Seismic Shifts in Paris, Wichita, and Elsewhere

Last night’s earthquake was the longest and strongest we’ve felt so far. There were no reports of injuries or property damage or anything that would impress a longtime Los Angeleno, but it rattled our old house with an unprecedented violence for an eternal 30 seconds or so, and as we are still relatively new to this sort of thing it rattled our nerves something awful. Although our prairie town has responded mostly with nervous humor, one can’t help noticing a widespread worry that the next one might prove worse. Alas, earthquakes aren’t the only thing in this unstable world giving us such an unsettling feeling.

The head-chopping, crucifying, gang-raping nut cases calling themselves the Islamic State continue to rule an Indiana-sized caliphate in the heart of the Middle East and have recently downed a Russian airliner over Egypt, launched deadly bomb attacks against formidable Muslim rivals in Beirut and Ankara, killed more than 130 infidels in six coordinated attacks on Paris, and threatened to do worse yet somewhere in America. Our leaders assure us they’re on the job of protecting the homeland, but they also assure us that the Islamic State is in no way Islamic and that they’re a “jayvee team” that has been “contained” and will “eventually” be eliminated, and that there’s no need to worry that a small but deadly number of its operatives might be among the many thousands of refugees seeking asylum from a Middle East and a North Africa that are on fire and being rapidly abandoned by millions of refugees despite our unquestionably successful foreign policy, and that the majority of Americans who harbor doubts about it are racist and xenophobic and religiously bigoted and downright un-American. Such arguments are somehow not reassuring, however, no matter how much petulant and un-presidential sarcasm they come with.

We’ve been reading up on basic seismology lately, just as we started reading up on basic Islam during the Iranian hostage crisis and then delved even further into the subject after the 2001 terror attacks on America, and both studies have reminded us how very unstable the world has always been. So far as we can tell from the seismology stuff, the world is riddled with fault lines where two great tectonic forces are in constant tension against one another, and although a stasis usually prevails there are occasional eruptions that shift the world into new shapes and sometimes do great damage to what had been built on the old shape. Along some of the fault lines one side has such a significant advantage in strength that it can push the other one in ways that do devastating things to the people who happen to be living there, but Tokyo and San Francisco and Los Angeles and some other modern metropolises located in such inconvenient places have largely coped with it through modern science and engineering, while such unfortunate locales as Iran and Haiti have not, and despite our post-earthquake nerves we still hold out hope that the Sears & Roebuck Company’s famously well-built Craftsman homes of the 1920s will survive the relatively mild rumblings we’ve been having here on the south-central plains.

This recent spate of terrorism by the Islamic State and other “on the run” terror organizations, on the other hand, seems indicative of a more significant seismic shift. Even the most peace-loving and clock-building Muslims of the politically correct imagination will acknowledge that the Koran specifically describes a world divided between Dar al-Islam, the “House of Submission” where Muslims are the ruling majority, and Dar al-Harb, the “House of War” where people go about their days according to their own more westernized and individual notions, and even the most politically correction imagination is forced to concede that over the past 1,400 years or so this fault line has occasionally shifted in ways that did great damage to the people who happened to be living there. Our leaders assure us that it’s all a misunderstanding about that awful George W. bush and the still-pesky-after-5,000-years presence of Jews in the Middle East, but Islam had conquered a large of chunk of Christiandom by the time the first crusades were launched, Europe’s white folks were entirely unaware of the North American continent until shortly after the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula from Muslim occupiers, the west’s survival wasn’t assured until hard-won victory at the Gates of Vienna in 1683, America was newly born and blameless when it launched its first war against an Islamic country that had been enslaving its sailors for the plainly stated reason that its religion demanded it, there was that British disaster in Khartoum when the natives went wildly religious, the Ottoman Empire’s role on the wrong side of the First World War, the Arab world’s similarly problematic involvement in a Second World War, all before there was an Israel or a cartoon drawing of The Prophet Muhammad — peace be upon him! — or even a George W. Bush. France’s difficulties with Algiers and everybody’s problem with Pan-National Arabism during the Cold War, or the slaughter at the ’72 Olympics and the bombings at so many long-forgotten nightclubs and cafes and South American Jewish centers, or the countless internecine wars with countless millions of fatalities, that long-forgotten hostage crisis and fare more recently but just as easily forgotten Boston Marathon massacre, none of which seem to have anything to do with Israel or George W. Bush or even the Koch brothers, all suggest that it’s a fault line that persists no matter how genuinely outreaching our foreign policy might be. One side has Baptist churches and gay bars and capitalism and busy-body bureaucracies and man-made constitutions and women driving cars and showing full facial nudity, while the other has very different ideas about such things, and it’s hard to how see they’ll ever comfortably settle up against one another no matter how soothingly blind to the facts of the matter our the leadership of our fissiparous side of the fault line might be.

So far as we can tell from all this seismology stuff the the seismologists still don’t have any reliably predictive understanding of when these fault lines wind up doing significant damage to the people living on them, and we expect it will take another couple of generations of historians to explain why things went so very wrong between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, so for now we’re left with that unsettling feeling. All our liberal Facebook friends are insisting the the local earthquakes have been been man-made by the lubricating waste-water disposal of the hydraulic fracturing method of petroleum extraction going on down in Oklahoma, which might even be true, although gasoline is currently selling for $1.88 cents at the nearest convenience store and we’d hate to be paying $4 for Iranian supplies and still suffering the occasional house-rattling earthquake, but at least there’s no denying the human agency in the Dar al-Islm versus Dar al-Harb fault line. To explain the sudden rift, we figure it’s a weakness on one side. The west still has the decided advantage in economic and scientific and military terms, but the strength of its belief in Baptist churches and gay bars and capitalism and bureaucracies and man-made constitutions and women driving cars and showing full facial nudity is invitingly weak to a more culturally confident enemy.

As nerve-rattling at the latest earthquake was, and in a state that’s also been tormented by the usual number of autumn tornadoes, we expect the next big event will be along that Dar al-Isam and Dar al-Harb fault line. The chances of mankind screwing that up seem far greater than it’s influence on nature. There’s also the fault line that’s looming on the public debt, too, and the looming realization that the $20 trillion of debt and zero interest rates that have kept America’s economy can’t continue forever, and that the rest of the west’s finances are similarly beset, and how that might affect all those poor refugees, and our nerves are rattled something awful. We hold out hope that our old Craftsman bungalow will preserve, and that the western world of Baptist churches and gay bars and capitalism and bureaucracies and man-made constitutions and women driving around showing full facial nudity will as well, but it’s hard to shake that nagging doubt. We don’t mean to go all Book of Revelation on you, but we can’t shake that unsettling feeling about this unstable world.

— Bud Norman

The Chill and the Boom

There’s no way to stretch out the holidays any further, and unless you’re lucky enough to occupy a high government office it’s time to get back to work and the long, hard grind through winter. For us that means resuming our reading of the news, among other things, although with all those high government officials still on vacation there’s not much there except the miserable weather.

Last year around this time the weather was just as miserable, but many of the media were eager to use that as an explanation for the upcoming miserable data showing a quarterly contraction in the economy. This time around the same media were disappointed that the holidays distracted attention from a robust 5 percent in the gross domestic product over the past quarter, and don’t seem eager to speculate how the frigid temperatures prevailing just about everywhere north of the Florida keys might slow the long awaited Obama boom. This is no time to be touting the president’s, so they’re filling the news hole the airtime with talk of that GDP figure and the the recent decline in gasoline prices and the slow but steady growth in the jobs market and the record highs in the stock market. Except for the college and professional football playoffs and the usual internecine Republican squabbles and the miserable weather there’s not much else, so their giddiness is understandable.

They won’t want too much attention paid to the economic news, of course, lest the public notice how the rosy reports differ from it own frost-bitten reality. The smart guys at Zero Hedge always manage to find the dark cloud within any silver lining, and they noticed that much of that 5 percent growth last quarter was achieved by an increase in consumer spending on higher health insurance premiums that was supposed to be counted in the contracting winter quarter that the government had already written off and was instead added to the far most robust report they’re now crowing about. Such Chinese-style statistical legerdemain is by now a common feature of the long awaited Obama boom, as is the apparent assumption by many of the media that paying higher health insurance premiums rather than the lower ones promised during the Obamacare sales job is a benefit to the economic well-being of the nation, and has thus gone largely unmentioned by many of the media.

That slow but steady growth in the jobs market has not raised the labor participation rate from the lowest level since the ’70s, largely because the number of legal and illegal immigrants has increased at a slightly faster and just as steady rate. The president’s extra-constitutional to confer amnesty on millions of illegal immigrants and thereby invite millions more is being touted by many of the media as part of his remarkable comeback after the mid-term election shellacking, along his with extra-constitutional agreement with the Chinese to combat global warming, but they probably won’t too much attention paid to that.

Those plunging gasoline prices are hard to ignore while shivering next to the pumps, but it will take a lot of doing by many of the media to make anyone think that the president’s policies have anything to do with it. The same president who made a campaign promise of skyrocketing electrical rates and appointed an Energy Secretary who openly pined for European gasoline prices and has denied drilling permits on federal land deserves no credit for America’s frackin’ oil boom, and any attempt he makes to claim credit will only make him seem all George W. Bushy and diminish his standing with the environmentalists of his party. The happily deflationary effects of lower gasoline prices will only encourage the Federal Reserve to keep up the money-printing that has fueled those bubbly record stock market indices, however, and somehow the president will get credit for that without losing his standing among the Wall Street-hating socialists of his party.

Nor will many of the media wonder if the Republican obstructionism and gridlock they’ve decried the past four years have anything with those rosy numbers they’re touting. Since the Republicans gained control of the House of the Representatives after two years of complete Democratic control of the Congress and presidency, and the officially reported deficits have gone down and government spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product has also declined, both which conservative economic theory considers a spur to economic growth, but better to report on those crazy conservatives’ challenge to the relatively timid House leadership. No use pointing out that most of the nation’s economic growth has occurred in states controlled by Republicans, either, especially when the governors of the most successful of them are among the contenders for the ’16 presidential race that is already affecting the reporting of many of the media.

Judging by the miserable weather forecasts we probably won’t be getting out of the house until then, and although the question seems of little interest to much of the media we can’t help wondering what effect it will have the economy if the rest of the country is similarly to get out to the store, but at least we’re back on the job and following what there is the of the news.

— Bud Norman