"You may as well enjoy the anticipation," she said, "Because it may be all that you'll get."

"There is a new reality in the marketplace."

Fence companies, meanwhile, appeared to be certain winners.

Wall Street's meltdown, linked to shady lending practices, reveals the moral bankruptcy of huge segments of the market. Yet political leaders now urge our children to quietly fill-in bubble tests, seeking only to become productive cogs in a broken wheel.

"We use latrines!" the children answered, knowing the right response.

It's a quiet alienation that others are hearing as well.

The question also continually nags as to whether there is a young generation to carry on the tradition.

"Every day we are walking on shaking ground."

But many boomers are ignoring this prospect.

"In my experience, don't worry about that."

We never thought this day would come.

The crisis has complex roots, and Somali warlords bear primary blame.

"I wish it would die already!" Mr. Moonves blurted out in a delightfully unguarded moment.

I have given this a lot of thought, and I think our best immediate course of action is to whine a lot.

Kissinger did not seek to make the world “safe for democracy.” Instead, he sought to create stability based upon trust and cooperation between strong leaders while ensuring continuous mediation by the American government. To him, the establishment and preservation of order and justice were not organic developments, but rather policy choices made by political elites that required active enforcement prior to being accepted by the general public. The pursuit of political goals through more democratic means was, intellectually and emotionally, too dangerous ...

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Chiquita was an equal-opportunity terror funder in Colombia: it also made payments to leftist guerrilla groups, including the notorious FARC. Nothing to do with ideology, of course. Just a routine business expense.

The argument here isn’t that voters are rational, well-informed beings. It’s all going to depend on turnout.

The Bush memorandum draws the sweeping conclusion that even federal programs subject to antidiscrimination laws can give money to groups that discriminate. Several law professors who specialize in religious issues called the argument legally dubious.

Down markets are good times to take a hard look.

Many of those who urge postponing dealing with the reform of regulations really hope that, once the crisis is passed, business will return to usual, and nothing will be done.

Mr. Black’s revolutionary idea was simply that we are not as shielded from a sudden dose of bad luck as we might like to think.

I don't share much of the endless cultural fascination with teenage manners and mores, but this has an undeniable, chocolate-level irresistibility.

Words don't just point to things but are saturated with feelings, which can endow the words with a sense of magic, taboo, and sin.

“In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said. “Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment.

Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.

The relentless promulgation of crude reactionary lunacy ...

Sometimes, of course, a mess is just a mess. Not every entropy increase is accompanied by the formation of an ordered structure.

On second thought -- do I want more structure?

The difficulty in distinguishing the delusional and the venal from the dishonest and fraudulent is why prosecutors would be hard-pressed to indict half the investment bankers on Wall Street.

It's a story of innovators prevailing again and again over skeptics who prefer to preserve the status quo.

A fallen raja, a half-Chinese convict, a plucky American sailor, a widowed opium farmer, a transgendered religious visionary are all united by the “smoky paradise” of the opium seed. It's a sumptuous, angsty, teeming, myth-infused, gaudy, exuberant, many-hued and restless world ... It was basically Summer camp for indie nerds.

We are so being bribed.

“I don’t have a problem with that,” she said.

She gave him a bobblehead doll carrying a briefcase marked with dollar signs.

Seems like a worthy idea.

In familial relationships, money can be a proxy for love and trust.

When we went shopping for a new washer-dryer recently, the salesman sidled up and purred, “And what kind of statement are you looking to make?”

The upshot: No one can be trusted.

I love the big crazy stuff.

Whenever circumstance brings some welcome thing your way, stop in suspicion and alarm ... They are snares.

Shared risk has since evolved from a source of comfort into a virus.

Almost one of every six homeowners has a mortgage larger than the value of their home.

If immunity wanes, a booster shot may be necessary.

But this is not something he likes to think about.

If that's not addiction, I don't know what is.

He claimed I wasn’t really invested.
I told him he was too invested.

This is different from bidding on dead tuna at a fish market auction.

"Maybe we have to readjust our expectations."

Happiness is for suckers and Disney Inc.

The sooner we have ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Is this the end of hypercapitalism?

Cable news commentators led up to the event -- what could well be a hinge moment in modern history -- like children on a Halloween sugar bender.

Cookies have long served as economic icons.

And it showed.

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It's just sad that it's come to this, but I can't say I'm surprised.

I don't want any of those things. I find it absolutely fatuous.

The greenest thing you can do in your kitchen is not tear it up and put in a new one.

You often learn who you are by realizing who you are not.

Forget, for a second, the image of fat-cat plutocrats walking away with taxpayer money.

We are in uniform, but there are no passengers. This means anything goes. We do not wear our seatbelts.

They deliberately use the word "fat" as a way to reclaim it.

Perfection is the consolation of those who have nothing else.

I guess the only consensus I've heard is that one is as bad as the other.

"We don't consider someone a real friend until we take a bath together."

Nearby a skeleton hangs from a hook as in a science lab.

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.

I've rarely felt compelled to award a Gold Star to a Comment in the New Yorker. But this latest piece by Elizabeth Kolbert earns it.

High energy costs are here to stay. People need to cowboy up and accept reality.

How important is it for candidates to tell the truth? Throughout his long career in politics, McCain, who called his PAC Straight Talk America, has presented frankness as his fundamental virtue. If his positions—on campaign finance, on immigration reform, on the Bush tax cuts—were unpopular with either the White House or the Republican Party faithful, that just showed that he was willing to tackle the tough issues. When his campaign very nearly collapsed and then revived, in December, McCain attributed his rally not to the fact that voters liked what he was saying but to the fact that they didn’t. “I’ve been telling people the truth, whether I thought that’s what they wanted or not,” he said. After his crucial victory in New Hampshire, in January, he again credited his candor: “I went to the people of New Hampshire to tell them the truth. Sometimes I told them what they wanted to know, sometimes I told them what they didn’t want to know.”

The past few weeks have seen a change in McCain. He has hired new advisers, and with them he seems to have worked out a new approach. He is no longer telling the sorts of hard truths that people would prefer not to confront, or even half-truths that they might find vaguely discomfiting. Instead, he’s opted out of truth altogether. “Well, that certainly didn’t take long,” the Times observed.

Of course, public-opinion surveys do not alter the underlying reality. The Department of Energy estimates that there are eighteen billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in offshore areas of the continental United States that are now closed to drilling. This sounds like a lot, until you consider that oil is a globally traded commodity and that, at current rates of consumption, eighteen billion barrels would satisfy less than seven months of global demand. A D.O.E. report issued last year predicted that it would take two decades for drilling in restricted areas to have a noticeable effect on domestic production, and that, even then, “because oil prices are determined on the international market,” the impact on fuel costs would be “insignificant.” Just a few months ago, McCain himself noted that offshore resources “would take years to develop.” As the oilman turned wind farmer T. Boone Pickens has observed, “This is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.”

Recent history suggests that Presidential campaigns don’t reward integrity; the candidate who refuses to compromise his principles is unlikely to have a chance to act on them. Still, McCain’s slide is saddening. That he has sunk to the level of “Pump” a full month before Labor Day really doesn’t leave him—or the race—far to go.

Changing Lanes

As dancing explodes in popularity on TV, it's harder to find at bars and the average party. What's popular on these shows and clips isn't dancing -- it's second-hand dancing. These people are dancing so we don't have to.

From the archive:

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.

Dance Dance Revolution is firmly entrenched as a college craze.

During the nineteenth century, attempts were made to amalgamate alchemy with the religious and occult philosophies then growing in popularity; and in the twentieth century psychologists--principally Carl Jung--perceived in alchemy a powerful vehicle for aspects of their theories about human nature. At the same time, laboratory scientists continued to experiment in ways very similar to those of their medieval and early modern forebears.

And the beat goes off