You Can't Fix Stupid - Salem-News.Com

WARNING: This column offers no fixes or solutions for the world’s emerging environmental or economic crises. It only offers depressingly morbid caveats.

(LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.) -

PROLOGUE: To better understand my view, either put Pink Floyd’s “MONEY” (DARK SIDE OF THE MOON 1973) on while reading this or go to the link below and listen while reading it.

Who knows, might help but then again maybe you’ll just get morose and ask yourself: “WTF, why am I browsing for more bad news on the web?” Whatever. Color me comfortably numb.

Like redneck comedian Ron White loves to tell us is, no, you can’t fix stupid, it’s forever----But there is a small chance that when it comes to America’s economy we could at least not be so gullible. As we are the keystone brick in the arch of global economy, look for the whole thing to collapse like the house of cards that it is.

On the other hand, it’s more complicated than mere money matters, than the fluctuating values of Euros, than Dow Jones or Nikkei averages. One thing people aren’t being told is that our spiritual, environmental and economic meltdowns were catastrophically converging years ago, they were on a collision course that has ultimately, irreparably broken our world into dissonant pieces.

Global core values, natural resources and monetary systems are inextricably inter-related now, joined at the hip. Superglue or Gorilla Glue are worthless, as is a compass for this puzzle board.

Deregulation will only increase the speed of environmental and fiscal entropy here in America. Short-term jobs yes, but long-term, irreversible adverse eco-impacts will flourish.

Back in the good old days (remember, way, way back around late 2006?) we were told by every flummoxed media blockhead in front of a microphone and/or camera that our economy was in a place it had never been before, possibly/probably irrevocably broken. That there were no GOOGLE® maps or GPS to help us navigate our way out of the dark tailspin we were in.

There was no precedent for such a complex interactive bundle, such a Gordian Knot of interwoven crises------so there was no predictive model for this type of spiraling down into environmental, spiritual and economic chaos, perhaps best summed up by Edgar Allan Poe in his Gothic tale “A Descent Into The Maelstrom” wherein he quoted Joseph Glanville, one of the Cambridge Neo-Platonists:

“The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.”

The Chinese fire drill of stupidity (not to mention confusion) was exacerbated when the media then went out and asked self-appointed/annointed economic experts whatever should we do in frightened tones. Everyone rolled their eyes like Betty Boop, gnawing at their respective lips and fingernails in pensive contemplation. Most, if being candid and not so righteous, toed the line and admitted that yes, by golly, by gum, we were really up a fiscal creek and even Obama’s “Hopey-Changey” stimulus paddle couldn’t get us safely to a sheltered shore.

Upside down or underwater morphed from creek navigation terminology to financial ones. The sky had either already fallen, was falling or would fall. Choose 1, 2 or all 3 for the Fiscal Trifecta. Metaphors and similes bred like flies while the tragedy churned and unfolded to common horror.

Then the multitudinous mainstream media moron muckheads (redundant?) began interviewing Mr. and Ms. Public, inquiring about THEIR solutions regarding how we should best turn this damn thing around. They gathered small groups of private citizens in mini-town hall type meetings, used the footage to appear intelligently exploratory plus reflecting how egalitarian, how democratic they were.

How this type of shotgun approach at info-gathering was supposed to solve things wasn’t important to them. Keeping the already-in-the-dark and frantically worried public engaged long enough to sell more irrelevant/unnecessary consumer goods, selling ad space was, is and always will be remains their main goal as this global Titanic gurgles down. These people would sell eye drops to blind people if it paid corporate dividends, got a big media market share.

The crisis, and attendant desperation, deepened as everyone suddenly became a pundit, any imbecile running for trash collector in any Podunk Town USA was an Economic Einstein and had legitimate talking points worthy of prime time coverage.

The media had, like a drunken Lothario at a bar, closing time approaching, begun hitting on anyone who might have a quote or strategy they could pimp. Picture the Marx Brothers interviewing The Three Stooges.

CNN probably led the way in the farce as they increasingly ratcheted up the shrill calamitous apocalyptic tone, giving more airtime to a global recovery overview by including such analysts as the UK’s Richard Quest.

If you’ve ever heard the obnoxious, shrill and irritating sound of fingernails on a chalkboard or a wet tile saw screeching, understand what a twit full of bollocks is, then you know what he is.

Who he is, this salivating Mr. Magoo, this blatherer of useless nonsense, well, that’s another question. CNN pulled him off of his beat to cover the Prince William wedding for a few days----What the two concepts, a spreading world-wide fiscal meltdown and a pompous, meaningless ceremony (full of sound and fury, signifying nothing) had in common escaped me.

Certainly the wedding celebrated excess, including the excessive drains on every media outlet’s expense accounts to send their wonk chosen ones to cover it. Millions of $$$ spent to cover what a few networks could have then shared and no one the lesser for it. Sidebar question: Why is it that although they may have in-place affiliates, local stations spend the budget $$$ to send cutesy reporters to these things? Take that, you feisty carbon footprint!

Today, what with Tea Party Poopers, plus the left, right and middle ground politicos, where are we and what are we doing? Actually, we’re still lost, and we as a country or we as the world have done little or nothing but run around in latitudinal circles.

Here in America, we simply need to recalibrate our gullibility event horizon quotient. Our economy is inextricably linked to the global one, the emerging one that leads to the return of an ancient metaphor: “The world is flat.”

It’s become flat regarding the environment (think Japan nuclear meltdown, oil spills, contaminated imported food, volcanic eruptions, terrorism or the Artic poles melting) and here, as in the majority of developed countries, fiscal things have pancaked, flat-lined. Get used to it, like diamonds, this might just be forever. No one seems to utter the obvious: As a planet, as a species, we’re fakakta, schiesser, screwed blued and tattooed economically and environmentally---This IS the new reality. Goodbye good times, hello double-digit (10%+) unemployment. Hello, carbon dioxide, good-bye breathable oxygen.

Forget what they’ve estimated the fiscal nuances and jobless to be or headed, so many have given up seeking work and we have so many illegals and unknowables here that we’re in worse shape than they can fathom or compute. This is a gone dead train. This isn’t stagnant, that implies the chance of a broken logjam, of movement. We’re more like DOA. And recently it was acknowledged that more and more significant numbers slip below the poverty level, more and more families go to bed hungry, without health care and many seriously ill.

CNN and all of the rest of the media dorks have expressed their contradictory positions: We’ve never been here before as a country or world, yet someone somewhere has some master plan to help us set sail for a full recovery. And gullible viewers believe that?

If your spaceship was broken down, you were marooned on a distant planet with unfriendly goblins, a deadly climate and a place no one had ever visited, a place where you have no experience at travelling around on or ever explored, where your money is worthless even if you had some, could you find your way around let alone find a way out?

In a sort of economic version of the movie “AVATAR”, if we’ve never been here before as these people have repeatedly told us, then why believe them now? Why believe that electing anyone for President (let alone that mentioned trash collector) will lead us out of the fiscal desert, out of our stranded dire straits? James Cameron called the substance humans coveted on the planet Pandora in AVATAR “unobtanium.” Well, maybe any significant global recovery is ironically that: Unobtainable.

As for the recent spate of go-to blather, well just as you can’t fix stupid, you can’t just materialize jobs by chanting “Job Creation In The Manufacturing Sector” like some hypnotized automaton. I’m not sure about other nations, but this one isn’t going to succeed that way, we don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell.

We might partially regain some of the big game’s ducats by expanding our technical potentiality. As competitive manufacturers either here or abroad, we’re toast, no one here can support themselves on 3rd World wages. You can’t make something out of nothing (I’ll leave the Lord God Creator element out of this), not even magicians do that, they’ve got SOMETHING up their sleeves, now don’t they? Are we destined to become a nation of salespeople, just product pimps and middle-men for commerce? How long will that last?

Unfortunately there are those cretins who assert that the very people who serve and protect you (firemen, police, lifeguards, etc.) are overpaid and besides we have too many of them. The next time you need a 911 response for yourself or a loved one, maybe playing Good Samaritan and you get a recording, remember that the belt-tightening strategy.

These are the same shortsighted budget-slashers who covet the reduction of teacher’s salaries and benefits (you know, the ones who educate and help raise the very global technocratic class that might emerge in my dream), leading the charge in slashing school district funds. How is an uneducated populace, already falling behind, ever going to be competitive or catch up?

See, it’s easy for them once elected, once they get hired. Did you know that only 20% of all state lawmakers have post-high school diplomas? Maybe that’s part of the problem, little education. Unlike the rest of us blue collar folks they see as the teeming unwashed masses, the under-class hordes, the schmucks, they’re on the dole for life. They’re inured, protected.

Massive public works projects could make a dent. It’s a well-known fact that here in America we don’t build things to last. Our engineers, given their historical technical parameters and budgets, designed project infrastructure (water, gas, sewer lines, bridges, roads, etc.) to have about a 50-75 year projected life span. Our population around 1935 was about 127 million, and today it’s at around 311 million. 2.5 times the population literally riding in a 75 year-old railroad car and on similarly aged rails. And folks, we’ll be riding the newly created 3rd rail, NOT politicians who refuse to touch this fiasco or fund it now.

Certainly, as we read every day in the media, the center is not holding, we’re falling apart piece-by-piece whether it’s a country road or a metropolitan building. Water mains are blowing, electrical grids failing, bridges collapsing, levees washed aside, sewers and waste treatment plants over-whelmed spewing human contaminates pell-mell, ubiquitously. You’d have to have your head up your ass to not know this is a result of antiquated systems.

The tort system is up, so lawsuits will keep our legal industry afloat. Injury and wrongful death attorneys WILL have jobs. Lots. I can hear them filing their fangs and claws to sharp points as I write.

Our infrastructure, whether built, owned and maintained by a public works departments and/or private corporations, has entered a dangerous place, hazardous actually if you consider all of the monumental impacts failures represent. We’re in a state of infrastructural breakdown, of entropy at a time when the economy is doing the same dance.

Unfortunately, that kind of WPA mentality could put only a few million people to work, lead to some stimulation like those high-voltage paddles for heart attack victims. The main body will still be old and weak as it flails towards minor stimulus or recovery. And the sands of time are running out and against us. While the imbeciles in Washington work this out to benefit their vested interests, the ones who prop them up with money, while they haggle over their constituents pork barrel needs, we suffer.

Like the story of the frog and the scorpion, these political a-holes will drag us all down as they juggle for the limelight on the nightly news. It’s their nature. They look great doing it too in spiffy clothes and coiffed hair, do they look like one of us, do they look like they’re suffering a meltdown?

Incumbents and candidates alike scream that we need to spend less while pulling back on regulatory oversight. Like cancer surgeons or gardeners, “cut cut cut” is all they know, damn the torpedoes, full speed astern. Corporate America will be our friends. Oh, great, was trickle down good for you? Isn’t that what got us where we found ourselves back in 2007, a dead end, winding up in the $$$ drainage gutters of Wall Street? Republicans yell about NOT increasing taxes on the wealthy, reduce spending, but how are we going to finance infrastructural rehab if we don’t have any money?

And those increasing millions of people slipping below the poverty level? We’ve created a two-class society, the middle class either microscopic or non-existent. Open a 1^st year sociology book addressing historical models: When you divide into “Haves” and “Have-Nots” you get violent social upheaval, massive and uncontrollable demonstrations, riots. On THAT issue the media have warned us, albeit in a muted voice. THAT aspect should alarm you, it should freak you out because we have a good chance of going back to the angry 60’s and “Burn Baby Burn” without the police or firemen to quell the looting conflagration …or at least as good a chance of 100% fiscal recovery once the smoldering flames die down as you’re being sold.

And if you want a cross-section of where we are and where we’re headed, turn off CNN, FOX, MSNBC, turn off Rush Limbaugh, NPR or Don Imus et al: S-N.com browsers might want to recover their youth, when people actually read paper pages: “The End of America” (2007) by Naomi Wolf or the religious right, end-of-times novel by the same name, authored by John Price-----Remember, it’s Armageddon, who’s going to be left to quibble about copyrights or trademarks? And this Christian diatribe is, like Wall Street wonks for commerce, prophetic. Personally, I found it racist and pathetic, several things it has in common with the men in the gray flannel suits.

Another really groovy browse is “AFTERSHOCK: Protect Yourself and Profit in the Next Global Financial Meltdown” (2009).

All three have led to a veritable cottage industry surrounding them. And puh-lease, don’t pay for them, borrow them or check them out of your local library---That is if yours hasn’t closed yet due to budget cuts!

I will throw one piece of encouragement out for your consideration: You don’t have to believe in the spirit, premises or conclusions of available information out there. But it is very stimulating, very healthy to read what you DON’T believe instead of reinforcing existing biases---It’s like travel, it opens your mind up, it allows for divergent instead of convergent thinking processes. It’s my humble opinion that only reading what you already agree with is stunting, incestuous, leads to the very placed Americans find themselves: Get outside of yourselves, NOT brainwashed by TV/Radio instead of reality.

AFTERSHOCK’s scholarly, erudite and fiscally savvy writers claim that they were the first to sound the Big Bubble Bursting alarm bells. They also assert that it's not too late for those who act quickly and correctly, there is still time to protect yourself, your family, and your business in the coming Dark Economic Ages. That is IF you’re not one of the lower caste schnooks already left out in the cold.

Sure, sure, you were the onliest ones who knew that there even was a bubble, predicted that bubble would burst, just like the Spanish Inquisition, who woulda thunk it could happen, huh?

Plus it does seem weird to a layperson like myself that there is a premise embedded here by these pros: Economics, and fiscal analyses, are sciences of some kind. Well, once again, never been here before, upon what classic analytic tools of observation can one then depend upon? Just as the stock market is speculation aren’t their conclusions for getting us out basically just guessing? Couldn’t I draw up a dartboard with as much statistical accuracy potential as some brainiac sitting in a well-financed ivory tower has?

See, you must already be a HAVE to do as their implied checklist suggests, you must already HAVE a tidy sum, flexibility and a parachute. The book specifically pushes: (1) Buying gold, (2) Selling your second home (vacation or investment property real estate), (3) Selling your business, (4) Buying Inverse ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds), (5) Converting your variable to a fixed rate mortgage.

All of that’s groovy, but what if you don’t HAVE any of those things? What if you lost everything in the meltdown or never had those things? Isn’t this formulaic manual a disguised or thinly-veiled Economic Darwinism Handbook? If you’re an über-wealthy HAVE, you can find means to avoid taxation, relocate into your mountain fortress or perhaps become a 3^rd world country ex-patriot where your gold buys more. Then again, finally a level playing field, EVERY country is going to be a 3^rd World Nation, huh?

If you’re a HAVE NOT in this book’s worst-case scenario, I suggest that you contemplate buying lots of guns and ammo, including the ability to recover your shell casings, melt down pots and pans, pour, then load your own full metal jacket rounds.

Like the zombie films where the surviving protagonists forage for limited resources, you’ll need those kind of “assets” to take whatever you need off of the rich still on domestic soil. Now THAT’S survival of the fittest! I’m 65, and even though I might not be around then I’m stocking up my revolver’s inventory and mulling over the assortment of hunting and assault rifles available. If it happens before I go, well, my local police can’t be everywhere at once, I’ll take what I need off of the HAVES who are a-plenty in my upscale, destination resort community. Our posh 5 star hotels and restaurants would be sitting ducks for a trained Marine!

After mentioning my column, a friend lent me a purported final draft of the last chapter of AFTERSHOCK (2^nd Edition) that has a strategic plan summation “considered too controversial to be included in the 2011, 2^nd Edition by the authors.” I must include the warning “purported” because who can tell if it’s actually the author’s thoughts or someone else? Nonetheless, it is consistent with the book and it is a cold-water bath, very startling.

It forecasts the social unrest but predicts no social chaos. Huh? There will not be mass violence in the streets, just demonstrations. Yeah, many will get stressed due to economic pressures. Divorce rates will rise, ditto for domestic violence. More family murders, murders of friends and failed business associates. Massive layoffs will lead to former employee-employer killings. Mid-management personnel given the “pink slip” task will also get bumped off in significant numbers.

It also projects an ongoing, surviving albeit diminished middle-class. Even says, in a twisted act of pretzel logic, that we’ll actually be wealthier after that Big Bubble Bursts. Ha ha, these experts are hilarious in an otherwise stoic look at our future.

Sorry, AFTERSHOCK authors, but you aren’t consistent, you contradict common sense after what you describe will happen: One-half of all American businesses fold and you still project the existence of a middle class, a viable economic structure with social mobility? You call that science?

In fact, it coldly predicts that the lower-level bureaucrats (be they corporate or even appointed and elected public officials) will get bumped off by the gross---But those higher echelon politicos will simply withdraw behind secure doors and windows, a kind of bunker mentality, local law enforcement their security detail and body guards. Paid for via taxation by the very barbarians at the gates!

The book and its strategies rely upon an interesting yet controversial point: The people WITH investments, the people WITH beaucoup assets and stock portfolios CAN shelter themselves. They CAN prepare, they CAN avoid the consequences of a USA or even global fiscal meltdown. We CAN increase productivity. Which is pretty ironic considering that was Obama’s mantra in 2008: “YES WE CAN!” This isn’t a children’s fable “The Little Engine That Could.” Kinda lookin’ like “NO WE CAN’T!” right about now, isn’t it?

Maybe Jared Diamond’s books could find a place, some resonance in your mindset. His novel “COLLAPSE” is fascinating, I’ve tried to read everything he’s written and self-educate myself---Though I’m not in 100% agreement they do stimulate and stir up the brain. Here’s Diamond’s own thoughts on COLLAPSE:

“This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute. My previous book (“Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Society”) had applied the comparative method to the opposite problem: the differing rates of buildup of human societies on different continents over the last 13,000 years. In the present book focusing on collapses rather than buildups, I compare many past and present societies that differed with respect to environmental fragility, relations with neighbors, political institutions, and other "input" variables postulated to influence a society's stability. The "output" variables that I examine are collapse or survival, and form of the collapse if collapse does occur. By relating output variables to input variables, I aim to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses.”

Author and anthropologist Daniel Quinn also points to the same pre-civilized, when-we-were-tribes benchmark, somewhere around 12-13,000 years ago as a critical nexus. That era was the crossroads acknowledged by many like him as where we took the wrong fork. We went from LEAVERS to TAKERS, from foraging to sequestering, hoarding, elitist/aristocratic controlling and VOILA! Capitalism was born. Explore the “ISHMAEL” trilogy, once again the caveat: Borrow don’t buy, keep an open mind whilst perusing, turn off your iPOD, TV or radio, ok?

And hey, don’t trust or believe me, but also don’t believe mainstream media. I never said that I had any expertise, I just sense that those X-Files mantra goofs were either ON something or ONTO something: The truth is out there. Trust no one. I admit that I haven’t a clue how to get out of this morass, but I don’t swallow FOX or Washington’s kool-aid either. At least I admit it and am not gullible, Pollyanna or even ignorantly utopian.

I would encourage you to stop being so optimistic and gullible too, start questioning the media sources you chronically follow, the advice or views you adapt or embrace. Maybe they’re letting you slip into darkness and don’t really care except for themselves, their stash, ever thought of that?

And as for those evangelicals like Joel Osteen and Rick Warren, tossing your money at them and their Plentitude-I’ll-guide-you-to-the rapture BS, that’s as nutty as the 70 virgins in Heaven that Islamic jihadists get sold.

Like the weakest link on LOST or SURVIVOR, those network waterheads and TV preachers have no lifeline to throw you, they cannot help you, they are NOT Moses leading you out of the global fiscal crisis desert. They’re getting 7 figure/year salaries, they don’t feel your pain in the makeup chair while getting prettied up. They, like your elected representatives, HAVE benefits and health care packages, they’re like hookers, they’re faking empathy.

Like porno fluffers, their cushy job is to keep the anxiety up, fan the flames of fear. These talking heads and gorgeous faces are celebrities, if they don’t exploit your terror then they’ll go to Plan B which is create something new to be afraid of…….Then you’ll keep tuning back in to bump their market share, their Nielsen Ratings.

Aristotle sat at the feet of Plato, then he was asked to mentor Ptolemy and Alexander the Great. Was Larry King or Bernard Shaw ever Plato, is Wolf Blitzer our Aristotle? Do you see televangelist Benni Hinn as Paul of Tarsus? Seriously, do you actually believe that they are that wise, think that they feel your pain or even share your general fright when not on camera?

2500 years ago the Oracle at Delphi in Greece came out of her trance, declared Socrates the wisest living man. Why? Because she had been told that: “Socrates knows that he knows nothing.” Now there’s a novel idea the media should embrace, that they really don’t know anything, have nothing new to offer and just shut up.

Do you really believe that Howard Stern, Glen Beck, Bill Maher, Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly with their millions from syndication have to check their bank accounts daily trying to figure out where they’ll get the money to feed their kids? No, they’re torn between pre-school Montessori’s (about $600/week), on to Choate, Exeter or Concord prep schools, eventually making that tough choice between Harvard and Yale…….not having to work 3 jobs (like their fans) while their kids stay at home until 30 working part-time (“Kid, wanna super-size that?”). Or the other scenario where their children work while in high school, eventually putting themselves through trade schools or community college (still living at home, 2 to a room) only to wind up unemployed or in low-paying, dead end jobs.

And the next time they ask you to sign up for a text message poll, Twitter/Facebook insta-poll or whatever bogus enfranchised method they use to push you deeper into the depression and fearful Hell they love to salivate over, entice you to voice your opinion uselessly, an opinion they really could care less about? Don't!

Just stop and think about what these same hucksters told you 5 years ago or last night. They were stupid then, they’re clueless now, you’ve had your trust and truthiness cherries popped and now must face extreme measures, a dystopic future you didn’t want or really even create.

America went down a management
cul-de-sac decades ago, just as Alice
went down that hole

America went down a management cul-de-sac decades ago. We became convinced that everything could be managed, the economy, the environment, cleansing our souls, anything we set our skills and righteous minds to would be successful. We’re a nation based upon the principle of accomplishment, after all we’re the democratic world model, the prototype of freedom. Nothing too complex or difficult for us to control, to direct, to remedy, right? Apparently no one has realized that this logic may be faulty, been bold enough to tell us poor schlubs.

These tough times might last for your lifetime regardless of your age now. Maybe forever. Deal with it, stop whining or looking for Mommy (the government) or Daddy (God) to intervene. You’re not getting off of this island, you’re stuck, your money, your rations (non-replaceable natural resources) are getting depleted, your water increasingly fouled, your personal options becoming more limited day-by-day.

There’s an old saying that when you’re lost any direction is a good direction, a bastard version of Louis Carroll’s character Alice “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

Psychologist Rollo May said: "Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.” Well, we’ve certainly lost our way when we rely upon TV celebutards and politicians with sub-100 IQs to tell us so. You might get better prognostications from your drunken Uncle Fred, unlike Piers Morgan, at least he’ll personally answer the phone when you call up demanding an explanation.

My personal favorite? Yogi Berra’s fracturing: "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

The world’s wealthiest class, the New Age Pharaohs who sit on top of the pyramid of the now AND future power won’t need or use money, they don’t need hedge funds. Money will be antiquated just like that 100 year-old concrete bridge down the street. The big cartels and conglomerates will have sequestered and hoarded fuel, food and water resources. They’ll be living in remote enclaves like Waterworld or Mad Max, their centurion or warrior caste their progeny’s guardians---Indentured slaves exchanging food, clothing and shelter for protection. They have insured their family tree future, isolated (insulated?) themselves from becoming victims of the furious collapse they know is imminent.

In that frame of mind or context, T. Boone Pickens and Ted Turner should be our guiding lights, they’ve been ahead of the curve for years by gobbling up land, natural gas and water rights wherever they were for sale. Ted Turner’s recent apocalyptic predictions might be right: We’ll be at war with each other in 15 years over the most basic of needs we’ve formally took for granted (water, fuel, etc.), probably be eating each other for sustenance in 25 years.

I’m 65 and I’m already gone”, but before I drift into the big sleep, I give you another warning type ditty from the same era:

His resumé is extensive, try an online GOOGLE search of his personal journey and historical accomplishments. His consultation fees are reasonable and if you've got a major project that alarms you, that needs creative intervention, then he's your man. His credentials and "CV" can be provided upon request.