Must-read on the twisted-horror of the US Senate health care bill at FireDogLake.

Politics and the human condition.

“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903

Writing in this modern age is still the same as in Twain’s day, only quicker and with a lot more adjectives, a word-group the Huck-n-Tom author found abhorrent.
However, we much-so live in an multi-adjective world (notice the much-used hyphen modifiers) as the data and information availability defies the imagination — the red links in this post testifies, but whether any kind of truth is at those links so poses the real question.

Truth is in the eye of the reader and should be in the mind of the writer — even authentic, good fiction is just truth self-created.

(Illustration found here).

Nowadays, writing takes two forms — no longer just the piece of paper/book held in one’s hand, but there’s also a virtual version, found only online.
And having now performed in newspapers and online, the latter is the more personal, especially since no financial compensation is part of the literary mix and no deadlines other than the inherent, obsessive desire to write and have at least one dumb-ass read it, but sadly, has no newsroom — blogging is most likely the equivalent of a professional diary in the form of journalism practiced under the auspices of some-type literature.
Of course, I speak of real writing/journalism/literature — anyone can get a blog, currently there must be a hundred-quadrillion blogs with even a blog for bloggers — but there’s a fairly-insufficient, short-list (how about that for adjective-hyphenated modifiers) of readable blogs where there’s decent writing and good journalism.
If one seeks current events in a somewhat fervent way, there’s only about a dozen blogs or so to be visited on a daily basis and maybe twice that number on a semi-regular basis — I tend to favor those sites with an emphasis on reality, which are few in number.
The MSM has to be verified and most of the time, that’s found strictly online (one extremely-glaring example is the New York Times Pentagon pundit story, on which the MSM’s TV side performed a near-complete black-out).

Blogging is what I do — and it fits.
According to that most-massive of information sites, Wikipedia: Blogging is not a full-time job for most bloggers, nor is it their main source of income. A blogger can also be a doctor, a mechanic, a lawyer or a musician, and thus bloggers typically maintain a variety of professions for which the act of blogging is their communicative outlet with the public.
My “full-time job” in this so-called “variety of professions” is with a northern California liquor store and currently I’m in a kind of the OJTing manager — our long-time manager suffered a stroke and I was tapped to take her job.
She’s doing fine and recuperating well, but not coming back.
Hence not many blog posts the past two weeks — way-too tired to do much more than surf the major news sites.
And, of course, since there’s not many visitors here, not a great crowd has been disappointed when they arrive at Compatible Creatures and it’s the same old shit.
But what the heck?
I’m a freakin’ blogger!
From Andrew Sullivan in a September 2004 piece in  Time magazine:

The critics of blogs cite their lack of professionalism. Piffle. The dirty little secret of journalism is that it isn’t really a profession. It’s a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience, and you’re all set. You get better at it merely by doing it — which is why fancy journalism schools are, to my mind, such a waste of time.

Indeed.
Although a graduate of the fairly-prestigious University of Florida’s J-school (In 1974, supposedly listed second behind number-one Columbia), I OJTed my first journalism job as police reporter — J-school didn’t really teach real-life and the only thing I got from UF was the sheepskin.
One doesn’t really need a telephone to be a good journalist (either print or online), but you sure-as-shit require “a conscience.”

Journalism movies are rare, and those portraying a conscience, rarer still — at least one, Shattered Glass, displayed none at all.

And just last night, I watched a DVD version of the newest, State of Play, a real-enjoyable twisting thriller set in a big-time MSM newsroom with a kind of subtext of new media vs old — and in this case ending happily, the veteran print journalist leaving a late-night, on-deadline newsroom nearly hand-in-hand with the newbie blogger.
Damn-good film, fun to watch and kind of neat to see a reporter as a character in what is way-more an action movie, or shoot-’em-up whodunit then the rigid journalism-first kind of flick, such as, All the President’s Men, or Good Night, and Good Luck.
Read a review of “State of Play” from HuffPost if you wish.

Print guy and blogger gal: Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams

One disappointment in “State of Play” was lack of any kind of detail in the actual professional working-together of blogger and print journalist — a most-valid point if the newspaper is to survive into the Internet age.
McAdams’ blogger character seems more on site just as a tag-along to Crowe’s version of ace newspaper reporter — spunky for the newsroom — and in a near-final sequence, allows the blogger to click “send” on the big story.
Yippe do da!
The movie also seems to view blogs (and supposedly the Internet at large) as more for trash, tabloid-fueled gossip then any serious presentation of current events — wrong!
The conscience of “State of Play” is that newspaper guys, print journalists, want the last thread in the needlework of a story to be all laid bare — the end is worth what it took to get there.

And what would Mark Twain say about all this media?
He’d most-likely have viewed it as weird, but inevitable.
From 1880′s A Telephonic Conversation:

Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, — a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer.
You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return.
You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay.
You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.

Extra! Extra!
Now everyone is the other end of the wire.

Home is not the castle so trumped years ago — now it’s nothing more than a file in the immoral portfolio of US banking’s financial system.
A system that’s so skewed you can’t tell the front door from the back.

McClatchy has another story on that ugly, nasty piece of shit called Goldman Sachs.

Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds.
Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.
The couple alleges that Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003.
…
Joining other Wall Street firms that bought millions of subprime mortgages, Goldman companies have gone to courts from California to Florida seeking approval to foreclose on the homes of middle-and lower-income Americans who couldn’t keep up with their loans’ soaring monthly payments.
Some borrowers were speculators or homebuyers who exaggerated their incomes on loan applications, thinking they’d always have an escape hatch because housing prices would keep rising.
Others, however, were victims of fast-talking mortgage brokers who didn’t explain that the loans’ interest rates could rise to as high as 15 percent.
Many borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages may never qualify for a home loan again.

And for in-depth background, read Matt Taibbi’s most-excellent comprehensive piece in Rolling Stone from last July about Goldman Sachs: The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Problem, though, is the very system itself.
On Bill Moyers’ Journal, James K. Galbraith, on why the financial future sucks:

The fact is, the economy — production is going to turn around, has started to recover.
But it will be six months in before a strong growth of production leads to new employment.
And the question is, will that growth of production continue, after six months?
The problem here is that we have a stimulus package, which is helping now, but it will be over with at the end of next year.
Will there be a basis for another strong, privately financed expansion at that point? I don’t see the evidence for that now.
And that seems to me to be something we should be worrying about.
…
“That’s the point about the crisis, is that it could have been prevented.
The people in authority two, three, five years ago, knew how to prevent it.
They chose not to act, because they were getting a political and an economic benefit out of the speculative explosion that was occurring.”
…
The overwhelming emphasis, in the administration’s program, I think, has been to return things to a condition of normalcy, to use a 1920s word, that prevailed five and ten years ago.
That is to say, we’re back to a world in which Wall Street and the major banks are leading and setting the path… Do you want to have a financial sector dominated by a small number of very large institutions, very difficult to manage, practically impossible to regulate and ruled by, essentially, the same people and the same culture that caused the crisis in the first place.

Of course, Galbraith is speaking of President Obama’s people like Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and so forth.

Recommendation: Get a big mattress.

Beware of feel-good economic news…

(Illustration found here).

Even as the US stock markets post some high gains, even as the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, which has risen over the past six sessions, also finished Monday at its highest level in a year, and even as those infamous banks appear to slowing on losses — all just a figment of fantasy.
The Dow is “flirting” with the 10,000 level this morning after opening, based primarily on JP Morgan’s huge $3.6 billion reported earnings in the last quarter, and there is festive fun for everyone!
A total financial-only gravy-train: Bigger than prior to September 2008′s Wall Street meltdown — Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007…
And from the New York Times yesterday:

In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs.
Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: the best workers would jump to another employer.
But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression.

In the face of the official line on the economy — US Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke’s blubberings last week helped fuel higher expectations and: “At some point, however, as economic recovery takes hold, we will need to tighten monetary policy to prevent the emergence of an inflation problem down the road.” — the reality is covered up by an artificial band-aid for this so-called period on ‘down the road.’
Prepare to duck, or maybe tuck-n-roll when banks use its earning in a strategy called Delay-and-Pray.
What’s to be expected, however, when the federal government is once again trying to stop financial suck-hole AIG from paying out $198 million in bonuses promised to employees of its trading unit — same shit from the same ass from last spring to the same assholes.
WTF!

Yes indeed, WTF.
Lester R. Brown, normally an environmentalist and also an early voice on global warming, has compared the world’s economy, and especially with the US, to a giant “Ponzi Scheme” that’s about to collapse around our collective ears.
In his book published earlier this month, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Brown asserts that too much of modern life is entangled in a vast overstretching of just about everything, and the planet just can’t sustain itself much longer.
The book’s first chapter, “Selling Our Future,” can be found here.
A few snips:

As recently as 1950 or so, the world economy was living more or less within its means, consuming only the sustainable yield, the interest of the natural systems that support it. But then as the economy doubled, and doubled again, and yet again, multiplying eightfold, it began to outrun sustainable yields and to consume the asset base itself.
In a 2002 study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980.
As of 2009 global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by nearly 30 percent. This means we are meeting current demands in part by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for an eventual Ponzi-type collapse when these assets are depleted.
…
The larger question is, If we continue with business as usual — with overpumping, overgrazing, overplowing, overfishing, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide — how long will it be before the Ponzi economy unravels and collapses?
No one knows. Our industrial civilization has not been here before.

An example question: The $3 per gallon cost of gas in mid-2009 — layered with even higher costs (finding the oil, pumping it, refining it into gasoline and delivering it)?

These indirect costs now total some $12 per gallon.
In reality, burning gasoline is very costly, but the market tells us it is cheap.

So, this literal house of cards, what’s its future?
Reading tea leaves can be a bit tricky, but sometimes You don’t need a weather man To know which way the wind blows.

One guy who has been making accurate economic-related predictions for nearly 30 years, Gerald Celente, views another massive, maybe even worse downturn as just around the corner — or maybe even closer than the nearest corner.
Considered the most extraordinary forecaster/herald this side of Nostradamus, Celente has been right on the money with all kinds of future readings, calling 1987′s global-market-crash, the infamous “Black Monday,” to the rise of the Internet, all kinds of other shit, to nowadays and the current economic predicament: In November 2007, Mr. Celente also told UPI a massive devaluation of the dollar was coming and that some Wall Street giants were headed for total collapse. He called it “The Panic of 2008.”
In an interview last week with the San Francisco Examiner, Celente said people need to wise up:

“We want to make it very clear that the policies leading to the decline of ‘Empire America’ have been long in the making,” he said.
“What has happened in the Obama Administration is that they have taken policies far beyond even what Bush took with the TARP program; for example, with his stimulus package, with the buyouts, with the bailouts, the rescue packages, these are unprecedented in American history.”
“Never before has so much phantom money been printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, producing practically nothing,” Celente continues.
“You don’t even have to be a student of history to know the outcome of this.
All you have to do is have your eyes open, and start thinking for yourself.”

Celente claims nasty shit is about to hit the swirling fan: He wrote in July about what will happen within the next two years — By 2012, even those in denial and still clinging to hope will be forced to face the truth. It will be called “Obamageddon” in America. The rest of the world will call it “The Greatest Depression.”

Don’t panic — yet.
Once the panic does arrive, however, the following suggestions are suggested (from SatireWire):

• Eat your young. “It seems barbaric, but trust me, if you don’t do it, someone else will, and you’ll end up kicking yourself.”

• If you live in Manhattan and hear somebody sing “It’s Rainin’ Men,” don’t hum along. Jump out of the way.

• Diversify your portfolio. Always sound advice, no matter the economic climate.

• Set aside 10 percent of your pre-tax income for firearms.

• Will your online broker be there in a market panic? Maybe it’s time you switched to a Schwab One account. (paid advertisement)

And always carry a pencil — you just never know.

A few short years ago, anyone who discussed subjects like “peak oil” were considered a crank (not to be confused with, for instance, ‘Will my car crank without fuel?’) or a nutcase or just a plain worry-wart-conspiratorial fruitcake (not to be confused with a Dick Cheney), but nowadays there’s enough evidence from authentic sources to ignite water.

The latest report outlines a “significant risk” of oil running out in a decade, another from Germany’s Deutsche Bank which spell the end of the oil era and from San Francisco, “the end of the world as we know it.”

(Illustration found here).

Peak oil, of course, is manacled hand-and-foot with global warming/climate change, though, it’s hard to tell which will seriously erupt first — coal and oil fueled the engine for an industrial society (advanced civilization) that seems about to eat itself.
A classic creation-destroying-the-creator scenario.
Peak oil is also tied to economics — when there’s no money, consumption drops and there’s less demand.
Some even ponder $6-a-gallon gas as making life better.
Catastrophic results of peak oil appear further on down the time-line, although who’s to really say about a future so entangled with so many varying variables.

This week, a gaggle of peak oil “theorists” will gather in Denver, also the HQ of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas-USA (ASPO), to swap figures, statistics and hopefully seek solutions on how best to handle the inevitable.
According to denverpost.com:

“Up until now, technology has delivered dazzling results to America and the world economy, in delivering oil from all around the world despite increasingly challenging environments,” said Dave Bowden, ASPO’s executive director.
“The harsh reality is, despite the best efforts of amazing technology, they’re not finding as many of these big fields anymore.”

ASPO and others of its ilk push wind, solar and ocean-wave power, along with hybrid cars and use of better technologies to extract more oil — a bandage on an gut shot.
Last May, the US Energy Information Administration released its International Energy Outlook 2009 and a large oil-gulping sound could be heard: World marketed energy consumption is projected to increase by 44 percent from 2006 to 2030. Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 73 percent, compared with an increase of 15 percent in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries.

And in Alaska, peak oil and climate change collide.
From MSNBC:

Oil companies scouring the coastline of Alaska’s North Slope for new production sites are converging on the same territory as hungry polar bears trying to escape shrinking and thinning sea ice.
Polar bears have not attacked any workers recently, but oil companies are reporting four times as many sightings as they did last decade.
…
“What this appears to be is bears looking for another option because their traditional habitat is not as healthy as it used to be,” said Steve Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey. This summer, Arctic sea ice shrank to its third-lowest area on record.

(h/t The Oil Drum)

Mad Max, a damn dog and polar bears.