This item seems to have slipped by, but I think it is important.  I thought it would develop, so I didn't write about it, but instead it sort of finished--for the moment.  But I think it will bubble up again, and soon.  Whence my belated alert.  

Musharraf, America's puppet in Pakistan, has made some bad choices lately, first ignoring and firing Pakistan's highest judge--roughly equivalent, I suppose, to a Supreme Court Justice, and now engaging in a shoot-out assault (actually a massacre) on a mosque in the capital city.  

The details of the shoot-out, over several days, are collected at the Agonist.  

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was left shaken but unhurt on Thursday on his first visit to Baghdad after a Katyusha rocket landed just meters from a building where he was giving a news conference.

Moments after telling journalists he might boost the United Nations' presence in Iraq because of improved security, a thunderous blast sent shockwaves through the conference venue, startling Ban and sending him ducking for cover behind a podium.

 

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Promoted by Steven D.

I wasn't going to write this, but then I saw skippybkroo's post on the spike in housing foreclosures languishing at the bottom of the diary list, and realized that he had caught the Scoop of the Week.  

It may not have been obvious:  This week has seen several interesting and portentious events.  But the import of his diary is this:  Our economy has entered the black hole of no return.  We have crossed the event horizon.  

His diary did not quite spell it out, and one might have missed it.  But this week I have been following the stories posted on The Housing Bubble, and change is in the air.  Go ahead and read.  Construction has stopped on major condo projects all over the country.  Unsold units abound.  Sold but UNOCCUPIED units abound.  Suddenly we are seeing what appear to be TORCHINGS of construction projects with no attempt to make it look accidental.  The smell of panic is as thick as the smoke.

Last Wednesday, on the twelfth day of winter, I walked to the top of a local hill to watch the rising of the full Moon.  Clouds to the west caught the red light of the setted Sun, and illuminated the shrubs and stones of the hilltop in a gentle, Otherworldly glow.  The land below, city-lights and all, sank away into darkness like the depths of the ocean.  The hilltop became an island, hovering above the gloom.  Overhead, a sky borrowed from late springtime matched the faux-vernal breeze playing with my open jacket.  The Moon rose in banded veils of unbleached chiffon.  The world stopped.  

We are all in.  

I am so embedded, personally, and as a society Americans are so embedded generally, in this construct of mind, that it is almost impossible to think about it directly.  So my excuse--such as it is--in writing so obliquely is that I do not have a better approach.  

As usual, I started my internet day with a survey of news and political blogs.  The item attracting blog attention was President Bush's rejection of (his father's) Iraq Study Group with his own assertion that instead of drawing down the commitment he will instead add 50,000 troops.  

Why is one unsurprised?  

Most of us can see that this is a military disaster, but there are two things that are harder to see.  First, that this is a perfect embodiment of the American spirit, as taught in countless aphorisms, self-help books, and Hollywood movies.  If Bush's pronouncements are really just prolefeed for the rubes, that is what he is appealing to.  Being delusional, it is possible he believes it himself.  

Second, these fantasies and delusions attract because the reality we have laid for ourselves is really, really hard.  Whether our desire for Iraq is democracy, an end to sectarian war, or simply to grab all that oil, there is no strategy whatever that can offer ANY of these things, let alone all of them.  

Who is willing to face that?  

And those are just the failed goals.  What about the malign consequences that are now fated to ensue?  

Last week I left off with this:

I feel sleep seeping into my head with each happy, irrelevant conversation I have, to the point I can hardly think  

I had better stop complaining, and just accept it:  This is my life!  

Monday, at a discussion group, our topic was sustainable housing.  Don't ask what that means--we never got there.  It was almost possible to ask where our food is going to come from; where we are going to live was too much to put on the agenda.  

Did I ever feel sleep closing in!  

The high-point (such as it was) was when I mentioned that the housing market has gone into a coma.  

"What do you mean!  You said that a year ago!"  

Too true: A year ago I had refered to Ian Welsh's prediction of July 2005 that the housing bubble would burst, probably in the fall of 2006 or winter of '06-'07, with serious impacts on the US economy.  

That was a year ago.  The prediction was for THIS year.  It looks to me now like Welsh is proving right, give or take a few months.  The bubble-burst has arrived, the larger economic effects have not (yet).  But how is it that what I said a year ago was remembered now, except with the meaning leached out?

This was so much like so many conversations these days.  If we are "reality-based" (unlike the Rethuglicans) how can we ignore the context in which any political policy or program has to be placed?  

James Howard Kundstler rails against peaceniks, well, the particular peacenik who sets off his ire drives not one but TWO SUVs!  That explains a lot.  The peaceniks I know myself do not bug me:  I agree with them.  (They also drive smaller cars.)  Except that, to be really for peace, you have to welcome the implications of giving up the war.  And while all of them are nice, good-hearted people,  they are pretty adamant about not thinking about that.  This does not seem to me a virtue.  

The Green(!) Party is just as bad.  I have nearly had it.  I am almost ready to take Dmitri Orlov's advice and found a local Collapse Party.  If I had any organizing skills I would.  

If I am going to stop complaining, I had better do something else instead.  And so, I review our context, the Triple Crisis--or, as Catherine Austin Fitts calls it (you thought I was a pessimist!)--the Terminal Triangle.  

It was Monday a week ago that Boston Joe posted a diary on Dr. Bussard's fusor design for a nuclear fusion power reactor, as described in his talk at Google.  

After viewing the lecture twice, it seemed to me that the fusor is indeed a serious and promising line of enquiry--more promising than the tokamak (in its various forms, including ITER)--and I reposted Boston Joe's diary at European Tribune, where it got a rather frosty reception.  But there were also some useful responses, including a link to the physicist Lubos Motl, who works in string theory, who posted on his blog a clear and concise summary of Dr. Bussard's design.  

But that is not precisely my topic today.  Rather, I want to note how I surprised myself with my enthusiasm for this research proposal, and what it meant that I should be so enthused.  For three days my entire mood was shifted and lifted!  

Why?  

(Though in a very limited way) the fusor design promises a way out--an amelioration--of what is coming, and no matter how hard I try, I cannot face THAT without a sense of desperation that I have not really acknowledged.  

Promoted by Steven D. As James says in the comments, "This is some good shizznit."

The media excitement over the "death" of "Zarqawi" does not excite me, but it has led to a plethora of diaries on several blogs.  This is natural, but some of the postings suggest that many folk are missing the essential points of information war.  Whence this.  

I begin by touting the site of James Howard Kuntsler, whose Daily Grunt of 18 May on the collapse of intellectual thought in the academic world will having you laughing or crying (or both).  Not my topic today, but a warning nonetheless:  When the academic world gives up standards of truth, it gives up its reason for existing--and will not, much longer.  Like everything else in our society, it seems to be rotting and going down.  (I don't doubt that the Republicans want this.)

More to the point is his Clusterfuck Nation essay of 15 May 2006:

   

Is it even possible these days to define a valid doctrine of political Progressivism?

This is the key point.  Progressives feel like they are creating themselves out of nothing, as though the progressive movement had never existed.  There is a reason for that:  

   

Nigeria's oil production capacity has been cut to 631,000 barrels per day (bpd), or some 25 percent of the country's total output, following attacks on a major pipeline belonging to Italy oil giant Agip.

According to a story posted on From the Wilderness.  The pipeline in the oil-rich Niger Delta was reported blown up on Friday night.

Remember the part early in The Handmaiden's Tale where the women wake up to find their bank accounts are frozen?  (Also they are fired from their jobs.)

Well, come next week I cannot cash checks in my own bank on my own bank account.  

Three weeks ago (Thurs--TAC VIII) I tried to write about the correct relationship of life and death.  It was inadequate.  I try again.  

It's a little urgent:  Stirling Newberry writes that Americans are not ready to give up on Bush. [OOPS--if you went there, you know I should have said GOP! Not the same (though no less depressing)--that's how information gets dirty. Sorry. FRIDAY 18: 05 EST] Why?  Because they think housing prices are still rising.  How can he write this without sinking into despair?  He is describing a people going cheerfully to extinction.  

Call it the Triple Crisis.  That's apt enough.  The parts:  politics, energy, biosphere (climate).  Each looks like a complete crisis, all by itself, but actually is generated by and linked to the other parts.  This is why each is thoroughly intractible.  Holistic thinking is required and we don't do holistic thinking.  Only compartmentalized thinking is permitted discourse.  Besides it would mean changing our Way of Life (of driving around in cars all the time) and that is Non-Negotiable.  

Coming back on line after having been sick--(which is why I didn't post last week, it was really that bad)--is a bit of a shock.  Events have advanced ahead of schedule.  First, my browser tells me that the PATRIOT Act--the great Undead of legislation, is re-passed, with all but a few Dems signing on to kill the Republic.  My own (Dem) delegation voted death.  

Drowned like a baby--you gotta love Rethug imagery--in a bathtub indeed!  

Today a friend says to me:  "It is such a nice day today."  Warm sun was melting the snow which had fallen heavily on Sunday.  

I was reminded of a festival a few years ago up in the hills a couple hours from where I live.  Though it was late spring, the weather had been cold and rainy the entire weekend--extreme even for the hills, which are always a bit wet.  Then the last morning came up sunny and warm.