Author Archives: Tom Lewis

The Worst News Story of 2015

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And the (early) award for the worst news story -- not the worst story, the worst news -- goes to......

And the (early) award for the worst news story — not the worst story, the worst news — of 2015 goes to……

What? Too soon? Maybe not.

This story had precursors in 2014, just a few hints about what it could become. In the spring, a courageous BBC journalist smuggled out pictures and reports of a three-year-old uprising where no uprising can be permitted. Shortly afterward the host country sentenced to death two leaders of the uprising (presumably by the country’s favored method of public beheading followed by crucifixion). Whereupon the uprising managed a murderous bombing attack. In the Middle East they have a name for this: Tuesday.

These events did not take on the gravitas of portents because they took place in the Middle East, but because they took place in Saudi Arabia. There they posed a threat not merely to another brutal Arab dictatorship, but to the entire industrial world, which cannot function without Saudi oil. Continue reading →

The Enhanced Interrogation of The Daily Impact

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Surly (right), RE (center), and Monsta (in turban) discuss the philosophy of TEOTWAKI with editor Tom Lewis of the Daily Impact (aloft).

Surly (right), RE (center), and Monsta (in turban) of The Doomstead Diner discuss the philosophy of TEOTWAWKI with editor Tom Lewis of the Daily Impact (aloft). Fortunately it was audio only.

The wait staff at the Doomstead Diner (Surly, RE and Monsta) spent nearly two hours (!) the other day interrogating Tom Lewis, the chief typist here at The Daily Impact, to learn the secret of his stunning lack of success. The first half of the interview, covering Lewis’s role in setting the Cuyahoga River on fire and ghostwriting Silent Spring, can be heard here. Even more to come. [Spoiler alert: in the end, he confesses to knowing how to save the world, but claims he forgot.]

 

Holiday Repost: Farewell to 2014

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For what we are about to lose, Dear Lord, we thank You. (Photo by Terren in Virginia/Flickr)

For what we are about to lose, Dear Lord, we thank You. (Photo by Terren in Virginia/Flickr)

 

[The Daily Impact is on hiatus for the holiday season. For your consideration, I leave you with a repost of a meditation on “The Last Good Year,” and a reminder that in 2015 it would be well to Brace for Impact.]

Thanksgiving is coming, and Christmas and Kwanzaa and Hanukkah and New Year’s, and we should make the best of them. These are the good old days, and we should celebrate them well, because we are probably not going to see their like again. Gas is cheaper than it was, and we should go to see the relatives this year, because next year will be different. Food is a little more expensive than it was, yet we should eat hearty nevertheless, because next year will be different. Continue reading →

CNN: “Russia Headed for Crash.”

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Russia, known for its long, hard winters, may be entering a very long, very hard one. (Photo by Elen Schurova)

Russia, known for its long, hard winters, may be entering a very long, very hard one. (Photo by Elen Schurova)

In the headlong rush toward the edge of the cliff at the end of the industrial age, Russia has suddenly pulled ahead by a nose(dive). The headline “Russia Headed for Crash” has appeared on the CNN Money website, although the news mavens in the Situation Room see no reason to go wall-to-wall with coverage when there are Cosby accusers to flush and another Bush is thinking about (!) running for president(!) in 20016! The lamestream media are trapped deep in the spurious narrative of the steely-eyed Putin resuming the Cold War as if it were 1950 and he were the Soviet Union, while Chinese tentacles slither across the globe projecting the power of the world’s largest (!) and weakest (!) and quite likely stupidest (!) economy. Continue reading →

Conn’s Game: Subprime Loans, Subhuman Lenders

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One of the stores built by a Conn’s game, based on junk bonds and subprime loans, in Houston Texas. (Photo by Mather Rutledge/Flickr)

One of the stores built by a Conn’s game, based on junk bonds and subprime loans, in Houston Texas. (Photo by Mather Rutledge/Flickr)

After some rant or another about the combined greed and stupidity of the industrial Masters of the Universe, I frequently get this response: “Look, they couldn’t be that stupid or they wouldn’t be in charge. They know what they’re doing, and we just don’t understand it.” Seriously. I get that. If a quick refresher on the Enron Bubble and the Dot-com Bubble and the Housing Bubble are not enough to put this turkey of an argument into the deep fryer for once and for all, then consider the true story of Conn’s, a Texas-based 90-store retailer who came up with the Business Plan to End All Business Plans. And it did. Continue reading →

The Oil Crash is Under Way [UPDATED 12/13]

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When big trees come down, they start slow and end with a crunch. (Photo by geograph.org.uk)

When big trees come down, they start slow and end with a crunch. (Photo by geograph.org.uk)

When you are felling a really big tree, the first signs that it is coming down are subtle; a crack here and there, a twitching of the crown. By the time these clues register on you, the tree is on its way down. The cracks and twitches from the U.S. oil industry are coming almost hourly now, and although it is a really big tree, and won’t actually hit the ground until next year, its fate is pretty well sealed. Here are this week’s signs and portents: Continue reading →

China and India: Accelerating to the Finish Line

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The air in Delhi, shown here in 2011, like the air in Beijing, is barely breathable by humans. Yet these two countries, with their 2.6 billion people, have just begun to burn fossil fuels. (Photo by je poirrier/Flickr)

The air in Delhi, shown here in 2011, like the air in Beijing, is barely breathable by humans. Yet these two countries, with their 2.6 billion people, have just begun to burn fossil fuels. (Photo by je poirrier/Flickr)

Hopium addicts and a few novelists nurture the convenient belief that while the 1.4 billion people of China and the 1.2 billion people of India struggle lustfully to live as luxuriously as do the 300 million people of the United States, they will manage to do so in a manner somehow less wasteful of energy and natural resources, less destructive of the living web of life, than we have done. The belief is convenient because, while there is not a whisker of evidence to suggest it is true, holding it permits the believer to carry on with business as usual. Continue reading →

Rage Against the Dying of the Lights

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The lights went out in Hoboken in 2012. They’re going out more often, for longer, in more places. Are you ready? (Photo by Alec Perkins/Flickr)

The lights went out in Hoboken in 2012. They’re going out more often, for longer, in more places. Are you ready? (Photo by Alec Perkins/Flickr)

Much of Detroit went “gentle into that good night” this week, its entire municipal power grid succumbing to age, infirmity and neglect.  It was no big surprise, Detroit’s public buildings (schools, fire and police stations, courts, a hospital, etc.) and traffic signals went dark in 2010, 2011 and 2013. Nor would it have surprised the readers of a recent study [“The Technology and Sociology of Power (Failure)”] whose authors concluded that “Blackouts are dress rehearsals for the future in which they will appear with greater frequency and severity, and as urban areas become more compact, with greater consequences.”

The world, they said, should “prepare for the prospect of coping without electricity as instances of complete power failure become increasingly common.”
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Wall Street: “Quite measurably out of its mind.”

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Forget the bull statue they have in the street in front of the stock exchange -- this is the guy who’s taking over in 2015. (Photo by Tambako the Jaguar/Flickr)

Forget the bull statue they have in the street in front of the stock exchange — this is the guy who’s taking over in 2015. (Photo by Tambako the Jaguar/Flickr)

John Hussman runs a very large mutual fund whose performance for the past five years has not been great. He is reviled by many of his fellow Masters of the Universe for saying of them, as he did in a recent client newsletter, that Wall Street, collectively, is “quite measurably out of its mind.” Others balance the scorn of the gamblers against the fact that Hussman was saying much the same thing just before the crashes of 2000 and 2008.  In a world whose collective memory maxes out at 90 days, in which logic and mathematics are optional belief systems, Hussman is an historian and number cruncher. What do the numbers tell him? To brace for impact. Continue reading →

Troubled Oil is Under Water [UPDATED]

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A Russian oil rig in the North Sea. New oil wells are deeper, more expensive, more complicated -- and play out faster -- than ever.

A Russian oil rig in the North Sea. Used to be only part of the oil business was in deep water. Now it pretty much all is.

The whole global edifice erected with oil profits is trembling and cracking while the people responsible for its imminent implosion refuse to even get under their desks, insisting that there is no problem. This crash that is already under way is not the ultimate one that will bring down the Industrial Age, not quite yet, but it is going to drop us from the rubble-strewn “new normal” of the post-2008 Great Recession to the cratered moonscape of the newer normal that will follow the Crash of 2015. The problem in 2008 was subprime home loans. The problem now is subprime oil wells. Continue reading →