First world shantytowns.

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

The surging number of homeless people in Fresno, a city of 500,000 people, has been a surprise. City officials say they have three major encampments near downtown and smaller settlements along two highways. All told, as many as 2,000 people are homeless here, according to Gregory Barfield, the city’s homeless prevention and policy manager, who said that drug use, prostitution and violence were all too common in the encampments.

Daniel Kent, a clean-shaven 27-year-old from Oregon, has been living in Taco Flats for three months after running out of money on a planned hitchhiking trip to Florida. He did manage to earn $35 a day holding up a going-out-of-business sign for Mervyn’s until the department store actually went of out business.

Mr. Kent planned to attend a job fair soon, but said he did not completely mind living outdoors.

Coming to America:

First world shanty towns.

Cities Deal With a Surge in Shantytowns

Jerry Fodor, in the LRB:

If there’s anything we philosophers really hate it’s an untenable dualism. Exposing untenable dualisms is a lot of what we do for a living. It’s no small job, I assure you.

Fodor quotes David Chalmers, from the forward to Andy Clark's new book, Supersizing the Mind:

My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me ... When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind.

Fodor asks:

Roughly, how many parts would you say your mind has?

Andrei Codrescu:

A philosophical shift does not occur when a machine says, "I'm a human being." It does occur when a human being says, "I'm a machine."

Nicholas Carr:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

Recently, Jello:

If my mind is a Turing Machine, my word queue is malfunctioning and is too small to hold enough words to speak normally.

From the archive, Freeman Dyson:

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

Eric Kandel:

If the century just passed was the province of the gene, then the next hundred years shall be "the province of the mind."

From the archive:

The other day while watching the evening news, it crossed my mind that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Where is my mind?

John Allen Paulos:

While corporate venality and fraud certainly played a role in some of these precipitous declines, the collapses of the various dot-coms, banks, foundations and financial institutions were not primarily the fault of con artists and high-society lowlifes. The responsibility extends far wider.

From the archive, Niall Ferguson:

This hunt for scapegoats is futile. To understand the downfall of Planet Finance, you need to take several steps back and locate this crisis in the long run of financial history. Only then will you see that we have all played a part.

Also:

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

Back to Paulos:

A quite different illustration of our short-sightedness comes courtesy of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp." The story tells of a genie in a bottle able and willing to satisfy your every romantic whim and financial desire. You're offered the opportunity to buy this bottle and its amazing denizen at a price of your choice. There is a serious limitation, however.

When you've finished with the bottle, you have to sell it to someone else at a price strictly less than what you paid for it. If you don't sell it to someone for a lower price, you will lose everything and will suffer excruciating and unrelenting torment. What would you pay for such a bottle?

From the archive, Freeman Dyson:

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.

Also, Stewart Brand:

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.

The Bottle Imp

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Things refuse to be mismanaged long.

The dice of God are always loaded.

What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears.

Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature, -- the sweet, without the other side, -- the bitter. This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted.

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be revised.

Beware of too much good staying in your hand.

As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.

I do not wish more external goods, -- neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure.

From Rumsfeld's Rules:

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.

From a 2007 essay on film noir:

What it was addressing was not our promising future but our dark and anxious past. It was simplistically suggesting that the inflationary 1920s had so overheated our economy and our expectations that we had stupidly “bought” the inevitable retribution of the Depression. In other words, the parade, like film noir, was directing our attention backward, not forward. After the war, we were not so much disillusioned by our prospects as giddily illusioned by them, and the message of film noir was curiously at odds with the national mood.

From the lessons of Robert McNamara:

Rationality will not save us.

Compensation

Richard Florida:

On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

No place in the United States is likely to escape a long and deep recession. As the crisis deepens, it will permanently and profoundly alter the country’s economic landscape. I believe it marks the end of a chapter in American economic history, and indeed, the end of a whole way of life.

Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age. It made sense, for a time. How do we move past the bubble, the crash, and an aging, obsolescent model of economic life?

Instead of resisting foreclosures, the government should seek to facilitate them. We can’t stop the decline of some places, and we would be foolish to try. We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall.

Jane Jacobs:

When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.

Paul Romer:

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Peter Schiff:

We need a serious recession in this country, and the government needs to get out of the way, and let it happen.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into.

Alec Dubro:

The personal automobile must be abandoned, and quickly.

From a year ago:

Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow's tenements.

Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

How the Crash Will Reshape America

Your genius isn't on Facebook. Your genius doesn't have a cell phone.

Because of technology, we never have to be alone anymore. And that's the problem.

An adult's capacity to be alone has its roots in his experience as a baby, learning to function independently while still in the presence of his mother. Yet today we're seeing this capacity weakened.

When was the last time you were truly alone and unplugged for a long spell?

When was the last time you were alone with your genius?

Does your genius say things like, "What's happened to us? We used to do things!"

The End of Alone

Alec Dubro wrote:

The personal automobile must be abandoned, and quickly.

Bucy responded:

What's the point in writing an article like this? Your base is going to applaud and everyone else is going to ignore you because this is not remotely constructive.

By way of reply, I'll quote Orwell on Dickens:

Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited. He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable, and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils cannot be remedied. Fasten upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting them off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks "Which root?" that one begins to grasp his position.

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as "human nature". It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like Our Mutual Friend, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of Hard Times, and indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of laissez-faire capitalism; but Dick... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: The Myth of the Efficient Car

I think investors were put off by Obama's warnings of "trillion-dollar deficits for years to come."

Here, clarity is king, "free and frank" discussions are the way to proceed, here we not only call a spade a spade, but we pick it up and decapitate our inept enemies with it. True, plenty of people find that offputting, alarming, disturbing even. Luckily those people can put the mouse down, and step away from the keyboard.

There is nothing more irritating and off-putting than some expert airily declaring that it's all very simple really, when it self-evidently isn't.

"He was always put upon," she says. "He was always kind of the patsy. He didn't tell jokes -- he was the butt of the joke."

Why do we put off until tomorrow what we can do today?

We assume it's the economy -- people are putting off the procedures they can put off.

Consumers feel put-upon. They feel downright suckered by their government, their financial institutions, their employers and their unions. Consumers are fed up, and they're just not going to buy it any longer.

"We have put off putting the prices up for 22 months. We announced in September we were holding off putting prices up because of the credit crunch to help our customers, but unfortunately we are now in a position where we need to put the fares up."

The sheer volume of traffic was off-putting at first, but as our stay progressed it became clear that Jersey also has some of the most laid-back drivers I have come across. Although the roads were busy, not a single horn was sounded in anger.

It should greatly entertain girls 8 to 16. Many parents will wince at the movie's over-the-top stereotype of female lust for things and appearances. Even more off-putting is the implication that women alone are guilty of this, while boyfriends and husbands roll their eyes in loving tolerance.

The plot has the rigid predictability of a wedding march; and while it's funny to hear one of the girls' bachelorette guests desperately yelping, "I'm gonna do a quick head-count of the ... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

A large sculpture of Christ on the cross has been removed from outside a church in West Sussex after its vicar said it was "scaring young children."

The Reverend Ewen Souter said the 10ft crucifix was "a horrifying depiction of pain and suffering" which was also "putting people off."

From last year, Errol Morris:

Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?

From the archive:

When an individual died, the female relatives were responsible for dismembering the body. They would remove the brain, arms and feet, strip the muscle from the limbs and open the chest and abdomen to remove the internal organs. Those that died of kuru were highly regarded as sources of food, because they had layers of fat which resembled pork. It was primarily the Fore women who took part in this ritual. Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives. Among the tribe, it was, therefore, women, children and the elderly who most often became infected.

Also:

Muslims in western India have been observing a bizarre ritual -- they've been throwing their young children off a tall building to improve their health.

Finally:

The settlers are calling their compound "House of Peace," but are also considering "Martyrs’ Peak."

Church removes 'scary crucifix'

Hillary's Downfall

Obama's favorite TV show is "The Wire."

"We don't subscribe to a marketplace of ideas."

First of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.

Over the last 20 years, every president has been a graduate of Yale.

In America we are currently living in a Kindergarchy, under rule by children.

Don't think I don't I tolerate gay people because I do. I tolerate them with all my heart.

This is the road to despotism. This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

"Never get into a wrestling match with a pig," Senator John McCain said. "You both get dirty, and the pig likes it."

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.

The Fathers hoped to create not a system of party government under a constitution but rather a constitutional government that would check and control parties.

He certainly had no choice but to resign (as he did on March 12th) if, as it seems, he broke the law. But that still leaves the bigger question of whether the law is an ass.

"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.

Politics and Government | Another Noteworthy Year