Month: January 2016

by William Skink

I went to see The Big Short last night and was not disappointed. The movie takes the purposefully opaque world of Wall Street right as the big banks blew up the economy and renders it approachable to the general public with the help of actors they recognize, popular music and humor. My wife, who has listened to me rant about this over the years (God bless her), said the movie did a much better job of explaining how this shake-down was perpetrated than I ever managed.

When the housing bubble burst terms like mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps provided that nice touch of mystification to confuse the public as to the criminally fraudulent nature of what led to the inflation of the housing bubble in the first place.

While the function of Wall Street jargon is acknowledged in the movie, it’s the following quote attributed to an overheard conversation that got me thinking about language:

The truth is like poetry and most people fucking hate poetry.

I had to laugh reading this on the screen, not because I hate poetry, but because I think, at least in this country, it rings true for “most people”. They read that and laugh, thinking, yeah, fucking poetry.

While the veracity of the above quote is difficult gauge, I think it’s safe to say there are other cultures that view poetry as more culturally relevant to their lives than mainstream American culture. It’s with that in mind that I bring readers attention to this interesting headline from the Guardian: Poetry used as ‘a perfect weapon’ for recruiting violent jihadis, study finds. From the link:

Poetry may be a potent tool in recruiting militant jihadis, a new study by Oxford academic Elisabeth Kendall has found.

In Yemen’s al-Qaida and Poetry as a Weapon of Jihad, published in a forthcoming book, Twenty-First Century Jihad, she writes: “The power of poetry to move Arab listeners and readers emotionally, to infiltrate the psyche and to create an aura of tradition, authenticity and legitimacy around the ideologies it enshrines make it a perfect weapon for militant jihadist causes.”

Osama bin Laden composed an ode to the destruction of the USS Cole in 2000, which he recited at his son’s wedding, and a second example of his verse was discovered in an abandoned safe house in Kabul, having been distributed among trainee jihadis as an exhortation to fight.

“In the quest to understand the hearts and minds of those who practise militant jihad,” Kendall writes, “neglecting to interrogate the poetry that speaks to both would seem a fundamental oversight.”

Yes, you stupid westerners, go interrogate poetry. Or maybe water-board poetry, and if that doesn’t work, send in the drones to take poetry out.

Here’s more from the article:

Kendall’s research is based partly on data collected in conversation with 2,000 people in the sparsely populated but geographically huge Mahra region. Interviewees were asked about the significance of poetry in their lives, as part of a wider socio-economic survey conducted by the Mahra Youth Unity Organisation, an independent non-governmental body.

“The survey was conducted in December 2012 by local fieldworkers, men and women, face to face, to capture illiterate respondents of both genders. A startling 74% of respondents believed that poetry was either ‘important’ or ‘very important’ in their culture today,” she writes.

Have our academic cultural explorers stumbled on to something significant here? Is poetry an art form that really helps the terrorists recruit new terrorists to commit themselves to jihad?

Personally, I think this is fucking ridiculous. Poverty, wars of occupation and regime change, and financing from terrorist sponsor states like Saudi Arabia are the main factors driving young men toward jihad, not poetry.

But in our culture, where deceit has been normalized through our commercialized material culture and vacuous political rhetoric, I can understand the uneasiness that a culture that values poetry may pose. Language in America is so full of deceit the possibility of poetry to illuminate our world seems remote.

I could go on prosaically about this topic, but instead I composed a little poem. Enjoy!

A POEM FOR POEM-LOVING TERRORISTS

read your silly poems, terrorist
in your sorry sandbox home
dream your dreams of virgins
once your body to bits is blown
no jihad verse will stop
the west’s crusade to kill
you can keep your poems
we have sports and E.D. pills
for our science is superior
and our culture is the best
so read your silly poems, terrorist
before strapping on that vest

–William Skink

by William Skink

Don’t let the calendar fool you. There will be nothing new in the coming year to change the economic, geopolitical and environmental trends leading us toward cataclysm.

Up North, as in the North Pole, a “freak storm” caused temperatures to be 50 degrees higher than usual, making it colder here in Montana than in the arctic. Add that to intense flooding in the midwest and a flurry of tornadoes and snow in Texas, one might wonder what more needs to happen to compel action.

If talk was tantamount to action, it would appear progress toward averting disaster is happening. But when one unpacks the rhetoric of, say, Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the reality becomes depressingly clear. While Whitehouse bashes Republican climate deniers, he’s also doing this:

As the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak continues to spew into the air, Rhode Island’s small hamlet of Burrillvillle is now facing the chance to be the future site of such a catastrophe. With the help of a key Democratic Party endorsement and accession from labor union bosses who should know better, Rhode Island may soon host a fracked natural gas plant rather than the saner move of a sustainable electric plant.

2016 will likely be dominated by election year politics. Anything that happens, either domestically or abroad, will be filtered through the lens of America’s reality television show we might as well call Presidential Idol. Donald Trump’s numbers show no sign of weakening, which is great news for Democrats because they can focus on the Trump boogeyman instead of their own terrible candidate, Hillary Clinton.

But let’s not forget Donald is a scary racist fascist who says terrible things like this:

In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have (been) wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.

Man, that is some scary shit. So let’s elect the cackling Clinton who celebrates the sodomizing and execution of heads of state, right?

Economically, 2015 was terrible. Despite that reality, the Fed simply had to raise interest rates to maintain the illusion that it can responsibly manage monetary policy. The S&P 500 ended the year in the red, highlighting the reality that, throughout the economy, major indicators are once again (as they did in 2007) warning that the wheels are about to come off the bus.

Here is a term that could rear its ugly head in 2016: bail-in (because bail-out is like so totally 2008):

It has now been more than two and a half years since the Cyprus Steal, the first “bail-in” perpetrated in the Western world, occurred. Before reviewing the history of this newest financial atrocity, it is necessary to define the terms.

The term “bail-in” describes a scenario in which a bank confiscates private property to indemnify itself for losses it has suffered. A bail-in is a totally lawless theft of assets, as there is no principle of law (of any kind) that could authorize such a seizure of private property. And in fact, there are many principles of law that demonstrate the lawlessness at work here. As with much of the financial crime jargon, “bail-in” is simply another gibberish euphemism like “quantitative easing” or “derivatives.”

There was a chance at the beginning of Obama’s reign to address the criminal syndicate known as Wall Street, but that didn’t happen. Instead Obama brought in the criminals and explained that his administration was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. Anyone who thinks another corporate coddling Clinton will do a damn thing about these criminals is pathologically delusional.

Maybe 2016 will be the year we hit bottom as a nation and start the long, difficult path toward a sane and sustainable future.

Personally, I’m still holding out hope that aliens will descend to provide a cosmic intervention before we destroy the ability of our species to live on this planet because short of something miraculous like that happening, I don’t see how we will change course before it’s too late.