WHO: one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression

chris hedges in truthdig...

When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.

[...]

Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels.

[...]

The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.” 

The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction.

what i've never been able to adequately grasp is why more of us haven't been able to see through such an empty, shallow view of life, one so completely devoid of any spiritual dimension...

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Morris Berman on why America failed: "They eat each other"

morris berman as interviewed by alternet on his latest book, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline...

There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.” Frankly, if I could summarize the argument of Why America Failed in a single phrase, this would be it. Unless Occupy Wall Street (or some other sociopolitical movement) manages to turn things around in a fundamental way, “They ate each other” will be our epitaph.

i'm a great fan of morris berman... i first started reading his work almost 30 years ago and it exposed me to a level of thoughtful insight that i hadn't previously experienced... i'm going to have to get my hands on this, his latest...

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There is now no longer any difference between formal democracy and dictatorship

from adbusters...

Capitalism burns all around us, leaving behind the debris of a bankrupt financial and political system. The illusion of limitless economic growth and the endless utopia of consumption have been forever shattered. Now governments have only austerity and hard times to offer us. Yet their assurances are wearing thin. Our political and economic masters know that people no longer believe in them, and behind the calm visage of power there is fear, fear of the specter of insurrection, the old fear that has haunted the imagination of every regime. Doesn’t everything – from the statements of politicians to the market predictions of economic gurus, to celebrity reality shows – now have a slight air of desperation, as if the entire spectacular-capitalist system (a system which in any case no longer even believes in itself and probably never did) is terrified lest it reveal the nihilism behind its facade?

[...]

[T]here is now no longer any difference between formal democracy and dictatorship; it’s simply a matter of degrees of repression.

[...]

And what is democracy in any case but a system that encourages a mass contentment with powerlessness, a collective voluntary servitude legitimated by the purely symbolic ritual of voting? The recent insurrections should be seen as being more than just about democracy, which in any case is now such an ambiguous term. Rather they were a collective form of voluntary inservitude. They were the realization that every system of power is ultimately fragile and dependent on the alienation and relinquishment of our power.

"a mass contentment with powerlessness"... kinda fits, doesn't it...?

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Let's make Black Friday "Buy Nothing Day"

from adbusters...





adbusters founder kalle lasn in the uk independent...

[A]ll our media and information delivery systems are infiltrated by pro-consumption messages, and that basically every aspect of our lives is controlled to some degree by this consumer machine. Consumption patterns in America have increased by 300 per cent since the Second World War, and the average American now consumes three times more than they did 50 years ago.

even better, adbusters is leading the charge to occupy christmas...!

#OCCUPYXMAS kicks off Nov 25/26

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A prison of personal choice, I might add

it's possible to move away from consumerism and the endless pursuit of things material... no one says we HAVE to keep buying...

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Matt Taibbi confesses - he finally "gets" the Occupy movement

i've "gotten" it from the beginning... as soon as i started reading about it, i instantly understood where the protestors were coming from because it's exactly the same place i've been coming from for a very long time and have been despairing that i would ever see like-minded people stepping forward...

matt taibbi in rolling stone...

We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.

If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.

yep, yep and yep... that's exactly what i want... something different... not just anything different, but something different that values people over money, compassion over selfishness, serenity over anger, and social justice over pay-to-play...

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A dumbed-down, morally bankrupt society

black friday is an allegory for what the united states has become...

The Madness of a Lost Society



(thanks to information clearing house...)

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Owning is being - we have become what we own

joe bageant...

There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other "developed" capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy.

It comes down to owning stuff, and that the stuff we own also owns us (as anyone paying rent for a storage locker can attest). Transmogrified by industrial materialism, we have become what we own. More specifically, what we are observed by the rest of our society as owning. In the commodified society of industrial materialism, owning is being. So much so, that politicians bandy the term "ownership society" about, not only without causing the public to gag, but to cheers. Even liberals who claim to dislike the term don't want to be in a "We don't own shit society."

[...]

Loathe as Americans are to believe it, the Mexican people and the American people are in the same situation of being mugged. However, they are robbed at a different rate and from different positions in the global pecking order. We rob the Mexicans and global capitalism robs us. Fortunately we can still afford to buy our national food staple from Dominoes. Which makes us a superior people.

[...]

Americans are hope fiends. We always see hope somewhere down every road, chiefly because honestly looking at the present situation would destroy just about everything we hold as reality. Personally, as I often state and catch readership hell for, I do not like hope. When Obama ran it up the flagpole for us to salute, and so many saluted, my blood chilled. Made me feel that we were all in deeper shit than I had supposed (Nevertheless, I reluctantly voted for Obama. At the time it seemed It was either Obama, or continuing war, debt, and diminishing civil liberties. Ha!) Hope is magic thinking, believing that somehow, some larger unknown force is in motion to set things right.

The world is what it is, and its injustices are set right by peoples and nations morally intact enough to challenge its malevolent forces.

Hope is political pabulum for an infantilized nation.

and, at the conclusion of an almost unbearably cynical rant - a rant with which i profoundly and gloomily agree - joe abruptly and unexpectedly captures my own present mood...

In all honesty, I am sick of thinking about it, tired of burning up unrecoverable hours at the end of my 63-year old candle writing about it. So are many of my colleagues in cybernetic left-space.

Distance and solitude seem the only refuge. Which is why I am "aging Mexican," and almost monastically absorbed in the small daily rituals of sustenance these days. I do not kid myself that it is permanent or a real solution to the unbearable ugliness of the American condition.

But at the moment, four AM, a cricket chirps in the orange tree by my window, and my tortillas are perfectly lovely.

while i'm not one to be found cooking tortillas at 4 a.m., i do find myself increasingly engaged in mundane, mindless ritual, often in the quiet of solitude... there is something deeply comforting about lying on my sofa in the afternoon in my leafy little corner of buenos aires watching the sunlight sparkle and dance off the deep green leaves as they rustle softly in the breeze or, in the evening, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood as it putters about before settling down into the late night quiet... it tends to make all the sucking up of internet news headlines that i seem helpless to stop doing just a bit more tolerable...

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Dubai ushers in the New Year with massive fireworks display (using more money they don't have)

from itn courtesy of juan cole...

The new decade makes it's entrance in the Middle East - the United Arab Emirates welcomes it with fireworks over the Burj Al Arab building.

once you're accustomed to obscene, over-the-top, insanely ostentatious displays, it's hard to give 'em up...

HAPPY NEW YEAR...!!

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Violence, violence, and more violence permeates our daily lives

david sirota offers up a very thoughtful piece on the violent culture of the united states in today's alternet...

Today, one in every three dollars the government spends goes to defense and security. The killing machine and adventurism that money manufactures has delivered 1 million Iraqi casualties, thousands of American casualties and an implicit promise of future wars -- indeed, of permanent war.

Perpetuating this expenditure, bloodshed and posture in a nation of dwindling resources, humanitarian self-images and anti-interventionist impulses requires a culture constantly selling violence as a necessity. It's not just video games -- it's the nightly news echoing Pentagon propaganda and "hawkish" politicians equating militarism with patriotism and "embedded" journalism cheering on wars and every other suit-and-tie-clad industry constantly forwarding the assumption that killing is a legitimate form of national ambition and self-expression. Is it any wonder that a few crazies apply that ethos to their individual lives, and begin seeing violence as a reasonable means to express their own emotions?

i was moved to respond...

Although, I must say, I completely agree with your assessment. Our national culture is totally constructed on exploitation - of people, of resources, of the planet - and exploitation is inextricably tied to violence. But it's not only the deeper questions about people turning to violence that our superficiality-obsessed society avoids, it is ANY deeper discussion about ANYTHING.

I teach a graduate seminar in leadership and one of the things I say to the students right off the bat is that the corpus of writings on leadership that leap off the shelves at the unwary consumer in every bookstore in the country are nothing more than fast-food recipes containing little in the way of nutritional ingredients and probably not much more in the way of anything natural whatsoever.

What is the level of national discussion about sex? Janet Jackson's nipple? Sarah Palin's daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy? There's no "discussion" to be had, merely more titillation.

The recent national obsession with the shooting of the three Somalian pirates was nothing more than violence pornography. The lede in Jonah Goldberg's LA Times editorial was this: "Shooting three Somali pirates was a good start. Now let's shoot some more." Unbelievable or, rather, perhaps TOO believable.

I am typing this as I sit at my desk in Kabul, Afghanistan, the current epicenter of violence, at least from the perspective of our violence-besotted media. But even my Afghan colleagues, inured as they are to violence on a daily basis, scratch their heads over the violent episodes they read about in the U.S. The U.S. is the penultimate, they reason. Why in the world would people there engage in such behavior?

Why indeed.

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Change I can believe in: "I’m just not seeking happiness from material things anymore"

if this is where things are headed, i say woo-hoo... it's about goddam time...

“I think this economy was a good way to cure my compulsive shopping habit,” Maxine Frankel, 59, a high school teacher from Skokie, Ill., said as she longingly stroked a diaphanous black shawl at a shop in the nearby Chicago suburb of Glenview. “It’s kind of funny, but I feel much more satisfied with the things money can’t buy, like the well-being of my family. I’m just not seeking happiness from material things anymore.”

To many, the adjustment feels less like a temporary, emergency response than a permanent recalibration, one they view in terms of ethics rather than expediency.

“It’s kind of like we all went overboard,” said Sacha Taylor, a fixture on the charity circuit in [Atlanta], 33. “And we’re trying to get back to where we should have been.”

i can't tell you how long i've been waiting to see things like this in print...

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Merry Christmas!

it's 4:30 a.m. christmas morning and, after having escorted my aging and insistent bladder to the appropriate place of relief, i thought i'd check my email prior to crawling back between those delicious flannel sheets to grab a last bit of shut-eye, before the grandsons shoot out of their beds like cannons to snatch up their goodies from under the tree in their annual frenzy of pillage and plunder...

for some reason i can't quite put my finger on, this is turning out to be the most wonder-filled, quietly happy and deeply satisfying christmas holidays i can remember for a long, long time... in past years i have been increasingly alienated by the relentless focus on the mercantile aspect of the season and the unreasonable and largely unattainable expectations that reality could never quite match... but this year is different... maybe it's just me, but i can't quite shake the feeling that there's something in the air and that a rising wave of good tidings is slowly but inexorably lifting us all to a place we've never been...

with that as backdrop, let me offer everyone my wishes for the best and most joyful christmas ever and my profound hope - ok, i'll say it - my profound belief that the best is not only yet to come but is also just around the corner...

in the spirit of sharing the joy of the season, let's have a great deal more of this...


My grandson's fourth grade class offering up their Christmas program

and a whole hell of a lot less of this...

Palestinian Christians living in Bethlehem could be spending their last Christmas in their hometown.

They live next to Jewish settlements and that means they also face the constant threat of eviction by the Israeli authorities.

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Pay as you go... Now THERE'S a concept...!

item...

[T]he freewheeling days of credit and risk may have run their course — at least for a while and perhaps much longer — as a period of involuntary thrift unfolds in many households. With the number of jobs shrinking, housing prices falling and debt levels swelling, the same nation that pioneered the no-money-down mortgage suddenly confronts an unfamiliar imperative: more Americans must live within their means.

“We don’t use our credit cards anymore,” said Lisa Merhaut, a professional at a telecommunications company who lives in Leesburg, Va., and whose family last year ran up credit card debt it could not handle.

Today, Ms. Merhaut, 44, manages her money the way her father did. Despite a household income reaching six figures, she uses cash for every purchase. “What we have is what we have,” Ms. Merhaut said. “We have to rely on the money that we’re bringing in.”

[...]

“The long collapse in the United States savings rate is over,” said Ethan S. Harris, chief United States economist for Lehman Brothers. “People are going to start saving the old-fashioned way, rather than letting the stock market and rising home values do it for them.”

In 1984, Americans were still saving more than one-tenth of their income, according to the government. A decade later, the rate was down by half. Now, the savings rate is slightly negative, suggesting that on average Americans spend more than their disposable income.

buried 27 paragraphs into the article, this fascinating little tidbit is revealed...

The top fifth of American earners generates half of all consumer spending, noted Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital.

what the article fails to note is that high debt is not only an integral part of the u.s. economy, it is also part and parcel of another phenomenon, whether it's a conscious, planned strategy or simply a natural consequence of the debt itself, to keep americans in bondage, chained to their jobs - no matter how awful they may be - spinning down to their graves on a greased slide of monthly payments...

i was part of that vicious cycle myself until about ten years ago... the freedom i now enjoy by being totally debt-free is a freedom that i never imagined could be so sweet... i live a very simple, uncluttered life with no assets to speak of and few headaches... i remember back in the late 80s when i was struggling mightily to break into that top fifth noted above, i had a major realization... all the "stuff" i was laboring to acquire in reality "owned" me, not the other way around... it took another ten years for that lesson to fully sink in to where i had permanently altered my lifestyle... now i wouldn't have it any other way and i think back and wonder what took me so long...

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Consumed by push capitalism

privatizing profit, socializing risk...

bill moyers interviews benjamin barber, part 1...



bill moyers interviews benjamin barber, part 2...



bill moyers interviews benjamin barber, part 3...



democracy as pluralism... what a concept...!

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The Bush economic policy - delusion, denial, and outright lies (but everybody's STILL out shopping)

from the la times...

It's the holidays. You do what you have to do.

item...

You could almost run that old Lone Ranger theme -- the famous William Tell Overture -- as the soundtrack to the local news stories I watched here in Boston on Thanksgiving day featuring perky local news "correspondents" stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers racing into malls for "midnight madness" sales.

[...]

[O]ur media is deeply complicit in promoting and encouraging mindless consumerism through newspapers, commercials and newscasts. This is a well-practiced formula mirroring TV's promotion of the war in Iraq, as the line between selling and telling disappears. Media outlets are amply rewarded with endless ad revenues hyping all the discounted goodies you can get, with the Boston Globe packing no less than 43 advertising-sales supplements (down from 47 a year ago) into a paper that had wall-to-wall Macys ads, including some offering $10 coupons to bribe you the stores.

item...

I’ve been visiting some of the people who have been most affected by the subprime mortgage debacle. It’s a largely bewildered, frightened group that includes people like Dorothy Levey, a 79-year-old widow who sits alone inside the small house she has lived in for 41 years, afraid to answer the telephone or the door.

She has every reason to be worried. The monthly note on her house in the city of Markham, just outside Chicago, is approximately 100 percent of her meager monthly income. Broke and behind in her payments, Ms. Levey expects a foreclosure notice to show up any day, followed by a visit from “the sheriff, or whoever they send to tell you to get out of your own home.”

While the media coverage has focused on the high rollers who created the subprime frenzy (“If you can breathe, we’ll give you a loan”), the hapless victims have remained in the shadows, condemned to economic ruin.

After faithfully making mortgage payments for decades, Ms. Levey and her husband, Dan, were persuaded to take out a new loan, ostensibly for debt consolidation, in 2002. It was like plunging into quicksand. Dan was seriously ill at the time and he died two years later.

To this day Ms. Levey does not understand what she and her husband of more than half a century had agreed to. The terms might as well have been written in Sanskrit.

But she kept trying to meet her obligation. She exhausted her savings. She lost her car. She stopped buying clothes and cut back on food. But there was no way to keep up with the payments.

“I had to go to the state and tell them I was hungry,” she said.

item...

We are a country obsessed with consumption, which would be fine if we seemed to be fulfilled getting bigger TVs but having less time to watch them. But, in the aggregate, that's not the case. "The things that we get used to most easily and then take for granted are our material possessions -- our car, our house," writes Layard. "But there is lots of evidence that people underestimate the process of habituation." The amount of happiness we think we'll get from a new house, and the amount of happiness we actually get from a new house, are not the same.

So why the ceaseless search for stuff? In a word, competition. It's worth it to stay ahead in the rat race. Researchers have asked people which they'd prefer: a world in which they made $50,000 but everyone else made half that; or one in which they made $100,000 and everyone else made twice that (prices are the same in both worlds). The majority preferred the first world. They would happily make less money, as long as everyone else made even less money.

yeah, yeah, yeah... so, what time did YOU have to get up yesterday to be among the first in line at the store...?


Sitting on the hard asphalt since 3:30 a.m.,
Lidia Marin of Santa Ana checks in with relatives
in front of Fry's Electronics in Fountain Valley [CA]

but at least SOME of the headlines strike a cautious note...

Crowds pack stores, but will the buying continue?

The Holiday's Shopping Season Can't Stop the Coming 'Severe Recession'

Lost in a Flood of Debt

Despite economy, malls and stores jammed

odd as it may seem, not a single one of those articles mentioned the collapse of the dollar... not one... for THAT story, you have to read the foreign press, such as this from süddeutsche zeitung via spiegel...

[T]he fall of the US currency has political and economic implications far beyond the present financial market crisis. Until recently, American politicians could nod along with Nixon-era Treasury Secretary John Connally, who said 'The dollar is our currency, but your problem.' ... This summer, that changed. Many investors fear a recession in America, and, even more importantly, they doubt their money is really well taken care of in the hands of the world's superpower.

meanwhile, back in california...

"I really can't afford this TV -- I'll be making monthly payments on my credit card until this time next year," the 19-year-old Laguna Niguel resident said. "But it's the holidays. You do what you have to do."

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'Tis the season - once again - for Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir

the question that's on everyone's lips...

WHAT WOULD JESUS BUY?

sounds like a must-see...

STOP the SHOPOCALYPSE!

Sho•po•ca•lypse [shah PAW kuh lips] n.
The end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption
and the fires of eternal debt!

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Black Friday started at 4 a.m. EST

toys "r" us, target, and wal-mart opened at 5 a.m. and penneys opened at 4... please make it stop...




A shopper carries off with a television at a
Target store in Chicago, November 23, 2007.
(John Gress/Reuters)

Shoppers — shrugging off a spate of lead-tainted toy recalls and higher prices for food and gas — jammed stores before dawn Friday to grab discounted TVs, toys and the hard-to-find Nintendo Wii, for the official start of the holiday season, expected to be the weakest retail showing in five years.

Stores are counting on hordes of shoppers who have pulled back in recent months. Merchants need them to keep coming throughout the holiday season to make their sales goals.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, threw open its doors at 5 a.m., offering such specials as a Polaroid 42-inch LCD HDTV for $798 and a $79.87 Sony digital camera. From 5 a.m. to noon, Toys "R" Us Inc. offered 101 early morning specials on such toys as Mattel Inc.'s Barbie styling set and Hasbro Inc.'s FurReal interactive jungle cat toy. That's four times the number it offered last year.

J.C. Penney Co., which opened at 4 a.m., an hour earlier than last year, served up such deals as a leather massage recliner for $298.88, after a $50 mail in rebate. The original price was $799. Other deals include 50 percent off toys and board games.

In a scene replayed again and again at stores nationwide, about 200 people stood in line outside a Target in Columbia, S.C., at 5 a.m., an hour before the store was to open.

Tracy Jenkinson, 34, arrived just after 3 a.m. to take the first spot in line.

in the interest of full disclosure, my daughter-in-law and her mom were up and out of the house well before daylight, and there have been at least two mid-sortie cellphone shopping "consultations" since with my son who is at home with the kids... yes, i tend to keep my mouth shut...

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The only rational response to the insanity of "Black Friday"

it's that time again and heaven help us all... here's my thought from last year...

i like it... a lot...

NOVEMBER 23 IS BUY NOTHING DAY - NO PURCHASE NECESSARY



THE ULTIMATE REFUND: On November 23d and 24th – the busiest days in the American retail calendar and the unofficial start of the international Christmas-shopping season – thousands of activists and concerned citizens in 65 countries will take a 24-hour consumer detox as part of the 14th annual Buy Nothing Day, a global phenomenon that originated in Vancouver, Canada.

From joining zombie marches through malls to organizing credit card cut-ups and shopoholic clinics, Buy Nothing Day activists aim to challenge themselves, their families and their friends to switch off from shopping and tune back into life for one day. Featured in recent years by the likes of CNN, Wired, the BBC, and the CBC, the global event is celebrated as a relaxed family holiday, as a non-commercial street party, or even as a politically charged public protest. Anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending.

Reasons for participating in Buy Nothing Day are as varied as the people who choose to participate. Some see it as an escape from the marketing mind games and frantic consumer binge that has come to characterize the holiday season, and our culture in general. Others use it to expose the environmental and ethical consequences of overconsumption.

this is the first holiday season in two years i will have spent in the u.s... i can't tell you the relief it has been to be away from the incredibly intense "buy, buy, buy" atmosphere of christmas in the united states... it starts in late september and is totally in your face right on through the after-christmas sales... however, my family is here and being with them outweighs any revulsion i might feel over the frenzy of consumption... nonetheless, i'm glad to see an organized effort against "black friday..."

this was in the local paper this past sunday...

The day after Thanksgiving typically signifies the official start to the holiday shopping season, and retailers say shoppers are usually ready for the all-day shopping extravaganza, even when it starts at 4 a.m.

"It is a tradition for people," said Cynthia Moore, marketing director for Meadowood Mall. Moore has worked the hustle and bustle of the holidays for 13 years.

"The people who come out usually have a plan," she said. "I've seen families who come out with matching T-shirts and conquer shopping as if it were a sport."

Moore said there are two schools of thought when it comes to tackling the crowds on Black Friday.

"There are the people that do it because it's a tradition and they are out shopping and taking their time," she said.

"Then there are the people who consider this day a true sport. They have a game plan and they won't break until they have all of their shopping finished."

there's at least one more school of thought, the school i attend: the entire goddam thing is true obscenity, a perfect example of how people have been completely brainwashed into accepting the corporate, government, media, elite-sponsored ideology of consumption as the highest calling of every citizen... i don't know what's worse, having a "plan" and setting forth to "conquer shopping as if it was a sport," or accepting that "shopping" is a genuine holiday "tradition..." either one, to me, is nauseating...

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"We don't even take the trouble to be united."

exceptionalism, clarified...

We are Americans, and so until recently, we knew that we were the best. Because so many people wanted to be us, we could act as we pleased — and we did, because we were the Great Exception; we were America the Blessed. Hence...

• [O]ur complacent belief, so long borne out by the facts, that American movies and American brands would always sell.

• [T]he Kyoto Protocol did not apply to us, so that we could spew out all the greenhouse gases we liked, and use a pig's share of the world's resources.

• [W]e could seize war criminals in any part of the globe and whisk them off to The Hague.

• [W]e insisted that should we ever commit war crimes, we would remain immune to prosecution in that court.

• [T]his president and his two attorneys general have quite literally legalized torture

• Bull your way ahead. If you meet obstacles, overcome them with arrogant bluster. If this fails, proceed to vicious, mendacious brutality.

• Americans not only voted for [George Bush], but after he proved himself to be a criminal, they reelected him.

• Why not do whatever suited our whims?

• "They hate us," we whisper to one another in amazement.

• What if we had to follow the rules that everyone else does? Well, why not put off that pain as long as possible?

• [W]e don't even take the trouble to be united.

• Alaskan towns are tilting in the melting permafrost, but who cares down in the Lower 48?
  

• Republicans and Democrats hate each other.
  

• Automobiles isolate us.
  

• Generations of advice-givers have made us believe that profit best defines the successful life.

it's tough swallowing a heavy dose of truth on a sunday morning...

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Nothing exceeds like excess

the super-rich are VERY different from you and me...

With his new boat, the Wally Island, Bassani has set sail for new territories. The 99-meter-long floating island with a 1,000 square meter deck is big enough for a garden, swimming pool, and a tennis court or helicopter landing pad. The five-story superstructure, reminiscent of an air traffic control tower, can be divided into 12 suites for 24 guests, not including the movie theater, spa, library and gym. Whether the floating luxury villa will ever be built is unclear, though interest is reportedly high.

every once in a while, i run across examples of such obscene excess that i am left gasping in horror and disbelief... this is one of those times...



A digital plan for Luca Bassani's "Wally Island," which has not yet been constructed.



What the owner would see from the windows of the master suite.

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