As the list of announced movies coming out in 2009 was being finalized, an awful lot of you were truly excited about three of them. So was I. But probably not the same three. Lots of you were excited about the Abrams' relaunch of Star Trek, the Transformers sequel, and the 6th Harry Potter movie. One of those I wouldn't cross the street to see if it was completely free, and the other two you couldn't pay me any sum of money to voluntarily sit through. (I am just that thoroughly done with remakes, sequels, and franchises.) No, the three movies I was the most excited about, breathless for them to open, were Dreamworks' "Monsters versus Aliens," Duncan Jones' "Moon," and Peter Jackson's "District 9." Well, I finally got to see Monsters versus Aliens at the local dollar theater last weekend, and it was even funnier than I'd hoped it would be. District 9 doesn't come out until next month. But Moon finally made it to the Plaza Frontenac theater in St. Louis last night, and even without seeing District 9, I'm pretty sure I've seen the best science fiction movie of 2009. And I'll tell you why: I think I've seen the best science fiction movie of the last ten years. Maybe the last thirty years.

It's the mid 21st century, and most of Earth's problems have been solved, directly or indirectly, by one company: Lunar Industries, Incorporated. They maintain a base on the far side of the moon where automated machinery scrapes the lunar soil for Helium-3. When they fill a Helium-3 fuel tank, it gets shipped back to Earth via magnetic catapult, where it powers the fusion reactors that provide 70% of the world's energy supply in an entirely safe, clean, and renewable way, providing the power to irrigate deserts for farmland, providing the power for nearly all of the world's transportation and industry. Of course, somebody has to man the base, to repair anything that breaks down, to transport full tanks of He-3 from the mining rovers to the launch vehicles, and so forth. And transporting people back and forth is expensive and slow. So Lunar Industries hires one guy at a time to work a three year hitch at their lunar base, with no company but GERTY (brilliantly voiced by Kevin Spacey), the emoticon-faced artificial intelligence assigned to care for him and keep him safe. When his three year shift is over, he shuts the base down temporarily, seals himself into a cryogenic capsule that gets loaded onto the slow space ship home, they send up another guy in the return capsule, and mining continues.

Actor Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, who is just two weeks shy of getting to go home. It's been a rough three year shift, because while he was still in transit from Earth, a solar storm knocked out the satellite that was supposed to relay signals around the curve of the moon; the only way he's had to communicate with his bosses, let alone with his wife and daughter back home, has been via recorded messages, relayed via a research station in orbit around Jupiter whenever they can spare the bandwidth for him. So he's been feeling extra isolated, and it's driving him just a little bit crazy. That's making him just a little bit sloppy in his work, which causes an accident ... one that reveals that there are several lies embedded in what I've told you so far. He's in a lot of trouble. (Warning: Trailer contains significant spoilers.)



Sony Pictures Classics hasn't been doing much to publicize this little $5 million movie; I've only seen one trailer for it, and no advertising at all, not even in front of other science fiction movies where it would have made sense for them to advertise. A few aging journalists paid it a little bit of attention because there was one trivia news "hook" that caught their eye: director Duncan Jones is David Bowie's son, who literally grew up on the set of "Labyrinth." But when I caught the New York Times' interview with Jones about his then-upcoming movie, the David Bowie link was the least interesting part, to me. What really caught my eye was that Jones didn't credit his father's work as the inspiration, but (in order mentioned in the article): "Alien," "Outland," "Silent Running," and "Blade Runner." That was enough for me: anybody in movie-making today who remembers the truly great science fiction movies, and even the mediocre ones, that came out during what seems to me, in retrospect, like the golden age of science fiction film between Kubrick's pretty but over-rated "2001" and Lucas's movie that ruined science fiction film forever ("Star Wars," of course) instantly gets my attention. Especially Silent Running, which I still consider one of the five best science fiction movies ever made. And this movie genuinely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath, as well as in the same breath as other greats from the same time period like "Escape from the Planet of the Apes," "Westworld," and "Soylent Green."

If, like me, you look at today's science fiction movies (and even much of the TV), where a gazillion-dollar special effects budget and a soundtrack full of explosions, plus gratuitous chase scenes, boob shots, and toy tie-ins, substitutes for any attention to acting, writing, pacing, plot, science, technology, or (gods forbid) thought, and think, "Wow, they just don't make them like they used to," you absolutely must track this movie down and see it, see it in a theater on the big screen, see it even if you have to travel to do so. It's absolutely worth it.

"Obama ousts AmeriCorps' IG who investigated friend," Ann Sanner and Pete Yost, Associated Press, 6/12/09.

Sacramento Mayor and former NBA star Kevin Johnson, a personal friend of the President, stole over $350,000 from the federal government's AmeriCorps "volunteer" program, and has agreed to pay it back. The investigation also turned up four separate teenagers, at least two of them legal minors, who accuse Kevin Johnson of using that money to try to get away with sexually molesting them. Inspector General Gerald Walprin of AmeriCorps was scathing about this in his May 13th, 2009 "Special Report to Congress from the Office of the Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service" (PDF), which seems to have been prompted by the decision of AmeriCorps to let Johnson continue to receive AmeriCorps funding once he's made a token partial repayment and taken a few classes.

You don't get away with treating a personal friend of the President of the United States as if he were accountable for his actions, apparently: President Obama announced today that he is firing Walprin: "It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as inspectors general. That is no longer the case with regard to this inspector general."

Nice friends you have there, Mr. President, and nice job of looking out for taxpayers, let alone children. I think I'm going to be sick.

Early Friday evening, a crushing weight was lifted off of my chest. The Tiller assassination hit me on a lot of levels, some of them personal, some of the political. But one in particular was weighing heavily on me: from where I was sitting, evidence of a cover-up by the Wichita police was inescapably clear, unambiguous, and 100% certain. This isn't something that I have the luxury of feeling surprised by, either. If you've read anything by any abortion provider, clinic employee, or clinic volunteer, or if you've spoken with any of them about this as I have, one thing you hear from very nearly all of them is this: cops don't care what happens to an abortion clinic or to an abortion provider. A disproportionately large number of the police chiefs in this country are, themselves, anti-abortion. But even the rest of them would quietly and secretly be delighted if the protesters and the terrorists they inspire managed to shut down their town's abortion clinic, because to a police chief, an abortion clinic is an "attractive nuisance."

So many people are willing to go to such illegal lengths to shut one down that there is no police department in this country that can afford what it would cost to fully investigate every crime against an abortion provider or an abortion facility. So even the best of them wish the problem would just go away, and the easiest way for the problem to just go away would be if the abortion providers and clinics moved out of their town, and became some other police department's problem. So while I wanted to scream with rage at the screen when I read that the Wichita police chief rushed to tell reporters that Roeder acted alone before Tiller's body had even been removed from the church, so early that even if it was true he couldn't possibly know that, I couldn't make myself feel surprised or shocked. At most, I was shocked that he was that sloppy and careless about giving away the fact that he had no intention of investigating to see if Roeder had any co-conspirators; shouldn't he at least have been ashamed to reveal that so early?

None the less, a substantial chunk of the anger that was gnawing at me and robbing me of my ability to sleep for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time was coming from my entirely justifiable fear that the rest of Roeder's terror cell were still at large, were still free to conspire against additional doctors and clinics, and once they found another willing patsy to do the last bit of dirty work and take the fall for them, they would kill again, and that none of the people whose job it is to do something about that were going to do so. So it came as an overwhelming relief when I found out, Friday evening, that the US Department of Justice had just put out a press release reading, in part:

The Department's Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas have launched a federal investigation into federal crimes in connection with the murder of Dr. George Tiller. The federal probe will consist of a thorough review of the evidence and an assessment of any potential violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act) or other federal statutes. ... The FACE Act was enacted by Congress in 1994 to establish federal criminal penalties and civil remedies for violent, obstructionist or damaging conduct affecting reproductive health care providers and recipients. "The Department of Justice will work tirelessly to determine the full involvement of any and all actors in this horrible crime, and to ensure that anyone who played a role in the offense is prosecuted to the full extent of federal law," said Loretta King, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division."

Thank all the holy gods, because this is something that the Wichita police department very deliberately, in the first few hours after the assassination, tried to prevent. In the first few hours after the shooting, they repeatedly told reporters that this was a crime by a Kansan with no links to anyone outside of Kansas, against a Kansan, within Kansas, with no part of the crime taking place across state lines, and therefore there was no federal jurisdiction. They didn't explicitly say "feds, back off," but they were pretty clearly unhappy that the BATF and the FBI responded to the 911 call from Dr. Tiller's church. And that left me very, very angry because if the Wichita police department was the only one that investigated this crime, I was pretty sure we were never going to get an answer to any of the following questions:

1. Tiller was famous for never going anywhere without at least one armed bodyguard. Only a fairly small number of people knew that there was one exception, that he didn't bring his bodyguard with him to church. Given that Roeder lives in Kansas City, who did the surveillance that turned up this tidbit, and how did it get to Roeder?
   
   
2. Furthermore, Tiller would only have been vulnerable on Sundays that he was an usher. Any time that he wasn't ushering, he would have been embedded in a crowd to big for Roeder to get through to get to him. Did Tiller usher every service? If not, how did Roeder know that Tiller would be ushering this service? Who knew that in advance? Most of the people I assume would know are pretty clearly above suspicion, like the deacons and the other ushers, but who prints the programs for Tiller's church?
   
   
3. And here's a really ugly one. Even as an usher, there was only a very narrow window of time when Tiller and the other ushers would be alone in the lobby. Two minutes earlier, and the lobby would have been too crowded for Roeder to reach Tiller with a gun. Two minutes later, and the lobby would have been empty. And church schedules don't run on split-second accuracy; the start of a service can vary by 10 minutes or more. Judging by the photographs of the building that I've seen, there's no way for someone in the parking lot to see how full the lobby of the church is, so how did Roeder know exactly when to walk in, how did he know the exact minute that if he walked in there would be nobody between him and Tiller, unless someone in the congregation text messaged him with it or otherwise signaled him? Remember: months ago, Roeder himself suggested, on the Operation Rescue chat forums, that someone from that group infiltrate Dr. Tiller's church.
   
   
4. When Roeder was arrested, reporters photographed his car, and visible on the top of a pile of papers on the dashboard was an envelope with the name and phone number of Operation Rescue "senior policy adviser" Cheryl Sullenger, who served a two year prison term in 1988 for the attempted bombing of an abortion clinic. Sullenger, who says that her violent days are behind her, has given at least two, maybe three conflicting stories to reporters about her contacts with Roeder. Was that phone number on the dashboard of Roeder's car after the assassination because he called her before the assassination? Or after? And what did they discuss?
   
   
5. Within an hour of the crime, the description of Roeder and his car, with license plate number, were released to the media. Reporters found out where that car was registered and went there, and asked the neighbors if they'd seen that car. According to early press reports, the neighbors knew instantly who they meant, because the house was a local nuisance. So many people were constantly coming and going from that house, day and night, every day of the week, that the local neighbors bitterly joked that it needed a revolving door. Some, but only some, of the gatherings of people sounded like worship services. Question: Who were those people, and what did they know about Roeder's plans?
   
   
6. Another complication: Roeder supposedly no longer lived at that address. It turns out that Roeder moved out of that house months ago, and was living across town in another part of Kansas City. So why was his car still there almost every night? Who does own that house, and what are they using it for?
   
   
7. Roeder was arrested slightly over three and a half hours after the shooting, on the outskirts of Kansas City. According to Google Maps, it should have taken him only two and a half hours to drive that far. Where was he during the missing hour, and who was he with? Police say they fanned out and checked every hotel and motel in the area, and he wasn't there. His car was being looked for by every patrolling police car. Who hid him? Or did one or more police officers see him and let him pass?
   
   
8. And given the relatively low number of interstate highways leaving Wichita, how did he get as far as Kansas City, especially if he didn't leave Wichita for an hour? Why didn't the cops catch him on his way out of town?
   
   
9. Furthermore, given that Roeder saw one of the ushers photograph him, and given the likelihood that he saw the same usher photograph his car as he left the parking lot, why was Roeder driving towards his home in the Kansas City area? Did he really think he was going to get away with it? Or was he heading that direction to distract police attention from Wichita?
   
   
10. Roeder spent a lot of time unemployed, recently, and at the time of the shooting his reported income was $1100 a month. But a third of that was being garnished to pay off a credit card he had defaulted on. And supposedly he lived alone. So how in the heck was he affording the gasoline to drive 150 miles each way from Kansas City to Wichita every day for Tiller's trial, when Tiller was accused of performing illegal late-term abortions on viable fetuses without medical necessity?
    
    
11. Furthermore, Roeder's employer is given as Quicksilver Airport Delivery. Roeder had a past conviction for transporting a partially assembled pipe bomb, and was a known past associate of the local chapter of the Montana Freemen white-supremacist militia. Shouldn't a job at an airport have required a background check, and if so, how did he of all people pass one?
    
    
12. Where did Roeder get a gun, if he was so broke? Who armed him? What did Roeder tell that person about why he wanted a gun?
    
    
13. And one really, really big and ugly one: if Roeder only has $10 in the bank, why was he so fiercely determined to get a judge to set bail? Who did he think was going to put up that five million dollar bail for him?
    
    
14. And finally, in light of all of the above, can anybody think of any non-sinister reason why the Wichita police department was in such a hurry to conclude that Roeder was a "lone nut" and in such a hurry to chase off the federal investigators?

Maybe, now that the feds are involved, we'll get some answers. But I already know this much for a fact: Scott Roeder did not act alone.

Before you comment, please read this blog's updated policy on commenting about abortion. Thank you.

Not quite five years ago, I predicted that Wikipedia would be remembered historically not as an encyclopedia, not as a news service, not as a popular Internet destination, but as the beginning of a change in the way we talk to one another that will be credited, by historians in the future, with having saved civilization. (See "Make Wiki, Not War," July 17th, 2004.) In particular, what I was lauding Wikipedia for was two interlocking principles: "Edit Boldly" and "Neutral Point of View." Since then, I'd add one other, implicit in those two, now explicit as a WikiMedia Foundation policy: "Assume Good Faith."

What that means, both to me and in practice, is this. When an issue is unsettled, each side makes their argument, with citations to neutral, generally accepted to be reliable sources wherever the facts are in dispute. (Hence the more famous and widely parodied Wikipedia policy, "[citation needed]".) But where Wikipedia differs from previous attempts to settle arguments is that if you think that the other person has made their case in a way that is dishonest, inflammatory, propagandistic, or in a way that assumes bad faith on the part of the people the author of that part of the article disagrees with, you are explicitly encouraged to delete that argument. If you have the skill, you are encouraged to try to replace it with a more honest, less inflammatory, more neutrally phrased, good faith statement of the same principles, the same theory, the same interpretation of the facts. But you don't have to. If you delete it, and don't replace it with something better, it is up to them to restate their case in a way that fits Wikipedia policy. Or, if they disagree that what they wrote wasn't neutral enough in point of view, they can revert your deletion. And you can revert their revert. Keep doing this for a little while, and maybe someone else will come in and propose a compromise that you can both agree is fair, whether or not you both agree with it. If the revert-war goes on long enough, the software will alert an editor who will lock the whole page and force both (or all) sides into a separate discussion forum, out of sight of the main page, to argue it out until they can agree on how both sides will be able to present their arguments. And I sincerely and truly and genuinely believe that if all of civilization adopted these rules of debate, it would save civilization.

I am not the WikiMedia Foundation. I haven't even bothered to edit Wikipedia in months, I think, and longer than that since I did more than fix an occasional typo. This web page is not Wikipedia. It's my personal LiveJournal. So I'm going to rule, here, in place of the Wikipedia editors, on what is and isn't Neutral Point of View on the abortion debate in America. You may not like what I'm saying here. You don't have to. It's a big Internet. Blogger, Blogspot, LiveJournal, Facebook, Yahoo Groups, they'd all love to give you your own forum for free, and on your own forum, you can discuss abortion (or not) by any set of rules you choose to impose, or without any rules at all, as long as you're within the Terms of Service of your forum provider. These are my rules:

I am ruling both the terms "Pro-Life" and "Pro-Choice" to be misleading and propagandistic. These terms may no longer be used as terms of debate in the comments on bradhicks.livejournal.com. If you use the term "Pro-Choice" to describe your side of the argument, I will contradict you and ask you to stop doing so here. But because the term "Pro-Life" goes even further and ascribes bad faith, and because it incites violence, I will go even further: those who describe their position as "Pro-Life" will have their comments deleted. Repeat offenders to either policy may have their LiveJournal or OpenID accounts banned from commenting; they may still comment anonymously, but those comments will remain hidden until I personally clear them.

(I'd settle for disemvoweling people who persist in using the banned terms, but LiveJournal doesn't support it.)

Let me clarify that if you are quoting a published source, or a public figure, for the intent of passing along what they said, you may quote them. For now. If this permission gets abused as a way of getting around the intent of this policy, I will revisit it. This restriction applies to arguments you are making in your own name (or under your own pseudonym) here.

What's wrong with "Pro-Life?" First of all, it's just flat-out dishonest: if a fetus is not viable outside the womb, it is not alive, any more than Terri Schiavo was still alive when they disconnected her life support. (If you only oppose abortion after fetal viability, see "what's wrong with both," below.) Secondly, it assumes bad faith: it casts anybody who disagrees with the "pro-life" side of being in favor of killing living people. Thirdly, it is inflammatory: it is exactly this kind of rhetoric, accusing abortion providers (and doctors who prescribe birth control pills, and pharmacists who fill those prescriptions, and doctors who fit their patients with IUDs) of being professional assassins and the women who buy those birth control pills, use those IUDs, and procure those abortions of being people who hire hit-men to kill other American citizens. Even if that is what you think, you may not say that here, because I do not consent to having the comment section on my blog used for you to recruit more assassins like Michael Griffin, Paul Hill, and Scott Roeder. Persuading those people to do your killing for you is something I will, from now on, be exactly zero tolerance towards. Nor is this my policy only with regards to this blog. If you say the words "pro-life" in my presence, I will respond to you exactly the way I would respond if you called someone a "nigger" or a "faggot." I will (as politely as I can manage) ask you to please not use that term in my presence, as I find it offensive.

If you oppose abortion under all or nearly all circumstances, there is an accurate term for that, and that term is "anti-abortion." If you wish to argue for the anti-abortion side and are unwilling to use that label, or some equally fair, equally unpropagandistic, equally uninflammatory label for you position, you may do so without any challenge or hindrance from me ... anywhere other than in the comments section of this blog or in my presence.

What's wrong with "Pro-Choice?" First of all, it's incoherent and misleading. Abortion-rights advocates aren't arguing that people should be allowed to make any choice they want. Not even the staunchest "pro-choice" advocate would argue that it is also a woman's choice if she wants to set a church on fire, or shoot the President of the United States, or send money to al Qaeda, or serve heroin to third graders. This is about one particular choice. But even that's misleading, and in a way that's misleading in an entirely unhelpful way, because this isn't about the "choice" of abortion. It's about the right to an abortion. And that right is, frankly, an inalienable one, even more so than Life, Liberty, or the Pursuit of Happiness, and that is because if a woman is determined not to carry a fetus to term, no force on earth can make her do so. If you believe that women should have that natural right as a legal right, you are not "pro-choice." You "support abortion rights," and I will thank you to use that terminology from now on when commenting in this blog, or any equally accurate, equally descriptive, non-inflammatory phrase that (as I'm also demanding of your opponents) grants good faith, as much as possible, on the part of people who disagree with you.

I stand by that "as much as possible," though, and it's why I'm not going to react as strongly, either in person or in the comments sections of this blog, to people who absent-mindedly or ignorantly or impolitely use the term "pro-choice" after I've asked you all not to. What this has to do with the phrase "as much as possible" is that it is undeniably true that unlike the term "pro-choice," the term "pro-life" has been used to solicit assault, arson, and murder. Therefore people who use the "pro-choice" term will get a little more benefit of the doubt from me, a few more chances to change their ways before they get put in the comment moderation queue.

What's wrong with both of them? And frankly, I have another reason to want to ban the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" from my presence and from the comments on this blog: they both assume a false dichotomy. By way of introducing my point, here, let me excerpt a Gallup Poll, taken regularly ever since Roe v Wade, quoted from PollingReport.com's abortion page:

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"Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?" (Margin of error: ±3%)

	Legal Under Any	Legal Only Under Certain	Illegal In All	Unsure
Apr 1975	21%	54%	22%	3%
Jul 1980	25%	53%	18%	4%
Apr 1990	31%	53%	12%	4%
Apr 2000	28%	51%	19%	2%
Jun 2005	24%	55%	20%	1%
May 2009	22%	53%	23%	2%

---

36 years of hard-core propaganda from both the abortion rights side, and the anti-abortion side, and they haven't moved the public debate in that whole 36 years. Within the margin of error of the polling, we remain exactly where we were when the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade: 20% who think that Roe v Wade doesn't go far enough in granting abortion rights, 20% who think that abortion should be illegal under all or nearly all circumstances, and (and this is the important part) a clear and unambiguous and unshakable majority who support Roe v Wade.

And, ironically, most of them don't know that. Because both sides' extremists, both sides' radicals (and I use both terms not as perjoratives but as descriptives, in this case, in the literal sense of "people whose views are outside of the mainstream"), as a propaganda tool, keep trying to persuade the vast majority who don't want to be dragged into this argument that there is no middle ground, that they must either support abortion rights unambiguously and in all or nearly all cases, or they must oppose abortion in all or nearly all cases. Nobody has coined a term for them. What's more, because nobody on either side of the propaganda war over abortion has any incentive to do so, nobody is telling them that what they want, really, is already settled US law. Pollsters have long known what a solid majority, not a plurality but an actual majority, of the American people want: they want abortion in the first 12 or 13 weeks of pregnancy, when the fetus more closely resembles a transparent soccer ball the size of a pinhead than it does a person, to be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. They want abortion after about 24 to 26 weeks, when the fetus could survive on its own if delivered via emergency c-section, to be illegal unless the baby is already doomed to die or the woman's health is in grave risk. And the vast majority of the American public have not made up their minds, even within themselves, let alone as a body politic, about the time period in between. They would like to hear an unimpassioned, reasoned, practical, legal, sane discussion about where to draw the line, and what exceptions to allow, in between. If you describe the compromise that Roe put in place, which allows abortion from week 14 to 26 in general but allows a wide variety of restrictions on the procedure, like waiting periods and mandatory counseling and restrictions on where and how the procedure can be performed, a pretty solid plurality, maybe even a majority, are okay with that. If the American people weren't being lied to every day about what Roe v Wade actually says, Roe v Wade wouldn't even be controversial.

And if you're one of those people? If that's what you support? Then when someone tries to make you choose between anti-abortion and abortion rights and doesn't allow you a middle ground, when somebody tries to tell you must choose sides between "Pro-Life" and "Pro-Choice?" Don't take the bait. Stand up against the extremists on both sides and clearly and unambiguously and directly state: "I support Roe v Wade."

One-Time Limited Exception to the Rules: Because I know that this is a controversial change, I know that some people will be even angrier and even more likely to take their traffic somewhere else if I don't at least allow them to make their case for why I'm wrong to impose this restriction. So I will swallow my bile and for a limited time, let's say the next week at most, I will allow you to violate the rules against describing yourself as "pro-life" or "pro-choice" in the comments to this one last journal entry. Still, you may only do so subject to the following restrictions: you may do so only for the purpose of defending why that and only that label is acceptable. You may do so if it is so that you can explain why you think that your preferred label of "pro-choice" or "pro-life" is neither dishonest nor propagandistic nor inflammatory; if you can't do those three things, don't bother. And you absolutely will discuss this in a polite way and without insulting each other, or I will delete your comments and whole comment threads if necessary. If there is any part of that that is unclear, you can contact me off-list and ask, or you can take your chances; nobody will be comment-deleted for first offense, let alone comment-banned, for this post only, and only from now until next Saturday.

And, I will say it once last time, you may disregard these rules as much as you like, as long as you do it anywhere other than here.

Discuss.

I didn't spend all of those years studying First Amendment law, or all of those years doing volunteer civil liberties work, without learning a thing or two. Which is why David Kravets' "U.S. Manga Obscenity Conviction Roils Comics World" (Wired "Threat Level" column, 5/28/09) came as exactly no shock to me. I'll bet quite a few of you can't say the same.

For those of you who don't want to (or can't) click through to the original article, let me summarize: in 2006, a (now) 39 year old Iowa manga collector named Christopher Handley ordered half a dozen volumes of "lolicon" manga from a retailer in Japan. They were intercepted by a US Customs Service inspector, and Handley was charged with importation and possession of child pornography, specifically "possession of any type of visual depiction, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct that is obscene." Yesterday, on advice of his attorney, he plead guilty to all charges. He faces a prison term of up to 15 years, a fine of up to $250,000, plus 3 years probation, and he will spend the rest of his life listed on the convicted sex offender registry.

No, we don't know what books he ordered, but according to the US Department of Justice press release ("Iowa Man Pleads Guilty to Possessing Obscene Visual Representations of the Sexual Abuse of Children", 5/20/09), "in May 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) intercepted a mail package coming into the United States from Japan that was addressed to Handley. Inside the package was obscene material, including books containing visual representations of the sexual abuse of children, specifically Japanese manga drawings of minor females being sexually abused by adult males and animals. Pursuant to a search warrant, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) searched and seized additional obscene drawings of the sexual abuse of children at Handley’s residence in Glenwood."

I will also tell you that either Handley's lawyer Eric Chase is either grand-standing, or else he's flatly incompetent to practice First Amendment law, if it's true that he told Wired, "It’s probably the only law I’m aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can’t tell them." Lawyers who specialize in obscenity cases, both pro-civil-liberties and anti-pornography, track jury verdicts and can tell you with nearly 100% reliability whether what they're looking at would be ruled obscene by a jury, and yes, I'm telling you right now, no jury has ever not indicted and convicted for visual portrayals of children having sex. The same is equally true of equally graphic portrayals of bestiality, necrophilia, urolalia, scat play, rape, or simultaneous sex and torture. To anybody who actually knows what they're talking about, this isn't even controversial, and if Eric Chase didn't know that, and didn't research the case law enough to know that, Handley had an idiot for an attorney. Or, alternatively, he does know it, but is counting on you not to know it.

If Handley had a case, that case would have depended on an "artistic merit" defense; under US obscenity law, no image is obscene if it has "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." (1973 Miller v California.) The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund says that they consulted on the case and lined up expert witnesses to testify to the artistic merits of "lolicon" manga. Apparently Chase, and Handley, concluded that the jury wasn't going to buy it. They may well be right; at least one past jury in a high-profile, well funded, well defended case made it clear that if the subject matter is offensive enough, they don't care how famous the artist is or what the critics say about the importance of the work, it's still obscene.

Told you so. Lots of you didn't believe me, but I did tell you.

---

P.S. Note the date of the interception of Handley's manga. The US Customs Service, and presumably thereby the US Postal Service, have known what retailers in Japan sell this stuff to American buyers for at least three years. Can your library survive a search warrant? If not, you've got work to do. Hope you own a cross-cut paper shredder and an indoor fireplace. Otherwise, you're betting the rest of your life that they won't pick you to be the next person they make an example out of.

You might keep being lucky. There are a lot of lolicon manga collectors in the US. Only one of them has been convicted, so far. Is it worth it to you to keep betting those odds? If so, be my guest. But if you are going to do so, may I politely suggest, not as a lawyer but as someone who studies the history of these things? Shut the hell up about it. Tell no one, especially not through an online email service or web forum or blog, no matter how good you think your anonymity is (because it isn't), that you are doing so. Because that's just asking for it. When prosecutors are looking to hand out search warrants, people who brag about their crimes in public are the first ones they target.

Unless, of course, you have a martyr complex and want to be a registered sex offender for the rest of your life, because taking a stand As a Matter of Principle is that important to you. If it is? Again, be my guest. If you're that determined to be a martyr, though, don't expect me to stand up for you.

P.P.S. Every time I write about anything like this, people think I'm standing up for the law or defending the prosecutors. I'm not. If it were up to me, you could collect drawings (or even pictures or movies) of anything you want. I don't write this stuff because I'm anti-porn, or anti- any "Forbidden Lore." I write this stuff because ignorance of the laws you live under appalls and offends me. I write this stuff because I'm tired of self-entitled idiots who've never participated in democracy in any way stubbornly and naively insisting that the law is whatever they want it to be, that juries have to agree with them about what should and shouldn't be legal.

If you want to enjoy an illegal hobby, it behooves you to know the law and your chances of acquittal if you're caught. If you want your illegal hobby to be legal, you've got work to do. Saying stupid crap like, "yaoi and hentai and lolicon manga are entirely legal because they're just lines on paper" doesn't make it true, it just makes you someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. If you want all lines on paper to be legal, your nearest ACLU would love you to donate and volunteer. You're not going to achieve that goal by whining about it in your LiveJournal, nor on mine. I'm just saying.

Not when two other bloggers have written the kind of thing I try to write, at least as well or better, on topics I usually cover. I read the Drug Monkey's "Your Pharmacist May Hate You" blog, and so should you (also available on LJ as drugmonkey_rss), but even if you don't, you should read today's article on why you should believe that the health insurance industry's offer to reduce health care costs is a flat out lie, "Big Pharma and the Health 'Insurance' Industry Come Up with a Comedic Routine That Leaves Me in Stitches," (drugmonkey.blogspot.com, 5/12/09).

And, found via solarbird, you should also read Gonzalo Lira's guest post at Zero Hedge, on why you should not trust the Obama administration on the economy, "Why I Am Freaking Out" (zerohedge.blogspot.com, 5/11/09).

I endorse both of these messages, and I'll add one thought for the day: Regulatory capture is a form of coup d'etat.

So, yeah, as I said the other day, I hated Cory Doctorow's Little Brother so much that it bothers me to know that anybody is reading it, let alone still recommending it. And that was kind of a shame, because the book came so highly recommended to me. But fortunately, all that extra reading time I had a week and something ago was not entirely wasted, because I also got yet another book read that was almost as highly recommended: Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.

Now, I approached this with some trepidation, because to my personal tastes (and I want to make it clear here just how aware I am that this is a matter of personal taste in fiction), Neil Gaiman is very uneven. I've loved some of the stuff he's done, especially Death: The High Cost of Living and the original Books of Magic. On the other hand, a lot of his stuff struck me as so uninteresting that I can't even remember a single line or character from it after finishing it, like American Gods, or so dull I'll never be able to get more than a couple of pages into it, like Sandman; for the same reason, I massively preferred the movie of Stardust to the comic books. And I actively disliked Neverwhere, for the same reason I dislike an awful lot of British fiction: I found it actively unpleasant to be inside the main character's head, I found him a tremendously unlikeable person and it wouldn't have bothered me a bit if he'd died in a fire -- so why do I care about this story? And yes, once again, I do know how much of this is personal taste on my part, that none of this is an indictment of Neil Gaiman as a writer. I just bring this all up to explain why, even though so many reviewers from so many different walks of life were telling me what a great book The Graveyard Book was, I was prepared to feel like I'd wasted my money.

Oh. My. God.

This is the most amazing thing I've read in years. For one thing, sheerly by accident, it has me just about perfectly centered in its cross-hairs. But even so, my imagination does not stretch as far as to imagine any human being capable of understanding English at the requisite (very low) level who wouldn't fall in love with this book. I find it now incumbent on me to do you all the tremendous favor of trying to persuade each and every one of you to buy at least one copy of The Graveyard Book without spoiling a single line of it for you ... a difficult challenge under the best of circumstances.

What I can tell you is this: in very abbreviated capsule summary, it's Kipling's The Jungle Book with ghosts in a graveyard instead of wolves in subtropical India, by someone who truly loves old, and old-fashioned, ghost stories and who truly gets Kipling. Just as in The Jungle Book, our viewpoint character (for almost all of the book) starts out as a toddler who accidentally wanders away from his family just before each and every one of them dies. Only instead of toddling into the jungle, our little hero-to-be toddles into a long-closed graveyard somewhere around London, one that's been designated as a wilderness preserve. And before she passes on to wherever the truly dead go, his mother persuades the ghosts of that graveyard to raise and to protect her little boy.

And what's so just staggeringly amazing about the first roughly 2/3rds of the book is that Gaiman so skillfully evokes Kipling without ever quoting Kipling, or ever even copying him. A baby boy raised by ghosts and other supernatural creatures is not going to have the same personality as a baby boy raised by wolves, nor is the graveyard run by anything like The Law of the Pack. But Gaiman has an ear for Kipling's (under-appreciated, these days) lyrical style, his musical style; if you know The Jungle Book at all well, out from under the long shadow of Disney, you'll keep getting little thrills as you see that Gaiman is telling the story as simply and as beautifully as Kipling himself would have done it on his best days. A mother ghost and a father ghost are not going to be the same people as a mother and a father wolf, but they will be a mother and a father to a boy who isn't like them, and the notes of beauty and love and strangeness and tension are perfect. A little boy raised in a graveyard isn't going to be protected by a panther or taught by a tree sloth, but there are non-ghosts who fill the roles of protectors and teachers, and while it would be unfair to say that this one is Balu and this one is Bagheera, there keep being these little grace notes of watching first one, then the other remind you of Balu, of Bagheera, in perfect little ways, while remaining entirely separate characters with entirely separate natures and personalities. And yes, Gaiman even found ways to evoke Kaa, and the Ban-Dar-Lag, in a graveyard full of Regency and Edwardian and Victorian ghosts, in ways that are delightful even if you don't know the original well enough to recognize the resemblances.

The last third of the book is weaker, at least to my taste, in ways that are somewhat predictable if you've read enough Gaiman. In the way he killed off the kid's family and stranded him in the graveyard, Gaiman painted himself into something of a very un-Kipling-like corner, and when it comes time to wrap the story up, he has to paint his way out the only way he knows, his way. If you love the endings of Gaiman's stories, you'll love this one. Me, I mostly don't, but I liked this one anyway, and I'll tell you why. By the end of this book, I liked listening to the way our ghost-raised young man thinks so much that I stayed with him even through the kind of Gaimanesque ending that I usually don't like, just because he had charmed me that much. It does wrap up the story in an entirely satisfactory way, while continuing to surprise on every page. Even though I wanted more, I couldn't deny that Gaiman had truly told it all.

Buy this book. Read this book. Read it aloud, especially; like Kipling, this book begs to be read aloud. Gaiman says in the afterword that the first few chapters began as a story he told to his own children at bedtime; you should tell his story to your children, even the ones big enough to go on from this to Lord Dunsany's Time and the Gods, et cetera, afterwards. Give it as gifts; you will be thanked. If you ever loved a book in your life, do yourself a favor and find out for yourself how much you're going to fall in love with Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.

After about five straight months of non-stop hype for the same book, I took advantage of the fact that I was taking time off from reading newspapers and the wire services to finally get around to reading Cory Doctorow's attempt to channel Scott Westerfeld, his already massively award-nominated young adult science fiction novel Little Brother. I was rather looking forward to it, even though I have no illusions about Doctorow's limitations as a writer. The man cannot describe a scene or write dialog to save his life, but then, the same is true of Bruce Sterling, and I love Sterling's stuff. Given that he credited Westerfeld, who I consider to be one of the best science fiction authors working today, in Little Brother, and given how many experts on the subjects of counter-terrorism and surveillance had favorably reviewed the book, I was expecting to groan through some of the uneven writing that you find in anything Doctorow does that's longer than a short story, but to otherwise have an enjoyable time.

Oh. My. God.

This book is a train wreck.

Here's the capsule summary, and I'll warn you right now, I'm going big-time spoilerific here, and I feel no shame about that, because I'm spoiling a book that you absolutely should not read. That's a bold claim, and I will defend it in a few moments, but:

( spoilers )

Oh, for gods' sake.

This is cartoon liberalism. This is straw-man liberalism. This is the kind of stupid crap that morons like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Weiner-Savage like to accuse liberals of believing. And yet not only Cory Doctorow, but everybody who has praised this book and everybody who has nominated it for major awards, apparently think this plot twist is plausible enough to not even be remarked on. This is not merely slanderous and libelous. This is not merely treasonous. This is not merely paranoiac psychotic thinking: this is stupidity on a monumental and brain-hurting scale. I can count on the thumbs of both hands all of the "liberals" I've ever met who believe that any of this is even possible, let alone proven true, and all of them have a long history with mental health professionals dating back to before 9/11. I find it irresponsible and disgusting to think that anybody but a paranoid or a schizophrenic praised this book to even one other person, let alone reviewed it favorably in newspaper after newspaper and nominated it for half a dozen awards.

I weep for my country.

Next: On the other hand, one of the books that was recommended to me as a fantastic book was actually under-rated. That book, when I get around to writing again.

The other "shiny thing" I kept myself distracted with, for about a week on either side of my newspaper and TV journalism fast, is the other big deal in MMO news lately: City of Heroes, Architect Edition, aka "issue 14," aka "Mission Architect" or "MA." Capsule summary: surprisingly less fun than I thought it would be, not worth the industry hype ... yet, anyway.

Those of you who've followed my journal for years know that City of Heroes is the MMO that I keep going back to. In a nutshell, it's because it is hands-down, no-comparison the least aggravating Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) in the history of the industry. No grinding for loot; no grinding, period. No item loss or item decay. Temporary jetpacks get you from level 6ish to level 14, at which point you can pick your permanent travel power at any time, flying at up to 45 miles per hour, super-leaping at around 55 miles per hour, or superspeeding or teleporting at up to about 80 miles per hour, which lets them have game zones as big as or bigger than any other MMO but without the tiresome drag of traveling for half an hour each way to your mission. Almost all combat is instanced and scales automatically to your level when you take the mission, and to your team size when you enter it. All character classes, even support classes, can solo, even from low levels. And best of all, the character creation tools are nothing less than mind-blowing: you really can look like, and roleplay your character, as just about anything you can imagine. Unlike almost every other MMO on the planet, your gear doesn't dictate what you look like, you don't have to look like every other level (your level) (your class) in the entire game world. Oh, and the team-finding, team member finding features are only just barely second to Warhammer Online's.

Counting only paid time, though, I've been playing City of Heroes for 39 months. (I know, I just got my 39-month veteran reward, unlocking boxing sports uniforms as costume pieces.) There is basically no content in City of Heroes that I haven't played at least once; all but the worst content, I've played so often I have it memorized. So I go away to other MMOs from time to time, but then I put up with "sprint" costing you all of your endurance in order to "run" at City of Heroes' slowest walking speed for 30 seconds, having to fight every trash mob between here and the mission 25 minutes to 30 minutes away from the contact, then having to fight my way back through every trash mob for half an hour just to tag the contact and continue. In reward, I get a piece of armor or a weapon that I have to wear, no matter whether it fits in with the looks of the rest of the gear I've got, because I need the stats on it. And obsessively track down an item-repair NPC every 2nd or 3rd mission, or risk having my equipment evaporate on me for lack of maintenance. All this so I can solo the one or maybe two character classes per game that can be soloed, because the only way to level any other character class is to stand around for longer than I spend in any MMO on average per session yelling "LFT!" A couple of months of that, and I'm back in City of Heroes, no matter how bored I am.

It turns out that there's a really good reason why it was taking the City of Heroes development team four to six months to crank out 10 or 12 missions' worth of new story arcs, though: their internal development tools stank on ice. For the first three years of the game, they had to hand-code mission parameters into a text file and feed the text files into a compiler before they could test them, then pop out of the game and edit the text file if they'd made any syntax errors or typos in the constants. Along about two years ago, they made a "giant leap forward" when someone designed an Excel spreadsheet that would let them do 75% of the work in Excel and use macros to export the basic outline of a mission. Eventually, they hired a guy who couldn't stand that, so in his spare time he started working on a set of Visual Basic scripts that would replace that Excel spreadsheet, including pull down menus and check boxes and so forth for the things that the Excel spreadsheet couldn't do. And as soon as he showed it off, someone asked: hey, do you think we could turn this over to players and let them write content, too? Well, not in the form it was. But one of the first things they did when NCsoft started investing more money into the franchise was hire a small programming team to rewrite that VB hack from scratch and embed it into the City of Heroes in-game user interface itself. It took them a year and half to get it to where it is, and about two weeks ago, they took the servers down and new buildings magically appeared in every major zone in the game: an entertainment and superhero-training virtual reality franchise called Architect Entertainment. You walk in, walk up to a terminal, and either start editing your own missions, or browse the list of missions other players have published.

On first blush, it's a fantastic system. Over the course of eight or nine years (counting pre-release development time) of building missions, they'd extended the code to allow a dizzying variety of "plot coupons" that can be embedded in missions: patrolling enemies (or allies) with their own dialog, allies to rescue who'll fight alongside you, ambushes, boss mobs, defendable objects, destructible objects, clickable collections of objects, hostages to capture, hostages to rescue, and MA handles nearly all of it. I say "nearly" because there are bugs, not just in the MA system but in the game engine itself and quite a few of the instance maps, that make it impossible to predict entirely reliably what'll happen when you use certain types of plot coupons on certain types of instance maps. But the system is easy to learn, it's highly iterative to test, and even once you learn what its limitations are, it's amazingly flexible. When I first got my hands on it, I found that I was excited about writing (what are, in effect) game modules for other players for the first time since my famous Mage: The Ascension campaign of the mid to late 1990s. I spotted two places in the villain game where the existing content just isn't that good, and where, even more importantly, there are some great plot points and story lines over on the hero side that never get explained or wrapped up for villain-only players. So over the course of about a month (counting open beta on the issue), I knocked out two story arcs that I'm quite proud of:

• #4427: "Fish and Cut Bait in Port Oakes," villain level 10-14. Even though (by now) you've noticed that there's a civil war going on within the mafia for control over the Port Oakes smuggling operations, the lower level lieutenants still have to protect the merchandise and get it onto the boats, so they're hiring freelancers, including a mafia-connected street gang from Paragon City, and including you. Includes foreshadowing for the Coralax story arcs in the late level 20 range that's really missing, even though you see Coralax on the streets of Port Oakes, and the missing chunks of "The Bonefire Plot" level 10-14 story arc from City of Heroes. So far, other players have rated it 4 stars out of five, and it's my most-played arc. And ...
  
• #32801: "Sharkhead Isle and the Circle of Banished Warriors," villain level 20-29. Sure, the villain-run government of the Rogue Isles lets people smuggle contraband in and out ... as long as they pay taxes, which an artifact-smuggling street gang from Paragon City, the Warriors, aren't. What starts out as a routine tax investigation, though, gets weird fast because you show up just as all of the mystical gangs of Paragon City are going to war for control over three in-game canonical weapons, any one of which could destroy the world. Fills in the missing Circle of Thorns and Banished Pantheon plotlines in a way I'm rather proud of, it's my one consistently-rated 5-star arc.

So, yeah, lots of fun ... until I tried playing other people's content. And found out that Ted Sturgeon's famous second law, "90% of everything is crap," was optimistic.

See, here's the problem, and it's such a crippling problem that it ruins the whole feature set for me: the only way you have to tell if you're going to enjoy somebody else's arc is an average rating, from those who bothered to vote, of 1 to 5 stars. Only about 3% to 5% of the arcs are getting 5 star ratings, call it around 1000 five-star arcs so far. (Yes, there are already many thousands of player-created story arcs up on the servers.) But of those, I'd say that maybe 1 in 20 actually deserve their 5 stars. The level of game background knowledge, the level of the writing and plotting, and even more annoyingly just the low quality of the debugging of these arcs before they were published, even at the supposedly 5-star level, is just intolerable to me. Maybe 1 in 20 of the supposedly 5-star arcs is even as good as the average canonical story arc. Half of them aren't just bad, they're really, really obnoxiously bad. And that's before you even jump into the sludge pile of stuff that's not rated, or rated 1 to 4 stars.

And I'm not the only one who's noticed this.

If you stand in any open city zone, nowadays, all you hear in broadcast chat is exploiters and farmers and power-levelers recruiting for teams. It turns out that Paragon Studios also did a pretty mediocre job of balancing risk-versus-reward in Mission Architect content, too, which leaves the game masters playing cat and mouse, all day long, with the exploiters designing custom villain groups that give maximum reward for minimum effort. For the first time since the famous "Winter Lord" debacle of 2003, we once again have players who just joined the game, have a level 50 character that has no equipment and that they have no idea how to play, who figure out within the week that there is no culture of level-50 PvP or level-50 raiding like there is in other games, so they quit, having decided that there's "nothing to do" -- since they deliberately cheated to power-level their way past all of the stuff that's vaguely interesting to do in City of Heroes.

Anybody who wanted to use Mission Architect the way it was meant to be used? The vast majority of them, like me, gave up at least a week ago. (Which is why I've had so much time to fiddle around with Free Realms.)

They're rushing out another major software release soon, they say, issue 15, that will include substantial improvements to Mission Architect. Maybe then I'll go back to it. Or I may get bored or frustrated with the pace of bug fixing in Free Realms and go back anyway, and just run new characters with new combinations of powers through the same missions I can do in my sleep in City of Heroes. But I'm just plain done, after scant weeks, with what was supposed to be the biggest, most important new feature to be added to City of Heroes in the last five years, at least until they heavily revamp it. And that's just not what I was hoping for, and I'm absolutely sure it's not what they were hoping for, either.

---

By the way, a quick poll: of the three books I read last week, one of them was disappointingly really awfully bad, way didn't live up to its hype. The other was even better than I'd been hoping, was way better than even the widespread hype has been claiming. I could make a case for reviewing them in either order: be cranky about the one that so many people liked that I truly hated, then sing you out on a happy note the next day? or show that there are some things that I really do like, before ripping a popular author a new orifice for how absolutely repugnant his best-seller really is? Which order would you rather see the book reviews in?
Poll #1395105 Good Review and Bad Review
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

Which one do you want to see first?

I've since caught up on the news since my self-imposed "newspaper fast." I didn't miss anything important, I see; on the big news story of the week, the only reliable news source has, of course, been cdc.gov/swineflu. Which, of course, should have been where anybody who wanted to know the truth went in the first place. And still should be. But taking time off from compulsively reading the news wires left me plenty of time to catch up with my reading (three books) and to play with two shiny things, the shinier of which (to my vast and pleasant surprise) has been Sony's new MMO Free Realms.

You may have heard a little bit about it, if you don't follow the MMO industry press; if you do, you may be sick of hearing about it. If all you want is the one sentence summary, I can't improve upon the punchline from Penny Arcade's moderately snide summary ("On Weak Points and Massive Damage," 4/15/09): "One creates a kart racing fairy chef who, when not playing with kittens, explores mines while building decks for a magical card game. You can also be a wizard." But that tells you almost nothing, really. Here's the interesting part:

This is, depending on how you count it, either Sony's fourth or fifth attempt to launch an entry into the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game market since Everquest II, and every one of them has flamed out. Star Wars: Galaxies, The Matrix Online, Vanguard, and Pirates of the Burning Sea were all, really, more Massively Over-Budget Unfinished Shovel-Ware Games. I mean, for crying out loud, how do you lose money on a Star Wars product? But Sony's a big company. They have a lot of profitable product lines, and they're very patient with failure -- as long as they learn something from every failure. Free Realms is a gigantic step in an entirely different direction, for them. And it is the first MMO in the last three years to show any signs of having been designed by a team that has studied failed MMOs as much as it studied the successful one(s). Instead of just buying a copy of 3D Studio Max and spending tens of millions of dollars developing art assets and then trying to bolt a generic game onto them, they spent the first quite a few years of the project building tools. If, like me, you were reading the developers' interviews with various blogs and industry reporters, this became obvious towards the end of the project when you'd see one interview that said "we just got in the concept sketches for (some region in the game)" and then scant weeks later you'd see another interview saying "we just finished (that whole region of the game) and it looks great," complete with a fly-through on YouTube. The current in-game map shows the next four areas of expansion; at the rate they were cranking them out at the end of their development calendar, this may be the first MMO since RuneScape to be able to crank out a major expansion every month.

They've avoided other classic industry pitfalls, too. In an industry that's rushing towards the M rating, Sony designed the user interface, the art, and the stories roughly the way Steven Spielberg designed the Animaniacs: safe and entirely accessible to kids, but with layers of reference and nuance that will turn your hair white if you're old enough to recognize them. This is a game that is marketed specifically as a game that parents can play with their small children ... with, among other things, a running theme of child abduction, and not always in subtle ways. It has robust built-in parental controls, with even better parental controls being added on. It's also rolling out for the PS/3 some time this year, and yes, it does look like it'll be in the same shared game world.

Another recurring industry pratfall: several companies in a row have now gambled tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars each that somewhere out there is an untapped customer base the size of World of Warcraft's that's looking for a game that's just like WoW only "more hard-core." The term "hard core" being defined by veterans of the original Ultima Online, where you could be ambushed and slaughtered by people so far above you you had no chance of escaping, roving in gangs that outnumber you 8 to 1, only to spend half an hour trying to get back to your corpse only to find that all the equipment you spent weeks accumulating is now gone. Oh, and you lost half a character level or more. If the people asking investors to pony up the cash for these vanity projects were honest, though, they'd have to admit that this has been tried, repeatedly, and no, the sum total market for games like that is a couple of thousand people. Well, plus a million or so Koreans and a million or so Chinese. But they don't play American games when that's what they're looking for. So Sony pushed this as far the other way as possible: there are almost no unpleasant surprises even possible in Free Realms. The only player versus player (PvP) in Free Realms is entirely optional dueling; the loser loses nothing but the fight. They even had the foresight to stick duel invites down into the bottom corner, so they don't interfere with whatever you were doing when someone sent you a duel invite. But they went even farther than that: even player versus environment (PvE) is 100% opt-in, player-initiated, too. You can roam the whole length and breadth of Free Realms all day long, and the wandering monsters will only threaten you. To actually fight them, you have to click on them and click through a pop-up dialog box that explicitly says what the terms of the fight will be. Then you disappear into an instanced version of the area you're in, and you (and your team, if any) fight them there. If you lose, you just get knocked out for 10 seconds. If you lose three times in the same instanced fight (five times for the ones rated medium to hard), you fail out of the instance -- and come out standing right next to the non-player character (NPC) you clicked on to start the fight.

They also listened, and listened thoroughly, to the people (like me) who said that doing nothing but fight, fight, fight all the time gets boring, people who wanted a non-combat way to play the game, too, and wow, did they deliver. This is what the Penny Arcade snark was about. There are six combat character classes. Four are hand-to-hand fighters: brawler (balanced fighter), ninja ("glass cannon"), warrior ("meat shield"), and medic (healer). Two are ranged damage, just with different special effects and different in-game story arcs: archers and wizards. But those are just six of the character classes. There are three crafting classes: chef (buffs), blacksmith (weapons), and miner (raw materials for weapons). There are two race-car driving professions, kart racer and demolition derby. There's a non-combat PvP game-within-a-game character class, card duelist. There's an almost entirely social character class, pet trainer. And there are two pure-exploration character classes, adventurer and postman. All of the non-combat classes have their own story arcs, and their own game play that combines searching the broader game world for nearby objects, or playing on-screen mini-games that look suspiciously like the ones over at PopCap. (In particular, I find the resource-gathering minigame that chefs use for harvesting fruits and vegetables, that miners use for gathering raw ore and gems, that adventurers use to sift for Precursor artifacts, and that postmen use to sort mail to be oddly soothing. All of its variations are also scored on a leaderboard, so in addition to leveling up and earning resources, you can compete with other people for video-game high scores.)

Ah, but the adventurer character class, that's the one that people keep underestimating until they've played it; it's probably one of the three coolest character classes in the history of the industry, and completely unique to Free Realms (so far). Early in development, it was called the explorer class, and that's a big slice of how the adventurer levels, by exploring. Are you the kind of person who looks at a spot halfway up a wall in a game and goes, "I wonder if I can get up there?" A surprisingly high percentage of the time, in Free Realms, you can -- and you find a hidden flag, or souvenir coin dispenser, or other surprise that gives you a big chunk of adventurer XP the first time you go there. (The unofficial Adventurer Motto, on the game forums: "If you're not getting stuck from time to time, you're not doing it right.") You get smaller chunks of adventurer XP just by exploring the main towns. And you get even more adventurer XP by keeping your eyes open, and by ignoring the "bread crumb trail" that leads you by the nose from quest to quest in order to find weirder or more interesting ways to get from point A to point B. Because scattered all over the game world are randomly-generated objects, most of them about 2' on a side and knee high, that sparkle visibly: click one, and it adds an item to the appropriate collection. Adventurers are all about souvenir/evidence/sample/artifact collection: collect 8 rare spiders from the sunken graveyard, collect 8 types of winter-blooming roses from the area around the ski resort, collect 8 different types of ordinary keys left behind by the Precursors, collect 6 unique water samples from the ocean just off shore of the beach resort: get another chunk of XP. How many collections are we talking about here? Try about 200 collections, with an average of around 6 items or places to find, each. The rarest collections grant their own unique costume items or props to show off, but really, what we have here is a massively multiplayer, online, persistent, easter egg hunt. I can't get enough of it.

They've also come up with a pretty thorough treatment (if not an all-out cure) for the disease known throughout the industry as alt-itis: the compulsion to start a new character from scratch every couple of days, to see if the grass is greener for another character class. I always say, "alt-itis is a crippling ailment, so, please, give generously to the National Alt-itis Foundation, so that some day, there may be a cure." But blast me if Sony hasn't cured mine, because you can be all fourteen or so character classes at once. Click two icons, change character class, level as that for a while. Get the urge to do something else? Click two icons. If anything, Free Realms gently but firmly disincents alt-itis, since you get rare weapons and items for all fourteen character classes, and have no built-in way to transfer them to your other characters. Many of the best ones are bind-on-pickup; you can't even transfer them with help. But whatever they are, you can use them. For example, here I am (as "Brad Bearheart") in my uniforms as a (currently) level 10 adventurer, level 11 brawler, level 18 chef, and level 20 postman:




I was also really pleasantly surprised by how much more interesting the in-game storyline is than a "kid-friendly" game has any right to be. (With one exception, so far: the ending of the Postman training story arc, at level 20, is pathologically lame.) Of course, so far, I only know the back-story from the pixie perspective, because nobody from any of the other sentient races has been willing to tell me their version of history, but under the Heart Tree Palace the pixies have a Hall of Remembrance with a set of giant stained-glass windows that explain their version of the backstory. As they tell it, some time in our very near future Faerie resumes contact with the Mortal Realm, it returns to Earth, it comes back into phase with reality; the mechanics are unclear, but magic becomes possible and all the classic faerie tale races and one or two others show up on Earth at once: elves, dwarves, pixies, goblins, trolls, yeti, and a race I've never heard of before (that seem to have been a servitor race to the pixies?) called the chugawug. After using magic to solve all of mankind's most persistent problems, all of Earth's intelligent races agreed to be ruled by something called the Gleam Council. But a conspiracy within the Gleam Council, calling themselves the Gloam Council, built a magical artifact that would give them mind-control powers over any being that had ever used magic; by that point, this let them turn every person of every race on Earth into mindless slaves. Fewer than six escaped control, but that's more than the Gloam Council expected, so they didn't do a very good job of guarding their mind control crystal. Besides, they knew it had one really good defense: any attempt to tamper with it would cause it to explode, destroying all life on Earth.

So our nameless heroes did just that, warning everybody they ran past on their way in to run for cover as soon as they got their free will back. The elves threw up a magical barrier that somehow held, and haven't come out yet. A few of the dwarves and the goblins and the trolls retreated into caves, a few of the pixies and the chugawugs managed to burrow underground fast enough to escape the blast wave that rendered Earth's surface uninhabitable. Generations later, pixies stumbled across changeling half-human survivors, went up above ground, started magically rehabbing the surface outward from their home under the long-erased ruins of San Diego, and as the other races showed up, so did the humans. Very peculiar.

But within the area "watered by Queen Ayani's tears" life is more or less wonderful. Magical agriculture and building techniques mean that nobody starves or freezes; the robgoblins and the chugawugs dig up Precursor artifacts for the dwarves and humans to magically power-up. The few races that don't want to get along with others, mostly the trolls and the yeti, have places they retreat to on the outskirts of civilization and mostly they and we leave each other alone (but only mostly). Much of what economy there is is in entertainment and leisure activities, the most famous of which is the happiest place on the reborn Earth, Merry Vale, a pixie theme park where everybody is happy. Ominously happy. Creepily happy. Even the parents who could remember, right up until they ate the cotton candy, that their kids have gone missing. Oh, and speaking of kids, you do get to meet some of the changelings. Wednesday Addams would be creeped out by these kids. *brrr*

And the best part of the game is that you honestly cannot beat the price. No, really, this time. It is genuinely free to play. And I don't mean that the way other "F2P" games mean it. When they say "free to play," what they mean is usually "Free to play the first 1/4 of the game; after that the price goes way up. And even for the parts you can play, you'll suck at the game unless you invest a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand dollars in the item store." Not Free Realms. So how do they do it? Well, for one thing, it was cheaper to develop than you might think; much of the tools budget is being spread across this and at least one other game, their upcoming spy/mercenary shooter The Agency. They do put some of the game behind a pay-wall: four of the six combat character classes (both support classes, both ranged classes) and one of the crafting classes (blacksmith) are only available to people who pay $4.99 per month. I don't miss them. They do have an item store, but first of all, you really don't need it: I've gotten items as rare loot that were just as good as the items sold in the store, just from rolling randomly at the Royal Vault with tickets I earned for running generic missions. And secondly, the prices extremely reasonable: $2.50 to $4.00 (one time fee) to adopt a puppy or a kitten, and maybe a grand total of $15 if you want the maximum load of XP-rate boosters and super-cool-looking (but no better) weapons. There are also some clothing items for adventurers/card duelists, but most are priced at 50¢ to a dollar; for example, I paid 50¢ (on a whim) for that Hawaiian shirt. They also have about 40% of the quests "behind the pay wall," only available to the $4.99 subscribers, but I like how they're doing that, too. They've announced that as they add new quests, those quests will go behind the pay wall and the existing pay-wall ones will go free to play. So I've played this game for a week now, and I can easily imagine it taking me several months just to exhaust the existing free to play content; why pay a monthly fee until I run out of the free stuff? And if they add stuff as fast as I think they're going to, who's to say I'll ever run out?

Oh, and they do plan to make money, ideally hand-over-fist, off of an associated collectible card game that's hitting the game stores any day now, if it hasn't already. You can play it entirely free, including a good starter deck, and additional cards earned by dueling NPCs during your training. But if you want to play it out of game, you buy decks and booster packs, and those out-of-game booster packs or decks come with codes you add to your account to add booster packs or decks to your in-game character, too. That's a trap I'll never fall for, frankly.

I swear: I have watched friends give up smoking more easily and thoroughly than I give up the news. So let me talk about the news for a second. Since I'm as cranky from fighting myself over wanting to read the New York Times and Yahoo! Most Read News (and watch Rachel Maddow) as your average nicotine addict is on day two of their latest attempt to quit, let me channel some of this crankiness into saying something impolite that I haven't had the guts to say lately:

Screw the newspapers.

No, really. Every single one of you except the New York Times, the UK Guardian, and maybe one or two other "newspapers of record." What are you good for?

I'm as serious as the grave here.

First, let me get out of the way the stuff that people other than me have normally read the newspaper for. Almost none of it is of any use to me, but this is the bulk of your traditional subscriber base. For as long as I've been alive, the vast majority of the working class, middle class, and professional class people I've known who took a daily paper only looked at the following: the TV listings, the movie listings, the funnies, the sports scores, and maybe their horoscope. A few who were bored enough also looked at Dear Abby Landers, whichever. All of those things are online now, and they are online in easier formats. Cartoonists are moving to the web, where they get to keep a higher percentage of their royalties than the newspaper cartoon syndicates ever paid them, and where they can put a link to the collected edition books and souvenir t-shirts next to every cartoon, and where -- to the readers' famous delight -- the cartoon appears big enough that the readers can actually read it. Oh, and with an archive that goes back as far as the reader wants. You're not going to out-compete the web on cartoons. Nor are you going to out-compete the web on TV listings, since websites customize them for the user's channel layout and offer nearly instant searches for programs they're looking for. Nor are you going to out-compete websites on movie listings, which people bring up on their phones when they want them. Nor are you going to out-compete MLB.com and the rest of the league sports sites, plus Sports Illustrated. I don't care what you do to the paper itself, I don't care what civic appeals you make, I don't care what ads you run: you contribute no value to that information stream, you actually subtract value from information streams that are more complete and useful without you in the middle; you are never getting those customers back. Period.

Now let me talk about what I use newspapers for, namely, the actual news. When was the last time you came up with any?

Because if all you're going to do is collect both sides' quotes and put them into standard newspaper article "reverse pyramid" style, I don't need you, either. If all I want to know about a national news story is what the White House says and what the Republicans are saying, I can get it in more complete form than you're running it and, on average, an hour or more faster than I can get it from you, just by looking at the White House blog and one or more Republican blogs. If all I want is what the police said about an arrest and what the accused and their family said, I can look at the police department's website myself. (Odds on I already know what the accused says. If not, some blog will show me. Everybody's got a blog or a Twitter feed or something these days.) Nor is collating these into stories and deciding what stories are hot adding any value to those collections of quotes: Google and Yahoo both do a better job than you do, and in real time, just by throwing new stories in at random seeded by semantic search terms and then tracking the click-through rates.

There is only one thing that you could do that would be worth my paying you, and that's if you find the facts that other people aren't trying to beat down my door to tell me. And the New York Times knows this, which is why I pay them, not my hometown newspaper. And even then, I don't pay much; I subscribe to the Latest Stories blog via my Kindle 2 for $1.99 a month. Apparently so do a lot of people; it's the single best-selling blog in the Kindle store, not counting Amazon's own free ad-ware blog. Because the NYT doesn't just wait for sources to come to them and tell them stories and then pass them along; they actually pay people to go out and find stories. How good are they? A while back, a Congressional staffer on one of the intelligence committees ran a cross-check, counting the times when the NYT said one thing and the CIA said another: every single time, the NYT was right. They don't do this by collating press releases; they pay reporters to travel around the country and the world and ask questions, they pay reporters to dig through piles of records. It's called investigative journalism. You know: that stuff you used to do -- because virtually every newspaper in the world cut their investigative journalists and their foreign bureaus and all the rest of their actual news gathering people first, the second they were acquired by cost-cutting conglomerates.

You want an example? Fine. I find it flat-out inconceivable that my hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the terrorist attack on Kirkwood City Hall last year. I read the Post's coverage. There wasn't any news in it. They had official statements from the usual people, and they had lots of weepy stories about how people felt about it. But it was the St. Louis Riverfront Times that actually dug up what little news was actually found about Cookie Thornton's motive. An ad-supported "free" newspaper. In their blog. I had to do most of the rest of the research myself. You know, if I had thought the Post-Dispatch actually had people digging up the dirt in Kirkwood, if it was going to be the Post-Dispatch that found out about the dirty deal between Thornton and certain white developers and their white political allies, the deal that Thornton felt they renegged on that drove him to homicide? I'd have paid for that. Entirely predictable "oh it was awful you can't imagine" weepers that all ended in "he was a crazy person, we'll never know why he did it"? What was I going to pay for that, for? I could have written that stuff myself and nobody could have told the difference.

I don't know how any local newspaper is supposed to get the funding for investigative reporting, or what those people are supposed to work on when they don't have any warm leads to chase, or how many people you could sell it to. You sure as heck aren't going to do it by selling advertisements; direct mail and Craigslist have eaten that revenue right out from under you, and it's not coming back, either. So if it can be done at all, it's going to have to be done by do something so radical it's never really been done before: selling actual newspapers for the cost to research them. All the way back to the dawn of the industry, ad revenue has matched or-outpaced subscription revenue, unless the newspaper was in some way externally subsidized. Maybe Fox News really is showing you the way, or more specifically, the way back: maybe every town is going to have to go back to being a two-newspaper town, where the local Democrats and the local Republicans each fund a newspaper out of their party funds, to investigate each other.

All I know for sure is this: unless you're finding news that somebody isn't beating down my spam filter to tell me themselves, I surely won't miss you when you're gone.

The funny thing is, I watch the news as if it were my job. I'm a news junkie. But I've been stewing in murderous rage most of this week, and I know why, and I know what I have to do about it. What I have to do about it is, stop reading and watching the news altogether for a week. OK, I may log into the Sunday NYT and read the features section. Or, if it's on the same subject, I may not. See, here's another funny thing: I'm becoming the guy everybody always thought I was. My facial expressions look angry even when I'm not; I'm prone to talking in an emotionally-drained sounding monotone even when I'm not, so all my life I've been confronted, over and over again, by people who tell me that I'm a very angry person, and I need to do something about that. Well, I wasn't, before, not really. Anger's hard to sustain, for me; it just bleeds away into no-longer-giving-a-crap within days or weeks if I don't keep getting prodded at. Well, guess what? I keep getting prodded at.

Here's the reason why I have to take a week off from watching the news. What we have seen, since Tuesday, has been the exact thing I've been bitching about for years about the Columbia Journalism School model of "professional" journalism: the belief that every news story has two sides, that the two sides are of equal value, that representatives of both sides should be quoted equally respectfully, that it is the job of sources and not journalists to determine if either or both sides are lying, and that it should always be left up to the reader to decide which side they want to believe. So ever since the Obama administration grudgingly gave in to the Freedom of Information Act request for "the torture memos," every journalistic outlet, but especially the newspapers and the network news, have been full of the same narrative: Side 1 says that these are evidence of intent to commit torture, so we should resolve to never do that again, but we certainly shouldn't "criminalize policy differences." Side 2 says that there was no torture, and it wouldn't matter if it was, because a "necessity defense" applies. And in all the mainstream news outlets, the stories mostly end there. Although there may be an article, way back in the paper (but absolutely not on the network news except during the opinion shows) that says that there are a tiny few people in side 3 who say that these memos are prima facie evidence of torture and that everybody who could have stopped this but didn't should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but the article then goes on to quote sources from side 1 and side 2 who say that these few people are "radical leftists" and shouldn't be listened to.

And if I keep hearing that, the very least that will happen is that I will go stark raving mad, screaming through the streets. If I keep hearing it even longer, without a vacation from it, I may even go on a killing spree. Because that narrative has me angrier than I have ever been in my entire life. What an honest god damned journalist would admit, if one could be found willing to research the facts and then report the facts in public, is that there is no god-damned controversy about any of the fucking facts at all, and only the criminals who were caught in the act, some literally red-handed, say otherwise.

FACT: As a matter of ample court precedent, every single form of "enhanced interrogation technique" they described in those memos, that they confessed to in writing, is something that past criminals have been convicted of in court as torture. It's not a matter of opinion whether or not locking someone in a stress position until their muscles ache is torture. It's not a matter of opinion whether or not slamming people into the wall over and over again is torture, no matter how careful you are not to hurt them. It's not a matter of opinion whether or not punching them in the stomach is torture. It is not a matter of opinion whether or not repeatedly dousing them in near-freezing water is torture. And it is, for gods' sake, absolutely and in no way a matter of opinion whether or not water-boarding is torture. All of these issues have been settled in courts of law, both here in the US and in US-run trials of other countries' war criminals, over and over again. An honest god-damned journalist, if one could be found, would privilege the facts over the opinion; if they did feel any "professional" need to let the criminals who did this make their defense, they would also show not somebody else's contradictory opinion but the actual proven facts to the contrary, and label them as facts.

FACT: As a matter of unambiguously settled US law, it is not up to Barack Obama or anybody else whether or not the people who are accused of doing this should face trial. No honest journalist would ask Obama, or Cheney, or Rush Limbaugh, or anybody for their opinion on whether or not accused torturers, or whether or not people accused of ordering torture, or whether or not people who are accused of facilitating torture, or whether or not people who attempted to cover up torture, should be charged, nor whether or not people who attempted to obstruct the prosecution of those people should also be charged. It's settled law: they must all be charged. The United States ratified the UN Convention on Torture, and that treaty does not allow any excuse whatsoever to not charge people accused of these crimes. There are only two questions about whether or not criminal investigations, leading to criminal trials for the indicted, will occur that an honest journalist would ask. An honest journalist would ask Eric Holder whether or not he intends to obey the law, as required by the UN Convention on Torture. And they would ask Barack Obama what he intends to do if Eric Holder does not. Nothing else about "should there or shouldn't there be prosecutions?" is an open question.

FACT: The people who are accused should not be making their defense in the media, or among the punditocracy, or from the podiums of civic forums, or on their blogs. Nor should they be making their defense in front of some flatly-illegal "truth and reconciliation" committee. The UN Convention on Torture was written, signed, and ratified specifically to take those options off of the table, lest our government or any other succumb to that temptation. There is a forum for the accused to make their defense. If they want to deny that they did what they're accused of doing, they may do so; if they want to deny that what they did meets the elements of the crime charged, they may do so; if they want to argue a "necessity defense" (even though the laws in question admit no "necessity defense" and no court has ever so ruled), they may do so: in court. There is nothing whatsoever political about it when the Attorney General presents evidence of a serious crime to a grand jury; there is nothing political about it if or when the grand jury indicts. Once the grand jury indicts, all the accused are promised their day in court. They may bring as much legal or expert assistance as they like. They are entitled to full procedural protection. They are entitled to voir dire and all other protections against biased juries; they are entitled to all protection against conflict of interest in the judiciary; they are entitled to appeal. But under the terms of the UN Convention on Torture it is just plain simply and factually and unambiguously not legal to settle the matter in any other way; asking people for their "opinion" on how this matter should be settled is dishonest and shoddy journalism.

I personally think, based on the evidence we have seen so far, that there is no question whatsoever that at least half a dozen top Bush White House officials are guilty of ordering torture; that no fewer than several dozen CIA and military personnel (but, praise the gods, no FBI personnel; thank all holy gods that Robert Mueller had at least that much integrity, or at least self preservation) are guilty of committing torture; I think that the four top ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are very probably guilty of covering up torture; I think that President Barack Obama would most likely be convicted by an honest impeachment trial of attempted obstruction of the investigation of torture and that he should therefore be impeached. I could also very possibly be wrong about all of these opinions. I'm also aware of the fact that according to today's Pew Research poll, 75% of all Americans think that we should disobey the UN Convention on Torture and at least occasionally torture prisoners, and don't think that that opinion isn't angering me almost as much as the journalistic coverage of this issue. These are all matters of opinion, and I do not object to them being reported as such.

But I need at least the better part of a week to calm down, and I cannot do that if journalists and members of the commentariat keep treating matters of settled fact and settled law as mere "policy differences." If I try, my rage absolutely will consume me even further than it already has.

---

Addendum: Why are we doing this? All I can say about that is that Sara Robinson is a lot more generous about this than I am. But you absolutely should read her thought-provoking article "The Truth about Consequences: Conservatives, Progressives, and Accountability Moments," Campaign for America's Future (ourfuture.org), 4/21/09.

I spent part of this afternoon trying to find the source of this statistic. All I remember about it is that it's something I saw during the early arguments about whether or not we should bail out the major automakers. The number stuck in my mind for more reasons than that, though, and it's this: If we continue buying new cars at the same rate that they are selling now, the average new car will have to last 28 years before it gets replaced. In other words, while the number of total automobiles on the road is remaining constant, we're buying 1/28th of that number in new cars per year. And, as was also pointed out in the same article, that number is just flat nuts, because that's not how long the oldest car on the road has to be before it gets scrapped, that's how old the average car has to make it to before it's scrapped.

And there just aren't that many cars that last an average of 28 years, American-made or otherwise. Over the course of my lifetime, the numbers have shifted, as the American people grew to lose patience with General Motors style planned obsolescence. When I was a kid, the average new car buyer traded the car in after 3 years; the car might rattle around the used market for another 10. But even now, a 13 year old car is usually on its last legs, even though the numbers are now reversed: the average new-car buyer drives it for a smidgen under 10 years, and they last 3 to 5 years on the used-car market. So the author of that article was arguing that we shouldn't be doing our calculations of which automakers can and can't be profitable based on current sales numbers, because in the long run, these sales numbers are unsustainable; sooner or later, the American people will have no choice but to double the number of new cars they're buying per year. But if unemployment keeps going up (and, I remind you, layoffs are still accelerating, not decelerating, and sales are still declining at almost every company), even if he's right, he's not right soon enough to help you. Your car may have to last twice as long as it was designed to last.

Nor, if I'm right that the trillions of dollars in excess of GDP that the Federal Reserve is dumping into the economy means 30% or more inflation in the very short term, is your car the only thing that's going to have to last a lot longer. Take a good long look at everything you own. If you rent, take a good long look at the fixtures in your apartment, too. Any of that that was imported? When it breaks down, there will be only three choices: (1) pay some American to build another one, at double the cost, (2) import a replacement from overseas, paying twice as much as we have because the dollar has sunk, or, and here's the one I want to talk about first, fix it instead of replacing it. Here's the single most important thing you should be buying right now: tools.

Is there anything that you know how to make with your own hands, and with tools that you can afford and that would fit in your home? Is there anything that you know how to repair with your own hands, and with tools that you can afford that would fit in your home? Is making that thing or repairing that thing something that you already like to do, because you're good at it, or something you're already doing now for some employer that may or may not last? If so, is there some professional-grade tool that you've been lusting after, something you were already thinking about buying some time in the next five to ten years? If so, buy it now.

Don't impoverish yourself to do it, but my gut instinct is that half or more of you wouldn't have to, because statistics also show that at the moment, US households are hoarding cash, holding off on major purchases until they know what the economy is going to do. And I don't blame them; heck, I'm doing the same thing myself. But frankly, if there's even the faintest prospect of high short-term inflation, hoarding cash is stupid of us. We're saving up $1000 in case we need $1000 next year, when in fact what we're saving up for will cost $2000 if we wait to buy it next year; smarter to buy it now, if it's something that will last. And even if I'm wrong and we're not facing severe stagflation, even if we're not facing high unemployment plus high inflation, you're not out much of anything, if it's something you were going to buy anyway. And if I'm right, remember this. In a country where people are having to keep their cars alive long after the car factories and the parts factories have shut down, no shade-tree mechanic will ever starve.

But autos aren't the only thing that will wear out and have to be repaired rather than replaced. For example, shoe repair tools are cheap, and in a country where we can't import another pair of cheap disposable sneakers from China every year when the previous pair wears out, anybody who knows how to hand-make and/or hand-repair shoes will ever miss a meal; if anything, they'll live like kings. True tale: all of the Faerie Folk are famous for fairy gold, fake gold, except for one. Who's the only member of the Folk that's famous for having a huge cache of real gold but, of course, the leprechaun. Do you know what leprechaun means? "Single-shoe maker." In the original folklore, the leprechaun was always sighted sitting under a shady bush with shoe-maker's tools, repairing some Faerie Folk lord or lady's shoe. And it makes sense, if as we're told that the Folk live primarily on glamour. They may be able to make their ragged clothes pass for royal finery by glamour, and they may be able to make mushrooms and leaves and rotted bark taste like gourmet cuisine by glamour, but no people who love dancing as much as the Folk are said to can survive on fake shoes. Nor are they the only ones who'll be desperate for repaired shoes; as someone here reminded me long ago, in any disaster, you cannot last any longer than your feet do.

Clothing, too. I'm blessed to have always been attracted to people who know how to sew, people expert at both machine and hand sewing and who've stuffed their basements, attics, garages, and rented storage sheds with specialty fabrics and who've crammed every drawer, cabinet, and closet in the house with hooks, buttons, snaps, zippers, ribbons, and trim. When we can't import clothes from Indonesian sweat shops and Chinese prison slaves any more, you'll cheerfully share whatever food you can get your hands on, either from relatives who grow their own or from the black market, with the person who knows how to make or even patch a winter coat, with the person who has the yarn and knows the skill to make your kids a winter hat. And if you already love to sew, or you already love to knit, and there's a sewing machine or a hand-loom or a type of practical, heavy fabric or yarn that you've been tempted to buy? There has never been a time like the present.

Speaking of food, I know some of you love to garden, but I know that I've listened to probably close to 1 in 3 of you talk about how some day you'd love to have a garden. Some of you have spent months or even years adding up what it would cost you to buy the lumber and the tools and the seeds and the starter soil and the fertilizer and the watering equipment to start in on raised-bed vegetable gardening, and thinking that there was always something better to do with the money. Well, maybe this year there isn't. Go ahead. Buy the tools. Buy the lumber and the seeds and the what-not. Try your hand at gardening instead of socking cash into the bank where inflation can eat it away or into yet another upgrade to your gaming computer that you'll just sit in front of and get fat or instead of another 50 or so DVDs you may never get around to watching. If things go completely pear-shaped, that could end up being how you pay for your next car repair, your winter coat repair, your shoe repair, your kids' new winter hats.

Nor am I limiting it to the crafts I've listed above. Just to rattle off a few more obvious examples of people who'll never starve: anybody who knows how to weld and owns their own welding rig. Anybody who knows how to repair furnaces and water heaters and refrigerators who owns their own HVAC tools. Anybody who knows how to repair cabinets and beds and cribs and sheds and storage shelves who owns their own wood-working tools. Anybody who knows how to do roof repair or other major carpentry who owns their own carpenters' tools. Anybody who knows how to pick, shimmy, or bypass locks and who knows how to repair, re-key, and reinstall them and who owns their own locksmithing tools. Anybody comfortable climbing up a tree to cut down limbs that are in danger of falling on the house, who knows how to do so, and owns their own chainsaw and their own tree surgery tools. The person who loves to cook for swarms of people at once who owns durable, heavy-duty high capacity cooking gear will be the one everybody who's smart brings their food to. And for crying out loud, whether good times or bad, no skilled plumber with his own tools ever, ever lacks for anything.

With businesses going into bankruptcy, inventory has to be piling up at the industrial auction houses, so prices on top-quality professional tools have probably never been lower. And that's what you absolutely should be buying, because if it can't be made to last five to ten years, it's no good to you. Treat anything even vaguely flimsy or sloppily assembled as if it were toxic, and treat the words "no user serviceable parts inside" as if they meant "causes cancer." This is the year, if you ask me, when you buy the good stuff: especially if this is something that you enjoy so much that even if I'm wrong, you're not wasting money, you're investing in a fun hobby. Don't go stupid, putting yourself into bankruptcy in order to try to buy all of these things. Pick one, one that you're good at and enjoy, or at least one you know you can quickly learn to do well and that you're pretty sure you'd enjoy. But for sure, if there are any that you're coveting, this is the time to buy tools.

I was, by request and by personal inclination, going to jump into the (by comparison) sunny news of my list of things that I think you should be doing now to prepare, now that we can be pretty nearly 100% certain that prices are going to go up much faster than wages for the next 5 years or more and now that we know that unemployment will hit at least 25% before leveling of, and may well get worse than that. I don't think America will tear itself apart the way Wiemar Germany did during their Great Inflation, but I do see enough parallels with history that (to my deep and unsettling rage, the pent-up anger that people have been falsely accusing me of carrying my whole life that I only now feel) we can no longer rule out the possibility.

But ... I knew that if I went into that list, people will fill up the comments with questions about, and arguments for, the things that I do not think you're being smart if you stock up on while goods can still be had with American money. I do not think that you should be stockpiling food. And I do not think that you should be stockpiling guns and ammunition. I may be wrong about both of these things. In fact, for both of those things, I can think of limited exceptions, and I'll include them. But I do not think that they apply to the vast majority of you. (I should also say: I am far more familiar with how Americans react to crisis and what resources America has for surviving the economic collapse that has now begun. I do not have any reason to think that my advice, in this journal entry or in the next, is of any use to the rest of you except as brief entertainment.)

Why Not Stockpile Food? First of all, it's not a given that a collapse of money means a collapse of agriculture in America. It may well not be food that we run out of. Remember that the source of America's greatest strength has not been in our Puritan culture, or our educational system, let alone an economic system that has changed every generation or two since the first white people came in here to stay in the late 1500s, nor even the insane good luck we got in our choice of revolutionary and post-revolutionary leaders. As good as some of those things have been, our single greatest source of strength has been our geography. No other nation on Earth has so many acres of arable land per capita. Now, some back and forth on that, because I'm really not sure how this will shake out, but: America is still only just barely a net importer on food. (Although how we screwed up this country so bad that we became a net importer at all, it still pains me to think about.) But American agriculture is heavily oil dependent. On the other hand, we still have the knowledge, and the vast numbers of unemployed former farmers, to go back to less oil dependent farming, and we didn't turn all or even most of our best farmland into suburbs, and it's not as if we don't have any oil of our own, nor is it 100% certain that oil will be what we run out of ability to import. (Likely, but not certain.) It is bad news that massively chemical-driven agriculture has stripped all of our existing farmland of any vestige of native soil fertility, but there may be good news. Climate change may move the longer growing seasons and/or nourishing rains to places with plenty of fertile soil that we could never farm before, and even if not, buried in our agricultural college system are the textbooks on how to take Dust-Bowl land and turn it back into farmland. We do still have the know-how. So while I'm absolutely certain that the percentage of your budget that goes to food will continue to go up and up, I think it at least somewhat unlikely that you will miss very many meals.

Besides, if you think you can stockpile enough food to last your way through another Great Depression, let alone a Great Inflation, you are either way, way too unreasonably optimistic about when this thing will end or you cannot do simple math. This is going to go on for at least another four or five years, well into the next administration. Who knows, maybe President Whitman will get as scared as her ideological predecessor, FDR, was and will actually break up the mega banks, restore the American financial system to sanity, and put the tens of millions of us that would rather burn this country down than be starved to death back to work. But even that may be optimistic; remember that recovering from their real estate bubble and resulting bank collapse and runaway unemployment has already taken the Japanese over a decade, and they had a thriving global economy elsewhere to work with. You just plain flatly can not, can not, stockpile enough food to get through this without help from others.

And remember what I told you before. If nearly everybody is going to have a problem, it is very much to your disadvantage to be either the first with the problem, or the last. The first people to have a problem don't get any help, because society either doesn't care, or hasn't figured out yet how it wants to help them. The last people to have a problem don't get any help, because everybody else has used it all up before they themselves got into trouble. If a problem is going to be society-wide, generally the safest place to be is with the rest of the herd. And nowhere is that more true than when we're talking about food. You do not want to be one of the first families to go hungry; ask them how bad that is. Nor do you want to run out of food and go hungry after acquiring a reputation for being a food hoarder, and even more so if you last so long that aid has run out and there won't be any more until the economy recovers.

But that brings up the one caveat, the one circumstance under which you might want to stockpile unusual amounts of food, but only if you're the right kind of person to benefit from it. One absolute inescapable rule of economic and/or social collapse is that solitary individuals don't make it. Period. Your odds of surviving and maybe even thriving through this are almost entirely correlated with how many people care if you live or die. If (and only if!) you are short of such people now, and if you can learn to like cooking for and feeding not just your family but your friends, and not just your friends but your neighbors? And if it turns out that I'm wrong and we do all start having to miss meals? If you burn through that food serving your friends and neighbors who are starving the same meals that you serve yourself and your family, if you use that stockpile of food to establish a reputation for hospitality (at the last possible second for doing so, frankly, if it isn't already too late), then it might make sense to stockpile large quantities of food. Otherwise? Maybe shop smarter than you do, but there's no point in buying any more than you already do.

Why Not Stockpile Weapons and Ammo? The first and single biggest reason: basic laws of physics. People who think that they are likely to have to shoot it out with hostile strangers for the stuff they need to feed their families have many problems, but the most important problem they have is that they don't know anything about real gun fights. When a real gun fight starts, there are two things you can be. You can be the person who knows that there will be a gun fight right now, this time, between you and the other person. Or you can be the person who doesn't know that. If the other person is inclined to shoot you to get what you have, not only will they have their gun in an easier place to get to than you probably will, not only will they be able to draw their gun more quickly than you? They will, even more importantly, be able to do so before you even know that this is a gunfight. You can not possibly spot a gunfight coming in less than about a third of a second, the human optical cortex just cannot process information any faster than that. And if you so much as twitch towards a gun at the end of that 300 or so milliseconds, there will already be a gun pointed at your center mass, and it will go off before you clear yours from wherever it is. Your gun can not possibly save your life. Unless ...

Your gun can not save your life from another person who is bringing a gunfight to you unless you greet every person with a drawn gun. You cannot save your life from a gun-slinging robber unless you always answer your door with a gun leveled. You could, of course, do that. What history shows, though, is that during really hard times, that kills you just as dead as the first choice would have, the choice to have a gun but not draw it until you know you need it. And just as with that mistake, this one will probably also kill you without the gun going off, and if you do use that gun, it will probably be to end your own life. Why? Because nobody wants to help that person who always answers the door with a gun. They're scared of them. How many of your harmless, innocent friends, neighbors, and even family members will you have pointed a gun at for certain before the first hypothetical armed robber shows up? So when the food runs out, or the fuel runs out, or whatever else runs out, and you're "safe" from enemies and alone in your house ... you will die alone, whether of deprivation or of self-inflicted gunshot. Now, maybe you are so mis-wired in the head that you would rather quintuple your odds of not making it through the Great Depression by waving around a gun than risk being helpless in the far less likely chance that somebody robs you. Maybe not having to chance feeling helpless or foolish is worth dying for, to you. If so? I think you're a fool, and I'm sure you think the same about me, and I'm sure my advice is useless to you. I'm talking to everybody else.

What's the one caveat this time? How do you feel about "roof rabbit?" More importantly, no matter how you feel about it now, how will you feel about it if your kids are starving? My own father told me he's pretty sure he only survived the earliest part of the Great Depression, before he started doing favors for whatever criminal gang it was that was paying him, because of his father's willingness to take a .22 caliber rifle out and hunt feral cats, feral dogs, pigeons, and squirrels. If you have no squeamishness about that, or if you think that if you (and your family) get hungry enough you can conquer that squeamishness while you're still fit enough to shoot straight? And you can learn to shoot a fast-moving small target in the dark while maintaining good weapon discipline, so that you never lose sight of who or what else is down-range while you're hunting, so you don't kill or even scare your neighbors with the rounds that miss? And if you think that you're more likely to use your weapons for that than you are to lose them to someone hostile, or to have you or one of your family members use them on each other out of despair? Then maybe. I wouldn't, but maybe you should have a small caliber firearm and some ammunition for it. Maybe. Otherwise? Don't stockpile weapons and ammunition.

So much for the don'ts. Next up: There are things that you ought be spending your money on while your money is still worth something. I have several suggestions. But this has been enough to talk about for one journal entry. Save your thoughts about the should-buys for tomorrow, please; in the comments on this entry, stick to either arguing with me about how useful stockpiled food and guns would be during a Great Depression or a Great Inflation, or talk about other widespread bad ideas.

Okay, I'm serious: you need to stop letting people with a vested interest in the stock market, including the President and his economic team, blow rainbows up your ass. This is not the bottom. We are not anywhere near the bottom. If you followed my advice and you've been reading solarbird's journal, and looking up the parts that you don't understand, you know this already. But let me lay out for you the important economic indicators that the news media here in America have completely and utterly glossed over:

The Dollar is doomed. The news media have been full of reports that "the dollar is up" against foreign currencies, as if you're supposed to be reassured by this. If you are feeling reassured by this, let me clarify something for you. Know anything about how the national debt works? The federal government buys money by issuing fixed-length bonds called T-bills, which they auction off. They offer to sell anybody who wants to bid, oh, let's say $100,000 in 10 years: how much will you pay them for it now? Annualize the interest rate on that, and that's the interest rate on the national debt. Still with me? Because they're fixed-term bonds, some of them come due every couple of weeks. And we're obviously not paying off those bonds; the US government hasn't paid a principal payment since the dot-com bubble, when Clinton (wisely) chose to use the capital gains taxes on the churn in inflated dot-com stocks to make payments rather than give Newt Gingrich the tax cuts he demanded. So what they do instead is they sell another bond, and use it to pay off the one that just expired. Now, the news part: about a month ago, so few people showed up to bid that the auctioneer wasn't getting what the government considered an acceptable interest rate. If we kept paying that rate at every auction from now on, our interest rate would have at least doubled, and interest on the national debt is the 3rd largest line item in the federal budget, just barely behind military spending and Social Security. No way we could pay that. So Federal Reserve chairman Bernanke announced that if not enough people were showing up to bid, the Federal Reserve Bank would buy up to $3 trillion (three million million) in T-bills itself. Where does the Federal Reserve get that money? They invent it. This is the reality behind the symbol "running the printing presses." How much is $3 trillion? Well, US GDP is about $10 trillion, so it's about 30% of this year's GDP. Since the GDP is going down, not up by 30%, this means that relative to any actual goods, the value of the money in your pocket just dropped 30% ... if Bernanke has to go through with it. So far he hasn't had to spend the whole $3 trillion to keep our interest rate pushed down, so far he hasn't inflated his way out of our national debt. But he means to, and that is what's behind China's panicky calls for an alternate global reserve currency. What this means for you: 30% inflation, across the board.

Corollary: Too bad we wasted all of that money, we could really use it now. We've spent about $2.75 trillion (counting, but not limited to, TARP) in direct capital assistance to the major money center banks. It's not enough. How much will be enough? I'm reading estimates of $6 to $8 trillion. If the banks are telling the truth, then that $2.75 trillion was good money thrown after bad, because there isn't going to be another $6 to $8 trillion to give them. Which means, among other things, that we're not getting that $2.75 trillion back, but that's not the horror of the situation. The horror of the situation is that when Barack Hoover Obama finally figures out what he should be doing, that $2.75 trillion, plus the roughly half a trillion we've spent in Iraq under the previous administration that was also for nothing, won't be there for him. He'll either have to further deflate the currency, or go without. Either way, we're screwed. How screwed?

Nothing has stemmed the acceleration in foreclosures. I spent much of last month on the edge of my seat, waiting for good news I could share with you. I was pretty sure it would be coming some time last month, because at the end of January, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo all announced 60 to 90 day moratoriums on foreclosures to wait and see what the new administration's plan for cleaning up the mortgage mess would be. So by definition, it seemed to me, January would turn out to have been the peak for foreclosures ... but it wasn't. Foreclosures went up, not down, in February. I have no idea how, but they did. Then in February the President announced his mortgage rescue plan. Effective March 4th, people who were in danger of foreclosure would be able to get help from the government to save their homes, so we had reason to hope that finally, at least, the March numbers would be better than February's. Well, we won't know the March foreclosure numbers for another couple of weeks, but we already know enough to know that it won't be good news. In the last couple of days, two reports on housing sales came out that usually track within a few percent of each other; this time, there was a huge disparity. One report said that sales of existing houses were way up. The other said they were even or maybe slightly down. What's the difference? The second one doesn't count foreclosures. That the gap between the two reports increased tells us that yet again, despite the President's housing plan, foreclosures went up again in March, not down. Nor is it going to decelerate in April, either. There's a reason for that, too.

The President has declared the big banks to be above the law. On at least two occasions in the last month, President Obama has announced that his commitment to saving Citibank and Bank of America is "absolute." The stock market is thrilled. You shouldn't be: that's the last nail in the coffin of the President's anti-foreclosure plan. Remember my pointing out that without further bail-out money, they were all insolvent, and under US law, they'd have to be closed? Remember the President saying that he was conditioning any further help for the banks on their participation in his housing plan? Guess what happened in the last week? A report came out explaining that the reason that foreclosures are still rising is that none of the big banks has agreed to accept the "voluntary" interest rate cuts. So, no more bailouts? You wish; where do you think all the AIG money has been going? You were told that, too, remember? So, the President lied. He was bluffing. But remember, there just plain isn't enough money, even the Federal Reserve can't print enough money, to actually render these banks legally solvent under US law. Which means that the President also lied when he promised to faithfully perform the duties of the President of the United States: he is not going to let the FDIC do what the law requires them to do, namely close insolvent banks. His commitment to their ability to continue flouting that law is "absolute." Not only that, he's going to help them violate the law some more.

The SEC is now officially replacing the fraudulent ratings agencies as the fraud facilitator of first resort. This last week, the SEC nudge-and-a-wink outright told the banks how to commit shareholder fraud. Step 1: Price their CDOs at such a high price that no sane private investor would pay that. Step 2: Use the fact that nobody bought any as proof that the markets are "frozen." Step 3: Invoke the SEC rule that lets them use "mark to model" accounting when "markets are frozen." Step 4: Value the assets, for legal capital asset requirement purposes and shareholder reporting purposes, using the same proven to be false mathematical model of what these CDOs "should" be worth. It's working, too; stocks in the big banks were up several percent yesterday. Working for the fraudsters, I should say, not you; those banks are still going to fail, they do not have enough assets to cover deposits, and the FDIC does not have enough money on hand to pay off the default. So the Federal Reserve will have to step in and print that next $6 to $8 trillion, after all. So that 30% inflation? That was just the first bump. It jumps to over 50% when the banks finally collide with reality. And finally:

Your boss already knows all of this. He, unlike you, reads the business pages, and so he knew all of what I just told you already. And he knows what it all means. Which is why, by the same measure of unemployment used during the Great Depression, the real unemployment number, as calculated by Shadow Government Statistics (shadowstats.com), is about 19.8%. Even the only somewhat fraudulent U-6 "real" (but not really real) unemployment number, available on the Department of Labor's website as of last night, looks like this:



(The U-6 has only been available there for about a week. They added it to those reports at my request. No, really; I got an email from the Bureau of Labor Statistics personally thanking me for suggesting it, and they implemented it immediately thereafter. Disconcerting. I wish the rest of the Obama administration was that much on the ball.)

By comparison? As Jess Bachman of the indispensable WallStats.com reminded me, via a poster made for mint.com, at this exact same point in the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was 8.9%. We're only one year into this Depression; it took four years for the Great Depression to reach 20% unemployment. What's more, the rate is constant over the last three months, at about 9/10ths of a percent per month. Which means that we hit the peak unemployment rate for the Great Depression some time around this September. If you look at the county-by-county unemployment map over at the New York Times website, you realize that it's already that bad now in most of Michigan, much of the South, in parts of the desert southwest, and in inland California. Now do you understand why the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the go-to journalist on the subject of militia violence, Dave Neiwert over at Orcinus, have both been reporting increases in recruiting for right-wing militant groups in the US? Including inside the US military? We could see the first mutiny against the federal government since Shay's Rebellion this winter.

Keep in mind, I'm not predicting a successful overthrow of the US government this year. Neither the Banker's Plot, nor Huey Long's Poor People's Army, nor the CIO's general strike, were successful in overthrowing the US government during the Great Depression. Also remember that one of the biggest places we're hiding unemployment people from the U-6 unemployment estimate is on SSDI for mental illness, which was already increasing in membership by 40,000 people per year before this year; the bad news, we can't go on like that, the good news, for as long as we do, it staves off riots. Call it another couple of months to a year before the threat of violence gets really serious. But nothing I've seen in the last two months has given me any reason to think it will take any longer than that before we have mutiny, insurrection, secession attempts, runaway inflation, brownouts or blackouts in the power grid, and conceivably even scattered food riots by late 2010.

I could be wrong. We could wake up on Monday morning and find out that Bernanke, Summers, Geithner, and all the rest of the Bush administration/Democratic Leadership Council holdovers in the Obama administration have tendered their resignations. Next Friday evening, the FDIC could borrow additional manpower from the US Marshals Service and actually obey US law, actually close down Citibank and the rest of the corporate scofflaws and stop the bleeding, selling the assets they're servicing to banks that will go along with the President's mortgage foreclosure mitigation plan, for whatever we can get; even if we have to loan them the money, it'll be cheaper than continuing to bail out the existing banks. (This is not a radical suggestion. This is US law. This is routine procedure when the law is being obeyed. Under routine procedure, it should have happened no later than 90 days after the banks were notified they were out of compliance with their capital asset requirements, back in April of 2007. They've been getting away with evading US law that long, under now two Presidential administrations.) And if the gods are truly kind to America, somebody could actually get through to President Obama and to the Democrats in Congress that the absolute last thing Americans of any social class need right now is another hand-out; what we need are jobs, even if the government has to print the money to hire us; if they're going to print the money and hand it out anyway, shouldn't the taxpayers get some work out of those of us, myself included, who are getting it?

But you'd be an absolute total idiot to assume that any of that is going to happen, let alone all of it.

I've seen people complaining about the news media focusing so much of their coverage on what the various world leaders' wives were wearing, and whether or not the Obamas technically violated British lèse majesté laws, instead of the "real news" from the G-20 Summit. Don't be silly. That was the "real news" from the G-20 Summit. Nothing else that happened there was actually news.

For one thing, as I was warning people who asked me about it all week, it was 29 world leaders and their entourages meeting for 36 hours: except that it was less than that, because it was two evenings and one working day. And most of that day was scheduled for entirely ceremonial functions, group photos and press appearances and so forth. Nothing got done at the G-20 Summit itself. It was entirely a publicity exercise. That's a mild indictment, as such things go, though. Influencing public opinion, campaigning on behalf of agreed-upon solutions, is in fact a legitimate part of the job of any nation's leader, and doing publicity stunts like summits is part of how you do that.

There was, of course, an official G-20 agreed-upon statement, even if it was actually negotiated by people far below the presidential level from the 29 attending countries, and over the preceding weeks, not the day of the event: the 2009 London Summit Communiqué. But it contains no actual news, either, for all that desperate business journalists tried hard to squeeze some whey out of that stone. In a nutshell, what it really consists of is America telling the rest of the world, "Screw you!" and the rest of the world telling America, "no, screw you, buddy!" Which is not exactly news, although it does technically qualify as an agreement: we all agree not to do what anybody actually asked.

America to World, "Screw You:" Okay, yes, we grudgingly admit that we will include hedge funds in our regulatory structure, even though no hedge fund played any part in this fiasco. We know why you're scared of hedge funds: they call you on it when you do something that isn't actually going to work, and short your bonds and your currencies. Since we're in the middle of something that nobody in their right mind thinks is actually going to work, though, this time we're on your side. But as for the thing you really wanted the most, some international body like the IMF to replace the SEC and all other global market regulatory and investigatory agencies? Screw you. Never going to happen. The closest we're ever going to even think about coming to that is an agreed-upon set of guidelines for such national agencies to follow. And we're withholding judgment on that much until we see the actual guidelines.

World to America, "No, Screw You:" Okay, yes, they all grudgingly agree that all the world's manufacturing companies are going to go bankrupt during the period of high global unemployment that's begun unless a lot of cash gets handed out for people to buy manufactured goods. They are not, however, going to do that themselves. What they have all agreed is that we should hand out stimulus money to Americans, while they hand out subsidies via their national banks to their local manufacturers: they make things and get paid, Americans buy things and spend money, that's how they all agree the world should work. And then, when even higher American unemployment wrecks our currency, they can come in and buy up anything of value that remains in the ruins.

See? Everybody agrees.

Now here's what I say. This "Americans are the purchasers of last resort" thing has got to end, and it has got to end now. There was some marginal justification for it back in the early 1970s, after we'd used our post-WWII domination to loot the 3rd world of most of its raw materials and exploited the Old World and Japan as our captive markets. But it has long passed the point of sustainability. This thing of every country in Asia and Latin America, and even some parts of Europe, keeping wages low so that nobody there can buy American goods or even locally-made goods, and selling the goods that their people make to Americans at government-subsidized prices, and calling it "protectionism" or "trade war" whenever we don't go along with this scam? And then expecting the US to fund 99% of NATO's expenses, while they spend any of the money they didn't spend on defense that's left over after subsidizing their industries on national health care, and using that to "prove" their moral superiority? If it doesn't end soon, the rest of the world is going to lose America as a dumping ground for their manufacturing capacity anyway, when America burns down, tips over, and sinks into the swamp.

But then, that's been the whole world's policy since the late 1970s. And Barack Hoover Obama with his all-Wall-Street economic team, like every President we've had since Reagan, thinks that what we have now is a "free market" and is terrified to "tamper with the free market" for fear of "contracting global trade during a recession." (Really? Global trade? Global trade in what? What, that we make, are they buying right now? Are they going to impose trade sanctions on the American food they make up reasons not to import, the American cars they don't import, the "American" computers that are actually made in Singapore and Hong Kong?) But that's been US policy since Reagan. We didn't need a G-20 Summit communiqué to tell us that, either.

So, yeah, if we're going to talk about the G-20 Summit, by all means, let's talk about fashion and diplomatic protocol. It bores me, I don't actually care, but it's far more newsworthy than the actual G-20 Summit "agreement" ever could be.

I haven't spent the whole last couple of weeks obsessed over the economy. No, in fact, I lost a couple of days of writing time to another obsession that's been chewing at my brain for a while. And before I introduce the particular obsession, let me background it by first complaining about something that I think we have an excess of, right now, something I'd just be okay with if the publishers declared a temporary moratorium on because we're so over-stocked: dystopian science fiction TV shows, movies, stories, and books.

Look, I know that things are bad, and everybody wants to know what it'll be like if it gets really bad. That subject is on a lot of people's minds right now. Even if the left and the right don't agree on which disaster is about to overtake us, Islamist jihadism or economic collapse due to corporate fraud and short-sightedness, rogue nukes or environmental collapse, right now both are entirely obsessed with apocalyptic visions. And I get that. I understand the urge to want to explore those possible futures, to try to get a sense in the here and now of what it'll be like if we have to live in those futures. But you know what? Writing that stuff is easy. Which is why everybody and his dog, except for the women who're writing supernatural romances, is writing dystopian science fiction. It's over-done. Move on.

Do something more interesting. Do something hard. Show me human beings, or aliens I can identify with, who live in an alternate history, or a distant future, or a remote planet somewhere in the cosmos, who look back on the problems we have now, and the problems we're about to have, and go, "Oh, yeah, we sort of remember something like that from our history. But we solved that problem long ago, and it doesn't happen any more." They don't have to have problem-free lives, let alone conflict-free or drama-free. Nor do they all have to love each other. Nor do you even necessarily have to explain in the story how they solved the problems of economic and political corruption, civil war and crime, poverty and bigotry, disease and pollution. I'll cheerfully allow the traditional one to three (or so) baffle-gab hand-waves. As Rob Lowe's character said in Thank You for Smoking, "There's a simple fix, just insert one line: 'Thank god we invented the, you know, 'whatever' Device.'" Show me how you think healthy, reasonably comfortable human beings who've grown up with more or less peace and safety solve their problems. How do they find each other and fall in love? How do they compete with each other for the most cherished positions, jobs, titles? When things do break, how do they work together to fix them? When they're confronted with something they don't understand, how do they investigate it?

I know it's not impossible.

Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. There was a famous argument between Gene Roddenberry and Harlan Ellison, when Harlan Ellison was writing the screenplay for "City on the Edge of Forever." Ellison's draft of the story involved a lowly crewman, a draftee with a dirty job, strung out on illegal drugs, stumbling into a time machine and wrecking history. (I know; Ellison got the right to reprint the story, with his version of the conflict with Roddenberry, in a book by the same title.) Roddenberry was adamant: in the 23rd century, there are no jobs that dirty and miserable, machines do them. There are no draftees on the Enterprise, being posted to it is an honor. And there is no drug addiction in the 23rd century, they solved that problem. Ellison flatly refused to consider it, even as a world-building exercise. But I think it made great fiction. There was a place for smooth-talking, impulsive liars and cheats like Kirk in that world: out on the frontier, where there were still surprises, some of which could bite, and hostile aliens to deal with. And they never did give us enough stories set back inside the Federation itself, to show us what their better world really looked like, until Next Gen. But in both Roddenberry's series and in Berman's first series, what we did see was sane, healthy people going about their jobs, learning to get along even with people they didn't like, and, when problems coming up, trying to solve them. I miss that feeling.

Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth. Yes, I know he's still writing them, and I'm a book or three behind. Still, we need more series like this, by other authors. Over the course of the series, he establishes that two species, over the course of a war against a hostile third species, found out that they were each others' perfect complements. Humans had pushed themselves and their societies to such intolerable hyper-competitiveness that we were constantly on the brink of war; Thranx had pushed themselves and their societies to such intolerable hyper-conformity that they were stifling their best people and getting nothing new done. When they learned to travel and work together in teams? "Where Humans go, Thranx go, and vice-versey, don't you know?" The resulting Humanx Commonwealth and its teasingly-named One Universal Church aren't a paradise. There's still crime. The AAnn are still out there, determined to kill us all. There are things in the galaxy even scarier than them, sleeping for millenia and just now waking. But even a poor orphan who grew up in a slum on one of the poorest of the outermost colonies grew up healthy, reasonably well fed, minimally well educated, and confident that if Humans and/or Thranx work together on something, especially in a team of both, things can get better, criminals can be brought to justice, problems can be fixed, mysteries can be solved.

Disney Channel's Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. I know, silly example. And again, as with the Humanx Commonwealth, it's not quite a utopia. Crime exists, especially one one particular hyper-capitalist breeding ground for criminals, Trade World. The Evil Emperor Zerg has a small empire out there on the border, and if we're not careful, he could become a serious threat. Politicians are still prone to being more interested in process and politeness than subject matter awareness and hands-on problem solving. But the planets of the Galactic Alliance have been at peace with each other for centuries, and the Alliance continues to encounter and make peace with new civilizations. The Space Rangers aren't perfect, but they're respected, because they have a track record for problem solving and relative incorruptibility. There's no poverty, and the few story lines the deal with disease treat it as something socially awkward, not particularly life threatening. And there still turned out to be plenty of room for good story telling. For example, they got a lot of mileage out of the rivalry between Buzz Lightyear and his younger partner Mira Nova over who was actually better at their job. X-R, Robot Ranger made a great viewpoint character as a robot whose programming had scrambled so badly he was as corrupt as a 20th century human; there was occasional danger and plenty of wacky antics in a galaxy full of sane, healthy people when this semi-lovable but deeply selfish guy got dropped into their lives. The character of Booster, the 4th member of Buzz's eclectic team, aspires to a whole heck of a lot more than members of his species are capable of, physically and intellectually, and that's shown as noble, not laughable, nor is he consistently shown as a drag on the team. You can, in fact, tell good stories even when most of the world's problems have been solved and most of the characters are relatively sane.

... and, for that matter?

The Jetsons. The symbolism of the pairing between The Flintstones and The Jetsons is creepy retro-futurism, I know: manual and skilled labor at job sites where you get dirty is Stone Age, white collar jobs in offices are The Future. But bear with me, because there's more going on in The Jetsons than that. George Jetson lives in a world where every human being we see is living a comfortable upper middle class life, except for one or two drop-outs and/or criminal deviants who chose poverty. And even the malcontents seem to live pretty comfortably, other than that they don't let their bathroom mirror shave them as often. They can all live like that because they solved their economic problems. We don't know how, but energy is clearly free. We do know that labor is obsolete, because robots are now as competent as humans, but miraculously unambitious. George's job is to monitor some automated process, notice when it goes wrong, and stop and restart it. He complains that his boss is working him too hard if things go wrong 3 times per shift, calling Mr. Spacely a slave driver in one famous episode because "I had to push the button 3 times today." But there are still human conflicts to write about. It's not a given that parents and children would ever fully understand each other, even if we solved all the other problems. If there were so few jobs that half of every couple stayed home to supervise the home robots and raise the kids, that gulf of experience within the couple would re-introduce all the problems of The Feminine Mystique, but with a twist: the couples confronting those problems would be people who (unlike us) grew up sane, safe, healthy, prosperous, and with the expectation that problems can be solved. How would that make their lives different? What would stay the same?

And those are just some examples that occur to me off the top of my head. Heinlein dabbled in worlds where we've solved our problems, even if he was cynical enough to assume we'd screw it up again not long thereafter; his long-lost and recently resurrected first unpublished novel was specifically a semi-utopian novel. Niven wrote three long periods of peace and prosperity and health and sanity into his Known Space series, the time between the rise of the Brennan-Monster and the first Man-Kzin War, the first century or so after, and the time thousands of years later after the Teela Brown Gene had run rampant through the human race; then he lost the will to write about them, and (in particular) left the Man-Kzin Wars stories to writers who turned them into trite mil-fic with the usual array of messed-up characters; man, I would love it if we could reboot that series, and make the writers remember that in the canonical fiction, the Man-Kzin Wars came after centuries of peace and were followed by centuries of peace and that the humans never had any particular doubt that they would win and would stay sane while winning. War is hell on the front lines of John Barnes' Timeline Wars trilogy, but the good guys' capital-world civilization is a world that had known millennia of peace and happiness by having avoided the mistakes of the Peloponnesian War, by having never had a Dark Age; by their 20th century, they could almost have taken peace and happiness and prosperity and health for granted, if there weren't a rival timeline trying to wipe them out. And in Barnes, our viewpoint character and most of his fellow soldiers on the side of good are from far less civilized timelines, including ours. But he does take us back to a functioning society often enough to remind us what we're fighting for. I'm sure you have others ready to hand. But it's been so long since any of it was mass culture, pop culture, on television or in blockbuster films! I miss it terribly.

Over the last weekend, I even thought of a lovely idea for a TV series, exactly the kind of thing I wish they'd put on TV. This will do me exactly no good. I have no ear for dialog. I have no work ethic for writing. I know nobody in Hollywood, or even in Vancouver's TV industry, who'd listen to my pitch. And I can think of several good reasons why the series is probably unfilmable; not technological reasons, just political and probably economic reasons. Maybe when I get a chance I'll tell you about it. Any way, maybe, just maybe, I'm the only one who misses stuff like this. Or maybe I'm not. I do know that I've been obsessing, lately, about how much I miss it.

I'm hearing a disturbing amount of optimism. I hear it from my friends. I read it in the newspapers and the blogs. I see it and hear it coming from half (but only half) of the economists, nearly all of the CEOs, and the entire Obama administration economic team: the worst is almost over.

These optimists are the people who believe, or at least appear to believe, what they are asking us to believe, these ideas that they want us to take for granted as long-proven facts, that they want us to bet all of our futures on, that they want us to plan our lives forever around:

1. There was, and is, nothing fundamentally wrong with the economic principles of Reaganomics. The "free market" is always better than government intervention, and for everything.
   
   
2. It is absolutely essential that taxes on corporations and on capital gains remain as low as humanly possible, in order to keep from draining money out of highly productive companies and wasting it on less-productive endeavors.
   
   
3. The vast majority of businessmen, especially in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sectors of the economy (I didn't coin the acronym), are the smartest people in the world; that's how they came to be entrusted with that much money. Nearly all of them are honest; the rest can be kept honest with minor changes to our accounting and reporting rules. Therefore we should give them whatever they ask for, because they're probably right.
   
   
4. In particular, when these very smart and very productive people tell us that only the biggest banks are worth saving, and that there is no reasonable upper limit to the size of any bank, and that we ought to allow as tiny an oligopoly to control our FIRE economy as can be arranged, we should believe them.
   
   
5. There was no real estate "bubble." Houses became more vastly more valuable because we freed up money that would have been spent on other things, like expensive American-made food and clothing and children's toys and toothpaste and electronics and cars. That's why the old rules about what people can afford to pay for a house are just wrong, so it is entirely natural that housing prices went up, and will continue to go up as we outsource more and more of our production to cheaper and cheaper countries.
   
   
6. There is nothing wrong with the fact that average American wages have declined relative to inflation during and over the same span of time that worker output per hour doubled relative to inflation, because real Americans don't make most of their money from wages, they make the bulk of their money from investments. Wages are for losers.
   
   
7. It therefore stands to reason that the "collapse" of the "housing bubble" was no such thing. We are a "nation of whiners" having a "mental recession," a "crisis of faith" not a crisis of capitalism. This crisis of faith was brought about by a few bad actors who engaged in fraud. Once we identify those people and weed them out of the FIRE sector of the economy, and put in place simple accounting rules and improved reporting requirements so that the private sector FIRE guys can spot each others' fraud in time to notify the rest of us and avoid it, no further changes will be needed to bring back the status quo ante, the booming global economy of, say, 2003-2006.
   
   
8. Once we do that, housing prices will return to their 2006 prices or higher immediately, and resume increasing at the rate they were increasing before April 2007. The rise in foreclosures that started then, and the wave of resulting bank failures, were entirely caused by misguided government "mark to market" accounting rules, not any fundamental problem with the underlying economy.
   
   
9. Once we do that, Chinese factory employees can continue putting their savings into bank accounts at home, and those bank accounts can continue to be loaned to American banks at low interest rates indefinitely, because they can uniquely trust us to return their money. That is why your real estate prices will continue to appreciate indefinitely.
   
   
10. Because housing prices will continue to increase indefinitely, there is no reason for anybody's wages to go up in order to afford a house. They can just sell their existing house for an ever increasing profit and use that money to trade up to a house that will, itself, continue to appreciate at double-digit rates forever. Nor will you ever have to make an actual down payment or pay even a token amount of principle; you can just pay your loans with the appreciation on the house.
    
    
11. Because manufacturing workers all over the world will have nowhere safe to invest their money other than here in the US, and because housing prices will always skyrocket, there is no need for the United States to try to be self-sufficient in anything. Nor should we want to have any jobs in the United States making anything. Manufacturing is a job for inferior people. Real Americans will work in the FIRE economy; the few Americans so inferior that they cannot find jobs in FIRE will mow the Real Americans' lawns, or maybe all go on Social Security Disability Insurance. But that's okay; once we make these few minor reporting changes, America will be wealthy enough that we can afford that, too.
    
    
12. Once make those minor reporting changes, those same Chinese banks will also continue to buy however much US government debt we want to sell to them, and then some. That is why the USA will always be able to afford to keep spending 90% of all the world's military expenses, which is why whenever any trouble breaks out where the UN and/or NATO want "boots on the ground," whether Afghanistan or Darfur or anywhere else, it will always be American boots. We will never stop spending that money, and it will never run out. Nor will any American, rich or poor, be asked to pay any taxes towards covering those war costs; it will all be paid for by the endless appreciation of our FIRE economy.
    
    
13. Most importantly, since no actual mistakes or errors were made by the private sector, only the crimes of a few bad apples and misguided regulatory mistakes of the hostile-to-business Bush (the Younger) administration, it is absolutely essential that we must not change anything important about the American economy, just make the barest minimum reform necessary to catch the few bad apples. If we change anything important about the US economy, we risk "creeping socialism," leading to an economy as dysfunctional as the old Soviet Union's; we know this because intrusive government, not the vast percentage of its GDP that the Soviet Union was spending on the Cold War, was what wrecked their economy, just as we know that labor unions, not the unsustainable costs run up during the Vietnam War and by the OPEC oil embargo, were what lead to the stagflation of the 1970s. If we change anything major about the US economy, we also risk making Americas as lazy as the Soviets were, by taking away their aspiration to some day be as wealthy as CEOs now are.

And the people who believe all of this had better be right. Because we have bet the absolute upper limit of the US government's current ability to borrow on it, and the Federal Reserve Bank has announced an intention to print several trillion dollars of new money above and beyond what we can currently borrow, and we are betting it all on just this scenario.

If any one of those thirteen statements is wrong? And, frankly, I think they all are? There will not be a "return to normal" in September of this year. Nor will it come by September of 2012. And maybe not for several years after that. If any one of those statements are wrong, we are screwed.

</a>I'm really torn as to whether I'm busy tonight, Saturday night, or not. I had planned to be, but life always does seem to get complicated.

As the Post-Dispatch's Deb Peterson reported a week and a half ago, the Koken Art Factory is hosting a fund-raiser tonight. Three local burlesque dancers have been invited to compete at the 2009 London Burlesque Festival, so the gallery is hosting a $10/head event to help them with travel expenses, the Bacchanal Carnavale. Several artists, both performing and plastic, are displaying. At least 11 burlesque artists or troops are scheduled, and there will be a dance floor with a DJ all evening. Even more to my liking, the web page says, "All those taking part in the celebration are invited to don their best Greek or Roman attire," and I still have the satyr pants that kukla_tko42 made for me long ago. Sounds fun!

So what's the catch? First of all, I'm really unhappy with the weather forecast: heavy snow starting right before the event is scheduled to open, and 2 to 8 inches accumulation by the time it gets out. Temperatures in the mid 20°s F. Boy, that takes all the fun out of a toga party or out of wearing my satyr pants and a vest, especially if I'm going to be waiting for a cab in the snow in a howling blizzard afterwards. The even bigger catch? I don't know of anybody else among my friends who are going, and this kind of event is very nearly zero fun for me if I don't have anybody to hang out with and talk to. Are any of you going, for some or all of the evening? Drop me a note in the replies or via email, or call me any time after 4:00 or so Saturday afternoon, so we can coordinate. Because if nobody else is going, I think the weather is more than enough excuse for me to stay home. Which would kind of be a pity; it could be a good time, and it's for a worthy cause.

I faced this dilemma back in November: it's hard shopping for your friends when you can't rule out the possibility of Weimar-style Great Inflation, let alone the lesser but sadly even more likely possibility (I would say at this point, certainty) of another Great Depression. What do you give your friends when 1 in 4 of them may be sleeping on friends' basement couches or living in their cars next Christmas?

Fortunately, an old friend of mine, bbwolf, gave me a great example long ago. Many years ago, Wolf and I were in the same faith group, and he surprised us all by giving all of us the exact same winter holiday present. It occurred to him, while visiting many of our homes, how few of us had a visibly displayed first aid kit in our homes. Sure, most of us had a full set of first aid supplies scattered here and there, but almost none of us had a nice, visible, easily recognized first aid kit where a total stranger to our house would think to look for it, recognize it on sight, and know to open it to find minimal first aid supplies. So he ran down to a local discount store, bought a ton of cheap first aid kits in water-resistant containers (those of us who already had kits could always use one for camping), wrapped them, and brought them to meeting. Call it a one-size-fits-all gift if you like; I think it was the most thoughtful and useful Christmas present I've ever gotten, and I think it's the only Christmas present I've ever gotten in my whole life that I was still using on a regular basis a decade or more later.

So that set an example for me, and with times turning potentially very harsh, it motivated me to try to match his cleverness and generosity, to try to find a gift just as useful that would serve everybody I knew as well as his gift served me, a gift that was well suited to the needs of the times. Finally, I came up with the one I settled on: a three-pack of pocket multi-tools. They're lightweight, they're practical, everybody can use them, and (as I told people when they unwrapped them) if the fit totally hits the shan, they can be bartered at really good exchange rate for food or medicine. So everybody on my list got:

• A Leatherman Squirt S4 Keychain Multi-Tool. I got one of these for myself years ago after wearing out a much older Leatherman Micra. The day doesn't go by that I don't get some use out of it. The scissors are the best scissors I have ever seen on a pocket knife, bar none, period, end of story. The knife blade has held an edge, and taken sharpening, better than any other pocket knife I've ever owned. The bizarrely well designed socket for the tweezers makes these the only multi-tool tweezers I've ever owned that actually stayed with the knife, no matter how much the tool has been handled. And I love, love, love the fact that all of the tools except for the scissors are on the outside edges, not the inside edges, so they can be opened without unfolding the whole knife, and yet despite this they make good handles for the scissors -- a hard trick to pull off. It's not 100% perfect. Some day, I hope that Leatherman gets smart and makes a hybrid P4/S4 that has the P4's pliers in the middle and classic pocket knife style folding scissors in the place of the fingernail file. But until that Platonic ideal pocket knife comes along, the Squirt S4 is just about the best pocket multi-tool invented, the Gerber MP600 of pocket tools.
  
  
• A Gerber Artifact. I saw this thing in Boing-Boing long ago, and had to find out if it was as cool as it seemed. The answer is not quite, but it's still a fun toy to own. It's hard to get a feel for it from pictures, but basically what it is is a folding X-acto knife with a pry-bar back end; when you fold the X-acto knife shut, it exposes what turns out to be the single best Phillips-head screwdriver I've ever seen on a pocket tool. No, really, for as flat as this thing is, the grip and the torque are amazing. The bottle opener on the side is pretty good, too. The pry bar works great as a pry bar, but not so well as the pair of flat-head screwdrivers they advertise it as; being that close together and parallel with each other, it's very hard to get a screwdriver tip in anywhere useful. But for those of my friends who still travel, the funnest thing about it is that it's a pocket knife and multi-tool that can't be taken away by the TSA Gangstaz -- because the actual blade part of it costs a couple of cents. Pop it off, leave it on the desk at home. (A friend of mine says he just puts his in his shaving kit.) When you get where you're going, stick your head into the first dollar store you see, buy a cheap pack of X-acto knife blades. They're disposable. Sharp, too. So it's not perfect, but it's pretty darned useful, useful enough to be the mythical fourth piece of the late lamented Burning Man "playa necklace."
  
  
• And a Swiss+Tech Utili-Key 6-in-1. I got these on a lark, because they were cheap; in fact, it's the only one of the three I don't own one of for myself. The basic premise is that it's a pocket knife (with flat and serrated edges), a bottle opener, and four sizes of screwdriver, but when collapsed, it's the shape and size of a modern car key. It's not meant to pass for a car key (I'm told the TSA Gangstaz have been trained specifically to look for them), so much as it is designed to fit in anything that holds car keys without making the key ring or key wallet or whatever any less convenient to carry around. I do like how easily they're designed to snap on and off of a key ring. If I owned one, I could see being comfortable snapping mine off, snapping it back shut, and tossing it across the room to someone. That being said, if you can't find one on sale for $5 or less, they're not useful enough to be worth it. I did find a stack of 'em that cheap, though, and thought they'd be fun to throw in with the other two (more useful) tools, just for the clever design factor.

On November 5th, 1999, the man who is now Barack Obama's chief economic adviser was Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary. It was the day that Congress passed a bill that he had lobbied hard for, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 2000. And as I'm very glad to have been reminded by Boing-Boing guest blogger Richard Metzger, who dug it out of the New York Times archives, this is what Lawrence Summers had to say about Gramm-Leach-Bliley: "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century. This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy." (Stephen Labaton, "Congress Passes Wide-Ranging Bill Easing Bank Laws," NYT, 11/5/99, page A1.) Here's what the bill's primary sponsor, John McCain senior economic adviser Phil Gramm had to say about it that day, from the same article: "We have a new century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer."

And here's what North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan said, again from the same article: "I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010. I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness." But then, he's basically nobody, right? Who's going to believe a bench-warming nobody from the middle of nowhere, when celebrated geniuses from both political parties say otherwise? Who's going to listen to a borderline socialist from one of the last states in the US to still have a Democratic Farm-Labor Party instead of a Democratic Party, Minnesota DFLP senator Paul Wellstone, when he says that all these experts are "determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes," when (unnamed) math wizards from the most prestigious economics school in America, the University of Chicago, are assuring the NYT's reporter that "the Glass-Steagall Act was not the correct response to the banking crisis because it was the failure of the Federal Reserve in carrying out monetary policy, not speculation in the stock market, that caused the collapse of 11,000 banks. If anything, the supporters said, the new law will give financial companies the ability to diversify and therefore reduce their risks."

Epimetheus howled.

You know, I almost decided, like Metzger, that this stands by itself. But then I remembered that not everybody is old enough to remember some things that the article left out, things that had been in the news for months leading up to that pleasant and sunny Friday morning in November, almost ten years ago. So let me fill in a few missing pieces, and see if they don't remind you of a few things about our current situation. Because this didn't start on November 5th, 1999. This started on April 6th, 1998, a year and a half before Gramm-Leach-Bliley passed, and it started with one man telling the federal government that he just plain wasn't going to obey the law, and that man's name was Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill. Sandy Weill's purchase of Citibank, as CEO of the brokerage and insurance company Travelers Group, was euphemistically called a merger, but it was Weill who was calling the shots, and he was open from day one as to what he was doing: intentionally violating Glass-Steagall, the law that prohibited banks from owning brokerages and vice versa. He didn't agree with the law, he wanted it changed, he believed that banks should be able to gamble on more risky assets, and he intended to get even richer doing so. Under the terms of Glass-Steagall, on April 6th, 1998 a two-year countdown clock to the destruction of Citibank automatically began. If he was going to obey the law, he had until then to announce a plan to spin off all of the departments that Glass-Steagall said a bank couldn't own, and then another three years after that to complete the sales, or else surrender his banking license to the FDIC. Instead, he said, in effect, "come and pry it out of my cold, dead hands. Go ahead, kill off the single largest and most important bank in the world for being a scofflaw. I dare you," in terms almost that blunt.

Congress blinked. On almost the last possible day they could do so, they revoked the FDIC's permission to yank his banking license. Why? Because Citibank was too big to fail. And that meant that it was too big to be forced to obey US law. And to the right-wing Democrats in the White House, and the Republicans in Congress, that was just okay with them. Only a few "far-left" "radicals" and "extremists" thought otherwise. Who were the American people supposed to believe, a tiny minority of "far-left" "radical" "extremist" "socialist" nobodies, or "historians," "economists," "financial experts," college professors from "top universities," "successful entrepreneurs," senior spokesmen for both parties, and the President's own Treasury Secretary?

And I'm sure if you ask President Obama about any of this, he'll put on the usual basset-hound expression that he wears when you ask questions about prior misconduct, and give his usual stern speech about "looking forward, not backwards" (when refusing to look backwards is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place). So I don't have to ask what Barack Obama would say about any of the quotes in this article. But I would dearly love it if somehow, someone would read Lawrence Summers' above remarks to him, now, in public, on the record, and ask him to explain himself, just to hear what he would say.

Postscript: By the way, you know where current Obama administration Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was on November 5th, 1999? He was working for Lawrence Summers.

Sick as I've been these last couple of months, I did get one thing done that I'd been meaning to do. Quite a while back I asked my "brain trust" to recommend a good overview text on the Weimar Republic period in German history, and everybody agreed on Richard Evans The Coming of the Third Reich, volume 1 of his trilogy on the rise, rule, and fall of the Nazis. I finished it a while back, and I have to agree with the many reviews that I've seen that this is the essential book to start with, the one that made sense out of everything else I've read about Weimar Germany before and since, by supplying useful historical context. Many thanks for the recommendation, those of you who suggested it.

Now, here's why I cared. I came by my fascination with the subject of economics when I had a teacher who was at least as good at explaining complex topics as I am, my Economics and Political Science teacher at the fundamentalist pseudo-prep private high school I was sent to against my will. The year was 1975, and especially for conservatives, the word "Weimar" was in the air, a lot. The US was still being hammered by economic sanctions from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Our ability to do anything about it was crippled entirely by the hammering our military took in Vietnam, and the hammering our budget took under the Johnson and Nixon administrations' "Guns and Butter" refusal to raise taxes, sell war bonds, or cut any other governmental expenses to pay for that losing war; they instead maxed-out our national ability to borrow, from anywhere, and left the resulting mess to Presidents Ford and Carter to clean up, neither of them shining examples of economic or political competence. The net result was double-digit unemployment, even by the heavily politicized, massively under-counted official rate, plus double-digit inflation and a Dow Jones Industrial Average in the low to mid 3 digits, and both political parties' leading candidates were telling us that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. And because the combination of high inflation and high unemployment is rare, the comparison that economists were nervously talking about was not to the Great Depression, but the far more sinister comparison to the Great Inflation that most experts cite as the most important cause of the rise of fascism and the end of democracy in Germany. The question was being very seriously asked, when I first started studying economics in the mid to late 1970s: were we heading towards Weimar America?

Here's the story my social-conservative Moral Majority charter member economics teacher, and other right wing economists of the time, were telling us to help us understand what they were afraid of. Weimar Germany, they told us, was hampered from the start by strong labor unions and a Socialist majority in their parliament. Those bad socialist economic policies, combined with the years of crushing and intolerably high reparations they were being forced to pay after World War I, combined with a total collapse of family values and a rise in public displays of sexual perversion not seen since the Roman Empire, so wrecked the Germany economy that the currency became worthless, people stopped working, and eventually people turned to Hitler in hopes of freeing the government from having to listen to labor unions, to free Germany from reparations, and to crush the sexual deviants that were destroying the Germany family and the German worker's ability to work. Yep. That's what I was told. But over the years, I've learned that there wasn't a single word of truth in that whole account. Labor unions were no stronger in Germany than anywhere else, and weaker than they were in Britain in the same time period, and they didn't collapse into fascism. Sexual "immorality" was no more blatant in Germany than it was in Paris, and barely more than it was in New York City, and neither France nor the US suspended democracy in a fascist revolution. And, and here was the big eye opener for me, Germany never paid the reparations, except for one token payment; the rest were funded via direct financial aid from, or open-ended loans by, the USA, which had opposed reparations from the beginning. So knowing those things, you can understand my curiosity when I wanted to find out: how, then, did the Great Inflation happen in Germany? How, then, did democracy die in Germany? And could those same conditions, that same situation, happen the same way here?

Let me massively speed up and oversimplify Evans' well-documented, definitively researched conclusions. Even with economic support from the US, Versailles Treaty reparations were enough of a drag on the Germany economy that there was pretty substantial inflation. Nothing unprecedented, and not all that much higher than elsewhere on the continent, but somewhat high nonetheless. Well, when they were dictating the terms of Germany's surrender, France insisted on a guarantee that they wouldn't be paid back in devaluated currency; they reserved the right to claim very nearly all of Germany's pre-war level of annual coal production. In 1923, they demanded the reparations be paid in coal. But the German mining industry had not yet recovered to pre-war levels; if nothing else, far too many workers were dead or still crippled from the war. Rather than accept that excuse, the French raised a foreign legion of black soldiers from French Algeria and invaded and conquered the German coal-mining and industrial states of the Ruhr river valley, and ordered their African troops to round up every able-bodied man, woman, or child and force them at gunpoint to mine coal until the reparations were paid, shooting anybody who refused to work, and anybody who spoke out against the invasion. The German people responded with a general strike, and this time, the level of national outrage was high enough that it stuck.

But a general strike in the Ruhr was no small deal. Over the preceding decades, Germany had basically dismantled most of its farm economy, retooling their whole economy around fabled German engineering and German manufacturing efficiency, exporting fine tools and heavy machinery to the US and to eastern Europe in exchange for food and to the Middle East in exchange for oil. With the Ruhr valley shut down, unemployment in Germany jumped instantly to over 50%, and German exports dropped to very nearly zero. As the last bits of food in the country were bid on by increasingly desperate people, the mark became essentially worthless; what good is paper money if it can't buy food? By the end of the six month general strike, by the time the US bullied France into withdrawing, only two things were keeping anybody alive in Germany: remittances from German expatriates in the US, and sexual tourism. Everybody who had family elsewhere begged them for cash. If you didn't have family outside the country to do that for you, then one or more of your family members had no choice but to head to a tourist city outside the Ruhr and compete with other equally desperate people for a share in the foreign sex-tourism business, children and pregnant women and mother/daughter acts and straight men competing with each other for the privilege of having sex with Arab oil sheiks or French "sophisticates" or British "gentlemen." Remittances and prostitution brought in hard currency that could be traded to black marketeers, who smuggled that money out of the country and food in, so if a family member suddenly and mysteriously had food, you didn't ask questions. You just quietly hoped that they'd gotten money from a friend overseas in the mail, and pretended not to think about any other ways they might have gotten it.

How bad did it get? We don't know. That's not a hand-wave, that's a sentence that should shock you to the core: the Germans were so shell-shocked by starvation that they, of all people, stopped keeping records. Towards the end of the general strike, German newspapers were estimating the combined death toll from starvation, suicide, and murder by Algerian troops at 140,000. That's very probably an inflated figure, a propaganda claim aimed at garnering US sympathy. Evans argues, somewhat uncertainly, that the few personal daily diaries we have from that year don't show people going to as many funerals as that high of a death toll would suggest. But on the other hand, he also admits, none of those diaries are from the Ruhr valley area, where the suffering would have been the worst. What we do know from those diaries is that long, long before the French occupation and the general strike were over, your average German was eating maybe one meal every other day, was too starved to think and almost too starved to move, counting themselves lucky every time they did eat, and feeling degraded at being that happy for so little. Once the general strike and the occupation were over, the government zeroed out the currency, issued new currency, put people back to work, and far faster than you would think possible, things returned to normal.

Interestingly, democracy in Germany didn't die of the Great Inflation. It lasted for another ten years. And in Berlin, in particular, the legacy of of a summer of rampant prostitution wasn't crippling shame, but a fairly widespread tolerance for sexual themes in art, theater, and music that had been unthinkably obscene before the Great Inflation. Many Berliners alive during that time remembered the 10 years from 1924 to 1933 as almost a golden age. No, the irony is that it wasn't the Great Inflation that killed democracy in Germany; it was the Great Depression in the US, which wiped out German savings that were invested in US stock market scams and which eliminated American banks' ability to lend money still needed for reconstruction to the Germans, that ended freedom and democracy in Germany. Even though the effects were far lighter the second time, the German people could withstand one such shock, but not two of them.

So, could it happen here? It's hard to imagine a collapse so thorough that unemployment reached 50% and US exports hit zero. It's theoretically possible, but really incredibly unlikely. If it did happen, we would have one advantage Germany didn't have. We've shut down an awful lot of agriculture over the last couple of decades to import cheaper vegetables and beef from Latin America, but even so, we're still very nearly self-sufficient in food. Or would we? American agriculture is entirely dependent on oil, and not only are we not self-sufficient in oil (obviously), but, no matter what lies the American oil industry tells you, there is no way we could produce enough oil in this country to fuel even just the agriculture industry and the shipping of food from farm to table. No matter how stable the US dollar has historically been, if food and fuel run out because our exports stop completely, Weimar-like levels of hyperinflation are far from impossible.

As I mentioned a while back, the last time unemployment got above 20% in the US, we faced three semi-credible attempts to overthrow the government. On the other hand, those attempts all failed, and that's perhaps less surprising than it could be. America's supreme Founding Father and Germany's supreme Founding Father were very different people, and they left us with radically different traditions. George Washington made all his army officers swear the Oath of Cincinattus. He sent them home immediately after the Revolutionary War, committing us as a nation to always demobilize our army between wars. Just as importantly, he intentionally stepped down while still popular, after two terms, to cure us of any temptation to elect a strong man for life. Otto von Bismark, on the other hand, elevated the King of Prussia to the Kaiser, the Caesar, of a new Holy Roman Empire, emperor for life, and set him up with a large and permanent army as the permanently most prestigious and most powerful branch of the new government. On the other hand, over General (then President) Eisenhower's objections and fervent warnings, we trampled all over one half of George Washington's legacy; as with Germany under the Kaisers, our army is now our largest permanent branch of government, too. But we don't remember a military dictatorship under a hereditary strong man as our golden age (quite), and we do retain our tradition of regular change of executive.

In the first years after World War I, the Germans also did something else that I don't think that we'd do, and it was very bad for democracy. Unemployment was high, veterans benefits were inadequate to the number of crippled and shell-shocked vets trickling back from POW camps, and the police were not back to anything like full numbers. So, to address all of those problems, all seven or eight of Germany's political parties set up their own private militias, paying veterans' paychecks out of party member dues: first to protect their campaign rallies, then to protect neighborhoods in which their party held the majority, and then ultimately to fight in the streets in several small civil wars. Somehow, even if the Democrats do split between the Reform Democrats and the Blue Dog Democrats, even if the Republicans split between the Evangelical Republicans and the Conservative Republicans, I just can't see all of them plus the smaller political parties going so far as to create their own uniformed armies, nor can I see the American people or their police, however strained and underfunded, letting them descend into armed factional warfare. Also, while racism is alive in America, but I can't even imagine Mexicans being scapegoated the way that Jews were leading up to and during the Third Reich; even Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck can't whip us up into the kind of murderous hunger for Mexican blood that several German political parties were able to excite against the Jews. At least, I don't think they can. And remember, when democracy died in Germany, it was less than 20 years old, not more than 200.

So, in conclusion, American democracy has safeguards, cultural and historical and political, that the Germans prior to American occupation and reconstruction never had. My impression is that, contrary to all the warnings I was given back in the 1970s and contrary to the casual way some people (myself included) throw around the term "Weimar America" all too loosely, we can probably remain pretty confident that it won't get that bad and that, being Americans, even if it did get that bad it wouldn't necessarily, or even likely, turn out the way it did in Germany a decade after the Great Inflation. However bad it gets, I remain more convinced than ever: it's not going to get that bad.

I am, as an old friend used to say about himself (in his case, partly tongue in cheek) "a sick weak tired old man." But, I am a certain kind of sick weak tired old man. I'm one who always as a child preferred the company of adults to the company of children my own age, but with one prominent exception. I have never had any use for people who only find one topic of conversation interesting: organ failure. I made a promise to myself a long time ago that no matter how long I lived or no matter what went wrong with me, I would not, not ever become one of those people who goes on and on and on about what parts of his body are out of order at the moment, in what order they've failed, what's being done about it, who else I know who's undergone organ failure, how sick they are or aren't, and what they're doing about it. I've reached the age where I understand how easy it is to be surprised by it when your body begins to disintegrate, and never in the order you expected, and once organ failures begin to set in, I've come to understand the "tech support" angle on wanting to know what resources are available and who's had what work for them in similar circumstances.

I also understand that the topic is deadly, deadly dull.

So if I disappear from this blog for a while, at my age (and, more importantly, after all of the bouts of grinding poverty I've lived through, and with no more health care than I've traditionally had access to, and weighing what I weigh) you should assume that it's because something has gone wrong. When I'm in enough pain that I can't concentrate when awake and can't sleep well when I'm trying to sleep, I don't have much to say, because the topic of what's gone wrong with me is the only thing I can concentrate on (if even that). And that's a boring topic. So you should assume that rather than natter on and on about it, I've shut up.

You may also assume that it's not serious. If it were terribly serious, I'd say something about it. If it were so sudden and serious that I couldn't do anything to let you know about it, alienne has the access codes to jump in here and let you all know. Yes, I have made arrangements for you to find out if something unforeseen but plausible renders me too dead or too (temporarily or permanently) crippled to update you myself. So if you haven't been notified that something like that has happened, and the news is still reporting that all or most of the Greater St. Louis Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area is still here, then nothing's seriously wrong except that I'm temporarily in no condition to write or think. No big deal.

(It probably also means that enough snarl has crept into my voice that I'm unintentionally doing a surprisingly credible impersonation of Saul frakking Tigh. Frak me, but it's true. *eye roll*)

How you can tell that I regained my confidence that we're not entering Great Depression 2.0: within hours of Obama giving his housing-plan speech, I had logged into Amazon.com and plunked down a smidgen over $400 for a Kindle 2. (The $359 price does not include a protective cover for the screen, the cheapest of which that didn't look ugly was $30. The rest was overnight shipping.) I know that some of you are going to be appalled: I spent how much on an e-book reader with proprietary DRM? Don't be silly. I didn't spend a single dollar on an e-book reader, DRM or no DRM. I will, in all likelihood, never install a single book on it. But what the heck, first, let's take Amazon at face value and talk about the Kindle 2 as an e-book reader. Here is their proposition:

For $359 you get a very sturdy-feeling, surprisingly rugged device the height and width of a trade paperback, and half the thickness and weight of one, that can be read (quite comfortably) in any light that you can read an ordinary paperback book in. It holds somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred books' worth of content. (A lot fewer if they're audiobooks, not that anybody in their right mind would use this machine to listen to audiobooks. In form factor and user interface, it's severely inferior to the worst CD player or the worst MP3 player you ever saw.) There are at least three hundred thousand titles available for it, roughly 240k for sale plus uncounted tens of thousands of older public domain books that can be downloaded for free. However, for all but the free books you completely and utterly give up your normal rights as a book buyer under the doctrine of "first sale:" you can not resell the used copy, you can not give it away, you can not lend it. You can't even easily exercise your Fair Use right to copy excerpts out of it, although it can be done. "Highlight" a section and it gets automatically copied to a text file that you can download to any computer via the USB port. But highlighting anything longer than a single page is slow and laborious.

On the other hand, it saves you the room in your house, call it one square yard per couple of hundred books. And you don't pay for overnight delivery, or buy enough books to get free delivery and then wait two weeks to get them; delivery in under 60 seconds is always free. And the books themselves are, on average, about $5 cheaper than new, or comparable on average to the used book price. So if you usually buy new books, your Kindle 2 pays for itself after about 75 to 80 books. But that's assuming no out-of-warranty repairs. The two year warranty is $65, and a replacement battery is $60 counting labor. So add another 12 to 13 books to the break-even time. And that's assuming you don't upgrade to a whole-new $359 Kindle (Kindle 3? Kindle Pro? Super-Kindle? Kindle 9000?) every year. Figure every other year, and round-up on the battery replacement or warranty cost, and what it comes down to is if you buy an average of one book every week, the Kindle just barely breaks even. So in practice, no, you're not getting paid anything for sacrificing your first-sale rights. Unless 60-second delivery is all that important to you, or you routinely and regularly have to carry around stacks and stacks of books, or are completely out of bookshelf space, or routinely pitch books when you're done with them and feel guilty about filling up landfills, the Kindle 2 just doesn't make any sense. As an e-book reader, that is. Fortunately, that's only one of the things it does. The only one that Amazon talks about (much), but still, only one of the four things it does.

(Although I will say this about it. Any book they sell in Kindle format, they also offer you the first chapter or the first 10% of it for free as a sample. If I want the books, I'll buy them, new or used and not in e-book form, but being able to instantly download those sample chapters no matter where I'm at beats the heck out of waiting to get back to my PC and then using Amazon's clunky "preview" feature. I may never buy a single e-book, but I have already downloaded the sample chapters from Cat Valente's Palimpsest and Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids to check out.)

To my minor annoyance, the inimitable xkcd beat me to pointing out one of the other things it does, because I was up way too late last night reading on my new Kindle 2:



From any page on the Kindle, start typing and it opens a "find" window at the bottom for you to type into. Hit return, and it searches the current book or document. But if you instead tap the little mini-joystick to the right, it offers you other search options. The first option is what you'd expect, to search all the books on your Kindle. But the next three options are to search Google and to search Wikipedia and to search Amazon. The last option is just labeled "Go," and if you've entered a URL, it opens a web browser and goes straight to that address. It does all four of these things at exactly zero cost to you, via Sprint's EVDO wireless broadband network: no per-transaction charge, no per-kilobyte charge, no per-minute charge, no charge period. Sweet, huh? Actually, it's merely okay. For all that Tim Berners-Lee, the W3C, and cranky old-timers like me have been screaming at web designers for at least a decade now not to make assumptions about the hardware that people are using when they browse the web, an appalling amount of the web assumes that you are on a screen with a minimum size of 1024x768 and using a minimum of 16-bit color. Most web pages look like garbage on the Kindle 2's 600x800 4-bit gray-scale screen. Google and Wikipedia both recognize the Kindle and use special style sheets or special pages to accommodate the device, but very few other web pages do, so they're practically the only web pages that are easily readable.

Correction: An earlier version of this review gave the CPU cache space figure instead of the actual RAM figure. Thank you warphammer for the correction. -- Brad

Also, it's not much of a web browser. The Kindle 2 User's Guide (PDF) identifies the browser as NF Browser 3.4, which claims to be HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.1, JS 1.5, and Ajax compatible, but either they're lying or Amazon deliberately crippled it for this device, because it doesn't reliably handle anything beyond HTML 1.2 and very minimal Javascript when I try it. Probably the latter, because the biggest limitation is that even as an embedded-Linux device, the Kindle sacrificed a lot of computer power to get longer batterly life: 532 MHz ARM-11 processor with only 64 Mb of RAM, with a half-gig of Flash memory (out of the 2 Gb installed) set aside for the operating system and software, running embedded Linux 2.6.22. In non-technical terms, less processor power and memory than some wristwatches. Sadly, if you imagine WebTV on an elderly black-and-white TV, you're pretty close to dead-on. So even though web pages download at 3G speeds, they then render at the rate some of my fellow old-timers remember from the days of dial-up Internet at 14.4 kb/sec: enter a URL, go get a cup of coffee, come back and see if it's done rendering. And it's buggy as all heck. It's supposed to be able to download Mobipocket ebooks directly from the browser, but every attempt I've tried has timed out (and left the broken file on the Kindle, where it could only be deleted by connecting it to a PC and bypassing the OS). Google Calendar wouldn't even render; Gmail timed out (even the mobile version) every time I tried to send a message. If I had bought it, as the character in xkcd did, primarily as a web browser, I'd be very disappointed in it. Still, always with you, lasts for days on a battery charge, and 100% free to use: even if it's slow and buggy, that's a lot better than nothing. And, fortunately, that's not the main thing I bought it for.

It can also do something that, I suspect, a lot of business users will find indispensable, and not a few gamers: you can carry your own documents around on it, too. Each Kindle comes with two email addresses: (yourname)@kindle.com and (yourname)@free.kindle.com. Mail any Word document, HTML document, text file, or zip archive full of bmp, gif, and/or jpg images as an email attachment to the first address, and they bill the credit card on your Amazon account 10¢ to convert it to an ebook and send it wirelessly to your Kindle. Send it to the second address, and they email it back to you for free at the email address on your Amazon account as an attachment in Kindle ebook form, for you to copy over via the USB port. You can also try it with PDFs, but they warn you that that's an "experimental" feature, even buggier than the rest of the device, because they're still perfecting the art of turning 8"x10" 1200 DPI 32-bit pages into 4-bit greyscale 600x800px pages. Or you can use Mobipocket's free conversion software to convert files yourself into ebooks and copy them over via USB. It's also supposed to let you just copy over a folder full of JPGs, GIFs, and/or BMPs and compile them into a book for you, but I can't get that feature to work reliably on mine, for all that Kindle 1 users say it works just fine on theirs; I suspect a bug in the latest software release. If I were in the habit of carrying around thick stacks of user manuals, gaming books, printouts, or company documents, I'd love the heck out of this feature. I may even use it occasionally. I don't think I'd pay anywhere near $359 for it, though.

So what did I buy a Kindle 2 for?

In addition to offering 240,000 (or so) ebooks for sale, Amazon.com also offers over 1300 blogs for automatic delivery in ebook format for 1¢/month to $1.99/month. They also offer 31 newspapers, daily delivery in ebook format, for $5.99 to $14.99 per month. But, and here was the deal-maker for me, they also offer 22 magazines, automatic delivery in ebook format, for $1.25/month to $3.49/month ... including Analog and Asimov's. And as soon as I realized that, I was in love with the Kindle 2, and knew I had to have one.

You see, I subscribed to Analog (and the old Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Omni while it lasted) from about age 14 until some time in my late 20s. For an uncomfortably long span of that time, F&SF was hopelessly in thrall to the 70s fad of "New Wave science fiction," which I despised and still mostly despise, but it was absolutely worth it to me to have one absolutely delightful anthology of the best science fiction stories in the world delivered to me every month, plus one that had an occasional gem. And I certainly didn't drop them after a decade or more because I'd outgrown science fiction; no, I'm still a fan. Nor did I drop them because I couldn't afford them; they've always been quite reasonably priced. I dropped them because I was out of room for them. Subscribing to a science fiction anthology magazine has always been frustrating for me in one regard: the user interface and form factor stink on ice. If there's even one short story in an issue that I haven't gotten around to reading yet that I know some day I might want to read, I can't throw it away. By the time I let them both go, they were taking over my living space. And long before it got to that point, I realized in frustration that if I wanted to go back to one particular story I hadn't read, good luck finding it; even if I could find that one particular issue in an ever-growing pile, the odds of my remembering what issue I was looking for approached zero.

I unsubscribed when I could no longer tolerate the frustration for a single day. However, I've questioned, and sometimes just plain regretted, that decision several times a year for at least the last decade, maybe decade and a half. The fact remains that, frankly, science fiction is a genre that was born in the short story, and in some ways has never outgrown that medium; most science fiction that I've read of any length longer than (at most) a couple of hundred pages would have been seriously improved if it had been cut way, way down. Some of my favorite authors' downward career spiral can be demonstrated to have begun the day they sold their first novel. (I'm looking squarely at you, Mr. Gibson.) Even for people whose novels I like, their short stories are almost without exception head and shoulders above their longer work; Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Spider Robinson, Connie Willis, and the late James Tiptree all come immediately to mind, and even Heinlein was better in his short stories than his novels, and better in his shorter novels than his longer ones. I know authors don't want to hear that, because the anthologies and anthology magazines pay squat compared to the book publishers, but it's true, at least as far as my tastes are concerned. So I've regretted on a regular basis that I wasn't throwing money at the short-story publishers just because I couldn't stand having partially-unread anthologies clutter up the house. It was a technological problem in search of a technical solution, and the very nearly perfect solution to that problem has arrived, and its name is Kindle 2.

(I say only "very nearly perfect" because Dell Publishing hasn't learned yet how to fully use the highly-important "table of contents" and "chapter" functions in their Kindle conversions, making it annoyingly difficult to figure out in advance how long a story is, or to skip from story to story, especially since they also set the issues to automatically open to the first editorial, so I have to page back repeatedly to get to the cover and table of contents. But that's a short-term problem; I suspect they'll get better.)

As soon as I saw my Kindle 2 had left the Amazon loading docks, I logged into Amazon.com and signed up for both magazines. While it was still charging, I got the January/February, March, and April '09 Analogs and the February and March '09 Asimovs delivered directly to my Kindle. I immediately flagged them not to age off, and have barely been able to put the device down long enough to skim the web since. This, this is something I've wanted for a third of my life and I never even thought of it as a possibility. I'm in love, and even though it sucks as an ebook reader and is kind of mediocre as a web browser, I didn't get it as an ebook reader and I only secondarily got it to access Google and Wikipedia on the run.

I got it, as I explained to several people at Conflation last weekend, to work through my issues.

Longer piece coming tonight, I promise, but this local news story disgusts me so much I have to post something about it right now. This is what "support our troops" really looks like. Not that that would have come as anything of a shock to a certain young Mr. Atkins.

There have been very few times in modern history that I have wished I was the proverbial "fly on the wall" secretly eavesdropping on a historical event, however major or minor. I figure that, contrary to most conspiracy theory, the motives of the people involved are generally far from inscrutable, their goals seldom secret, and their agreements and joint actions that matter generally become public knowledge in a matter of years, or even days. But I'm having one of those moments now. And, bizarrely, for the second time in less than a year, one person was involved in both conversations. The content of both of those conversations have remained incomprehensibly successfully secret, considering their importance, and I'm dying to know.

Yesterday, President Obama flew up to Canada and back for the traditional first foreign state visit of almost every President, to Canada. You can see a typical media account of it in the New York Times dated 11/19/09, "Obama Makes Overtures to Canada's Leader" by Sheryl Gay Stolberg. But that account has a surprisingly large gap in it. It turns out the White House's official blog "live-blogged" the visit, and here's the President's schedule as it happened:

• 10:35 to 11:32 am: Obama in closed-door meeting with Governor-General Jean.
  
• 11:32 to 11:47 am: Motorcade from her office to Parliament.
  
• 11:47 am to 2:42 pm: Private meeting and working lunch with "Prime Minister" Harper.
  
• 2:42 to 3:38 pm: Joint press conference, Obama and Harper.

I understand that as a ceremonial matter, it makes sense for President Obama to meet briefly with the Governor-General. But what did they find to talk about for almost an hour in private? He met with Harper for almost 3 hours, and we were told in detail what they talked about. He met with the Governor-General for about an hour; neither he, nor she, has said word one about what the subject of their meeting was.

I will admit up front that I am still under-educated about, and slightly confused by, the Westminster system and Canadian politics. That being said, this is interesting to me for the reason that I (intentionally snidely) put the words "Prime Minister" in quotes with regard to Harper, because this isn't the first time one of those two has had a secretive closed-door conversation with Governor-General Jean. Harper had his first, a two hour meeting with her on the morning of December 4th, and it lead to what Wikipedia is currently euphemistically calling the "2008-2009 Canadian parliamentary dispute." In a smidgen under two hours, Prime Minister Harper somehow persuaded the Governor-General, allegedly on her own authority and without even consulting with Queen Elizabeth, to do something almost completely unprecedented since the Magna freaking Carta: to suspend a Parliament against their will, without them having first asked her to do so.

It is my understanding that, for centuries now, the sovereign's calling of Parliament into session, giving them permission to meet and an agenda of things the sovereign will allow them to talk about, and then dismissing them at the sovereign's will, have been purely ceremonial legal fictions. And yet, this was specifically done to prevent a no-confidence vote for long enough for Harper to figure out some way to break the coalition against him, to keep the Conservatives in power against the majority will of the Canadian voters. That was months ago, and neither he nor she has said word one, yet, about what in the heck it was that he said to her that persuaded her to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So I hope you'll excuse me for wishing that I had been a fly on the wall in that conversation, and then again when she met equally secretively with our President before his meeting with "Prime Minister" Harper. Mind you, I'm not accusing any of the three people involved of anything dastardly, I'm just bursting with curiosity as to what in the heck those conversations were about?

If nothing else, I'm oddly baffled that a celebrated career journalist elevated to what is (under the Treaty of Westminster) presumed to be an almost entirely ceremonial post has been so oddly secretive, and even more oddly successful at keeping her secrets. I find it weirdly and not entirely pleasantly fascinating.

As you can tell, I spent most of yesterday and today poking around the edges of President Obama's plan to solve the mortgage financing crisis; bear with me for one more post about it, because I think I just figured something out. And when I did, I laughed myself absolutely silly. You may hate this. Most of you will probably love it.

From the White House blog, I found a link to a (PDF) document on the Treasury Department website, credited to Jacob Leibenluft, "Support Under the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan: Three Cases," (treas.gov, 2/18/09). The first two cases are uninteresting. Let's look at example 3, in the author's own words:

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Family C: Eligible for Homeowner Stability Initiative

• In 2006: Family C took out a 30-year subprime mortgage of $220,000, on a house worth $230,000 at the time (they put less than 5% down). Their mortgage broker – Mom & Pop Mortgage – sold their loan to Investment Bank. The interest rate on their mortgage is 7.5%.
• Today: Family C has $214,016 remaining on their mortgage but their home value has fallen -18% to $189,000. Also, in November, one parent in Family C was moved from full-time to part-time work, causing a significant negative shock to their income.
  • Their loan is now 113% the value of their home, making them “underwater” and unable to sell their house.
  • Meanwhile, their monthly mortgage payment is $1,538 and their monthly income has fallen to $3,650, meaning the ratio of their monthly mortgage debt to income is 42%.
• Under the Homeowner Stability Initiative: Family C can get a government sponsored modification that – for five years – will reduce their mortgage payment by $406 a month. After those five years, Family C’s mortgage payment will adjust upward at a moderate, phased-in level.

	Existing Mortgage	Loan Modification
Balance	$213,431	$213,431
Remaining Years	27	27
Interest Rate	7.50%	4.42%
Monthly Payment	$1,538	$1,132
Savings:	$406 per month, $4,870 per year

Homeowner Stability Initiative: How the Program Works for the Lender, Government and Borrower

• First, Investment Bank (working through a mortgage servicer) reduces the interest rate so that the Family C’s monthly debt-to-income ratio drops from 42% to 38%. This means that Investment Bank must reduce the interest rate from 7.50% to 6.38%, bringing down Family C’s monthly payment from $1,538 to $1,387.
• Second, the government and Investment Bank share the cost of further reducing the interest rate so that the Family C’s monthly debt-to-income level is lowered to 31%. Any dollar the bank spends is matched by the government. At this stage, Family C’s interest rate is reduced from 6.41% to 4.43%. In total, Family C’s monthly payment has fallen from $1,538 to $1,132.
• If Family C remains current on their payments, they will receive incentive payments up to $1,000 a year, or $5,000 over five years, that would go towards reducing the principal they owe. Additionally, the mortgage servicer can earn an up-front incentive fee of $1,000, plus up to $1,000 per year in “Pay for Success” fees for three years, so long as Family C remains current.

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Now, let's add some annotations to that: how does this actually work? Well, first the bank that's servicing their loan, Investment Bank, "voluntarily" lowers their interest payment from 7.5% to 6.38%, the maximum that this program allows them to charge and still "voluntarily" participate in this program. Because there's a 6.38% interest cap? No, because there's a 38% of income cap, and that's what interest rate would have to be if they were paying off a $213,431 loan over 30 years at a fixed rate and only paying 38% of their current monthly income.

Now, immediately a problem crops up. Investment Bank didn't issue Family C's mortgage, remember? They're only servicing it for some mortgage investment pool that Mom & Pop Mortgage sold the loan to. And because they were planning on selling it to a mortgage investment pool, there's a clause in Family C's contract that says that the interest rate on this loan cannot be legally lowered. Period. At the very least, not without a court order. Nevertheless, Investment Bank will "voluntarily" do so. So, what do they do, dare any of the shareholders in that mortgage pool to sue them for violating the contract? Probably not. If not, they have only one choice: "voluntarily" pay off Family C's mortgage themselves and issue them a brand new 27-year mortgage for the same amount at 6.38%. Since they paid off a 7.5% loan and issued a loan that only pays them 6.38%, they take a substantial loss on the deal. Why are they willing to do that? Because they're doing it "voluntarily." And because they did so "voluntarily," the government will pay Investment Bank $255/month towards Family C's mortgage payment, so that Family C can more easily afford the loan, bringing their payment down to 31% of their income from 38%. What do the taxpayers get for their $255 a month? Nothing. We're doing it "voluntarily."

What does "voluntarily" mean to Investment Bank, in this example? It means that Investment Bank is under no legal obligation to do so. On the other hand, President Obama has just pointedly and explicitly reminded them, there's nothing in the law that says he has to bail them out if their capital asset ratio is out of whack. Which, I guarantee you, Investment Bank's is. So, yes, sure, certainly Investment Bank can decide that even with the government paying $255/month of it, Family C is a bad bet for a $1,387/month mortgage for 30 years, and they are absolutely free to turn them. Yes, they can. They are also legally entitled to decide that the house is a bad bet at $213,431, and turn them down. They are also completely and fully allowed to refuse to take the loss from paying off their old loan. Yes, they are. And President Obama absolutely can say, oh so casually, "Nice banking license you have there. It'd be a shame if anything were to ... happen ... to it." Like, say, him wiping his ass with it, which he absolutely can do any time he wants, now. Not only can he do it, if mark-to-market rules were being strictly enforced, he'd be legally obligated to do so. And there isn't a damned thing Congress can do about it. Nor would they want to. The way the voters feel about banks right now, Congress knows which side their bread is buttered on. Nor do they even have to stick their necks out to give him permission to do so; they already did. The original TARP authorization includes enough weasely language that the President and the Treasury Secretary can do just about anything they want to or about the banks, it's as loosely and sloppily worded as the 2001 war powers resolution was. He absolutely can do this. And there really isn't any way anybody can stop him.

Hey, what do you know? Obama did learn something about negotiation while he was in Chicago, after all! I laughed myself silly when I figured this out. Heck, it's hours later, and I'm still giggling when I think about it. If nothing else, somewhere the ghost of Inigo Montoya is saying, "You keep using that word, 'voluntary.' I do not think it means what you think it means."

Even a blind squirrel can occasionally find a nut. There are remarkably few right-wing Democrat/anti-government Republican fingerprints on the speech that Obama just gave and on the plan summary on his blog. (Maybe the real purpose of the Geithner plan was to serve as a "monkey trap" to keep them all busy while the "reality-based community" worked on the real problem? We can only hope he's that smart.)

The documentation on this stinks, it reads like stereo instructions with at least one missing page, but let me see if I can summarize this a little more clearly. The Obama Plan sets a target price for mortgage payments at 31% of income, which is an unbelievably good and very welcome breath of fresh air, in a world gone mad where brokers were telling people that paying 50% of your income for your mortgage was normal and sustainable. People are paying more than that (and therefore, as we've always known people who are paying more than that would do, going broke) for one or more of several reasons: they got scammed on the value of the house, they got scammed on their loan terms, or the economy went into the tank and their income fell; we're going to save as many of those people as we can. People in that situation will have several options:

If (and only if) the amount owed on the house is no more than 105% of what a (hopefully more honest) appraisal of the house is worth, and they have enough income to afford that much house via a 30 year fixed-rate mortgage with payments of no more than 31% of their income, the government will refinance their mortgage for them, through the recently re-nationalized Federal National Mortgage Association and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation: no points, no fees, semi-automatic application process. I'm all in favor of it, and am hard-pressed to imagine anybody objecting to this part.

If they owe more than 105% of the value, or don't have enough income to qualify, the government will "create incentives" for the company that's currently servicing their loan to renegotiate on the following terms. The mortgage servicing company finds them some way to refinance it as a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at any payment, and the government directly subsidizes the difference between that payment and 31% of their income. And if that isn't enough incentive for them, the President may have just said (the language isn't clear) that agreeing to do this for all the loans they service is a condition of those companies receiving any government aid of any kind? OK, but I have some serious reservations about this part of the plan. First of all, for about half of the loans in question, what he's asking the mortgage servicing companies to do is basically flatly illegal, because the mortgages were written with an explicit clause in the fine-print that rules out any renegotiation on any grounds. There's nothing in here that explains how they're supposed to get around that.

Secondly, it really does reward people who bought way more house than they could afford, speculating that they could refinance bring their payments down later by reapplying their "certain" future home equity as down payment. There are enough such mortgages out there that I'm far from sure that the $75 billion he's estimated to be available is enough. The main protection we've got against that is one that he doesn't promise, only promises to "support," and that's cram-down through the bankruptcy process. Let's say you can only afford a $150k mortgage, by any honest measure. But you bought a $250k house, on an optional-payment adjustable rate mortgage (option-ARM) that let you only pay what the mortgage would be on a $150k house for a while. You did this because you were just that sure that a year later, the house would actually be worth $350k or $400k, so you would take out the equity and reapply it as a down payment. The Obama Plan basically lets you have that money, or more precisely the benefit of that money, for free. Only it does so by, in effect, repricing your house down to $150k, thereby bringing down the average value of all the houses in your neighborhood. I'm of two minds on this. It's obviously morally wrong for you to have made this deal, and for the taxpayers to be on the hook for it is reprehensible. On the other hand, most people in this situation didn't come up with the idea on their own, they were hard-sold into it by even more corrupt and reprehensible mortgage lenders who never intended those people to get to keep their houses, they only wanted to scam the system for their loan origination fees and then split with the money. And it's not as if the information that this was a scam was made widely available early enough, often enough, or loud enough for it to be fair to have expected them to know that it was a scam. On the other hand, I get the sense that the threat to cram-down the value of the house through bankruptcy court order is just a poison pill, that the intent is to create that as a threat, not to actually have it ever happen, just to create yet another incentive for the mortgage servicer to find some way to refinance ... or else.

So I'm not sure it's going to work, especially not without a bunch of details that we were just told may not be available for another two weeks. But I'm cautiously optimistic, if for no other reason than this: he didn't say the words "public-private partnership" and he didn't pretend that there's a ton of "private investment" out there waiting to be "attracted" to solving this problem for us. So, against all expectations, he may actually pull this one off. And, as I said last night, if he gets this one right, it may not matter that he screwed the pooch on the financial rescue plan and the stimulus bill. Maybe I can renew my lease this spring, maybe I can spend some money on some things I want to buy that would (indirectly or directly) provide income to some friends and acquaintances of mine, maybe I don't have to plan for the very-near term collapse of the US economy. We might just make it through this one with no more than "normal" recessionary damage. That it's at least possible is rather substantial relief.

The anxiety symptoms are back, including nightmares so vivid I can't get back to sleep. I recognize this: it's a panic attack. Something is pushing my phobia buttons. For those of you who don't know, my particular phobia, going back to when I was 13, is of having some bureaucrat in a suit holding my life in his hands, screwing me over, and having no way to placate or persuade them otherwise. Most of my outbreaks have been job-related. This one isn't.

President Obama inherited a whole heck of a lot of messes from his anti-government governmental predecessors, but three of them rise to the level of genuine existential crisis. To stave off Great Depression 2.0 not just here at home but world-wide, he has to do three things, and do them fast. He must keep unemployment from rising to the point where the American people withdraw their consent to be governed altogether, from the historical point where we risk descent into anarchy and totalitarianism. He must keep our financial system from cratering so hard it wrecks the whole global economy, plunging much of the rest of the world into anarchy and totalitarianism. And he has to address the underlying cause of both of the above, by doing something about the mortgage industry mess that started kicking off these problems about 9 months ago.

How's he done so far? Well, we have a local news story about his nearly $800 billion attempt to solve the unemployment problem. It turns out Missouri's Democratic governor, future presidential hopeful Jay Nixon, wanted to be able to make the propaganda claim that the very first stimulus dollars were spent right here in Missouri, so his state department of transportation had lined up a series of four road expansion and repair projects that he knew would qualify, and assigned the contracts subject to the stimulus bill being signed and with the requirement work begin the second the signature was complete. You can see the press release here: MoDOT, "Missouri Has First-in-Nation Economic Recovery Project," 2/17/09. What's missing from that press release? Any mention of any actual hiring. It went to an existing contractor, who's working the project with his existing employees. You can argue that maybe this contractor might not have had another contract lined up and might have been about to lay people off, but the press release doesn't allege that, either. In short, the very first economic stimulus project to begin created zero jobs, and may not have even saved any. I'm not saying we didn't need to fix those roads and bridges. And I'm not saying that Missouri could afford to do so. And I'm not coming out against infrastructure spending. But right this second, we have bigger problems. If it wasn't going to put currently unemployed people to work, right away, we had more urgent needs for that money. Road repair could have waited. So, score so far: 0 for 1.

Then there's the Geithner Plan, which still exists only in the form of a vague outline that Geithner himself didn't even write, half of which contradicts the other half. And it violates important laws of physics, by implying (contrary to fact) that we have as much time as we want to "stress test" the banks that are hovering on the brink of failure, and that somewhere out there is a mythical swarm of investment pixies who are urgently eager to pay full price for all those currently valueless collateralized debt obligation shares if the government will just offer to also sell them insurance on them. Nobody, not even Geithner himself as far as I can tell, is defending the claim that the Geithner Plan will actually save a single bank, save a single brokerage, save a single pension, save a single 401k, or save the FDIC from running out of money any day now. Hurray again. Score so far: 0 for 2.

Needless to say, I am holding my breath, desperately hoping that the President doesn't go 0 for 3. He has one last chance to get this right, this (Wednesday) morning at 10:15 am Mountain Standard Time at a high school in Phoenix. If he gets this one right, it will barely matter that he screwed up the first two, because he will have successfully addressed the underlying cause of the first two problems. If he gets this one wrong, he might as well legally change his name to Barack Hoover Obama, and we're going back to the Great Depression. In particular, if he even says the phrase "public-private partnership" (creating yet another fraudulent corporation that will pay itself a fortune, stiff the taxpayers, and leave the work undone, like every other public-private partnership of the last 30 years) or if he even suggests that it's possible to "attract private investment" to solve the problem (from where?), take a good look at yourself and your three closest friends who still have jobs: by this fall, one of the four of you will be unemployed, and will take at least 18 months to two years to find comparable work. And it might well be you. For the next four to eight years, three of you at a time will continue to draw roughly the same salary, but for most of that time things will cost twice as much. Plan accordingly.

What would a real solution look like? There are some promising hints that have leaked out of the White House policy shop, or at least supposed leaks. An AP wire story had some of them earlier, but before I could clip them out, the version on the web changed and dropped that paragraph. Alyssa Katz at Slate's sister site TheBigMoney.com has a (frankly skeptical) article with some hints, too ("The Loan Ranger," 2/17/09). One is that the administration will try to push through Congress an existing bill to give bankruptcy judges the right to reduce loan amounts on mortgages, even if they've been sold into mortgage pools with "no modification" clauses in the contracts. If this passes, expect financial sector stocks to drop like a brick, almost to the point where if you open a new checking account with a $100 balance, they'll give you majority ownership in a bank. But in a twisted sense, that'll be the good news, because once those "cram downs" begin, it will force a fast and accurate accounting of what the CDO shares are actually worth, and then we'll have the result of Geithner's "stress test" without setting up a dangerously lobby-able government agency to assess them. A similar (supplementary? competing? we'll know today, I hope) proposal would be for the government to step in and guarantee a weird form of debtor-in-possession financing for everybody with a mortgage on a house that was fraudulently assessed or who was stuck with an ARM that reset on them through no fault of their own. The trial balloon we've heard is that as long as there's at least one person on the mortgage with a job, the homeowners will pay 31% of their take-home pay for 30 years, and own the home outright; if a 30 year loan at 31% of their monthly income per month doesn't pay for the house, the government will pay off the rest.

Do they do this via direct subsidy? My guess is no. Considering that just about everybody in this mess was promised, by everybody, that it didn't matter that these loans couldn't be renegotiated because (as long as the homeowner made their payments up until the interest reset date) they were certain to be able to refinance, the fairest way to do it would be for the government to force a cram-down onto the current loan servicer, and then finance a mortgage through Freddy or Fannie that keeps the homeowner in the house at their current salary. I don't know if they do this by having the taxpayers put up a down payment in exchange for equity in the house when it sells, or via balloon payment down the line to cover the difference between what the homeowner paid and what the house was worth, or something altogether different. It would be sheer brilliance if it works, though. Right now, there are a ton of people, millions of them, who're stuck in loans that reset to rates they can only pay by stopping spending on everything else. There are also roughly as many people looking up towards the reset date that hasn't hit them yet, but they know it will, and they've stopped spending anything because they know that when it does they'll need every penny they can scrounge between now and then to save the house. Lower that first group's payments back to what they can afford, and free the second group from fear, and you just about single-handedly jump start the retail and automotive and durable goods sectors of the entire world economy.

But we're not guaranteed anything nearly so smart. Obama is famously a smart guy, one who learns from his mistakes, but he's also most famous as a guy who learns from the people around him if he doesn't go into a situation with an opinion of his own. And I'm not even vaguely happy about the people he's gathered around him, the literally hundreds of held-over Bush appointees and warmed-over right-wing Democrat Clinton-era appointees that David Sirota at the Campaign for America's Future has taken to calling "the Team of Zombies." If he listens to them, he'll reject bold action on the mortgage crisis in favor of a nice, (politically) safe plan to "attract private investment" in order to "harness the energy of the free market" to solve this problem via "a public-private partnership." Or, just as bad, he may have learned now not to trust the Team of Zombies, only to find out that after letting Pelosi and Reid (and House and Senate Republicans, to whom he gave far too many concessions) turn his stimulus bill into a legislative Christmas tree, and after giving Geithner a blank check and no deadline, there's no money left in the treasuries market for him to use to do the right thing. In either case, we're screwed. And I've been losing sleep for days now waiting to find out which it'll be.