Never Eat Dinner With Your Back To The Door.

Conditions: Warm Amid The Storm.


We're All Gonna Get In A Fight!

Well, so far in the race for the presidency we've had three debates and we haven't learned a damn thing that we didn't already know. All the candidates do is stand there and throw policy at each other. Or rather, throw policy past each other. They have their set speeches wired in so tightly that all someone has to do is mention a key subject and they're off, like a wind-up toy. And once the policy has been regurgitated, they move to the next topic, as if there's no point in discussing the merits of anything.

The first problem with this debate was calling it a debate. The second was calling it a "town hall." In the strange, stilted ritual atop the red carpet at Nashville's Belmont University, the studio audience looked less like an inquisitive cross-section of the American public than it did a cast of apolitical drones programmed to deliver canned questions in exchange for canned lines. This was mostly thanks to the rules. The two candidates were literally, according to guidelines agreed upon by the two campaigns, prohibited from addressing each other directly. The result was an hour and a half of parallel speechifying in which disagreements were expressed in terse, passive-aggressive sideswipes by two men who, as McCain might say, clearly "don't like each other very much." In such a format, meaningful discussion -- or even entertaining television -- is fairly impossible.
[...]

It was deja vu all over again at the Tennessee presidential debate, or perhaps instant reruns after only the first show. The evening was replete with Tom Brokaw as the annoying moderator, inarticulate questions from the audience and the Internet, and the two guys doing the same, same dance, but this time walking around with microphones rather than standing behind a lectern. The candidates repeated verbatim many of the same things they said a week ago. Last night was supposed to have a more lively town meeting format, but instead the affair was rather sedate, leaning toward boring. How many people are going to come back to watch Debate III, with the reruns already playing.

- alternet.org/

I've come to think that the entire point of the debates is wrong, starting with the name. 'Debate' is wrong, we don't actually really want a debate. That's why more people tuned in for the Palin/Biden 'debate' than the McCain/Obama one: They weren't looking for a debate, either. Palin's folksy freshness and apparent quick temper gave them, and us all, a good chance of seeing what we really wanted. We wanted a fight.

Not the traditional kind of fight, where things get broken. (Although watching Obama break a chair or two over the Iraq war would be a fine sight. An inspiring sight. ...ok, now I feel like breaking a chair.). We essentially want an argument. We want them to disagree openly with each other. Not in the way they do now, with the toothless manners and charm, where they tirelessly and teeth-grittingly correct each other on what they actually said, or actually did, and that's the end of it until the next time. We want clear, angry contradictions, and disagreements, and raised voices, and the moderator calling for calm. A little passion, a little animation, a little life coming to light under this giant spotlight. Because only in an argument can you see people's true colours. Only in an argument can you understand a person's true character.

Here's a crazy idea: For the final debate, the final matchup, the last chance for the two nominees to size each other up, the last face off before the American public chooses literally the future direction of the country, for this final chance the moderator should set these two up with open microphones and say to them this: "Gentlemen, there will be no set topics for this last debate, and no time limits. There will be no red lights or 60 second rebuttals. You both have a total of 90 minutes and a microphone, and by now you both should know the subjects Americans want to hear about, and need to hear about. The floor is yours." And that's it, have at it. They're not children, they're both accomplished and experienced politicians, vying to take one of the tougher jobs in the world, at one of the tougher times in our history. If they can't deal with a free-for-all, think on their feet and stand up to each other type of argument, then now is the time for us to find out.

And I want to be clear, I'm not expecting either of them to actually solve all our problems in the debate. Our problems are many and complex, and ultimately the debates are just for show. A careful canter around the race track to show the form. Well, let's really see that form. Let's up the pace a little. Let's have them demonstrate their true character by engaging with each other in the important topics of our time, and in that way we can get a better chance of truly judging them. Because what we have now, this pandering, carefully crafted, scripted pat Q+A stump speech crap doesn't really define anything other than how well prepared the candidates can be to take on the expected. And the last eight years have proven how terrifyingly bad it is to elect someone based just on how well he can be prepared to deal with the expected.




Money, Whoarr! What Is It Good For? God God, Y'all.

A little while ago, the president's financial men begged and pleaded for 700 billion damn dollars in order to save the economy. See, it turns out capitalism only works if people don't get too greedy and stupid. D'oh! Anyway, the market tanked and the people responsible for overseeing it demanded a quick 700 billion to patch it up. How'd that go?

U.S. stocks plummeted in early trading today as economic turmoil rippled through Europe and investors questioned whether a bailout of the financial sector would be enough to prevent a global recession.

The Dow fell more 500 points mid morning but then retreated to more than 400 points lower by 11:18 a.m. It was the first time since October 2004 that the Dow fell below 10,000. The Nasdaq and Standard & Poor's 500-stock index were both down by 6 percent and by 11:18 a.m. had come back slightly, down 5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively.

- washingtonpost.com/

Meanwhile...

Britain's benchmark stock index, the FTSE 100, lost 220.11 to 4,760.14 _ a 4.42 percent fall. The declines were led by the banking industry, with the mining and oil industries also suffering drops. HBOS PLC's share price dropped 15.7 percent, while the Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC fell 13.6 percent.

Germany's DAX index fell 4.22 percent to 5,552.27. France's CAC-40 index dropped 4.85 percent to 3,882.81. In Russia, the RTS stock index tumbled more than 7 percent in first 20 minutes of trading.
[...]

Across Asia, all markets were also in the red. Tokyo's Nikkei 225 index fell to its lowest level in 4 1/2 years, sinking 4.25 percent to 10,473.09.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng index slid 5 percent to 16,803.76. Markets in mainland China, Australia, South Korea, India, Singapore and Thailand also fell sharply. Indonesia's key index plummeted 10 percent, it's biggest one-day drop ever.

In Russia, the RTS stock index tumbled more than 7 percent in first 20 minutes of trading.

"Everyone is losing confidence," said Mark Tan, who helps manage about $20 billion of equities and bonds at UOB Asset Management in Singapore. "The problem now is that the lack of foreign confidence could affect the Asian consumer, which would lead to a bigger slowdown in Asia than expected."

- huffingtonpost.com/

Okay, okay, so it seems the $700 billion dollar rescue package just up and disappeared into a giant hole in the ground, and furthermore nobodies ever going to ask just where in hell it went. Fine. But doesn't all this seem a bit familiar to everyone? A little hint of deja vu, at all? In fact, I seem to remember a few bubbles bursting on Wall street over the last few decades, complete with wailing investors and enraged analysts. Is there something organically cyclic about the stock market going boom?

During the past few weeks, America's economic and political elites have been running around like the house is on fire, and after quite a bit of arm-twisting, they passed a mammoth banking bailout in an attempt to stave off a complete crash. But nobody dares discuss why this cycle of growing and popping bubbles continues to happen. There's been some discussion of deregulation, but the simple fact that this pattern is caused by imbalances inherent in our global economic structure has been completely obscured in our mainstream economic discourse.

Only by understanding that some fundamental economic changes that have occurred since the early 1970s have created this cycle of boom and bust can we even hope to prevent the next crisis.

Consider how the following factors play into the investor class's repeated fits of "irrational exuberance":

* A long-term movement of "corporate globalization," beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s, created a global economy in which the wealthy world held onto high-value "core" functions, and farmed out a great deal of nuts-and-bolts manufacturing to the developing world. The problem is that only a handful of people are able to earn a good living from those high-value activities, and the wages of working majorities in wealthy countries have stagnated (more so in the United States than in the social democracies where unions still have some clout). This has led to rising income inequality in the advanced economies.

* The share of the world's income pulled in by a small elite has grown dramatically, while their share of the tax burden has declined, and those at the top of the economic pile now have more money than they know what to do with. At the same time, global inequality has risen as well, meaning that there's still a huge portion of the world's population that doesn't have the means to be "good consumers."

* That has led to a "crisis of overproduction," with the world now awash in goods -- from microchips to steel to automobiles -- and not enough consumers to absorb all this stuff.

* As a result, the return on real, productive investments like manufacturing and agriculture has declined steadily since the early 1970s, and countries like China only make it work with an almost endless supply of cheap labor -- rural poverty in China is enormous, and as the country's manufacturing base grows, peasants are simply grabbed from the countryside and stuck onto the factory lines to churn out more crap for Wal-Mart shoppers.

* Since the 1980s, the big multinationals, under the guise of "free trade," have obliterated most domestic regulations on investment capital in countries around the world.

Put all that together, and what we have is a small group of institutions and individuals fat with capital and looking around the world for a better return on their investments than they can get from the "nuts and bolts" economy. All that hungry and lightly regulated capital sloshing around the globe has, in turn, given rise to an enormous speculative economy, and that, in turn, has driven the cycle of boom and bust in recent decades.

- alternet.org/

So, there we go. While we have our houses repossessed and our jobs taken away from us while everyone on television acts like insane robots who spiel on and on about arcane bullshit while the walls behind them are burning down, we can all relax in the knowledge that what this is another go-round of the El-Nino/global warming of the economy that we now live in. The markets, once stable in the time of our fathers, have now, thanks to greed and stupidity, become an unstable and wildly complicated mess, capable of huge upheavals at the drop of a stock portfolio. Not that the old stockmarkets weren't the battlegrounds of greed and stupidity, it's just that humans are very good at outdoing their predecessors in all the bad things. It's just nature, baby.



A Tale Of Two Wars.

And just in case there wasn't enough shit going wrong, we get these updates from the front lines:

A draft report by American intelligence agencies concludes that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral" and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban's influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document.
- truthout.org/
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A nearly completed high-level U.S. intelligence analysis warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year.
- truthout.org/
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The draft NIE, however, warns that the improvements in security and political progress, like the recent passage of a provincial election law, are threatened by lingering disputes between the majority Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and other minorities, the U.S. officials said.
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Inside the government, reports issued by the Central Intelligence Agency for more than two years have chronicled the worsening violence and rampant corruption inside Afghanistan, and some in the agency say they believe that it has taken the White House too long to respond to the warnings.
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Trouble spots include whether the former Sunni insurgents, also known as the Sons of Iraq, find permanent employment; provincial elections scheduled for January; Kirkuk's status; the fate of internally displaced people and returning refugees; and "malign Iranian influence," the unclassified Pentagon report said.
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Senior American commanders have recently been blunt in their assessment of the security trends in the country. "In large parts of Afghanistan, we don't see progress," Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top American officer in Afghanistan, told reporters last week. "We're into a very tough counterinsurgency fight and will be for some time."
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Isn't it nice that, with all the new shit going wrong, we still have all the old shit going wrong as well? Brings a nice balance to the apocalypse, I think.




Glancing Down Upon The Waters.

The poorly-named orbital craft Mercury Messenger has sent back some lovely images of it's target planet.

- nytimes.com/

Film Review: Babylon A.D

If you're the kind of person who thought 'Children Of Men' was a good idea, but a bit too wishy-washy, then this is the film for you. In a dystopian future, Vin Diesel now must escort a young girl across the border to safety, and will discover how important she is along the way. And so instead of a Clive Owen out of his depth, you have Vin Diesel kicking ass and bellowing at people. You know, I like Vin Diesel. And I like going to see Vin Diesel movies. He's kind of the last of the old Hollywood dinosaurs, a club he only just qualified for back in the day. But in a world now devoid of Schwarzeneggers, Stallones or even a decent Bruce Willis, Vin is also our last best hope.

Here he's been cast as a 'retired' Russian special forces smuggler, who's been round the block a few times and is charged with smuggling two women back into America. The plot is essentially the same as Children Of Men, so really you're just left to enjoy the scenery and see if the actors can make something out of it. And Vin, along with another assist by Michelle Yeoh, does a reasonable job. He can do more than just knock people around, and the script calls for his character to bond with the rather odd girl who's protection he's been charged with.

Surprisingly for a Vin Diesel action film, it seems to work best when it slows down, and Vin's dramatic gears get a chance to grind. The action scenes aren't plagued with too much shaky-cam, but it's there enough to make it's presence felt, and you really just want to get on with Vin figuring out what the hell is really going on. Also, while it's a very pretty shot, you might want to avoid seeing or hearing the first 30 seconds, as for some stupid reason they give the ending away at the start of the film. Which kinda takes a lot of the suspense out of the next 90-odd minutes. Bad move, but overall a fairly enjoyable time at the movies. Three Bellows out of Five.




- Peace out.