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Sunday, September 22, 2024

2024-09-22

 ***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:

The neutral real rate of interest is back in focus as the shocks from the pandemic and 2008 are finally being worked out of the financial system.

Demographics on their own have ensured a decline in R*, as has disappointing productivity growth. The Global Financial Crisis administered a massive further blow downward. A number of estimates are out there. Vanguard Group’s chief economist Joe Davis shows how two models from the New York Fed have measured the neutral rate going back to 1960:




"The Fed (did not) do it"

The big story on Wednesday, September 18, was that the Federal Reserve’s open market committee finally got around to “cutting rates”, and doing so by more than expected. This action, much debated and discussed during all of 2024, was greeted as "big" news, and market prognosticators argued that it was a harbinger of market moves, both in interest rates and stock prices. The market seemed to initially be disappointed in the action, dropping after the Fed’s announcement on Wednesday, but it did climb on Thursday. Overall, though, and this is my view, this was about as anticlimactic as a climactic event gets, akin to watching an elephant in labor deliver a mouse.  As a long-time skeptic about the Fed’s (or any Central Bank’s) capacity to alter much in markets or the economy, I decided now would be as good a time as any to confront some widely held beliefs about central banking powers, and counter them with data. In particular, I want to start with the myth that central banks set interest rates, or at least the interest rates that you and I may face in our day-to-day lives, move on to the slightly lesser myth that the Fed's move lead market interest rates, then examine the signals that emanate supposedly from Fed actions, and finish off by evaluating how the Fed's actions affect stock prices. .........

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Conclusion

 I know that this post cuts against the grain, since the notion that the Fed has superpowers has only become stronger over the last two decades. Pushed to explain why interest rates were at historic lows for much of the last decade, the response you often heard was "the Fed did it". Active investors, when asked why active investing had its worst decade in history, losing out to index funds and to passive investors, pointed fingers the Fed. Market timers, who had built their reputations around using metrics like the Shiller PE, defended their failure to call market moves in the last fifteen years, by pointing to the Fed. Economists who argued that inverted yield curves were a surefire predictor of recessions blamed the Fed for the absence of a recession, after years of two years plus of the phenomena. 

 I believe that it is time for us to put the Fed delusion to rest. It has distracted us from talking about things that truly matter, which include growing government debt, inflation, growth and how globalization may be feeding into risk, and allowed us to believe that central bankers have the power to rescue us from whatever mistakes we may be making. I am a realist, though, and I am afraid that the Fed Delusion has destroyed enough investing brain cells, that those who holding on to the delusion cannot let go. I am already hearing talk among this group about what the FOMC may or may not do at its next meeting (and the meeting after that), and what this may mean for markets, restarting the Fed Watch. The insanity of it all! 


If stocks already were due for a tumble and the economy for a recession, the Fed’s rate cut probably didn’t avert it

Wall Street commentary around this week’s Fed rate cut could have filled a very long and boring book, but much of what you need to know about its effect on the stock market can be found in a movie rarely linked with monetary policy: “The Wizard of Oz.”

The great and powerful man behind the central bank curtain, Jerome Powell, really can’t do as much as people think to keep their portfolios from shriveling if the wheels are already starting to come off the economy.  Stocks’ initial reaction to Wednesday’s cut was exuberant. That often proves to be a head fake, though—we still don’t know how this movie ends.

Take the start of the rate-cutting cycle in 2007—one that coincidentally began on the same day of the year, the same starting federal-funds rate, and was for an identical amount, half a percent (50 basis points)—as Wednesday’s move. The effect was electric: The Dow Jones Industrial Average had its largest gain in more than four years .........

Yet there have been 22 bear markets in the past century for all sorts of reasons. Economists who dismiss the possibility of a tumble just because specific excesses such as toxic subprime loans as in the mid-aughts or ludicrous dot-com valuations akin to the late ’90s don’t exist today could wind up with egg on their faces. Like generals fighting the last war, they rely too much on their lived experience.

In a classic of the genre, then Bear Stearns chief economist David Malpass wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Don’t Panic About the Credit Market,” in August 2007 after a two-month retreat in stock prices............

Claims that the U.S. economy could soon contract aren’t very convincing at the moment, and a sharp pullback of a third or more in stocks would be unusual unless the economy stalls. That helps explain why stocks are near record highs and the usual signs of market caution so subdued. But so does the misguided belief that Fed cuts are themselves a reason to remain calm and keep buying.

There are smart people on the fringes—they usually are at this stage—warning about excesses in private credit and commercial real estate or the effect of China’s alarming slowdown on the world economy. U.S. stocks have rarely been so expensive, concentrated or dependent on a single theme—the promise of AI. And government indebtedness around the world has never been as high, making the response to the next recession trickier.

We’re not in Kansas any more.


Balanced risks to inflation and employment indicate it’s time for the Fed to normalize interest rates, enhancing a positive backdrop for bonds.







.............................. Brett makes a very important point about momentum investing.

Researchers say investing in so-called “momentum” stocks, is the best documented and most durable “edge” in the market.

Critically, that applies to owning individual equities in a portfolio. Not passively holding an ETF.

There is a difference.

Yes, on a passive basis since 2014, momentum has outperformed the benchmark and value indices. However, passively holding an ETF negates the value of momentum investing.

“And there is an inbuilt cautious bias to this portfolio as well, because it only holds stocks that have positive trailing returns. In a bear market you may be invested in nothing whatsoever. As Meb Faber and others have pointed out, momentum strategies can help you avoid the worst market turmoil.” – Brett Arends

Read that again.

As a strategy, momentum investing raises cash when the momentum of holdings turns negative. Such is not the case for an ETF that must always remain invested. If we break the comparative performance down into specific periods, the value of the momentum strategy gets lost. ............


..... The realization that nothing lasts forever is crucial to long-term investing. To “buy low,” one must first “sell high.” Understanding that all things are cyclical suggests that investment strategies must also change.

The rotation from “momentum” to “value” is inevitable. It will occur against a backdrop of economic weakness and price discovery for investors quietly lulled into complacency following years of monetary interventions.
“Relative valuations are in the far tail of the historical distribution. If, as history suggests, there is any tendency for mean reversion, the expected future returns for value are elevated by almost any definition.” – Research Affiliates


Berman: The End of Growth: Why Oil Prices are Falling

Paradigms hold on until they can no longer offer believable explanations for what’s happening. Oil markets and the global economy are now in the middle of such a shift.

................................... The reality is that weak oil demand has been the main force pushing prices down in recent years, but geopolitical factors—including OPEC production cuts—have repeatedly stepped in to prop them up. 

..................... Analysts and economists continue to force today’s realities into obsolete models. Oil isn’t just a commodity; it’s the foundation of the global economy. It signals where the future is heading. Right now, oil markets are flashing a clear message: the era of growth is over—not just for oil but for the global economy.



China Fare:

The Chief Economist of Bank of China International urges Beijing to emerge from Friedrich Hayek’s shadow and listen to John Maynard Keynes.





Quotes of the Week:

someone on BNNTV: "What we are seeing is the belief that the Fed has everything under control and they are going to engineer a soft landing and therefore risk assets are moving ahead strongly,”



Charts:
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MMT Fare:


Yves here. We were comparatively early to discuss Modern Monetary Theory, back in the days when a small group of scholars and economic writers like Randy Wray Stephanie Kelton, Scott Fulweiler and Warren Mosler were trying to get it out of an academic backwater into the mainstream. The fact that some libertarians mention it with a lot of choler and not much understanding says that this group of advocates has raised its profile.

But why the intense reactions? The response are often visceral, as if Modern Monetary Theory, which says that a sovereign currency issuer is not constrained by its ability to tax but the productive capacity of its economy (and the government can spend to marshal that to the extent the private sector is failing) is fiscal immorality. In fact, as Richard Murphy explains below, a more basic reason is Modern Monetary Theory upsets power dynamics via showing how currency issuing governments don’t rely on bond investors to spend. That means financial markets and banks wield much less power that the press and officials lead us to believe. ..............



(not just) for the ESG crowd:



Let’s be CLEAR about what “Mainstream” Climate Science actually says. (Part One of Two)

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“The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast.” — Vaclav Smil


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Our current Climate Sensitivity estimates date back to the 70’s. We bet the FUTURE of humanity on a 1970’s understanding of the Climate System.

The essential problem with “climate sensitivity”. Is that after 130 years we still don’t know what value to assign to it. ..................

MEANING

The Moderate Faction of Climate Science would rather crash our civilization and see half the world’s population die before they will admit that MAYBE they’re wrong about how the Climate System works.

In 1979 we should have listened to the Alarmists.

I close with a thought from Mr. McGuire, Climate Scientist and Alarmist.

As a climate scientist, it is my duty to tell you about what is happening to our world, whether it engenders fear or not.

A failure to do this will mean that the public is left ignorant of the true extent of the climate emergency, which in turn can only hinder engagement and action. ........

Billions of human beings are going to die over the next 10 years.

The risk of civilizational collapse is GROWING. How does one “prepare” for that?

Dust Bowl 2.0, here we come. 2025 -2028 is probably going to see the collapse of the Great Plains agricultural zone.

This is not THEORETICAL anymore. This is our NOW.

If you waited this long to start prepping. Well, you waited till the VERY LAST minute.

THE LIFE YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO HAVE IS GONE.


The Energy Collapse | Louis Arnoux
System failure by 2030

What happens when economics takes precedence over thermodynamics?
Eventually, the system collapses—because being incompatible with thermodynamics is impossible. That’s the stark message of this week’s guest, Louis Arnoux, a scientist, engineer and managing director of Fourth Transition, who has been working on this problem for decades. Louis and his team’s research point to our energy systems collapsing by 2030 because we’re having to spend more energy than ever before to extract fuel. Soon, the energy cost of extraction will equal the energy benefit. Such an equilibrium is, in his words, a dead state.

In the episode, Louis gives a phenomenal overview of the three thermodynamic traps human civilisation is caught in, including how decarbonising to renewables is exacerbating the thermodynamic problem .............



PLEASE stop using the word, "problem," to describe ecological overshoot and all its symptom predicaments such as climate change. 

There is literally a huge difference between a problem with a solution and a predicament with an outcome, and there are mountains of empirical evidence pointing to the fact that overshoot, climate change, energy and resource decline, biodiversity loss, pollution loading, extinction, etc. are all predicaments for which there are no solutions. 

Nonacceptance of these facts is understandable but unacceptable, as it fosters a cultural conditioning of ordinary people to believe that some sort of "solution" is right around the corner when in reality this could not be further from the truth. Technology use and innovation are precisely what have brought us to this point in time. These are behaviors of ours, and they cause ecological overshoot. Continuing to promote the idea that there is some sort of solution which will "fix" any and/or all of these predicaments only makes the existing predicaments worse as businesses and individuals promote technological ideas that only increase overshoot, not reduce it.  
By utilizing the words, "predicament" and/or "dilemma" to describe these predicaments, you are honoring facts rather than falsehoods. We are addicted to technology use, plain and simple. Certain kinds of technology will probably always be with us as long as we inhabit this planet - things like fire, the wheel, and basic hand tools. Other types of technology will disappear as a result of energy and resource decline, a key symptom predicament of ecological overshoot, producing the outcome of collapse and die-off. 

You don't have to accept these facts. Addicts often deny their addiction for years. They try bargaining with it, but it doesn't change or go away. They try stopping for awhile, but go back to the exact same behaviors as soon as they pick it back up again. The only way anything changes for the better is when they finally accept the actual reality - the truth. Only then does their life begin to change for the better. 

The same is true for those who deny that overshoot is a predicament with an outcome, not a problem with a solution. They try to bargain with the predicament, but nature does not negotiate. So all these attempts to "solve" what is seen as a "problem" go absolutely nowhere. Meanwhile, efforts to try to "solve" the predicament only end up increasing overshoot instead of reducing it. Increasing overshoot tends to increase all the symptom predicaments which are produced as a result of overshoot, which is why emissions continue rising. Pollution loading continues increasing. Ocean acidification increases. Biodiversity loss increases. Extinction increases. Global temperatures increase. Tree decline increases. Cryosphere loss increases - and on and on and on. For those who are new to this, this is where we're going. .............


A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature

CONCLUSION
PhanDA provides a statistically robust estimate of GMST through the Phanerozoic. We find that Earth’s temperature has varied more dynamically than previously thought and that greenhouse climates were very warm. CO2 is the dominant driver of Phanerozoic climate, emphasizing the importance of this greenhouse gas in shaping Earth history. The consistency of apparent Earth system sensitivity (∼8°C) is surprising and deserves further investigation. More broadly, PhanDA provides critical context for the evolution of life on Earth, as well as present and future climate changes.



There are several interlinked Crises , extant today: climate change, societal 
atrophy, threat of global war , and nuclear catastrophe.

Interestingly, it is the societal atrophy underlying it all that rarely gets any
deep scrutiny

It is my Argument, made for some 3 decades now, that All of these Crises , in
their current form, stem from the same set of systemic causes that I collate
under the rubric of European Modernism or EM .

EM is the specific variant of Modernism imposed on the world, and on itself, by
Europe, in the 17-18th century.

In sum, what we view around us today is the cumulative ‘butterfly effect’ of
bad idea (l)s.



U.S. B.S.


.................... This is not democracy. This is plutocracy. This is oligarchy. We’re just indoctrinated into calling it democracy, by the very same mass-scale psychological manipulations they use to keep it from being a democracy.

All US elections these days come with allegations of election interference, especially from the losing side. But it’s important to keep in mind that even in the unlikely event that those allegations were 100 percent true, they’d still be a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the election interference that’s already happening right out in the open.



I don’t care who Americans vote for in November, or if they vote at all. In order to care I’d have to believe US presidential elections matter. 

But they don’t matter. No matter who wins, the empire wins. No matter who loses, the world loses. 

No matter how things turn out this particular time around, Democrats and Republicans will continue to win roughly 50 percent of the time each, and the US-centralized empire will continue to trudge on unaffected by the results.

I don’t care how you vote. Vote for Harris or for Trump if that’s what you feel like doing. But I do think if you vote for either of those monsters, you should at least have the decency to feel gross about it. Like you did something very dirty and shameful in order to get by.

I just think that would be the mark of someone with a well-developed moral character, who’s entering into this thing without dissociation or compartmentalization. It would indicate that you live your life with your eyes wide open, being real about what’s real and not hiding from unpleasant truths to avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings. ............



Geopolitical Fare:

Radagast: Oh, boy

you all realize how horrifying this is, right?

The EU parliament just voted to deliver Taurus missiles to Ukraine and for Ukraine to be allowed to use those missiles deep inside Russian territory, on strategic Russian targets.

Putin has already warned that would basically put the EU at war with Russia.

We’ve never seen a situation like this. Remember the hissy fit the Americans threw when the Soviets were putting missiles on Cuba? We call that the Cuban missile crisis. Now we’re expecting the Russians to just keep fighting with one hand tied behind their back, as Ukraine gets its missiles to hit Russian targets deep inside Russia.

What’s the exit strategy here exactly? Expecting Russia to say “ok Ukraine, you won, we withdraw from your country”? You know that’s not going to happen right? ...........

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Really, none of these idiots were able to just work out some alternative, where Ukraine is a kind of neutral country not part of NATO or Russia’s sphere?

Twenty-five years ago, the idea was that Russia might someday become a part of the EU. Well you all screwed that one up. ...............

I don’t care what they taught you at political science, the council on foreign relations or some think tank or party member congress you attended. Power is power, but in the west, we pretend that our power is not just power. The whole world recognizes that when we speak of “democracy”, we speak of developed service economies within the American empire. And that’s all fine, but it becomes a problem when we start believing our own rhetoric.

Democracy is a joke, it’s a lubricant that oils the machine. These “civil liberties” mean entirely nothing to you, when a new virus breaks out you prohibit the proles from leaving their home. It’s all entirely conditional on working efficiently. Americans don’t even get an actual election, they just have Harris appointed for all practical purposes, unless they really insist on the village idiot.

All I know is that if there are history books, they’re going to call you a bunch of dogmatic ideologues who began to believe in their own bullshit, if you end up triggering a nuclear war over this. You’re going to have Russia end up looking like the reasonable party in the history books, if they launch nuclear missiles at us in response to these Ukrainian attacks inside their territory with our missiles. If Cuba was launching Russian long range missiles at your nuclear launch silos, you would shoot the big bombs too.



Person watching October 7: Why would Hamas do such a thing?? 

Person watching Israel’s actions for the past year: Oh that’s why.

❖

Everything Israel has done since October 7 are things it was doing before October 7. Raping. Torturing. Stealing. Siege warfare. Killing kids with snipers. Murdering journalists and healthcare workers. Israel’s actions before and since October 7 show you why October 7 happened.

❖

I saw a quote by Chris Hedges from 2002, “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered, but never before have I watched as soldiers enticed children like mice into a trap and murdered them for sport.”

I think huge amount of Israeli depravity hides behind westerners giving Israel the benefit of the doubt, thinking “No, no nation that my government supports could possibly be THAT evil, and if they were I would have heard about it in the news.” 

But Israel is that evil. Always has been.

❖❖❖

Trump and Harris both deserve hate, but they don’t deserve any special amount of hate more than all the other managers of the US-centralized empire. If it wasn’t them running it would be two equally evil monsters of the same politics. Don’t personalize the evils of the empire.

The most remarkable thing about Trump and Harris is how unremarkable they are. The thing that matters most about them is how little they matter. They’re just mindless empire goons who can be swapped out and replaced with an ideological clone at the drop of a hat; we just watched this happen in real time with Joe Biden.

If you find yourself harboring any kind of special, seething personal hatred toward Trump or Harris as individuals, you’re falling into the delusion that the evils you are seeing the empire inflict upon the world are caused by wicked individuals. This leads to the delusion that it’s the individuals who are the problem rather than the empire itself and the systems which prop it up, which then leads to the delusion that all you need to do to fix the problems is change out the individuals.

It doesn’t work that way. The candidates aren’t the problem. The presidents aren’t the problem. The empire itself is the problem. The giant globe-spanning power structure centralized around Washington comprised of allies, assets and agreements which fights every day for complete planetary domination, and the oligarchs and government agencies who run it. That’s the problem.

Don’t suffer the indignity of letting them trick you into spending your political energy barking and snarling at the two puppets in the puppet show while the real people in charge construct a cage around the entire world. The only reason to talk about this election is to highlight the fact that it doesn’t matter and that its candidates are fake. Start talking about them like they matter and you reify the illusion.

❖ .....



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Hezbollah are vastly morally superior to the IDF. The one and only reason you see the former called “terrorists” and the latter framed as legitimate defense forces is because one works against the strategic interests of the Pentagon while the other aligns with those interests.



............. It goes without saying that if a government like Russia, China or Iran were even suspected of being responsible for similar attacks, Kirby and his fellow podium people would be not just naming the suspected aggressor but fervently denouncing the attack as an act of terrorism. 

And it is here worth reminding readers that in 2017, a leaked State Department memo explained in plain language that it is standing US policy to overlook the abuses of US allies while denouncing the abuses of US enemies in order to undermine enemies and show other countries the perks of being aligned with the United States.

....................... By pointing out the glaring discrepancies between the way the western political-media class responds to things like Israel turning electronic devices into thousands of bombs placed throughout civilian populations and the way they respond when other groups detonate explosives among civilians, you’re helping to punch holes in the veil of indoctrination they have cast over our collective understanding of the world. The more you recognize that you only see your society as good and others as bad because of the way world events are framed by western news media and politicians, the closer you get to having your “Are we the baddies?” epiphany. .............

And the same is true of the mainstream western press. You’ll see them completely ignore the abuses of US-aligned governments while showing immense interest in alleged abuses by empire-targeted groups, often on very flimsy evidence. Mock them and dismiss them when they act like they care about human rights abuses. They don’t care. They just want to make sure the abusive power structure they conduct propaganda for is the one in charge.







........ One reason for such extreme secrecy is that the US and UK are intensely conscious of the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s explicit warning on Thursday that any use of western long-range missiles to strike Russia “will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are parties to the war in Ukraine. This will mean their direct involvement in the conflict, and it will clearly change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict dramatically.” 

Putin added in measured words: “This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries –- are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.” 

Admittedly, Putin has given similar warnings before also, but did not follow through even when western weaponry was used by Ukraine with impunity to invade Russia recently. So much so that Biden was plainly dismissive about the latest Kremlin warning, saying, “I don’t think much about Vladimir Putin.”  ...............




Antony Blinken's foreign policy conduct has been a textbook recipe for a mutiny in the military ranks.

........................ It appears that the U.S. military leadership took Vladimir Putin's warning about this escalation seriously. His words are worth pondering carefully: ..................

Whatever the case may be, if there was indeed a mutiny at the Pentagon and a palace coup in the White House, the escalation to World War III might have been averted, and this would be the best news you'll read all day today.  ........





Multiple empire managers have made separate public statements around the same time which, taken together, serve as a disturbing reminder of the dark things our rulers have planned for our future. 

The US Navy chief has unveiled a plan to be ready for hot war with China by 2027 while the US deputy secretary of state calls China the “most significant challenge” the US has ever faced in its entire history, at the same time the EU’s defense chief says Europe must prepare to fight a hot war with Russia in the next few years. ...........

No one is more dangerous than warmongers who believe they can win an unwinnable war.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that the US empire is not run by rational actors is the way all facts show that a war with China could not be won and would destroy the economy and the ecosystem — and yet all facts also show they’re preparing to wage this war anyway.

As we discussed recently, Russia has already stated that it is prepared to join with China in a fight against western aggressions. The western power structure that is centralized around the United States is preparing to wage a global war against multiple nuclear-armed states. Revolution is becoming a matter of existential urgency for our entire species.


***** Lawrence: Defending Humanity
In the face of the dangerous U.S. determination to prolong its global primacy, a reform movement to reconstruct our long-abused global institutions merits serious attention.

Anyone taking up the question of our shared humanity in the late summer of 2024 must begin with mention of the Gaza crisis, or — with the escalating violence in the West Bank — the wider Palestine crisis.

These events are of world-historical magnitude. They challenge any idea of humanity we may have until now held as truths held to be self-evident, as we Americans would say.

That seems to be over now. It is as if an era in the human story has ended, and we enter upon one that requires us to think again, maybe for the first time since the 1945 victories, when those who came before us looked back upon the wreckage of the 1930s and 1940s and asked, “Where is our humanity?”

The events that lead us to this point are diabolic, something close to sheer evil. And how strange it is that the nation that leads us to this point represents the first half, the older half, of what we commonly call “Judeo–Christian civilization.” 

Our shared task, in light of terrorist Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, is to begin the work — to wage another war, I would also say — in the cause of restoring our common humanity. This is a war against the indifference various forms of power incessantly encourage us to cultivate. To wage this war against power means learning from the crisis that defines our time — that makes this a world-historical moment — and then proceeding in a new direction. ...........

As I have mentioned in various commentaries, the Palestine crisis confronts us with a very bitter reality. This is the reality that, our democracies having devolved into “post-democracies,” none of the institutions through which we thought we could speak any longer functions in this way.

The institutions that are supposed to represent our will and aspirations are more or less broken. We have no way of expressing our objections to U.S. support for Zionist Israel’s genocide — no way that makes any difference, I mean to say.  ............

The U.S. is now generally recognized, according to various surveys, as the primary cause of global disorder. We should see the Palestine crisis in this context. It is without question among the most egregious manifestations of American power in all of history. And it is in response to this, direct response, that we find new and very important efforts to reconstruct the “global commons” that the founding of the United Nations represented. 

Just a few years ago a number of nations, all of them non–Western, formed a group advocating a return to the U.N. Charter as the basis of international law and the conduct of U.N. member states. This was not a very large group, and so far as I know it has not made a significant mark in and of itself. 

It is the intent I wish to draw to your attention. The members of this group included, among others, Russia, China, India, Brazil, and I think South Africa. We know from things stated at the time that these nations acted in response to the wild disorder occurring as the U.S. advanced its now-infamous “international rules-based order.” The world had become too dangerous for these nations not to act.  ...........





Sci Fare:

Neurologists are just beginning to understand Alice in Wonderland syndrome.



Other Fare:

The Truth About Matthew Perry

Matthew Perry’s 2022 autobiography Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing was billed as two things: an addiction memoir and a behind-the-scenes glimpse at one of the most popular TV sitcoms of all time. I didn’t read it when it was released (I’ve never read a single ‘celebrity memoir’) but picked it up at a thrift store recently as Perry once again dominates the headlines due to the ongoing trials of those who supplied the ketamine that killed him last October. I don’t recommend it—it is profane and not particularly well written, although it does effectively convey something of the profound despair addicts of Perry’s calibre experience. 

What struck me, however, was not the sparse celebrity anecdotes or Perry’s interminable rehab stays. One of the least remarked on revelations of Perry’s memoir is the fact that he lived the lifestyle promoted by Friends to the hilt, and it was one of his greatest regrets. He was rich and famous and leveraged that—as most celebrities do—to live a wildly promiscuous lifestyle. Yet Perry doesn’t really boast about his sexual antics. Instead, he writes time and again that if he could go back and do it all over, he would have gotten married and had children instead. .............

Considering his regrets, it is a sad irony that Perry catapulted to fame starring in a show that did more to mainstream the Sexual Revolution than any other. Friends deliberately pushed the envelope on a host of social issues, normalizing same-sex ‘marriage,’ surrogacy, pornography addiction, and cross-dressing, wrapped carefully in comedy and showcased by brilliant, attractive actors. But it was casual hookups and predatory sexual behavior that made up the core of the show. Over the ten-season run, NBC’s flagship sitcom portrayed the six friends having a total of 85 sexual partners without ever contracting an STD or getting an abortion—and it was all portrayed as innocent, normal fun.  ............



Fun Fare:




Pics of the Week:





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