The Arizona Republic ran my lengthy op-ed in their Viewpoint section Sunday and a follow-up Q&A piece in Wednesday’s paper. So far, a few minutes before noon, email responses to me on Sunday are mixed. About half are vile, in-denial buckets of hate. The other half are thankful, fearful, and/or curious to learn more. One respondent indicated the piece was linked to Oil Drum already, but I haven’t taken the time to find it there.
Our first move in 18 years is complete. We’ve moved into a shabby rental house in a great neighborhood a couple blocks from campus. We’re moved in, but not settled in — that’ll take a while longer.
The U.S. economy is moving in ever-tighter, ever-accelerating spirals. This, mind you, despite ongoing attempts to prop up the economy in the name of staving off a recession by Ben Bernanke and the ghouls at the Fed, Hank Paulson and his gangsters at Treasury Department, and Dubya and his cabal of criminals.
Seems my entry from last week was premature. Specifically, I wrote: “The federal government’s complete unwillingness to deal with the tsunami of economic news, from home foreclosures to runaway inflation and supply disruptions in gasoline, is truly pathetic.” The federal government and its primary media outlet suddenly leaped into action.
The hallucinatory economy of the United States, based on the “service” industry and consumption of salad shooters, is starting to drag. Seems the absence of cheap oil, along with the closely related inability to use our homes as automatic teller machines, removes the grease from the skids. The associated friction has the Dow doing its best impression of a man falling down the stairs, lurching and spinning and almost recovering before he falls headlong into the abyss of the black widow-infested cellar he couldn’t even imagine except for the old stories about the previous Great Depression.
I took my favorite urban walk today, perhaps for the last time. It’s in the nation’s capital city, and I doubt I’ll have many more chances to get here in the years ahead. Usually I take the walk in the morning so I can watch the sun rise from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but tomorrow’s weather forecast calls for freezing rain.
