Readers, add to Kuntsler's piece that the upcoming hurricane season is going to be horrific in at least two ways. The key piece of information is that the average surface water temperature is about 7 degrees above normal thanks to the now dark coloration of the Gulf. This is the energy that fuels hurricanes. These hurricanes will lift up the crude oil and dispersants and at least spread it through the gulf states. We may even break records relative to the power of these hurricanes as measured by the category system. stay tuned and batten down if you can't escape. Tadit Anderson

I think America missed something. It must be the time of year, what with
inhaling all those fumes from the charcoal starter ... and fueling up
the Jet-skis so as to turn a perfectly good mountain lake into something
like a Cuisinart on the guacamole setting ... and the rousing evenings
in the Nascar parking lots hitting palmetto bugs with your wiffle bat
... and all that anxious waiting for a 10W-40 hard rain to fall on the
Gulf Coast states - but President Obama made a very interesting remark
when the financial regulation package passed in the senate the other
day. He said the bill would make sure that "Main Street is never again
held responsible for Wall Street's mistakes".

Whoosh ...

That was the sound of something going over America's head. Something
about the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile. And frankly I don't think
the president even meant to be coy or deceptive. It just means he
doesn't get it either. Never again ...

Never again?

What the f**k?

Why even this time? Why isn't there an army of federal attorneys out
there, their teeth bristling with subpoenas, beating the bushes in every
lane and skyscraper floor of lower Manhattan (and Fairfield County,
Connecticut, not to mention a thousand office parks around the USA) to
roust out the grifters and swindlers who took Main Street to the
cleaners this time.

The audacity of cluelessness! And the hilarity of "next time".

Earth to President Obama: there isn't going to be a next time. This time
was enough to git 'er done. Wall Street - in particular the biggest
"banks" - packaged up and sold enough swindles to unwind
2500 years of western civilization. You simply cannot imagine the amount
of bad financial paper out there right now in every vault and portfolio
on the planet. Enough, really, to sink any company even pretending to
trade in things more abstract than a mud brick or an hour of labor.
What's more, the cross-collateralized obligations between them are so
vast and intricate that all the standing timber in North America could
not be fashioned into enough pick-up sticks to represent the hideous
death-dealing tangle of frauds waiting for the wing-beat of a single
black swan to come crashing down.

Go out and get a copy of Michael Lewis's recent book The Big Short
(2010) for a close-up view on one micro-corner of the investment world.
You will discover that the people fabricating things like synthetic
collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) had no idea what the fuck they
were doing - besides deliberately creating documents that nobody would
ever understand, that would never be unraveled by teams of law clerks or
secret words or magic incantations or prayers to some dark hirsute
deity, and were guaranteed to place in jeopardy every operation of the
world economy above the barter level. Sorry to invoke the hoary old
metaphor about the horse being out of the barn - but the larger problem
is what the horse left behind in a great steaming mound clear up to the
rafters. There was nothing to understand in all this crap, except that
betting against it was a good idea, and then only for those who placed
the earliest bets - because everybody else is going to get just as
screwed as those who stuffed their vaults and portfolios with Triple-A
rated horsesh*t.

What banks and governments have been doing for the past eighteen months
is a dumbshow meant to distract the public from the fact that the world
financial system has been effectively destroyed. There isn't enough
money left in the known reaches of the universe to pay off the
outstanding claims. In fact, not even close. Everything that proceeds
from this fiasco will be in service of impoverishing most of the
population and, incidentally, probably bringing down governments and,
with them, convenient social usufructs such as due process of law and
civil order. What remains - what you're watching right now on CNN or Fox
- is just a representation of the former structures of civilized life,
what Joe Bageant refers to as "the hologram", a kind of 3-D picture you
can see around, that looks like reality, but is actually immaterial, a
collective hallucination. It's comfortable living in a hologram - until
you discover that you're in one.

In the summertime, when there are weenies to grill and Jet-skis to
commit suicide on, the public is usually having too much fun to pay
attention to anything. Maybe this is how come summertime is also when
lots of bad sh*t happens, or gets ready to happen. The guns of August
... blitzkrieg ... 9-11 ... the death of Lehman Brothers ...

A few other social notes this week: Something else the public (and, of
course, the news media) missed in the General McChrystal affair. It
wasn't just that the general bad mouthed his civilian superiors. It was
that he was not the other thing that an army officer should be: a
gentleman. He was a lout who reveled in everything lowest in his own
culture. He was a man so disturbed by having to spend a night in Paris
at a good restaurant with civilized people that it seems to have driven
him plumb bat sh*t. General George Patton - a man renowned for his own
profane intemperance - would have boxed Stanley McChrystal's ears for
his sheer childishness and assigned him to Graves Registration. When the
USA falls apart in a few years, let's hope General McChrystal doesn't
ride over the horizon on a white horse with an army of Af-stan vets
flexing their neck tattoos behind him.

Oh, and something else: notice that the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher has
vanished from the front pages of The New York Times and even The
Huffington Post. Nobody gives a sh*t anymore. Bring it on.