In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is merely an observer
— Dave Cohen
As I was casting about for something to say today, I kind of gave up. You could say I am burned-out, and it's true, but that doesn't quite capture the greater truth behind the truth. I'm toasty because the world-at-large has become utterly predictable. The news is almost all bad of course, and that's a big part of the story, but I can't honestly see what I'm supposed to say about this noxious nonsense which I haven't already said many times before. This will not change.
Let me give you an example. Last week Bloomberg published American Dream Eludes With Student Debt Burden: Mortgages.
Luke Nichter of Harker Heights, Texas, said he’s not a renter by choice. The Texas A&M University history professor’s $125,000 of student debt means he has no hope of getting a mortgage.
Nichter, 35, who’s paying $1,500 a month on loans for degrees from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, is part of the most debt-laden generation to emerge from college. Two- thirds of student loans are held by people under the age of 40, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, blocking millions of them from taking advantage of the most affordable housing market on record.
The number of people in that age group who own homes fell by 4.6 percent in the fourth quarter from the third, the biggest drop in records dating to 1982...
And so on. The American Dream, which keeps getting re-defined downwards, is dead. Is this news? No! Give us a break! If you have a functioning brain you know the American Dream went belly-up in the hot noon-day sun a long time ago. The Bloomberg report has some nice details for those of you who are particularly fond of autopsies, but I am not one of those.
"Gee, Fred, that American Dream is deader than a doornail. Let's get out the sharp implements, cut it up, and see what happened."
If there is news in Bloomberg's student debt slavery report, it is that no one running this country feels even the smallest compunction about promoting the evil status quo. But few people are willing to tell you that.
No Change = Predictability. How many times does a person—do I—have to say things like The American Dream Is Dead?
So, I didn't want to write about debt slavery again. What's the fucking point?
And as I looked over my notes file, I saw many similar stories. Writing at Doug Short's website, Lance Roberts says the economic peak is in. He's got lots of charts to prove it. Of course the peak is behind us! That's only news to somebody who was delusional enough to think there was going to be a new boom after the the shit hit the fan five years ago.
I'm so burned-out about all this that I don't even feel like dragging that dummy Paul Krugman through the mud again. Economists are useless of course—there are no laws of economics—but what strikes me (and has for several years) is how many writers talking about the economy only do so because they have an investment interest in it. There's no moral sense, no sense of unfairness, no sense of injustice. The American Dream is a goner, oh, yeah, but so what? — how can I make money off it?
Therefore the big questions are what's the price of gold? What's the price of oil? And so on.
Here we meet up with the Greater Predictability of human beliefs, interests and actions. Humans love oil and gold. They love money! They can't stop thinking about it!
Maybe this tedious human obsession is tied up in their dominant instinctual drives to survive. Ya' think?
I'm not writing DOTE to report over and over again on lower brain-stem functions.
Then again, maybe that's precisely what I've been doing
Lately, you can't take a serious interest in "the news" without stumbling over a zillion articles about the price of gold. Unless you're living in a cave, you will have heard that the price of gold has plummeted in recent days. And so has the price of crude oil. Brent is now below $100/barrel.
“It looks like the ship is being abandoned,” said Addison Armstrong, director of market research at Tradition Energy in Stamford, Connecticut. “This is the second day in which we’ve seen strong selling accompanied by high volume in both WTI and Brent. The next target for WTI is right below $90, which is where we bounced from a little over a month ago.”
It looks like those oil traders who ran the price up for no good reason only a few months ago are abandoning ship now. Is that news? No! The only news here is that we're in the 18th year of the Bubble Era, as I wrote about last Friday in Sometimes the Pool-Pah...
In the Bubble Era, what goes up must come down. Always. Utterly predictable.
At the end of the world, half the humans will be dying and the other half will be trying to figure out how they can make a buck off it.
So as I feel the burn-out this morning, I have to ask myself is this the best the humans can do?
There's no avoiding the obvious conclusion. I don't even have to say it.
Yep. And in this country, it sure doesn't help that we live in the most narcissistic society that ever was or likely ever will be.
Posted by: Mr. Roboto | 04/18/2013 at 10:03 AM