rush to purchase goods, while the country's out-of-control inflation leaves many worried about buying necessities. And the shelves stay empty. If you went in desperate search last spring for toilet paper or disinfectant wipes, you have some idea of what the Lebanese are enduring right now, except that their reality is much worse.

Protesters have returned to the streets of Lebanon. Currency collapse has spurred the country's economic meltdown, which has brought about widespread hardship. Supermarkets and grocery stores around the country have temporarily closed, raising fears that a country reliant on imports could soon face food shortages as the currency plummets. Last week the Lebanese pound sank to 15,000 to the dollar on the black market — its lowest level ever.

Lebanon's modern history has been marked by civil war, sectarian conflict, Israeli occupation, and a number of flavors of corruption. Theirs is a situation that bears watching because it may be predictive: collapse does not necessarily mean nuclear war or an EMP event. It means empty shelves, and your money is worthless.  For openers. And for more:

Lebanon’s Financial Collapse Hits Where It Hurts: The Grocery Store

The country’s currency has sunk to a new low against the dollar, sending prices for once affordable foods soaring out of reach.

Quick Takes

How Lovely. How Early. Cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan hit their peak bloom last week—the earliest date recorded in official records and, some say, the earliest date of bloom for the trees in more than 1,200 years. And climate change has a hand in the trees' early beauty show.

Deadly hospital superbug found on the beach of a remote tropical island

Researchers say that this superbug is the first example of a new pathogenic fungus emerging from human-induced global warming.

Great Barrier Reef doomed as up to 99% of coral at risk, report finds

Unless immediate "transformative action" is taken to drastically reduce global warming, Australia is set for the destruction of its reef and more storms and floods, per the Australian Academy of Science.

New U.S. coronavirus cases rise by 12 percent as nation braces for fourth pandemic wave

More than 550,000 people have died due to covid-19 in the United States, out of more than 30 million infections.