The reboot of Patrick McGoohan’s celebrated psy-fi series closed shop last night on AMC. But will it live on as long as its original copy? I pondered The Prisoner’s lasting legacy for Wired last week. Read More »
[Naomi Klein, The Nation]
The other day I received a pre-publication copy of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit. It’s set to come out ten years after a historic coalition of activists shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, the spark that ignited a global anticorporate movement.
The book is a fascinating account of what really happened in Seattle, but when I spoke to David Solnit, the direct-action guru who helped engineer the shutdown, I found him less interested in reminiscing about 1999 than in talking about the upcoming United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen and the “climate justice” actions he is helping to organize across the United States on November 30. “This is definitely a Seattle-type moment,” Solnit told me. “People are ready to throw down.” Read More »
[Jim Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation]
Every time I do a Q and A after a college lecture, somebody says (with a fanfare of indignation) - so as to reveal their own brilliance in contrast to my foolishness - “You haven’t said anything about overpopulation!”
Right. I usually don’t bother. Their complaint, of course, implies that we would do something about overpopulation if only we would recognize it. Which is absurd. What might we do about overpopulation here in the USA? Legislate a one-child policy? Set up an onerous set of bureaucratic protocols forcing citizens to apply for permission to reproduce? Direct the police to shoot all female babies? Use stimulus money to build crematoria outside of Nashville?
It’s certainly true that the planet is suffering from human population overshoot. We’re way beyond “carrying capacity.” Only the remaining supplies of fossil fuels allow us to continue this process, and not for long, anyway. In the meantime, human reproduction rates are also greatly increasing the supply of idiots relative to resources, and that is especially problematic in the USA, where idiots rule the culture and polity. Read More »
Time is too short to explain here why I loved Patrick McGoohan’s influential series The Prisoner. Instead, Wired paid me to pontificate about it, starting with AMC’s ambitious reboot starring Sir Ian McKellen and Jim Caviezel. Might as well bring the worst news first: Read More »
[Jim Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation]
In The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and ineffectual - that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in years ahead, whether it was a government, a state university, a national chain retail company, or a giant midwestern farm. It is characteristic of the compressive contraction our society faces that giant hypercomplex systems will wobble and fail. We should expect this.
It’s tragic that the avatar of hopefulness himself, Barack Obama, stepped into his role at exactly the moment when this set of conditions was getting traction. It is sure to get worse, and there are going to be a lot of disappointed people out there who will be suffering terrible losses and real pain in daily life. Societies don’t do well when the public falls into the broad despair that is the opposite of hope. That’s when the long knives and the tribal animosities come out and things get smashed.
Within the context of conventional party politics - the kind that has been baseline “normal” in the USA for a long time - we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for “hope” - if not hope itself - the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They’re flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government’s name. They’re willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against “the malefactors of great wealth.” They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return to the prior state of reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a “consumerism”) that has made us so ridiculous and unhealthy.
Read More »
The greatest band of the ’80s and ’90s is back again, this time to rep its crossover knockout Doolittle with a full-album tour, including B-sides. This monkey just went to heaven for Wired. Read More »
[Greg Palast, Morphizm]
On September 11, 2001, my office building, the World Trade Center, was attacked by al Qaeda, a murder cult of Saudi Arabians, funded by Saudi Arabians. And so, in response to the Saudis’ attack, America invaded … Afghanistan. Like, HUH?
And here we go again. New York Times headline last Friday: “Pakistani Army, In Its Campaign In Taliban Stronghold, Finds A Hint Of 9/11.” Google it and you’ll find the Times report repeated and amplified 5,785 times more. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11. Your eyelids are getting heavy. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.
It’s the latest hit from the same crew that brought you Saddam = 9/11 and its twin chant, Saddam = WMD, Dick Cheney’s chimerical tropes which the New York Times’ Judith Miller happily channeled to the paper’s front page. Read More »
I recently interviewed Devo’s head mutant Mark Mothersbaugh about his busily devolved life. Lately, it includes taking Devo on tour to perform full-album concerts of its recently reissued classics Are We Not Men? and Freedom of Choice.
But it also includes crafting up deranged rugs for your home and mine, where a homosexual cyclops ponders the walk of shame, and worse. Get one for your kids! For the office! But scan my chat and gallery on Wired first. Read More »
I conceived this article before the Dow passed 10,000, and wrote it afterward. It went up on AlterNet right before the Dow fell from 10,000 and now I’m posting it here as it tries to climb back. But it won’t.
We’re still out of value, out of options and almost of time with this recession hallucination. Let’s call it what it is: A depression, one that will revalue our nation as we knew it.
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[Jim Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation]
A side-trip to the local mall - where else to buy ammo around here? - evinced an epic struggle for supremacy of the chain stores between the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus, with both fat-assed icons trying to shove the other out of the primary display sites as if the store aisle were a WWF ring in some grubby forsaken Palookaville far far from the salons of Washington decision-making, which, I guess, this is. This is the kind of place that a Jimmy Stewart character would have called home in 1946; only today it looks like a place taken over by a certain species of space aliens, slovenly in mind as well as body.
Our gods are not happy. Anyway, that third fat-assed icon, the Thanksgiving Turkey, was nowhere in sight, perhaps due to the recognition that there is far more grievance than gratitude ‘out here’ in the fly-over zone. Read More »
My name is Scott Thill, and I launched alt-culture pusher Morphizm.com on July 4 2001. It serves as the home base for my professional and original work, as well as those who I like. I'm currently a journo for Wired, AlterNet, Filter, Huffington Post and more, many of whom can be found on the Who? page above, along with other Morphizm contributors. Want to get in touch? Visit the Contact page. Enjoy. 
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