Peregrinating
2012

September

1 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

Draghi and Bernanke have been anointed with the power to dole out trillions of dollars and euros more, and they'll hand it to whoever's bought the best seats in the house, claiming straight-faced that it's the only way to save the US, the eurozone, the economy and the planet itself.
That this money will need to be paid for at some point in time doesn't seem to be a concern for anyone anymore, or at least it's not addressed. As far as politicians, bankers and media are concerned, it could come from somewhere anywhere they don't care. They're all convinced they won't be the ones who have to foot the bill, and the way things are going they're probably right.
Nothing we will see in the coming months will provide any real solutions to what ails either the American or European economies. There are no politicians left in positions that make any difference at all who are where they are to serve the best interests of the people they are supposedly representing. And central bankers, of course, represent no people at all; they represent industries and special interests, under the guise of being independent.

2 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

The truth is that macro-aggression is not really possible without a cultural basis of micro-aggression. For America to stop being an imperial power, arrogantly imposing (or attempting to impose) its will on the rest of the world, its individual citizens have to stop being mini-imperialists; they would have to respect the space of other people. But this is not very likely to happen, because it–i.e., nonrespect, in the form of extreme individualism–is the very fabric of American social life, and thus, in effect, invisible. This conforms very well to Marshall McLuhan’s famous quip, that the last thing a fish is aware of in its environment is water.

3 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

Meet the new third party in national politics: Reality. Reality is the only party with an agenda consistent with what is actually happening in the world...Reality will be the winner of the 2012 election no matter what the ballot returns appear to say about the bids of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to lead the executive branch of the government. In the vicious vacuum that national party politics has become, the Republicans and Democrats are already dead...

Compare and contrast the platforms of the Republicans and Democrats with the Reality Party:

The two major parties both propose that the colossal machine of everyday life in America can not only run indefinitely, but continue expanding, and include ever more member people who trade ever more schwag...Reality knows we have entered a long-term compressive economic contraction; that there is no way we can persist in the current living arrangement; and that the necessary outcome to avoid immense human suffering can be described as the downscaling and re-localizing of everything we do.

The two major parties regard the rule of law as optional, especially in money matters...Reality knows that the absence of the rule of law is suicidal. Reality is incapable of pretending that it doesn't matter.

The two major parties pretend that so-called "entitlement" programs can be simultaneously reformed, improved, and abolished - that is, you can have your cake and eat it (with ice cream) at the same time you throw it in the garbage. Reality rejects this incoherent juggling act and proposes that Americans better just make other arrangements for old age, routine medical care, and daily bread.

The two major parties both proclaim that the USA is verging on "energy independence." Both parties are lying. Reality knows that the shale oil "game changer" is a mirage.

The two major parties believe that the foreign wars are good for business as long as you can minimize the casualties on our side and keep war news off the TV. Reality knows that war as currently practiced by the US Military is a failure if 1.) you can't control the terrain in the foreign theater of operations, and 2.) you can't control the behavior of the foreign population.

4 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

On Thursday, August 30, Time magazine disclosed that U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Martin Dempsey, told reporters in London, “I don’t want to be complicit” if Israel chooses to conduct a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. No top general would ever say anything like that without orders from the White House. Those are clearly Obama’s words, not Dempsey’s.
Israel needs not only missile shields, but also military help from the U.S. to protect her civilian population and her very survival. Even worse, the X-band radar system in the Israeli desert aimed at Iran and linked to Israel’s anti-missile systems, to warn Israel of incoming missiles, is manned by and controlled by U.S. military personnel. Without cooperation from the U.S. military, Israel is literally “flying blind.” The ability to save Israeli civilian lives and shoot down incoming missiles is in the hands of Barack Obama. And his message is clear, “We don't have your back."

5 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

In the case of the United States, the imposition of rules and limits on individual behavior to protect the commons is not, at present, a realistic prospect; the population is simply not having it, end of story. But how much longer before this freedom of choice is regarded as an impossible luxury? In fact, no crystal ball is required to predict the future here. The tragedy of the commons–what Hardin called “the remorseless working of things”–is that a society like the U.S. won’t undertake serious changes even when it is sitting on the edge of an abyss. It has to actually be in the abyss before it will entertain such changes; i.e., it has to be faced with no choice at all. It seems unlikely now, but things are probably moving faster than we realize.

6 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

As of Friday, August 31st, the debt stood at $16.016 trillion. Since the president took office, that number has increased by $5.389 trillion. To the extent that this increase in debt burden under the president is ultimately borne by individuals, it is reasonable to apportion the national debt increase on a per capita basis. This amounts to $17,146 per person.
The United States must pay interest on its debt obligations. At present, the average interest rate paid on U.S. debt is 2.62 percent. This rate represents interest owed not only to U.S. creditors in the public, but also to non-marketable securities, such as federal trust funds. The relatively low rate reflects low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve and the global perception of Treasury securities as a virtually riskless investment, which keeps yields at bay. This rate compares quite favorably to consumer credit rates. For example, as of the end of August the average variable-rate credit card APR was 14.52 percent.
Thus any individualized analysis of the recent increase in federal indebtedness depends heavily on interest rate assumptions. Both the low-bound assumption (the current low average federal borrowing rate) and the high-bound assumption (the average credit card rate) reflect a sufficiently high increase in indebtedness under the current administration to require over a decade to fully pay off. Indeed, using the Federal Reserve's pay-off calculator that includes standard assumptions about minimum payment requirements, assuming an individual debt balance of $17,146, and the low-bound interest assumption of 2.62 percent, it would take 18 years to fully repay the debt increase under President Obama, with an initial minimum payment of $343. This payment would diminish over time to reflect a lower principal balance. Under the high-bound interest assumption, it would take an individual 36 years to repay $17,146 in debt with an initial minimum payment of $343.
The bottom line is simple: if an American put $17,000 on her credit card, she would face over 35 years of the burden of repaying. In the past four years, the President has done exactly that.

7 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

8 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

With the release Friday morning of the August job numbers there are still 261,000 fewer Americans employed than when Obama became president. Almost a million – 822,000 - fewer Americans have permanent jobs...
Remember back in March 2009, just five weeks after the stimulus was signed into law, President Obama was already declaring: “We’re beginning to see signs of progress.” By May, Obama told Americans: the program was “already seeing results.” In September, Vice President Joe Biden announced: “In my wildest dreams, I never thought [the stimulus] would work this well.” But unemployment just kept on increasing. By April 2010, Obama administration announced the summer of 2010 would become known as the “Summer of Recovery.”
Needless to say, we aren’t now close to the 6% unemployment rate that the Obama administration was predicting after the stimulus passed. And four more jobs programs were passed after the stimulus during Obama’s first two years in office, and positive results were promised each time. Yet, instead, this has been the worst recovery on record...
At the beginning of his administration, Obama promised: “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s gonna be a one-term proposition.” Mr. President your time for excuses ended months ago.

9 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege, comfort, and entitlement....Our power elite has a blind belief in a decaying political and financial system that has nurtured, enriched, and empowered it. But the elite cannot solve our problems. It has been trained only to find solutions, such as paying out trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out banks and financial firms, to sustain a dead system. The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse... The elite...know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless.

10 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

I voted for him (President Obama) in 2008, by the way, since the wish-fulfillment motif moved me, and also because of the horrifying McCain-Palin opposition. In office, then, Mr. Obama quickly proved to be a different breed of porpoise than the voters bargained for. He let the Wall Street privateers run amuck another four years, aided with colossal infusions of conjured-out-of-nothing "money" from the Federal Reserve. He let loose the demons of a high-tech totalitarian "security" state with every sort of electronic surveillance, citizen data-mining, and drone spying that innovation allowed. He stood silent like a Banana Republic store mannequin after the supreme court decided that corporations could buy elections (he could have pushed loudly for legislation or even a constitutional amendment to redefine corporate "personhood"). And of course, he continued to prosecute the absurd war in Afghanistan where, after nine years, US forces are unable to accomplish the only aims of being there: to control the terrain and to moderate the behavior of the people who live there.

11 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

The White House has rejected a request by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet President Barak Obama in the United States this month, an Israeli official said on Tuesday, after a row erupted between the allies over Iran's nuclear programme.
An Israeli official told Reuters on condition of anonymity that Netanyahu's aides had asked for a meeting when he visits the United Nations this month and "the White House has got back to us and said it appears a meeting is not possible. It said that the president's schedule will not permit that."

12 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

13 September
Saguaro RV Park
Jackpot, NV

Mr. Obama also came to office saying, and apparently believing, that a more deferential America would be better respected around the world. He will finish his term having disproved his own argument. The real lesson of the last four years—a lesson as much for Republican isolationists as for Democrats who want to lead from behind—is the ancient one that weakness is provocative.

In his famous 2009 Cairo speech, portentously titled "A New Beginning," President Obama declared:

I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles--principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

As wonderful as justice and progress and tolerance and dignity may be, America's central principles are principles of freedom....The idea that a submissive-sounding president could set things right in the Muslim world always struck us as far-fetched. Yesterday's events render it indefensible. This looks like the end of the "New Beginning."

14 September
The Banc Club
Tonopah, NV

In the classic 1968 film "Once Upon a Time in the West," a villainous Henry Fonda shoots one of his lackeys, in part for the sin of wearing both a belt and suspenders. How do you trust a man, muses Fonda, who "can't even trust his own pants?"
Mitt Romney is slipping in the polls because, when it comes to his own policies, he is once again wearing a belt, suspenders, and even some elasticized waistbands. The bold Romney who picked Paul Ryan as a catalyst to run on ideas has been ousted by the return of the careful Romney who wants this race to be about Barack Obama. And America is unwilling to trust a man who seems unwilling to trust his own agenda.
The re-emergence of the well-belted Romney began at the GOP convention, where he delivered a speech that had been pared away to nothing but a fleeting reference to his policies. It was on vivid display, too, in Mr. Romney's Sunday appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," in which he managed to use 30 minutes of prime time to talk mainly of flotsam, as well as (news flash!) how bad Mr. Obama had made the economy.
As for how he would create "more jobs" and "higher income," Mr. Romney wasn't saying. His references to his "tax policy" served mainly to explain what it doesn't do. He vowed to replace ObamaCare with his "own plan"—which is? He explained he had "big policy differences" with the president on Afghanistan. Those differences are "important." So important that he moved to the next question.

15 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

On Friday, White House spokesman Jay Carney told the world that the violent protests in Cairo and Benghazi and elsewhere were a “response not to United States policy, and not obviously the administration or the American people,” but were “in response to a video, a film we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting.” Carney repeated the point for emphasis: “This is not a case of protests directed at the United States at large or at U.S. policy, but in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims.”
Carney’s comments lie outside the range of plausible spin, even by Obama administration standards, and if his bosses believe them—as we fear they do—are simply delusional. .. They all send the message to America’s enemies that if you kill our diplomats and lay siege to the our embassies, the first move the American government will make is to denounce . . . Americans. Our leaders apparently believe that the way to protect Americans from extremists and terrorists abroad is to tell other Americans to shut up.

16 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

Three days before the deadly assault on the United States consulate in Libya, a local security official says he met with American diplomats in the city and warned them about deteriorating security.

Libya President Mohamed Yousef El-Magariaf said Sunday that 50 arrests have been made in connection with last week's "preplanned" attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead. "The way these perpetrators acted and moved -- I think we, and they're choosing the specific date for this so-called demonstration, I think we have no, this leaves us with no doubt that this was pre-planned, determined," Magariaf said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi was not premeditated, directly contradicting top Libyan officials who say the attack was planned in advance. “Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo,” Rice told me this morning on “This Week.”

17 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

Morris Berman is one of our most prescient and important social and cultural critics. He marries a laser-like intelligence with a deep moral core. His writing is as lucid and crisp as it is insightful. His newest book, Why America Failed, rips open the dark and dying carcass of empire. His analysis is sobering and often depressing. But the truth at this stage in the game is depressing, very depressing. Those who refuse to face this truth because it is unpleasant, because it does not inspire happy thoughts or offer false hope, are in flight from the real. The collective retreat into self-delusion has transformed huge swaths of the American populace into a peculiar species of adult-children who live in a Peter Pan world of make believe where reality is never permitted to be an impediment to desire. It is too bad Berman, who sees and writes about all this with a stunning clarity, lives in Mexico. It gets lonely up here.—Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion

18 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

19 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

Following controversy over its purchase of around 1.2 billion bullets in the last six months alone, the Department of Homeland Security has put out a new solicitation for over 200 million more rounds of ammunition, some of which are designated to be used by snipers. The number of bullets purchased by the DHS now adds up to a staggering 1.4 billion over the last six months.
Following a barrage of questions about why the federal agency has purchased so many bullets, the DHS has refused to respond and even gone to the lengths of censoring information relating to solicitations for ammunition. The mainstream media responded to the controversy by focusing on a purchase of 174,000 bullets by the Social Security Administration while completely ignoring the fact that the DHS had purchased well over a billion rounds.

20 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

In pinning the blame for the attacks entirely on an unknown film maker, White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed the notion that the uprisings reflected hostility to the US, or to our foreign policy. That does not seem credible.
The reality, which the media shrinks from telling, is that during the past three years regard for our country has dropped precipitously around the world – and it has nothing to do with an anti-Muslim film. The Pew organization tells us that the number of people in Muslim countries who hold favorable views towards the US stood at 15% in June—down from 25% when President Obama took office. Only 24% of those surveyed in those lands have confidence in Obama’s policies, down from 33% three years ago. Please note: this is in Muslim countries – where the president extended the most emphatic overture of his presidency.

A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that just 15 percent of Democrats believe that recent economic news is mostly poor, a percentage that took a significant drop from the 31 percent of Democrats polled last month who did think that economic news was mostly bad. According to the study, the 15-percent clip is among the lowest percentages during President Barack Obama’s nearly four years in office.
But with those citizens with Republican leanings and no political leanings at all, the outlook remains the same. Sixty percent of Republicans find that most of the economic news is bad. Among independents, the percentage is 36 percent. Both of these data sets remain virtually unchanged from a month ago, according to the study.

21 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

Since January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, the net change jobs has been negative (-1.3 million), while 5.7 million workers and dependents have been awarded disability and a whopping 15.1 million have been added to the food stamp rolls.
"A total of 46,670,373 Americans are now on food stamps," according to the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee. "The food stamp program has doubled in size since 2008 and quadrupled since 2001."

22 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

Campaigning in Las Vegas, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Friday gave President Barack Obama an "F" on the economy and proposed a five-point plan to revive the housing market in hard-hit Nevada..
Romney said he would reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to protect taxpayers from more risk and to provide a long-term, sustainable future for housing finance...
Replace the Dodd-Frank Act with "sensible regulation" that could make it easier for banks to approve mortgage loans to families with good credit...

23 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

Although the big word on the left is "compassion," the big agenda on the left is dependency. The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
Optimistic Republicans who say that widespread unemployment and record numbers of people on food stamps hurt President Obama's reelection chances are overlooking the fact that people who are dependent on government are more likely to vote for politicians who are giving them handouts.

24 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

25 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

26 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

27 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

28 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

29 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV

30 September
Pair-A-Dice Escapee Co-op
Pahrump, NV