The Invisible Library

McCain as the Joker:

Take your pick of suitable pulp narratives: Wall Street as wild west gambling saloon or corrupt urban jungle, there has been no shortage of loose-cannon melodrama in the name of Restoring Order, none of it remotely constructive. First was Henry Paulson with his out-of-the-blue no-accountability bail-out plan, followed by Bush with his “there is even more to fear than fear itself” address, both trying to goad the nation into a state of malleable panic. None of this serves the nation as an anchor for morale or perspective. Entropy increases.Enter John McCain. He “suspends” his campaign on the spur of the moment and sweeps into Washinton without a plan, lying his way out of an appearance on David Letterman’s show and setting himself up for ridicule before a national audience, triggering Bush to call a pointless photo-op summit at the White House and throwing  both the bail-out negotiation timetable and the debate timetable into question. Perversely, he leaves the meeting having said barely a word. Meanwhile, his campaign tries to shelter running mate Sarah Palin from any meaningful and/or revealing dialog with the press, after having created the overnight Palin media sensation in the first place.

The political process in this country, like the economy, like our foreign policy, has become a series of bombshells and cliffhangers. History has been replaced by a narrative for short attention spans, akin to HBO, the Hollywood blockbuster cycle and the comic book.

As much as I love comics, I like them to stay on the page, or if they have to stray at all, into a theater. Even then, I’m weary. And watching John McCain over the last two weeks has been a lot of bad theater. The cheep melodrama is getting so thick, even conservatives are loosing their shit. And who could blame them? The GOP is trying to distract us long enough to steel the election. And I mean steal – at this point that’s the only credible way this freakish clown could get into office – through malfeasance, shenanigans and a complete disregard for the American people and the democratic process. Unfortunately, he’s shown that he has all of these, in spades.

The election is yours to loose, Obama. Try not to be that much of a Democrat. Because the next four years we need something different, not a Dukakis side show that leads to Prince John of the Death Wish and little Princess Sarah the Cheerleader, bringing on the Doom.

Link via Xeni Jardin on Twitter.

I took these with my new camera phone. Pretty decent image quality for a telephone, I think.

Douglas Rushkoff on the economic fuffallah and why it might not be as bad as all that:

All this means is that you can’t count on capitalism anymore. Your wealth is not how many paper assets you have. It’s not even how much land you have (or think you have). It’s what you can do. It’s your value to other people.

The real economy need not suffer in the downfall of the speculative economy. If anything, the real economy has been repressed by the speculative economy. Real farmers have been crushed by Big Agra, real druggists have been crushed by Wal-Mart and real transportation alternatives have been crushed by Big Oil and Big Auto.

The opportunity here, while the big boys are down, is to rebuild the genuine, local commercial infrastructure. To make shoes, clothes, food, education, healthcare and everything else we can in a bottom-up fashion. While speculators enjoy the economy of scale, we inhabit an ecology scaled to the human being that was lost in the corporatist equation.

So, chill out people. We can still build and create and think and innovate. We just have to remember that our wealth lies not in what commodities can be bought and sold but what we can do that improves the human condition. Even if you loose your home and can’t fill the gas tank in your car, you still have something of worth to contribute to society. All you have to do is figure out what that is and how to make it available. Preferably without getting a corporation between you and the human market.

Rushkoff also has a manifesto of sorts up at Boingboing.

It’s really hard to play video games when the cats have decided to make you their sofa.

Wednesday night we went to hear Naomi Klein talk about her book, The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I haven’t had the time to properly digest everything she talked about but some initial thoughts:

She did a remarkable job of explaining the shock doctrine* and how it applies to not just recent history (both the obvious, like 9/11 and the fall of communism) and with tying it in with the election and the economic meltdown.

(more…)

You may have noticed this week that the world was not destroyed. While this tends to happen on a fairly regular basis, this week the world didn’t blow up in spite of unfounded concern about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Some people were afraid that by turning on the LHC, the world would be converted into Strange Matter, sucked into a micro black hole or would in some other way befall a fate worse than a mediocre episode of Stargate SG-1.

Or maybe it did.

Perhaps by turning on the LHC,* the fundamental properties of physics have gone subtly but irrevocably boink. You can’t tell, see, because we’re on this side of the event horizon and everything on Earth 2 is at an oblique angle to how things were on Earth 1.

For example:

On Earth 1, John McCain said that governors and mayors weren’t experienced enough to be Vice President or President while in Earth 2, he nominated Sarah Palin, who is now a world renowned Russian expert due solely to her being able to see Russia from the Governor’s mansion in Alaska.**

Also, on Earth 2, the US Army has a super secret weapon that is as revolutionary  in modern warfare as the tank or the nuclear bomb. You just can’t, you know, see it. My guess? Yaks with laser beam eyes. It’s a post-LHC world, baby. If the GOP can field a woefully unqualified soccer mom for the VP slot and still be taken seriously, then yaks now have laser beam eyes. QED, bitches.

_______

* The large hadrons are not yet colliding, as the proton flow is only going in one direction. At near the speed of light. How cool is that? So long as they don’t cross the streams, we should be OK.

** Which means that, because I can see the moon form my window, I am now an astronaut. Suck on it, Neil Armstrong!

Librarians for Palin? Are you high? She threatened to fire one of us for not doing her bidding and you think this is the sort of person who deserves to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? When that heartbeat is farting around in the 72 year old chest of john Effing McCain?

At least the Librarians Against Palin have the good sense to use Wordpress.

Links via Jessamyn West (who is also on Twitter)

Update: Pam Spalding at Pandagon finds ABC doing some actual journalism on Sarah Palin and her taste in literature.

The house in which Jerry Siegel created Superman is in poor shape. Watch this video and see how you can help save an antional historic landmark and a piece of American mythology.