We're only a few weeks into 2016 and bullshit is everywhere. It's even worst than I thought it would be. Here in the United States, the media are obsessed with the presidential race to the near-total exclusion of everything else.
I mean, this is bad. In 2015 at least we could ridicule that bogus Paris climate deal. This year, we'll be lucky if climate change gets mentioned at all. Even the oversold recovery, which is always the most important issue on voters' minds, is taking a back seat to Donald, Bernie, Hillary and Ted. And nobody has cast a vote yet. Check out The Huffington Post homepage to see what I mean.
Oh, wait, there's the $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot. I forgot.
I keep a notes file for stuff I may want to write about or stuff I might want to link-to when I post. So far this year, there's been hardly anything to take note of. There's that natural gas leak in southern California, and there are those dying seals and sea lions courtesy of Al Jazeera. That's about it among the things I might want to comment on. But neither story is compelling to me. Been there, done that.
The world's financial markets, including the U.S. stock market, are in "correction" territory, and that's interesting, sort of. But really, what is there to say about it? We're in the 21st year of the Bubble Era. What goes up must come down. Case closed.
And oil prices? Well, $30/barrel for crude is indeed newsworthy, although I am at a loss to tell you what that means exactly outside the fact that the global economy is in really bad shape. Prices will go up again, eventually. Producers have to to keep the supply side going, though when prices will rise is anybody's guess at this point. China continues to unravel. The "emerging markets", especially those that are resource-based, are a mess.
Both the market turmoil and plummeting oil prices give a big boost to daily "end of the world'" predictions, but that's not what DOTE is all about.
Regardless, none of these stories is getting much coverage in the United States, where we are suffering a near-total intelligence blackout, as in there's not anything remotely "intelligent" going on. It's all politics all the time. There's dumb, and there's dumber.
While the blackout persists, posting will be light. David Bowie died. I was sorry to hear that.
Regarding economic doom:
I don't have the best understanding of this, so please bear with me. I've been hearing about how debt levels are out of control, unsustainable, etc. I get that unpaid/defaulted debt is bad thing. What I don't get is some aspects of this relationship between energy and debt. I understand that adding more debt allowed more investment in extracting expensive energy. I get that reversing that process would likely mean the opposite. However, I don't understand why people wouldn't abandon that system in order to get more energy. How can something like debt or credit, which are essentially imaginary, determine the physical availability of a tangible resource? Why would the world collectively say, "We can't get more of this real stuff since we have lost our faith in these human created concepts"?
Sorry if I'm not making much sense. It might be better if I just ignore these things completely.
Posted by: Jeremy | 01/14/2016 at 10:50 AM