Stirling Newberry's blog

[2012-04-20: This hardy perennial from Stirling Newberry just got a link from the SideShow, so I thought I'd repost it to the top of the heap once again. My hat is off to perhaps the best 30,000 foot view of American politics I've ever read. For "progressive," since that term been co-opted by Moderate D weasels (sorry for the redundancy), you might perhaps read "prefigurative left" -- everybody who's sick at heart from the corruption, the looting, and is trying in their everyday practice to make the situation better with solutions that scale. In other words, it's not a matter of policy lists any more, as I wrote two years ago. It's systems.... Read on! --lambert]

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[2010-09-12: If Yves can do Summer Re-Runs, then I can do Fall Classics. This post by Stirling Newberry from 2009-07-09 is one such. Vocabulary note: In using the word Progressive, Stirling does not mean 'career "progressive",' but... the "third pole" in American politics, by which he does not mean anything like the "Third Way." --lambert]

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[2010-04-17: Welcome, Open Left readers! Stirling wrote in 2009. Needless to say, in 2010 self-identified career "progressives" are firmly at the Moderate pole, based on the health insurance company bailout debacle, the news blackout imposed on single payer policy advocates, and a general unwillingness to challenge the Obama administration when it consolidates and rationalizes Bush policies (for example, executive powers) --lambert]

[2009-07-09 I'm leaving this sticky because Stirling's ideas generated such good discussion. --lambert]

[And again Sunday. Generally, I'm agnostic about policy lists, but after looking at what Obama and our tribunes of the people in the blogosphere -- that is, the Moderates -- did to single payer, I'm starting to change my mind. What would be Progressive policy wedge issues that would break up the Confederates and/or the Moderates? I say policy because it might make sense to start from the fresh perspective that "It matters that you're a citizen. It doesn't matter what your fucking social identity markers are -- These are the basics that every citizen should get." --lambert]

It would be easy to hope that this downturn represents the final capitulation of the Bush years, and that once we work away the excess, that there will be a new age after it. However, this is not what the numbers indicate. While selling self-spin and hope may be the province of those who hope to curry favor with the powers that be, or with masses of people desperate to believe that this is as bad as it will get, hard slabs of reality are my stock and trade.

Let me introduce you to post-petroleum thesis.

Some time ago, I warned people. It was over a year ago and some. Those warnings, as usual, are not heeded, because in our present degenerate age, we spend all of our time communalizing the last disaster, not preparing for the next one. The specific prediction was this: with the falling of the sunspot cycle, the sun's magnetic field, for long periods, will not impinge on the earth as much as it used to. This is because of the conveyor belt of sunspots. When the sun's outerbelt spins more slowly, more radiation leaks out, when it spins faster, less does. Read below the fold...

If you want to see scenario fulfillment, read anything popular. If it is popular, it is probably based on a bad idea that everyone accepts, and then argues for, precisely because everyone accepts it. The history of science, is the history of one person being right, and everyone else being wrong, which is why in a scientific society, wrongshock is a sacred moment: the moment where you find out that everything you believe is wrong. Read below the fold...

As fast as fingers can fly the news has gone from bad to worse, Democratic Congresswoman Giffords was shot at a public event. She is now reported in surgery, though earlier she had been reported dead. Fox News reports at least 12 were shot. This is not an isolated incident. Read below the fold...

This America is doomed. There will be another America, and millions of people will live there. Many will be happy. Some will be well off. But it will not be this America.

This Left is doomed. There will be another left, and people will believe in it. But it will not be this left, nor composed of the people who have been made icons of it. Read below the fold...

[I'm stickying this post, if a bit late, since it seems to tie together a lot of what we've been talking about since the lame duck session. --lambert] Read below the fold...

[Welcome Global Sociology readers! Welcome C&L readers! -- lambert]

Yesterday "Saw 3-D" hit the theatres, and was billed as the last of the series. This represents a cultural moment shift, and one that people should note carefully. Read below the fold...

Friday is a good day to write something that few will read, and most will not understand – for a long time. This essay is on a short topic, the process by which the pyramid top down structures are eating their own. Social organizations exist in feed back with their means of production and acquisition, and move along the lines of their communication and flow of benefits. One can see a structure by the equality of its nodes and the direction of communication and benefits. A pyramid is a top down structure were command flows primarily downward. Read below the fold...

The essential problem of the neo-liberal era is a broken triangle:

1. It has to have low inflation and volatility in the real economy, as well as in the macro-economy, otherwise, those who generate excess profits will not put them back into circulation as liquidity.

2. It has to have low interest rates and low liquidity preference by a sizable share of consumers.

3. It has to have greater volatility for individuals. Read below the fold...

[Welcome, Ian Welsh readers! Welcome, Crooks and Liars readers! --lambert]

Part II here. Read below the fold...

["The solution is redefining happiness." Read this post, and then read the next stickied post by Ohio. They're related! --lambert] Read below the fold...

In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin noted that inflation acted as a tax: the government could create money, spend it at par value, and others would have to take it, but be able to buy less with it. The Federal Reserve has a lesson to teach how "too much money" can lead to inflation. There is a voluminous literature on how governments can use "seigniorage" to its advantage. Read below the fold...

America is not at war with the Taliban, nor at war with Al Qaeda, nor with any other physical enemy, but at war with its own inner demons. When David Woods declares that Petreus' strategy "works" as a "fact" – he is blessedly, if post-ironically, able to ignore the "fact" that the people in his own example were assassinated. The supposed proof is Iraq, or rather the real proof is that Iraq has fallen out of the headlines. Read below the fold...

How did Ben Bernanke save the banking system? It's simple: he used that heroine of high finance, paper money. Since then the investors of the world have stumbled along, waiting for the next visit from the smack faerie. The performance of the markets over the last month has been the withdrawal of a small fraction of that "fiat money" from the system. Since the Yuan dynasty invented it, paper money has been one of those bad ideas whose time has come. Read below the fold...

Read below the fold...