New years thought

This one wandered out of my mind and onto a piece of paper yesterday, and sat around for a day expecting to be posted:

I grew up wondering
if I’d live to see the Millenium
and here it is almost a decade beyond,
the last of the Noughts.
What should I wonder now?

links for 2008-12-31

  • A Growing Detention Network
    NYTimes: "People picked up on suspicion of immigration violations are held in a patchwork of detention centers. Most of the largest are privately run… The fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago…" …map with mouseover detail
    (tags: migration panopticon disgrace)

Harvesting Zeitgeist

Starting from the question

name a piece of culture (book, movie, album, TV show, etc.) that “exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush”

Phil Ford notes that

Historical epochs do have deep structures of sensibility…

So we can all see how the torture apologetics of 24 play into the Bush II zeitgeist. I’m not going to argue against that — any future study of American culture in the Bush II era will doubtless (and correctly) point to 24 as Exhibit A of an America scared shitless and consoling itself with the spectacle of tough guys torturing bad guys.

I resolve to keep an eye peeled for others. Not irrelevant: my own posting from January of James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make It Here”

Harsh words and grim prospects

from Mike “Mish” Shedlock, a “registered investment advisor” with what look to me like Libertarian predilections:

In total, the Treasury has now committed to squander $700 billion and that is before Obama squanders anywhere from $750 billion to $1 trillion trying to prop up a dying consumer-based economy that really can’t be propped up.

More or less the same analysis of the overall plight as Jim Kunstler, though I’m not sure on which points the two would disagree. Kunstler (in his Forecast for 2009) is focused on the upshots of what he summarizes as the Happy Motoring fallacy, which is of course not just about cars:

Happy Motoring is at the core of our unsustainability trap. The car system is going to fail in manifold ways whether we like it or not, and it will fail due to circumstances already underway…

Another voice with some of the same tidings is NYU economist Nouriel Roubini:

But the worst is still ahead of us. In the next few months, the macroeconomic news and earnings/profits reports from around the world will be much worse than expected, putting further downward pressure on prices of risky assets, because equity analysts are still deluding themselves that the economic contraction will be mild and short… The credit crunch will get worse; deleveraging will continue, as hedge funds and other leveraged players are forced to sell assets into illiquid and distressed markets, thus causing more price falls and driving more insolvent financial institutions out of business. A few emerging-market economies will certainly enter a full-blown financial crisis.