nicklloydnow

[nicklloydnow]

Yukio Mishima by Eduardo Paolozzi, 1980

“When the idea of putting an end to it all takes hold of us, a space opens out before us, a vast possibility outside of time and of eternity itself, a dizzying issue, a hope of dying beyond death.

To kill yourself is, thereby, to compete with death, to prove that you can do better than death, to put one over on death and—no negligible success—to redeem yourself in your own eyes. You are reassured, you thus convince yourself that you are not the worst, that you deserve some respect. You tell yourself: up to now, incapable of taking any initiative, I had no self-esteem; now everything is changed: destroying myself, I thereby destroy all the reasons I had to despise myself, I regain confidence, I am someone forever. . . .” - Emil Cioran, ‘The New Gods’ (1969) [p. 50]

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Le Christ mort et les anges by Édouard Manet, 1864

“No matter what we say, the end of all sadness is a swoon into divinity.” - Emil Cioran, ‘Tears and Saints’ (1937) [p. 19]

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““I cannot differentiate between tears and music” (Nietzsche). Whoever is not immediately struck by the profundity of this statement has not lived for a minute in the intimacy of music. I know no other music than that of tears. Born out of the loss of paradise, music gives birth to the symbols of this loss: tears.” - Emil Cioran, ‘Tears and Saints’ (1937) [p. 11]

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“For Stirner, revolutionary action in the past has been a dismal failure. It has remained trapped within the paradigm of authority, changing the form of authority but not its place: the liberal state was replaced by the workers' state; God was replaced with man. But the category of authority itself has remained unchanged, and has often become even more oppressive. Perhaps, then, the idea of revolution should be abandoned: it is based on essentialist concepts and Manichean structures which always end up perpetuating, rather than overcoming, authority. Stirner has unmasked the links between human essence and power, and has shown the dangers in building a revolutionary theory around this notion. Perhaps, therefore, revolutions should be about escaping subjectification—rejecting the enforced identity of human essence and man. Perhaps, as Stirner argues, revolution should become insurrection:

Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising but a rising of individuals, a getting up without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on “institutions." It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established.

It may be argued, then, that insurrection starts with the individual refusing his enforced identity, through which power operates: it starts "from men's discontent with themselves." Insurrection does not aim at overthrowing political institutions themselves. It is aimed at the individual, in a sense overthrowing his own identity—the outcome of which is, nevertheless, a change in political arrangements. Insurrection is therefore not about becoming what one is—becoming human, becoming man, as the anarchist argues—but about becoming what one is not. Stirner's notion of individual rebellion involves, then, a process of becoming. It is about continually reinventing one's own self—an anarchism of subjectivity, rather than an anarchism based on subjectivity. The self, or the ego, is not an essence, a defined set of characteristics, but rather an emptiness, a "creative nothing," and it is up to the individual to create something out of this and not be limited by essences. The self exists only to be consumed: "I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself; but my presupposition does not struggle for its perfection like 'Man struggling for his perfection,' but only serves me to enjoy it and consume it . . . I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself.” - Saul Newman, ‘From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power’ (2001) [p. 66, 67]

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See how the national debt grew to more than $36 trillion

“The United States owes more than $36 trillion. Washington now spends close to $2 trillion more each year than it collects in revenue, forcing the Treasury Department to borrow to make up the difference. Which means the national debt is still growing.

Without major changes, the debt will soon be bigger as a share of the economy than when it peaked at the end of World War II. Most of that debt has accumulated over the past 20 years. In 2001, the nation actually had a cash surplus, when the Treasury collected more in taxes than it spent on government services.

Since then, four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars have contributed to the tide of red ink. Thanks in part to policy decisions made generations ago, Social Security and Medicare are growing in cost, also adding to the debt.

More recent decisions — budget-busting tax cuts, bipartisan spending deals and staggering sums to cope with the coronavirus pandemic — have all forced the nation to sink more deeply in debt.”

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Lawmakers Traded Stocks Heavily as Trump Rolled Out ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs

“As markets tanked in the wake of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April, members of Congress and their families made hundreds of stock trades, shining a spotlight on a controversial practice that some lawmakers have pushed to ban.

From April 2, when Trump launched the sweeping tariffs, to April 8, the day before he paused many of them, more than a dozen House lawmakers and their family members made more than 700 stock trades, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of disclosure filings. Top stocks purchased in that “Liberation Week” period, by the number of trades listed in the disclosures, included MKS Instruments and JPMorgan Chase, while the most sold stocks included Honeywell International and Visa.

Two lawmakers who have called for stock-trading bans in the past—Reps. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) and Rob Bresnahan (R., Pa.)—reported the most transactions by themselves or family members, the analysis found.

The trading took place during one of the wildest stretches for global financial markets of the past decade. The S&P 500 tanked more than 4.5% for two consecutive sessions shortly after Liberation Day and recorded the biggest fall since the March 2020 market crash. More than $6 trillion in market value vanished.

The upswing after Trump announced his 90-day pause was dramatic, too. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite shot up 12% in a single session on April 9, its best day in 24 years. Stocks have largely kept rising since—staging a U-turn that has helped major indexes recoup April losses.

Broader trading activity surged in early April when Trump put up an economic wall between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Trading volumes on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq surged to some of the highest levels in records going back to 2007. House lawmakers and their families logged more trades in April than any other month in the past year, the Journal found.

Disclosure rules only require members to report wide ranges of transaction values, not specific amounts or the price. For most members who both bought and sold, that makes it impossible to tell whether their overall trading activity that week made or lost money. For instance, a typical purchase disclosure would say a member bought between $1,001 and $15,000 of a stock on a given day, leaving the exact size of the investment and the price paid unknown.

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Lawmakers passed a law in 2012 prohibiting trading on insider information and mandating disclosure. Lawmakers rekindled discussions about trading restrictions in the wake of the market volatility influenced by Trump’s trade policies.

“This whole episode is a reminder that the opportunity for insider trading by members of Congress is very real, very toxic and needs to be eliminated,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner (D., R.I.), who is leading negotiations on a bipartisan bill that would further restrict trading.

A small group of House lawmakers including Magaziner and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.), along with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Chip Roy (R., Texas) and others, are completing negotiations on a new bill that they say amounts to the first realistic shot at stock trading-based ethics reform in more than a decade.

The most active traders, as measured by the number of trades, during the week following Liberation Day were Khanna and Bresnahan, as well as Reps. Jefferson Shreve (R., Ind.), Julie Johnson (D., Texas) and Michael McCaul (R., Texas). Lawmakers are required to make filings showing trading by the lawmakers as well as close family members.”

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Untitled by Nick Cave, 2018

“I’ve always loved America — it’s the country I love most of all, in a way.” - Nick Cave, Los Angeles Times (5 September 2024)

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Nick Cave on joy, grief and the ‘treasured evenings’ he spent in L.A.

“You talk about finding joy in “Wild God.” Did pursuing that joy ever feel like a betrayal of your son?

That’s a huge trap that grieving people get into. I don’t buy it at all. I think when things like that happen to us — and it’s something that most of us will go through in one form or another — I think it’s imperative that we point ourselves towards the happiness that we can find, if only to influence the condition of those that have died. My greatest worry, as bizarre as this may sound, was my concern about my son, wherever he may be — the feeling he may have for how much pain his death caused his parents and other members of the family. So I felt on some level that it’s for him that we searched for some way of dealing with the world that had meaning and joy in it.

I spoke recently to Jack Antonoff, who told me that the latest record by his band Bleachers is the first that’s not in some way about losing his younger sister when he was a kid. For years he believed that anything that went wrong in his life was somehow connected to that tragedy. Does that make sense to you?

It makes sense, but I don’t see things the same way. Terrible things don’t really happen to you after you’ve lost a child. You can lose another child — that’s the terrible thing. But essentially the world has done its worst. I’ve seen it with my wife. She had this company, the Vampire’s Wife, that made extremely beautiful dresses that really grew out of her despair [over Arthur’s death]. And this company collapsed a few months ago. Now, this should affect Susie terribly, but on some level she’s kind of immune. We’re just toughened by grief.

Are you tougher than you ever thought you’d be?

I’d say toughened — slightly different than tough.”

painting by Philip Guston

Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?

Dear Valerio,

You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you, especially your child. Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.

I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

Love, Nick”

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“Tyranny goes by the law of the hunting preserve; if any of the young harts thinks he can defy the royal stag, they engage in a test of strength. Then all hell breaks loose.” - Ernst Jünger, ‘Eumeswil’ (1977) [p. 103]

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“Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get confused out there. Power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity. But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God. Because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have them. Walt Kurtz has reached his. And very obviously he has gone insane.”

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“Barbarism, no doubt, saw more of slaughter than do we; but the old yearning for it will not die, and we certainly make the most of what we have. We film it, headline it, and chart it, until it becomes a staple feature of our daily life. Like Dryden’s Alexander, thrice we slay the slain, and the most Cowperian of us would feel a haunting void were it withdrawn. There is still a strain in us that calls for a certain amount of bloodshed, real or imaginary, to be enjoyed, if not experienced. Mere accidents, it is to be observed, do not satisfy this craving.” - Edgar J. Goodspeed, The New Barbarism (September 1922)

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“This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society that has ceased to develop.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University (8 June 1978) [p. 45]

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Jeff Koons and Ilona Staller, Made in Heaven

“Ecstasy replaces sexuality. The mediocrity of the human race is the only plausible explanation for sexuality. As the only mode of coming out of ourselves, sexuality is a temporary salvation from animality. For every being, intercourse surpasses its biological function. It is a triumph over animality. Sexuality is the only gate to heaven. The saints are not a-sexual but trans-sexual. They no longer need the revelations of sexuality. To be a saint means to be always outside yourself. What else would sexuality add to this? Sexual orgasm pales beside the saints' ecstatic trance.” - Emil Cioran, ‘Tears and Saints’ (1937) [p. 19]

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“In their loss of purpose, in their abandonment even of the themes they most sincerely espoused, Britain, France, and most of all, because of their immense power and impartiality, the United States, allowed conditions to be gradually built up which led to the very climax they dreaded most. They have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behaviour towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us today to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale.” - Sir Winston Churchill, ‘The Gathering Storm’ (1948) [p. 38]

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“It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world the way to successful economic development, even though in past years it has been sharply offset by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall certainly not speak for such an alternative. The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University (8 June 1978)

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"If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of the criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.

* * *

Punishment is no longer fashionable. Why? Because—with its corollary, reward—it makes some people guilty and others innocent, some good and others evil; in short, it creates moral distinctions among men, and, to the "democratic" mentality, this is odious. Our age seems to prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility." - Thomas Szasz, ‘The Second Sin’ (1973) [p. 42]

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“In short order, Donald Trump has inflicted deep damage to three of the unique sources of American superpower. And he’s on the very brink of shattering a fourth.

The United States enjoyed the unique advantage of an alliance network of more than 40 countries. But an alliance is meaningless to Trump’s America. The US uniquely created and built the world trading system as a source of growth and prosperity. Trump is dismembering it.

The US uniquely held in check war between great powers through its military might and strategic credibility. Its might remains. But American credibility started to slide under Barack Obama and today approaches the point of extinction.

Trump’s threats and promises are worth nil. Russia ignores his threats to stop the war in Ukraine. China successfully called his bluff over tariffs. Trump claims to have stopped an escalating war between India and Pakistan, but they say he had nothing to do with it.

Two newborn acronyms, both coined in the finance world, tell the story. One, coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong this month, is TACO – Trump always chickens out. The other, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last week, conveys investor sentiment about where to put money. It’s ABUSA – anywhere but USA.

Now Trump is on the cusp of surrendering a fourth unique source of US superpower, and perhaps the single most important – America’s “full faith and credit”. That is, the ability to borrow cheaply, to spend lavishly and to enjoy the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the global reserve currency.

(…)

It’s no secret that the US has been building a vast national debt for years. Indeed, it’s literally up in lights in the form of debt clocks at multiple bus shelters around Washington, DC, courtesy of the Peterson Foundation. The clocks show US government debt at $US36 trillion and ticking higher by the minute. That’s about $US106,000 for every man, woman and child in that nation. Before the pandemic, US debt stood at the equivalent of about 100 per cent of America’s GDP. Today, it’s 122 per cent.

Some investors are starting to doubt that the US ever will repay it. The doubters include Trump himself. In 2023, he was asked about the risk of a US sovereign default. He replied: “You might as well do it now because you’ll do it later.”

The worry is that “later” has arrived. Eleven days ago, the credit rating agency Moody’s cut the US government’s creditworthiness – for the first time since 1919 – to second-tier.

Of the 200 countries in the world, only 10, plus the European Union, are rated as risk-free by all three major credit agencies. The US is not among them. The AAA sovereigns are Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland.

There are signs of growing anxiety in the markets. The US dollar has been sold off in the past week and bond interest rates bid up. And now comes the fiscal vandalism that Trump likes to call his “big beautiful” bill.

(…)

But that’s their country, their business. Where it gets ugly for the world is its effect on the federal debt. The technocrats of the Congressional Budget Office calculate that it would add about $US4 trillion to the debt over a decade.

(…)

Peter Orszag, head of the US investment bank, Lazard, and previously director of the Congressional Budget Office, said this month that, in the past, he had ignored “all the Chicken Little, kind of ‘the sky is falling’ fiscal stuff because all the dire predictions were not happening. But if you compare where we are now to where we were a decade ago, it’s a lot different. The deficit is twice as high. Interest rates are dramatically higher. I think it’s time to worry again about this trajectory”.

So does historian Niall Ferguson. In February, he proposed something he calls “Ferguson’s law”. It posits that “any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defence risks ceasing to be a great power”.

He describes his proposed threshold as timely “as the US began violating Ferguson’s Law for the first time in nearly a century in 2024”. The Congressional Budget Office says that US net interest payments hit 3.1 per cent as a share of GDP last year, overtaking defence spending at 2.9 per cent.

Different agencies have slightly different estimates, but the broad point is that the US is now in Ferguson’s danger zone, which he calls “a useful predictor of the decline of a great power”.

How does this hurt a great power? Because there is less butter and fewer guns: “The debt burden draws scarce resources towards itself, reducing the amount available for national security and leaving the power increasingly vulnerable to military challenge.”

He also finds the “Ferguson limit” signals the internal fragility of a great power, as well as its external vulnerability. His paper for the Hoover Institution studies empires from Habsburg to British to support his thesis.

Ferguson doesn’t claim that US collapse is inevitable at this point. But if its political system plunges ahead into ever-deeper debt, the risk of a market panic rises. And a chaotic sell-off could indeed seal the fate of empire. There’s an old market adage: “Deficits don’t matter. Until the day they do.””

“If we take a step back from all this, Samantha, the really big significance of what we’re talking about here is we are witnessing in the daily news the implosion of an empire. We are witnessing the end of the American Empire that has stood like a colossus across the globe since World War II. It’s coming to an end. Donald Trump is accelerating it and day by day, these developments we’re talking about are all details in that larger pattern of decline.” [7:53 - 8:22]