"The market is sleeping," he said.

"That could be problematic strategically for the United States."

Take heart: cave dwelling is making a comeback.

I believe marriage is meant to be a scared institution be a between 2 unwilling teenagers. But don't think I don't I tolerate gay people because I do. I tolerate them with all my heart.

Priceless.

Saturday Night Live - Palin / Biden Debate

Stratfor:

We believe that any realistic analysis of al Qaeda’s strength must assess more than a basic head count of militants willing and able to conduct attacks. As we have noted previously, there are two battlespaces in the war against jihadism: the physical and the ideological. Although the campaign against al Qaeda has caused the core group to become essentially marginalized in the physical battlespace, the core has undertaken great effort to remain engaged in the ideological battlespace.

Sometimes, things that emerge in the ideological battlespace can provide indications of important developments in the physical battlespace.

Al Qaeda and the Tale of Two Battlespaces

Last week, I wrote:

The larger question is, does this crisis demand anything more than our money? Is it just about getting Unstuck and going back to business as usual? After we give everything (again), then what?

Yesterday, Juan Enriquez and Jorge Dominguez wrote in the Boston Globe:

Within the billions of sentences about the financial bailout there is one word notably absent, austerity. All talk is of payments, supports, subsidies, incurring more debt, stimulus packages. The thesis seems to be: If only we spend more the party can go on. True, only if the financial meltdown is a temporary mismatch and dislocation in housing and credit markets. But suppose there is something fundamentally wrong with the US economy. Then spending more will not fix it. Getting the diagnosis right means getting the treatment right. It may save us a trillion or two.

A solution requires the country to begin to spend what it earns, reduce its mountainous debt, and address massive liabilities, restructure Social Security, pension deficits, military, and Medicare. No wonder politicians would rather spend more of your money now rather than address these problems. Because we have been spending 5 to 7 percent more each year than we earn, a forced restructuring, triggered by a currency collapse, would have the same effect on wages and purchasing power that the housing collapse had on housing prices. So let's learn from our Latin and Asian friends and act before it is too late.

What about austerity?

Where have we seen this before? Oh, yeah:

On Friday, a deeply divided House rebuffed President Bush's demand for retroactive immunity, then defiantly left Washington for a two-week spring break.

Republicans said the secret session proved to be deflating, not because of the quality of the evidence, but because of Democrats' unwillingness to listen.

From the archive, Sorry, I thought I had it:

Lisa: "Can't you see the difference between earning something honestly and getting it by fraud?"

Bart: Hmm, I suppose, maybe, if, uh ... no. No, sorry, I thought I had it there for a second."

Defiant, House Heads to Havasu

From the heady days of a bygone era ... a glimpse of the future present.

Problem is, anyone with a camera and a cable network can broadcast a public funeral - and an 82 percent market share divided between four networks and several news channels isn't enough to attract a Bud Bowl. The answer is the F! channel, which will offer definitive coverage of famous deaths - all day and all night. Sure, reruns will attract only the faithful (or the downright weird), but when the world mourns, F! becomes must-see TV in a way NBC execs can only dream of. In much the same way that MTV branched out from videos into other aspects of the music scene, F! will offer original programming as well. F! Unplugged will feature the exploits of Dr. Kevorkian, and Mourning Becomes Eclectic will give viewers a glimpse of "alternative" burials around the globe.

Since most of F!'s programming will consist of filmed public events, costs will be low. The most significant start-up expense will be a publicity campaign aimed at convincing local cable companies to carry F!, though this outlay may be mitigated by a possible partnership with G-SPAN. The steady stream of celebrity death should ensure plenty of free promotion - elaborate outside advertising isn't necessary when the passing of even culturally marginal figures receives extensive what-does-it-all-mean metareporting in the nation's newsweeklies. Rather, the channel will produce effective but inexpensive posters that feature catchy slogans like "Imagine living in a non-funeral country," "Tragedy from 9 to 5, eulogies from 8 to 11," and "You could have talked to your wife any time."

The Pitch | Suck: Daily

Don't say you didn't see this coming.

Marge goes to the "Picture Perfect" seminar.

Host: Now, folks, I don't wanna alarm ya, but scientists say forty percent of America's pictures ... are hanging crooked.

[the audience gasps in shock]

Host: Yep, it's true. And I hear you asking: "Well, who's gonna straighten out all these artistic abominations?" Your friends? A neighbor? Those fat cats in Washington?

[chuckles]

Host: Good luck. Hey, you know, maybe no one'll notice! Maybe the problem will just fix itself.

Marge: Now you're the one who's being naïve.

In November 2007:

Dark days ahead. Stock up.

Here's Harvard's Lawrence Summers, whose assets are clearly in derivatives based on shorting the market:

Three months ago it was reasonable to expect that the subprime credit crisis would be a financially significant event but not one that would threaten the overall pattern of economic growth. This is still a possible outcome but no longer the preponderant probability.

Even if necessary changes in policy are implemented, the odds now favour a US recession that slows growth significantly on a global basis. Without stronger policy responses than have been observed to date, moreover, there is the risk that the adverse impacts will be felt for the rest of this decade and beyond.

In January 2008:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

As they've just displayed, career Congressmen are voters, too. And with elections only a few weeks away, they are acutely sensitive to the near-term prospects of suffering.

In June 2008:

This is a data-heavy presentation from two economists at CIBC World Markets. You'll have to make your own soundtrack. See how China dominates the growth in demand for natural resources. See how much is accomplished by Americans' purchase of hybrid vehicles, in the face of massive market growth in Russia and China. Watch how gasoline hits US$7/gallon by 2012. Watch ethanol peter out and energy capacity fall short. Watch the Case/Shiller HPI continue to plummet as delinquencies soar. And so much more!

In 2004, Decius wrote this in response to a February 2003 essay by Paul Graham:

To a great extent, the sleeping American populace has woken up to the fact that there is a problem with the way that they operate their society. ... People want to do something about it. Unfortunately, by all accounts, the dialog even years later is wanting.

People seem to grasp onto oversimplified solutions ... This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scope of the issue.

I have always felt that these problems were systemic and structural rather then limited and specific, and that we are unlikely to be able to see them, understand them, or address them as a society because we do not want to change the things that we would need to change.

A parting thought:

“People loved comedies during the depression, too,” said R. J. Cutler, executive producer of “Flip That House.”

Who will have the last laugh? Stay tuned!

Are you reading Anathem?

Brand: How might long-term ethics differ from ethics as we generally understand them?

Dyson: If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Brand: Do you have a list of these principles?

Dyson: No. You'll never get everybody to agree about any particular code of ethics.

Brand: But if they're going to be long-term ones, you'd better have some agreement. This is a cross-generational issue. It's caring for children, grandchildren. In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

I'm working on a project, The Long Now Foundation, to encourage long-term responsibility. Esther's on that board, too. We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed? For instance, if you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.

Dyson: I'm accustomed to living among very long-lived institutions in England, and I'm always surprised that the rest of the world is so different. At the beginning of Imagined Worlds, I mentioned the avenue of trees at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is an extremely wealthy foundation, founded by Henry VIII with the money he looted from the monasteries. He put his ill-gotten gains into education, much to our benefit. So we pray for his soul once a year. I went to the commemoration feast last March and duly prayed in appropriate Latin. Trinity is an astonishing place because it has been a fantastic producer of great science for 400 years and continues to be so. Beside Henry VIII, we were celebrating the 100th birthday of the electron, which was discovered there by J. J. Thomson. He was appointed professor at the age of 28.

Anyway, they planted an avenue of trees in the early 18th century, leading up from the river to the college. This avenue of trees grew very big and majestic in the course of 200 years. When I was a student there 50 years ago, the trees were growing a little dilapidated, though still very beautiful. The college decided that for the sake of the future, they would chop them down and plant new ones. Now, 50 years later, the new trees are half grown and already looking almost as beautiful as the old ones. That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.

Chop, baby, chop, and chop now.

Freeman Dyson's Brain, by Stewart Brand | Wired 6.02

Here's the Economist, this week:

A brave man would see catharsis in all this misery; a wise man would not be so hasty.

Susan Jacoby, in her latest book, The Age of American Unreason, wrote:

The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between. This illusion of course is not confined to America, but its effects are especially deleterious in a culture (unlike, say, that of France or Japan) with an endemic predilection for technological answers to nontechnological questions ...

This condition is aggressively promoted by everyone, from politicians to media executives, whose livelihood depends on a public that derives its opinions from sound bites and blogs, and it is passively accepted by a public in thrall to the serpent promising effortless enjoyment from the fruit of the tree of infotainment.

Here's the Economist, again, from back in January:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

One from Adbusters:

We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.

Finally, from Gertrude Himmelfarb:

To Carlyle, these legislative reforms were evidence of the incorrigibly utilitarian character of the age, mechanical attempts to cope with spiritual problems. In fact, they were brought about by the combined efforts of Evangelicals and utilitarians -- and Evangelicals perhaps more than utilitarians. The philosophy of the two could not have been more discordant. Where Evangelicalism derived its ethical and social imperatives from religion and morality (a religiously suffused morality), utilitarianism was a purely secular and pragmatic philosophy; the calculus of pleasure and pain that determined the individual's self-interest was presumed also to determine the public interest, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Yet this odd couple, Evangelicalism and utilitarianism, so far from operating at cross purposes, managed to cooperate in pursuit of the same social ends.

What next for financial capitalism?

The President had the audacity to not even mention energy in his "bailout my bank, please!" speech.

Of course, he did phone it in to the GOP convention, so he may not have heard Michael Steele's impassioned plea.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitiztion, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.