[RE]

Given we have Deja Vu all over again with rising Fascism, concentration camps, nationalism and escalating warfare, a return to protectionist trade policies seems highly likely.  It's not that we don't learn from history, it's that the same causes produce the same effects.  The cause is basically that there is a huge amount of malinvestment and debt overhang in systems that require gobs of cheap energy to run, and the cheap energy is running out.

Leading up to WWII the new systems were automobiles that need petroleum to run and shipping where boats that had been run on coal were being converted to oil as well.  Airplanes also needed the Black Gold.  There was still tons of it untapped under the desert sands of MENA, so a mad scramble took place with the major powers all attempting to grab a piece of that property for themselves.

We have the same problem now with AI needing tons of energy, but unfortunately there's no place left to just punch holes in the ground and get gobs of it practically free.  The debts are coming due on real estate and factories that won't get paid off without continued growth and the banksters are losing faith in each other's currency.  The protectionism is a response to the attempt to extract money from each other from the malinvestment.  The Chinese can produce solar panels and EVs much cheaper because they front loaded and built out their production system on a ton of debt.  To pay it off, they have to sell their EVs and solar panels.  By dropping on tariffs, the FSoA tries to extract money and protect local producers of these items.  The end result is debts don't get paid and banksters get pissed.

Going to war won't solve the problem this time, so there is a lot of confusion about what to do?  Meanwhile in the poorer countries of the world goobermints are collapsing, anarchy and gangs are taking over and refugees are scrambling to get out as fast as they can.  This is creating a backlash in the countries they are trying to migrate to, creating the rising nationalism.

Next step is probably going to be attempts to shut down the borders and increasing civil conflicts between the haves and have nots.  We're closing in on the end game.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce93n7lgw5qo

'Protectionism eroding global business' - world trade chief

RE

[K-Dog]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce93n7lgw5qo

'Protectionism eroding global business' - world trade chief

RE

One man's protectionism is another man's 'Planned Economy'.

Another 'He-Haw let the free market run article.


But I'd not expect anything more from the BBC.  Another fascist mouthpiece.

[TDoS]

We're closing in on the end game.
RE

Could be. Altrnatively, we've been waiting for the end game so long now that we're all scared of dying before it happens, and are hoping if we just click our heels together hard enough and pray and keep repeating ourselves, Richard Duncan's genius idea before its time will FINALLY come true!

Love the cliff in 2008!

Certainly happened to Richard himself, may he rest in peace.

[RE]

2008 was pretty nasty, and it's pretty dark in Houston today.  6 years to 2030, a lot can happen.  It's getting lively anyhow.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/race-restore-17m-still-power-hurricane-beryl-forecasters-warn-dangerou-rcna161073

RE

[TDoS]

2008 was pretty nasty, and it's pretty dark in Houston today.  6 years to 2030, a lot can happen.  It's getting lively anyhow.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/race-restore-17m-still-power-hurricane-beryl-forecasters-warn-dangerou-rcna161073

RE

Houston needs to learn how to handle hurricanes. But even lacking that ability, 16 years over the cliff deep into Richard's into blackouts and my guess is even lacking any ability to be prepared,  thtey will cure "the cliff" consequences pretty quickly.

Was in a meeting with 2 Houstonians this very day...they had enough electricity for Teams meetings. I didn't ask if their A/C was functioning, or maybe they were using their EVs to power their house for the day.

[RE]

Oh, I'm sure the class of Houstonians that does Team Meetings at the very least have backup generators that pop on automatically when the power goes out.  The problem is of course the same as in the 3rd World, it's the poor folks who have the least reliable power who also can't afford backup generatorrs or wiring their EV into the home circuit.

Duncan's timeline is Global, not just the professional class of the FSoA.  What wll probably be sorta fixed in a week or 2 in Houston (until next time) is a daily fact of life in Venezurla, South Africa, Croatia etc etc etc.  Puerto Rico is a good case study of what is happening in most of the world outside the FSoA and major western European economies.

https://www.wsj.com/story/why-puerto-ricos-power-grid-keeps-failing-b375500f

However, the very fact that even here in the land of good and plenty anybody who wants reliable power has to set up their own backup systems demonstrates the collapse is well underway.  Back in the 70s-00s, few people had home generators unless they lived totally out in the boonies.  Nowadays you can't trust the power even in big shities like Houston or LA on a hot day.  Throw in a hurricane, wildfire, atmospheric river or ice storm and you can be without ice for weeks.  My sister didn't have power for almost a month after an ice storm a few years back.  Springfield is a decent size small metro with the regional medical center.  Joplin right down the I-44 took months after it got flattened by an F-5 Tornado that ran smack thru the middle of town.  Then of course there was Katrina...

It's also not getting better, it's getting worse, and the Braniacs building AI Data Centers are pouring gasoline on the fire.  I'm sure you will be fine though with your EV hooked to the McMansion, PV panels on the roof and a 10K Watt Generac that switches on seconds after the voltage drops passing through the meter.  You probably won't even notice the lights flicker.

By 2030 with the current trajectory and plans to add load for home heating, more EVs aand AI, we'll be lucky if the lights stay on as much as they do in Caracas today.

RE

[RE]

Ice still in short supply for your Scotch on the Rocks in Houston..

There were wraparound lines at gas stations and drive-thru restaurants, and people have been racing to find ice to preserve any food they have left. Many have suffered lost wages and spoiled food.

https://www.axios.com/local/houston/2024/07/11/houston-power-outage-storm-beryl-centerpoint

RE

[K-Dog]

The parallels of what is happening now to the early 1930s' is now brutally apparent.  Much more so than when RE started this thread.

Maybe most people don't care that much. I do, but don't see major political parties dealing with anything that concerns me. Big govt is the biggest problem. Ive come around to the Fourth Turning theory, at least thats where my own hope for a better way of life, free from so much govt interference emerging is. Goldernen Oxernen

I don't agree with the government angle, but the fourth turning aspect explains a lot. 

Bear with me on this.  I read this short story today by Edith Wharton.  It is called 'The Verdict', and it was written in 1908.  Skip the story if you want.  I explain what it is about at the end, and why it is here.

I HAD always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius--though a good fellow enough--so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)

"The height of his glory"--that was what the women called it. I can hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing--his last Chicago sitter--deploring his unaccountable abdication. "Of course it's going to send the value of my picture 'way up; but I don't think of that, Mr. Rickham--the loss to Arrt is all I think of." The word, on Mrs. Thwing's lips, multiplied its _rs_ as though they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors. And it was not only the Mrs. Thwings who mourned. Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the last Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before Gisburn's "Moon-dancers" to say, with tears in her eyes: "We shall not look upon its like again"?First

Well!--even through the prism of Hermia's tears I felt able to face the fact with equanimity. Poor Jack Gisburn! The women had made him--it was fitting that they should mourn him. Among his own sex fewer regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur. Professional jealousy? Perhaps. If it were, the honour of the craft was vindicated by little Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith, brought out in the Burlington a very handsome "obituary" on Jack--one of those showy articles stocked with random technicalities that I have heard (I won't say by whom) compared to Gisburn's painting. And so--his resolve being apparently irrevocable--the discussion gradually died out, and, as Mrs. Thwing had predicted, the price of "Gisburns" went up.

It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few weeks' idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why Gisburn had given up his painting. On reflection, it really was a tempting problem. To accuse his wife would have been too easy--his fair sitters had been denied the solace of saying that Mrs. Gisburn had "dragged him down." For Mrs. Gisburn--as such--had not existed till nearly a year after Jack's resolve had been taken. It might be that he had married her--since he liked his ease--because he didn't want to go on painting; but it would have been hard to prove that he had given up his painting because he had married her.

Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as Miss Croft contended, failed to "lift him up"--she had not led him back to the easel. To put the brush into his hand again--what a vocation for a wife! But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have disdained it--and I felt it might be interesting to find out why.

The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely academic speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo, caught a glimpse of Jack's balustraded terraces between the pines, I had myself borne thither the next day.

I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs. Gisburn's welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I claimed it frequently. It was not that my hostess was "interesting": on that point I could have given Miss Croft the fullest reassurance. It was just because she was _not_ interesting--if I may be pardoned the bull--that I found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by interesting women: they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the hot-house of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note what effect the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss Croft) was having on him.

I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was immediately perceptible that her husband was extracting from this circumstance a delicate but substantial satisfaction. It is, as a rule, the people who scorn money who get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain of his wife's big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To the latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he was buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a discrimination that bespoke the amplest resources.

"Money's only excuse is to put beauty into circulation," was one of the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an exquisitely appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had again run over from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to every form of beauty."

Poor Jack! It had always been his fate to have women say such things of him: the fact should be set down in extenuation. What struck me now was that, for the first time, he resented the tone. I had seen him, so often, basking under similar tributes--was it the conjugal note that robbed them of their savour? No--for, oddly enough, it became apparent that he was fond of Mrs. Gisburn--fond enough not to see her absurdity. It was his own absurdity he seemed to be wincing under--his own attitude as an object for garlands and incense.

"My dear, since I've chucked painting people don't say that stuff about me--they say it about Victor Grindle," was his only protest, as he rose from the table and strolled out onto the sunlit terrace.

I glanced after him, struck by his last word. Victor Grindle was, in fact, becoming the man of the moment--as Jack himself, one might put it, had been the man of the hour. The younger artist was said to have formed himself at my friend's feet, and I wondered if a tinge of jealousy underlay the latter's mysterious abdication. But no--for it was not till after that event that the _rose Dubarry_ drawing-rooms had begun to display their "Grindles."

I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of sugar to her spaniel in the dining-room.

"Why _has_ he chucked painting?" I asked abruptly.

She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.

"Oh, he doesn't _have_ to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy himself," she said quite simply.

I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its _famille-verte_ vases repeating the tones of the pale damask curtains, and its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded frames.

"Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven't seen a single one in the house."

A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open countenance. "It's his ridiculous modesty, you know. He says they're not fit to have about; he's sent them all away except one--my portrait--and that I have to keep upstairs."

His ridiculous modesty--Jack's modesty about his pictures? My curiosity was growing like the bean-stalk. I said persuasively to my hostess: "I must really see your portrait, you know."

She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her husband, lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn the Russian deerhound's head between his knees.

"Well, come while he's not looking," she said, with a laugh that tried to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the marble Emperors of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terra-cotta nymphs poised among flowers at each landing.

In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of delicate and distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval canvases, in the inevitable garlanded frame. The mere outline of the frame called up all Gisburn's past!

Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a _jardiniere_ full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and said: "If you stand here you can just manage to see it. I had it over the mantel-piece, but he wouldn't let it stay."

Yes--I could just manage to see it--the first portrait of Jack's I had ever had to strain my eyes over! Usually they had the place of honour--say the central panel in a pale yellow or _rose Dubarry_ drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it took the light through curtains of old Venetian point. The more modest place became the picture better; yet, as my eyes grew accustomed to the half-light, all the characteristic qualities came out--all the hesitations disguised as audacities, the tricks of prestidigitation by which, with such consummate skill, he managed to divert attention from the real business of the picture to some pretty irrelevance of detail. Mrs. Gisburn, presenting a neutral surface to work on--forming, as it were, so inevitably the background of her own picture--had lent herself in an unusual degree to the display of this false virtuosity. The picture was one of Jack's "strongest," as his admirers would have put it--it represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of veins, a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one of the circus-clown's ironic efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted "strongly" because she was tired of being painted "sweetly"--and yet not to lose an atom of the sweetness.

"It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with pardonable pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself--"but the other doesn't count, because he destroyed it."

"Destroyed it?" I was about to follow up this clue when I heard a footstep and saw Jack himself on the threshold.

As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen coat, the thin brown waves of hair pushed back from his white forehead, his lean sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that lifted the tips of a self-confident moustache, I felt to what a degree he had the same quality as his pictures--the quality of looking cleverer than he was.

His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled past her to the portrait.

"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing herself. He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.

"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then, passing his arm through mine: "Come and see the rest of the house."

He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the trouser-presses--all the complex simplifications of the millionaire's domestic economy. And whenever my wonder paid the expected tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I really don't see how people manage to live without that."

Well--it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only he was, through it all and in spite of it all--as he had been through, and in spite of, his pictures--so handsome, so charming, so disarming, that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with your leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied with your work!"

But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected check.

"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room at the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery: no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in a picture weekly--above all, no least sign of ever having been used as a studio.

The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break with his old life.

"Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still looking about for a trace of such activity.

"Never," he said briefly.

"Or water-colour--or etching?"

His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under their handsome sunburn.

"Never think of it, my dear fellow--any more than if I'd never touched a brush."

And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything else.

I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected discovery; and as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above the mantel-piece--the only object breaking the plain oak panelling of the room.

"Oh, by Jove!" I said.

It was a sketch of a donkey--an old tired donkey, standing in the rain under a wall.

"By Jove--a Stroud!" I cried.

He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little quickly.

"What a wonder! Made with a dozen lines--but on everlasting foundations. You lucky chap, where did you get it?"

He answered slowly: "Mrs. Stroud gave it to me."

"Ah--I didn't know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an inflexible hermit."

"I didn't--till after. . . . She sent for me to paint him when he was dead."

"When he was dead? You?"

I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's an awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him done by a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the surest way of proclaiming his greatness--of forcing it on a purblind public. And at the moment I was _the_ fashionable painter."

"Ah, poor Stroud--as you say. Was _that_ his history?"

"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him--or thought she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the drawing-rooms with her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could always get near enough to see his pictures. Poor woman! She's just a fragment groping for other fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever knew."

"You ever knew? But you just said--"

Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.

"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was dead."

I dropped my voice instinctively. "When she sent for you?"

"Yes--quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him vindicated--and by me!"

He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch of the donkey. "There were days when I couldn't look at that thing--couldn't face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now it's cured me--cured me. That's the reason why I don't dabble any more, my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason."

For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into a serious desire to understand him better.

"I wish you'd tell me how it happened," I said.

He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers a cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.

"I'd rather like to tell you--because I've always suspected you of loathing my work."

I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a good-humoured shrug.

"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself--and now it's an added tie between us!"

He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep arm-chairs forward. "There: make yourself comfortable--and here are the cigars you like."

He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.

"How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn't take much longer to happen. . . . I can remember now how surprised and pleased I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note. Of course, deep down, I had always _felt_ there was no one like him--only I had gone with the stream, echoed the usual platitudes about him, till I half got to think he was a failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he _was_ left behind--because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let ourselves be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current--on everlasting foundations, as you say.

"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do the picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to stammer something about her poverty. I remember getting off a prodigious phrase about the honour being _mine_--oh, I was princely, my dear Rickham! I was posing to myself like one of my own sitters.

"Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my traps in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to work. He had been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly, of heart disease, so that there had been no preliminary work of destruction--his face was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was superb.

"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to have my hand on such a 'subject.' Then his strange life-likeness began to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he _were_ watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes began to go a little wild--I felt nervous and uncertain.

"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret? Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me, they crumbled. I saw that he wasn't watching the showy bits--I couldn't distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!

"I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was the last thing he had done--just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack. Just a note! But it tells his whole history. There are years of patient scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke. . . .

"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my things? They hadn't been born of me--I had just adopted them. . . .

"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do another stroke. The plain truth was, I didn't know where to put it--_I had never known_. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of colour covered up the fact--I just threw paint into their faces. . . . Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see through--see straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can? Well--that was the way I painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my 'technique' collapsed like a house of cards. He didn't sneer, you understand, poor Stroud--he just lay there quietly watching, and on his lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear the question: 'Are you sure you know where you're coming out?'

"If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see that I couldn't--and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute, Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn't have given to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: 'It's not too late--I'll show you how'?

"It _was_ too late--it would have been, even if he'd been alive. I packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I didn't tell her _that_--it would have been Greek to her. I simply said I couldn't paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the idea--she's so romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey. But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait--she did so want him 'done' by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn't let me off--and at my wits' end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the 'coming' man, and she told somebody else, and so it got to be true. . . . And he painted Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among her husband's things. . . ."

He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the chimney-piece.

"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he'd been able to say what he thought that day."

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--"Begin again?" he flashed out. "When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is that I knew enough to leave off?"

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. "Only the irony of it is that I _am_ still painting--since Grindle's doing it for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but there's no exterminating our kind of art."

The point of the story is that, confronted by great talent the artist realizes he is mediocre, and he quits painting.  This story was popular in 1908 in a way which could not be possible today.

Pioneers and heroes demand integrity.  First turning.  Artists and nomads do not.  Fourth turning.  Jack Gisburn could not have been on the Trump team.  But now we live in a time where surface appearance rules, and actual substance does not.  Everything, not just beauty, is now skin deep.  Skin deep lies.  Nobody is asking 'where is the beef'.  Everyone screams, just give it to me.

Now unlike Jack I won't be deciding my writing is mediocre, and give up the Diner.  My writing may be mediocre, but it is an order of magnitude better than what would it be had I not ever done this.  It would be 'shit' had I not done this.  I think so.  Mediocre is ten times better than that.  Ten times worse than mediocre would have to reek.

But it would be so nice if some of the Trump team realized the mediocre truth about themselves.



I am thinking about making a Trump 2025 deck of cards.  She is one of the queens.

[RE]

But it would be so nice if some of the Trump team realized the mediocre truth about themselves.

It would be a long climb up the ladder for the Trump team to achieve mediocrity.

RE

[K-Dog]

But it would be so nice if some of the Trump team realized the mediocre truth about themselves.

It would be a long climb up the ladder for the Trump team to achieve mediocrity.

RE

You are correct, once again I am too kind.