Rationally, we should make today a day of national fasting and somber spiritual reflection… a recognition that our status, at least collectively (though less and less so as individuals) as the world’s richest nation (and in resource depletion and waste, we are, to be sure, NUMBER ONE! AMERICA, FUCK YEAHHHHH!!!!)… has attached to it, some, you know, responsibility. As if. And so, instead, the Thanksgiving Holiday now serves as an excuse for gluttony, in a country where something like the majority of our population is overweight, with huge numbers actually obese, and of course, today is the precursor-day to “Black...

What Michael Berube said. Michael, of course, as the Paterno Family Chair holder in English at Penn State, has a unique perspective on the unfolding tragedy. Perhaps the gravest crisis we as members of a society are now in is the utter collapse of trust in just about everything, particularly because of the integrity-failure of otherwise long-trusted institutions, be they things like faith in the integrity of the commodities/futures industry, now probably forever shattered by loathsome scumbag Jon Corzine and the MF Global fiasco, the breakdown of trust in virtually all other financial and governmental institutions now energizing the “Occupy”...

It seems that Lord Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s girlfriend Diana L. Taylor just happens to sit on the Board of Directors of Brookfield Properties, the “owner” of Liberty Plaza Zuccotti Park. Amusingly, the original date for “eviction” of October 14th was before thirty days of occupancy and, you know, the requirement for actual judicial process would have attached. Funny all that.

The OWS movement marked two months today with an impressive array of protests, including over 200 arrests in New York City alone. For a fascinating “gestalt” view, Sandy Krolick hits it out of the park, by observing among quite a few other things that the genius of the movement to date has been its utter refusal to express banal demands of any kind, and its refusal to even negotiate with a dehumanizing system… Efforts to pin an agenda on the movement have thus far at least, failed. May they continue to do so. Of course, in pondering the “eviction” from...

All hail the conquering hero, Mike Bloomberg and his now-deployed-as-mercenaries-for-the-banking-sector New York Police Department, for their daring middle-of-the-night-raid to roust and evict Occupy Wall Street from Liberty Plaza Zuccotti Park. I confess that amidst my seasonal-never-ending-cold induced insomnia, I was actually thinking about heading over to my office (yes, it’s across the street from OWS, conveniently located at the center of everything between the NY Stock Exchange, NY Fed, and WTC construction site) to look at (and maybe even participate in) the mirth and merriment that a middle of the night Move On.Org e-mail advised me was underway… in this...

I’m pretty much at a loss for words viz. world events, legal events, economic events, or pretty much anything macro in nature. We are already at the front end of the effects of man-made climate change (snowstorms in October from which thousands are still without power coming less than two months after Hurricane Irene did the same thing, up against God knows what’s coming this winter… Texas and Oklahoma suffering insane droughts of dust-bowl magnitude), deficits galore but both “revenue increases” and “entitlement reform” both utterly unthinkable (my headline: “super-committee succumbs to super-rich and super-annuated”), the usually more sensible Europeans...

The homo sapien underlying the conversational canine says “happy birthday” to Secretary of State Clinton… who gets to ask if we will still love her when she turns 64… she does today… and. of course, to himself, as he enters his 50th year in this realm, today.

With apologies for the post title to national treasure Yogi Berra, those interested in the specific mechanics of what might well be this year’s world financial meltdown might want to take the time to read this lengthy Zero Hedge piece by Reggie Middleton on the coming collapse [and inevitable bailout!] of Too Biggest of them All to Fail, Bank of America, and its, you know, larger effects. I’ll just clue you in a bit… Reggie points out a little known change made to the bankrupcty law in 2005 [the better known change, of course, screwed individual debtors by making it...

What if they had a protest that was getting world-wide attention literally across the street from your office building… and, by and large… you mostly thought you didn’t care too much…? Until lately, that is. Thus goes “Occupy Wall Street” in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Ezra comments on it… but I don’t find much value-added there. Ezra seizes on a few protestors who lament that they have incurred massive student loan debt (conveniently non-dischargeable in bankruptcy) and nothing much to show for it (including and especially a job.) This is interesting… no, who am I kidding… this isn’t that...

I can’t sing the praises of Charles Hugh Smith and his “Of Two Minds” blog enough. Case in point is this piece entitled Bleeding the Patient: Modern Economics and the Symbolic Economy, in which Smith ties together why nothing in our modern world seems to be working anymore, specifically, because our “unifying model,” the ersatz “science” of economics, is as wedded to the reality of the actual behavior of economic “bodies” as, say, medical “science” was wedded to the reality of the human body, circa, say, the year 1500 or 1600. Or, as I heard recently in another context, if...