The Pressure Just Shifted From Greece To The US & EU | Zero Hedge

The Pressure Just Shifted From Greece To The US & EU | Zero Hedge

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

With the 3rd US Q1 GDP print coming in at -0.7% (-3% if not for inventories), perhaps the media spotlights – and lively imagination – can move away from Greece for a few weeks. The US has enough problems of its own, it would seem. For one thing, its Q1 GDP is now worse than Greece’s. Of course its debt is also much higher, just not to the IMF and ECB. But let’s leave that one be for the moment. Though a bit of perspective works miracles at times.

Of course it’s not a technical recession yet for the US, which only recently presented a +4% quarter with a straight face, and there’s always the ‘multiple seasonal adjustment’ tool. But still. It’s ugly.

The IMF confirmed on Thursday that Athens has the right to ask for “bundled” repayments in June. “Countries do have the option of bundling when they have a series of payments in a given month … making a single payment at the end of that month,” as per an IMF spokesman. Who added that the last country to do so was Zambia three decades ago.

That leaves Athens, in theory, with a 30-day window, not a 7-day one. This of course takes the pressure cooker away from Athens, and the media attention as well. There is no immediate risk of a default, or a Grexit, or anything like that. The negotiations with the creditors will continue, but the conversation will change with time less of an issue.

One thing that’s changing is that the pressure on the other eurozone countries is rising fast. They might yet get to regret the way ‘their side’ conducts the debt talks with Syriza, in which they are a party through the eurogroup of finance ministers. Because it makes ever more deposits disappear from Greek banks, some €300 million in the past few days alone. That triggers a eurozone ‘program’ entitled Target2. For those who don’t know what it is, I’ll use an explanation by Mish from 2012:

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Was Charlie Hebdo A "Convenient" Incident For Policymakers? | Zero Hedge

Was Charlie Hebdo A "Convenient" Incident For Policymakers? | Zero Hedge

Submitted by Claudio Grass via Acting-Man.com,

Many Questions

On the 7th of January two gunmen attacked the office of Charlie Hebdo, a French weekly magazine. The shooters were two brothers who belonged to the Yemeni branch of the Islamist terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. The attack resulted in 11 casualties and many injured, while the shooters were shot a few days later in an exchange of fire with the police. Charlie Hebdo is a satire magazine, and its jokes and cartoons and its secular approach are widely considered anti-religious. Social media went into a frenzy with the hashtag “Je suis Charlie”. Four days later two million people including tens of world leaders participated in a rally for national unity in Paris, and over three million participated across France. A lot of questions were raised by this tragic event and its aftermath that we will look at in this article.

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, Superpower in Distress | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Superpower in Distress | TomDispatch

Delusionary Thinking in Washington 
The Desperate Plight of a Declining Superpower 
By Michael T. Klare

Take a look around the world and it’s hard not to conclude that the United States is a superpower in decline. Whether in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, aspiring powers are flexing their muscles, ignoring Washington’s dictates, or actively combating them. Russia refuses to curtail its support for armed separatists in Ukraine; China refuses to abandon its base-building endeavors in the South China Sea; Saudi Arabia refuses to endorse the U.S.-brokered nuclear deal with Iran; the Islamic State movement (ISIS) refuses to capitulate in the face of U.S. airpower. What is a declining superpower supposed to do in the face of such defiance?

This is no small matter. For decades, being a superpower has been the defining characteristic of American identity. The embrace of global supremacy began after World War II when the United States assumed responsibility for resisting Soviet expansionism around the world; it persisted through the Cold War era and only grew after the implosion of the Soviet Union, when the U.S. assumed sole responsibility for combating a whole new array of international threats. As General Colin Powell famously exclaimed in the final days of the Soviet era, “We have to put a shingle outside our door saying, ‘Superpower Lives Here,’ no matter what the Soviets do, even if they evacuate from Eastern Europe.”

Imperial Overstretch Hits Washington

Strategically, in the Cold War years, Washington’s power brokers assumed that there would always be two superpowers perpetually battling for world dominance.  In the wake of the utterly unexpected Soviet collapse, American strategists began to envision a world of just one, of a “sole superpower” (akaRome on the Potomac). In line with this new outlook, the administration of George H.W. Bush soon adopted a long-range plan intended to preserve that status indefinitely. Known as the Defense Planning Guidance for Fiscal Years 1994-99, it declared: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.”

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A Very Real Argument That We As A People Are…. « The Burning Platform

A Very Real Argument That We As A People Are…. « The Burning Platform

Guest Post by Karl Denninger

That’s done.  As in baked, cooked, finis.

Let’s just look at the charges and specifications of late, shall we?

• Big US and Global Banks have admitted (that is, have been convicted) of multiple criminal offenses over the last several years.  A partial list can be found here; let me remind everyone that an ordinary person who commits three felonies, even if some of them are very minor in comparison to any of the listed ones here in impact and they take place over a period of decades, goes away for life under long-existing three strikes laws.  All four of the banks listed in that dissent have three or more “convictions” and thus all of them should be dissolved as they are obviously incapable of modifying their behavior.  Nonetheless literally tens of millions of Americans and American corporations not only refuse to stand and demand that these charters be revoked they voluntarily do business with one or more of these firms!
• We have a medical and insurance industry in this country that routinely, on a daily basis, engages in behavior that can easily be described as meeting the criteria for fraud, bid-rigging, racketeering and routinely uses the threat of both bankruptcy and violence by government goons to get what it wants.  This “industry” routinely, for example, bills for things they didn’t actually do, sends people bills for hundreds or thousands of dollars for someone sticking their head in a door and saying “Hello”, allows “off-plan” doctors to treat people without their consent exposing them to thousands (or tens of thousands!) in unauthorized charges and then enforces those “charges”, takes drugs off the market that they produce so that the only remaining options are those made by the same company but are under patent and more.  The single most-common cause of bankruptcy in this country is medical debt incurred as a direct result of these practices and these practices are where the so-called “need” for Obamacare, that is now resulting in demands for 50% premium hikes in some markets for the next year, came from.  Yet we, as a nation and as a people, routinely consent to this crap and allow these corporations, institutions and individuals to continue their outrageous acts of pillage daily.

• We have a former Secretary of State who now wants to be President but while Secretary of State her private family foundation took tens of millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments that were, at the same time, lobbying the very State Department she was in charge of for permission to buy over a hundred billion dollars worth of weapons.  How this fails to qualify as a federal crime is beyond me given that a foreign agent is unable to buy a Senator lunch.  Irrespective of whether this leads to indictments it is outrageous that such a person can be considered as fit to be President by anyone irrespective of party or other affiliation; that any material percentage of our voting population would cast a vote for such a person proves beyond any doubt that the majority of voters in this country are literally suicidal.
• We have law enforcement agencies that actually claim in court through filed, sworn documents that when they throw a bomb into a baby’s crib as they attempt to raid a house and the person they are seeking isn’t there (because they didn’t bother to confirm he was there), leading to the infant being critically injured, that it is the infant’s fault that its face was blown off because it failed to move out of the way of said thrown bomb while it was sleeping in its crib.  In other words we, as a nation, sit silently while government agencies claim the right to blow the face off innocent infants becausethey are too lazy to bother with ordinary police work.  We could indict the government goons who refuse to wait for the person they want to arrest to depart wherever they are and thus make it possible for the police to arrest them without grievously injuring innocent children who had exactly nothing to do with the acts the accused is alleged of committing, but instead we allow innocent children to be grievously injured or killed due to the laziness and malfeasance of these so-called “boys in blue”and even allow to go unchallenged claims that said goons are there to “protect and serve” the public!
• We have entire legislatures that engage with lobbyists to let them write and vote on laws they then rubber stamp. When caught by the press (good work, by the way) the members of the press who catch them are literally thrown out of a hotel they paid to stay at by men with firearms who are in fact off-duty cops — cops that, I remind you, draw their salaries directly and indirectly from that same legislature!

I could go on, but why?

Until and unless we at least resolve all five of the above, and everyone involved wears an orange jumpsuit and has their corporate and institutional edifices closed down with the ill-gotten gains disbursed back to their victims we are, as a nation, DONE.

And more to the point we have all collectively consented as well.

Will A Robot Steal Your Job? | Zero Hedge

Will A Robot Steal Your Job? | Zero Hedge

Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares of Sinlair & Co

Some Thoughts on Automation

Will a robot steal your job?

It turns out that the answer depends on the prevailing macroeconomic conditions much more than people think.

We started our professional career at General Electric, when it was still being run by the legendary Jack Welch. At that point GE’s experience with automation had not been fantastic. It had been tried in several manufacturing facilities but managers invariably found that rather than improving the bottom line the new robots were creating increasing amounts of waste. In other words, they were making the same mistakes as before – only faster.

The focus then shifted to analyzing key business processes as a whole to figure out where they could be improved. In 1995 Welch implemented an ambitious Six Sigma program with the goal of massively reducing defects across all of GE’s businesses (a six sigma process only has 3.4 errors per million opportunities). In fact he made it central to the business strategy of the company, tying executive compensation to Six Sigma results and making sure that everyone at all levels got adequately trained on the concept.

As employees across the organization began figuring out opportunities for improvement, automation became a tool rather than the focus of the entire exercise.

Cont.... 

Euro-sclerosis | Zero Hedge

Euro-sclerosis | Zero Hedge

Submitted by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

There appears to be little or nothing in the monetarists' handbook to enable them to assess the risk of a loss of confidence in the purchasing power of a paper currency. Furthermore, since today's macroeconomists have chosen to deny Say's Law, otherwise known as the laws of the markets, they have little hope of grasping the more subtle aspects of the role of money in price formation. It would appear that this potentially important issue is being ignored at a time when the Eurozone faces growing systemic risks that could ultimately challenge the euro's validity as money.

The euro is primarily vulnerable because it has not existed for very long and its origin as money was simply decreed. It did not evolve out of marks, francs, lira or anything else; it just replaced the existing currencies of member states overnight by diktat. This contrasts with the dollar or sterling, whose origins were as gold substitutes and which evolved in steps over the last century to become standalone unbacked fiat. The reason this difference is important is summed up in the regression theorem.

The theorem posits that money must have an origin in its value for a non-monetary purpose. That is why gold, which was originally ornamental and is still used as jewellery endures, while all government currencies throughout history have ultimately failed. It therefore follows that in the absence of this use-value, trust in money is fundamental to modern currencies.

The theorem explains why we can automatically assume, for the purposes of transactions, that prices reflect the subjective values of the goods and services that we buy. This is in contrast with money that is not consumed but merely changes hands, and both parties in a transaction ascribe to money an objective value. And this is why the symptoms of monetary inflation are commonly referred to as rising prices instead of a fall in the purchasing power of money.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is plainly assuming the euro is money on a par with any other major currency with a longer history. Despite caution occasionally expressed by sound-money advocates in Germany's Bundesbank, the ECB is aggressively pursuing monetary policies designed to weaken its currency. For example, it has reduced its deposit rate for Eurozone banks to minus 0.2%. This is wholly unnatural in a world where possession of money is always more valuable than an IOU. Furthermore banks are encouraged to limit their customers' cash withdrawals, often under the guise of fighting tax evasion or money laundering. But in Greece restrictions on cash withdrawals are clearly designed to protect the banks.

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1812: The Inconsequential War That Changed America Forever « The Burning Platform

1812: The Inconsequential War That Changed America Forever « The Burning Platform

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

Most adult Americans today are unaware of what caused the War of 1812, who started it, what the outcome was, or even who the belligerents were. If I recall correctly, my grade school / high school History Class covered The War Of 1812 — aka America’s Second War Of Independence, or America’s Forgotten War — for a total of maybe one week. And what a worthless week it was. Like most history teachers I’ve ever had, they turned an exciting story into a dry bundle of boring crap … focusing on memorizing dates and random events without getting to the real story behind the story; i.e. why did it happen, how does the war affect us today, and what can we learn from it?  This is a crying shame because the war had a tremendous impact on American political development, territorial expansion, and national identity.

A 19^th century French historian said, “History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit.” The word ‘history’ comes from the Greek, and literally means “knowledge acquired by investigation”. So, let us investigate the War Of 1812, and the spirit of humanity which caused it … and changed America forever.

OVERALL SUMMARY

There were two major reasons given for the war.

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The Dissident Dad – 10 Things I Had to Unlearn That My Children Won’t | Liberty Blitzkrieg

The Dissident Dad – 10 Things I Had to Unlearn That My Children Won’t | Liberty Blitzkrieg

The Dissident Dad | Posted Thursday May 28, 2015 at 4:41 pm

This list could grow to 1,000 ideas, but I’ve kept it down to ten. In the future, I might update it and add some more.

There are a lot of bad ideas that dominate the world we live in today, most of which are uncritically accepted as the norm and fully embraced by society.

As a millennial myself, I’ve noticed my peers seem to accept most of these as conventional wisdom. Hook, line, and sinker.

Here are some ideas I was propagandized with that I hope my children will never have to “unlearn.”

1. Violence is normal.

Presidential candidates today are fighting over who can kill better by using drones or boots on the ground. By constantly threatening the use of violence against other countries, statists have conditioned the population into thinking that killing tens of thousands of people is normal behavior, instead of the immoral, dangerous provocation it is. Rather than being charged with murder, politicians and others that help support this behavior are often paid $250,000 or more a speech after they leave office, and referred to as Mr. President or former Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Video games, movies, television shows, and even toys all have a common theme: death and destruction. For example, there’s nothing like teaching your child about policing in 2015 America via these Playmobil toys:

This isn’t normal; this is psychotic. And the sociopaths that rule over us are murdering and imprisoning people every day because “we the people” are not only allowing it, but often times, cheering it on.

Outside of self-defense, respecting other peoples’ property should become the new norm.

2. Political parties govern differently. 

As a former Republican, I used to hate the Democrats. Now I see these two parties as just two wings on the same beast.

It’s true that they run with different themes and talking points, but in the end, they govern the same. They share the top donors, vote yes on the same wars, and never roll back a single thing the other does once in power.

Bush picked Bernanke to run the Fed, and Obama re-nominated him. Republicans like Nixon ran on an anti-war platform during the Vietnam era, until Reagan/Bush took over in the 80’s. Then the Democrats were anti-war in the 2000s, until Obama took over in 2008. Clinton, Bush, Obama… looking back at the last 25 years, I don’t see how anything has changed in the U.S. with regard to foreign policy, spending, or lying about U.S. economic data.

The oligarchs have us all fooled. Political parties are nothing more than spectator sport for a dumbed down public.

3. Patriotism is a virtue. 

Why? It was an accident that I was born here. Am I grateful to be living in the U.S., surrounded by family and friends? Yes. All the same, I owe the U.S. government nothing. I am a sovereign man, and shouldn’t have to subscribe to any group or nation just because I happened to be born in a part of the world called North America.

I love everyone in this world, and I am not going to express loyalty for a specific region like a sports fan who loves his team only because it’s in the same city he resides in.

Governments are dangerous, and the U.S. is the most dangerous one at the moment. My love for the U.S. is no more than my love for the Bahamas or Europe.

4. Illegal aliens are evil criminals who desire to collect welfare from taxpayers.

For a long time, I couldn’t stand these people. Nevertheless, if I wasn’t randomly born in Los Angeles and was instead born just 144 miles south, in Tijuana, I would be doing the exact same thing the illegal aliens are doing. I would be attempting to better my life and my children’s lives by migrating north. Humans moving to different regions is a natural event; the only unnatural thing is the imaginary lines we call borders.

As far as the welfare, that’s a symptom of the disease we call government. It’s like me taking a tax deduction. While I don’t support the income tax, I’m not stupid, and I’m going to do everything I can to game the system and benefit myself.

5. Taxes are justified at gunpoint.

Taxes with the threat of jail or violence is wrong. I’m sorry, but I don’t owe you or anybody else a portion of the fruits of my labor – especially not under the threat of violence.

6. War is good for the economy.

I was told at a very young age, and even in high school, that war helped the economy boom. When you think about it, it makes no sense. Using production lines to create products that blow up into nothing is a tremendous waste of resources. Looking back, after WWII the U.S. cut spending by 50% and reduced the military from 12 million to 1.5 million. The evidence from the late 40’s and 50’s is that the economy boomed when we had less war.

7. Terrorists hate our freedom and culture. 

Are there extremists? Absolutely. But the fact is the U.S. has troops in so many countries (see: The Golden Age of Black Ops – In Fiscal 2015 U.S. Special Forces Have Already Deployed to 105 Nations), and has a horrible track record of toppling democratically elected governments, supporting sociopaths, and arming rebels who later become “terrorists.” It’s no wonder than these policies occasionally come home to roost.

For one second, imagine that a nation bombed your neighbor and killed your son. What would your reaction be? These are the situations thousands across the world face on a consistent basis.

What if Iran had troops in Mexico and Canada, ships off our coasts, and drones over our air space? Would we want a nuclear bomb for defense?

George Washington was a terrorist in the eyes of Great Britain. If you want to know who’s dishing out much of the tyranny and chaos in the Middle East, as an American, you don’t have to look far from home.

8. The U.S. has a free market economy.

This is seriously stupid, but college professors and politicians repeat this mantra every day. In reality, the economy is so centrally planned that if the Fed alters one sentence in their statement, the Dow Jones could rally or fall by 200 points in an hour.

Here’s another fact. Nearly 50% of America’s EBT program in Oklahoma went straight to the coffers of one company: Walmart.

Meanwhile, regulations in some industries have forced business to have an entire division dedicated just to compliance. Even worse, many of these regulations are pushed by the larger corporations in order to drown out the competition with bureaucracy they can’t possibly afford.

There is no free market in the U.S. – only crony capitalism, manipulation, and a centrally planned system manned by busybodies.

9. U.S. troops are dying for my freedom.

This is a tough one, because you want to naturally love and respect anyone who does something for you, especially if it’s to protect you from harm. The only reason I even bring this up is because many of the troops are honest, decent young men looking to serve their country or be a part of something greater than themselves. Nevertheless, these men and women are merely being used and abused in a Game of Thrones-esque battle for global wealth and power. They are often just collateral damage for large corporations looking to expand their businesses into territories and countries that, without U.S. military intervention, would likely be thrown out by the locals.

I genuinely think the troops are willing to die for my freedom, but the corrupt American Empire poses a much greater threat to my freedom than any outside enemy we are constantly taught to fear.

10. My vote matters. 

Remember in 2006 when the Democrats were going to get our fiscal house in order? Or was that in 2010, when the Republicans were going to do the same? I don’t know, but your vote doesn’t matter. The populace is easily manipulated and/or asleep when it comes to matters of importance, so why bother.

The vote counters and the media have already decided who’s acceptable and, of course, at the end of those strings are the oligarchs who run the world. See my post from last year: Election 2014 – Why I Opt Out of Voting.

Edward Snowden sacrificed his freedom to alert voters of high crimes in the U.S government, and many Americans have no idea who he is. Meanwhile, most politicians want to try him for treason.

Summary: The good news is that because of the communications revolution we are in right now, I truly feel like there is a great awakening happening. We see it in the alternative media boom, blogs like Liberty Blitzkrieg, ZeroHedge, and others are currently challenging conventional wisdom with ferocity and success.

We need to keep fighting.

– Daniel Ameduri aka The Dissident Dad

U.S. Households Under Pressure: Stagnant Incomes, Rising Basic Expenses | Zero Hedge

U.S. Households Under Pressure: Stagnant Incomes, Rising Basic Expenses | Zero Hedge

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

How do you support a consumer economy with stagnant incomes for the bottom 90%, rising basic expenses and crashing employment for males ages 25-54? Answer: you don't.

Frequent contributor B.C. passed along a sobering set of charts that provide context for How The Average U.S. Consumer Spends Their Paycheck. The basic story is well-known to the bottom 90%: most of the household income goes to taxes, housing, food and transportation, with healthcare and insurance, pensions and retirement contributions rounding out the big-ticket items. (Higher education is, as we all know, paid with student loans by all but the top-tier of families.)
 

Here's the question this raises: is the sliver that's left enough to support a $17 trillion consumer economy? The answer is obvious: no.
 

Stagnant household income has a number of systemic causes, including the generational decline of full-time employment (A Rising Share of Young Adults Live in Their Parents’ Home) and the concentration of wage gains in the top 10%. These dynamics are not easily addressed, for the simple yet profound reason that the amount of human labor that generates a meaningful profit in a stagnant, over-indebted, financialized economy is declining.
 

The only way most enterprises can sustainably earn a profit is to offload costly human labor (with its immense burdens of healthcare, pensions, workers compensation, disability insurance, etc., and the heavy regulatory burdens of workplace rules) and replace it with networked software and smart machines.

Cont.... 

The Archdruid Report: The Era of Response

The Archdruid Report: The Era of Response: The third stage of the process of collapse, following what I’ve called the eras of pretense and impact, is the era of response. It’s easy ...

Israel Is A Discredit To America -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org

Israel Is A Discredit To America -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org

You Are Judged By The Company You Keep
Paul Craig Roberts

The Israel Lobby tries to prevent reports and criticism of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians by branding every critic of every policy of the extreme right-wing Israeli government an “anti-semite.” In other words, if you object to Israeli armed forces shooting down Palestinian children in the streets and then bombing the funerals of the kids the Israelis have already murdered, you hate Jews and are an anti-semite.

The success that the Israel Lobby has enjoyed in imposing this twisted logic on Congress, the White House, the media, the universities and the insouciant American public is astonishing. As a consequence, Americans are no longer answerable to Christian morality but to the evil that the Israel Lobby represents.

Americans have become accomplices to genocide, lies, and unspeakable evils.

Jeffrey St. Clair, one of the few remaining Western journalists with a moral conscience, describes the latest Israeli horror to which we are all accomplices.

Cont.... 

Prepare Your Homes And Neighborhoods For The Violence That Is Going To Sweep America

Prepare Your Homes And Neighborhoods For The Violence That Is Going To Sweep America

 By Michael Snyder, on May 26th, 2015

The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted on a daily basis is beginning to disappear, and a new era of chaos and anarchy is coming to our cities.  I don’t know if you have noticed, but violence is increasing on the streets of America.  Over Memorial Day weekend, 29 people were shot in Baltimore and 55 people were shot in Chicago.  But of course the trend that I am talking about is much broader than that.  According to the FBI, the number of police officers “feloniously killed” in the line of duty rose by an astounding 89 percent in 2014.  We live at a time when Americans are becoming extremely angry and extremely frustrated, and this is only going to intensify as economic conditions worsen.  But already we have seen some of this anger and frustration boil over into violence in Ferguson and in Baltimore.  And you know what?  The vast majority of Americans expect more of the same in the coming months.  According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey that was recently released, 96 percent of all Americans believe that there will be more civil unrest in America this summer.  What we have seen up until now is just the warm up act.  The main event is still to come.

If things are this bad already, how bad will they be when the next great economic crisis hits this nation and unemployment skyrockets and poverty is everywhere?

Cont.... 

America has no enemy more dastardly and lethal than the Neoconservative | Non-Intervention.com

America has no enemy more dastardly and lethal than the Neoconservative | Non-Intervention.com

By MIKE | Published: MAY 25, 2015

Those men who wrote our Constitution made it perfectly intelligible to anyone who cared to read it. They also left some flexibility in its articles to ensure that as time passed and circumstances changed the document would remain viable as the indispensable protector of the republic they created and of the liberty of citizens who delegated a limited amount of their sovereign power to the national government through its provisions. And after a long and often  angry ratification debate, the first congress added a bill of rights to the Constitution as that document’s first ten amendments. These amendments were fully as clear as the text — perhaps more so — but less flexible than the body of the document because they dealt with the tenets of republican liberty which, if regularly and deliberately violated by the national government, would require that Americans, to paraphrase Jefferson, demolish the existing government and erect a new one that would better safeguard their liberties and their republic’s security.

In recent decades, however, Americans have been treated to an endless stream of politicians, academics, lawyers, and pundits who describe the opaqueness of the Founder’s Constitution and the need for “experts” to decipher or infer what the document means. As a result, we now have presidents who take the country to war on their whim; politicians who are legally bribed by “campaign contributions” from rich individuals, corporations, labor unions, and foreign lobbies and governments based on an absurd reading of the Constitution; a public that is increasingly endangered by flamboyant blasphemers who seek violence and war under the protection of the First Amendment; and the routine criminality of executive branch officials who refuse to obey their oath of office to execute the laws. We also have the overwhelming majority of both political parties willing to destroy the Fourth Amendment in the name of providing for national security against an enemy they have resolutely refused to either stop motivating or militarily annihilate. Together these realities amount to a more-than-full justification for Americans to recall that, as Jefferson wrote, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

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“Disposable Architecture” | Architecture Here and There

“Disposable Architecture” | Architecture Here and There

Architect Jenny Bevan, of the Charleston firm Bevan & Liberatos, gave a TED talk called “Our Disposable Architecture” in that fair city on Tuesday. She spoke about sustainability in architecture, essentially pointing out that whatever you may think of this or that style of design, buildings erected using traditional techniques not only create beautiful buildings but lasting buildings – architecture that lasts for generations, often hundreds rather than the 40 or so years (and shrinking by the decade) timespan associated with most buildings erected in the past several score of decades. She’s in the right city for that.

Well and poorly designed cornices.

Bevan describes how many features considered merely ornamental (I use “merely” with a wink) play a role in adding to the life of a building and reducing its cost of operation and maintenance.

An example I often use is the cornice. A properly designed ornamental cornice directs rain to drip down parallel to the side of a building so it won’t get into joints on the way down. A poorly designed cornice – “abstract,” as Bevan put it – often leads rainwater directly into a building. It’s no wonder this building will have a shorter lifespan. Most modernist buildings have no proper cornice at all. These days, some modernist buildings seem to have roofs canted inward and downward, as if designed to collect water and funnel it right into the maintenance budget of the building owner!

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