Tidbits From The Web #54

So you think you can...OUCH!
Vicious vortex...
20 disturbing facts about US healthcare...
Massive cosmic pileup on the Universe interstate...
What the world will look like by 2050...
Most painfully awesome Mike Tyson punchouts...
VODKA!
Remembering the boombox...
Sand art...
Hidden meanings in popular logos...
Call me...
Now that is a chess set!
Another awesome LEGO creation...
HD in slo-mo...
Spit or swallow?
Rowdy Romanian rugby rumbles...
Where do your federal taxes go?
Not even if you were the last man on Earth...
Surreal art...
If Dorothy stepped into Boogie Nights...
Beastie Boys vs Led Zeppelin by DJ Moule...
When you don't feel like explaining...again...
Part insect...part timepiece...
Why Congress won't investigate Wall Street...



Corn...it does a body good...





Dead or Alive?
Dead or Alive? can help you find answers to that all too common question of a person's existence. 'This site tracks whether famous people are still alive or whether they have passed away.' You can search the database of over 7800 people by last name, by age, by birthdate, sex, the field in which they excelled as well as by several other categories. There are even quizzes that list some really obscure famous people (a great resource for Trivia). On a positive note, our senior citizens, those over 85 years old, are listed with their ages. Currently there are 2 entries for people over 100 years young!

Oxymorons.info

"An Oxymoron is a combination of contradictory or incongruous words, such as 'Cruel Kindness' or 'Jumbo Shrimp' (Jumbo means 'large' while Shrimp means 'small'). It is a literary figure of speech in which opposite or contradictory words, terms, phrases or ideas are combined to create a rhetorical effect by paradoxical means." How's that for an explanation of this word combination! Oxymorons.info is an interesting resource for word scholars and the general public, well organized by subject as well as accessible by alphabetic listing. You'll find 'Top Favorites' and 'Self-Contradictory,' a 'Daily Oxymoron' and even an 'Oxymoron Forum' where you can discuss your favorite rhetorical figures of speech. Do take your time when browsing through the site. As Sir Winston Churchill said to his chauffeur, "Drive slowly, we're in a hurry."

HAPPINESS

Join with those who sing, tell stories, enjoy life and have joy in their eyes—because happiness is contagious….Join those who walk with their heads held high, even though they have tears in their eyes. Stay away from those who hold their heads high because they've never shed a tear. --Paulo Coelho

Happiness is like manna; it is to be gathered in grains, and enjoyed every day. --Author unknown

"Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too." -Joyce Cary

He who wants to expand the field of happiness, let him lay the foundation of it on the bottom of his heart.

- Tao saying

FAITH

"Just as the body cannot exist without blood, so the soul needs the matchless and pure strength of faith." -- Mahatma Gandhi

"One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself." -- Lucille Ball

"When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: there will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly." -- Barbara J. Winter

"The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible." -- Richard M. DeVos

A HARMONIUS BALANCE

I have been through a lot and I have suffered a great deal. But I have had lots of happy moments, as well. Every moment one lives is different from the other. The good, the bad, hardship, the joy, the tragedy, love and happiness are all interwoven into one single, indescribable whole that is called LIFE. You cannot separate the good from the bad. And perhaps there is no need to do so, either.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis


[F]riendship is precious, not only in the shade but in the sunshine of life; & thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.

Thomas Jefferson

Whiskey & Gunpowder
By James Howard Kunstler
June 8, 2009
Saratoga Springs, New York, U.S.A.

Revolving Debt Cheap Energy Economy on Its Knees

Through the tangle of green shoots and sprouting mustard seeds, a certain nervous view persists that the arc of events is taking us to places unimaginable. The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler signifies more than the collapse of US car manufacturing. It spells the end of the motoring era in America per se and the puerile fantasy of personal liberation that allowed it to become such a curse to us.

Of course, many Nobel prize-winning economists would argue that it has only been a blessing for us, but that only shows how the newspapers are committing suicide-by-irrelevance. And if other societies, such as China’s late-entry industrial start-up, want to adopt a similar fantasy, they will only find themselves all the sooner in history’s garage with a tailpipe in their mouths.

Here in the USA, we will mount the most strenuous campaign to keep the motoring system going — in fact, we’re already doing it — but it will fail just as surely as two (so far) of the “big three” automakers have failed. It will fail because car-making is only one facet of a larger network of systems that is coming undone, namely a revolving debt cheap energy economy.

Americans will never again buy as many new cars as they were able to do before 2008 on the terms that were normal until then: installment loans. Our credit system is completely broken. It choked to death on securitized debt engineered by computer magic and business school hubris. That complex of frauds and swindles coincided with the background force of peak oil, which meant, among other things, that economic growth based on ever-increasing energy resources was over, and along with it ever-increasing credit. What it boils down to now is that we can’t service our debt at any level, personal, corporate, or government — and that translates into comprehensive societal bankruptcy.

The efforts of our federal government to work around this now, to cover up the “non-performing” debt and to generate the new lending necessary to keep the old system going, is a tragic exercise in futility. I’m not saying this to be “pessimistic” grandstanding doomer pain-in-the-ass, but because I would like to see my country make more intelligent choices that would permit us to continue being civilized, to move into the next phase of our history without a horrible self-destructive convulsion.

Another consequence of the debt problem is that we won’t be able to maintain the network of gold-plated highways and lesser roads that was as necessary as the cars themselves to make the motoring system work. The trouble is you have to keep gold-plating it, year after year. Traffic engineers refer to this as “level-of-service.” They’ve learned that if the level-of-service is less than immaculate, the highways quickly enter a spiral of disintegration. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported several years ago that the condition of many highway bridges and tunnels was at the “D-minus” level, so we had already fallen far behind on a highway system that had simply grown too large to fix even when we thought we were wealthy enough to keep up. Right now, we’re pretending that the “stimulus” program will carry us over long eno ugh to resume the old method of state-and-federal spending based largely on bonding (that is, debt).

The political dimension of the collapse of motoring is the least discussed part of problem: as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves able to buy and run cars, they will feel increasingly aggrieved at the system set up to make motoring virtually mandatory for all the chores of everyday life, and their resentments will rise against the elite that can still manage to enjoy it. Because our car-dependency is so extreme, the reaction of the dis-entitled classes is liable to be extreme and probably delusional to an extreme, too.

You can already see it being baked in the cake. Happy Motoring is so entangled in our national identity that the loss of it is bound to cause a national identity crisis. In places like the American south, the old Dixie states, motoring lifted more than half the population out of the dust, and became the basis of the New South economy. The sons and grandsons of starving sharecroppers became Chevy dealers and developers of suburban housing tracts, malls, and strip malls. They don’t have any nostalgia for the historical reality of hookworm and 14-hour-days of serf labor in hundred-degree heat. Theirs is a nostalgia for the present, for air-conditioned comfort and convenience and the groaning all-you-can-eat Shoney’s breakfast buffet off the freeway ramp. When it is withdrawn from them by the mandate of events, they will be furious.

Given the history of the region and the predilections of its dominant ethnic group, one might imagine that they will want to take out their gall and grievance on the half-African politician who presides over the situation. Among the ever-expanding classes dis-entitled from the so-called American Dream, the crisis is only marginally different in other regions of the nation. Mr. Obama faces a range of awful dilemmas, and it is painful to see them go unrecognized and unacknowledged by his White House. It’s hard to imagine that the president and his elite advisors are blind to these equations, but as the weeks tick by they seem stuck in a box of limited perception.

We’re in a strange hiatus for now. “Hope” levitates the legitimacy of the dollar, the stock markets, and the authority of leadership. In the background, implosion continues, debt goes unpaid, banks ignore bad loans to keep them off their books, jobs and incomes vanish, cars and other things go unsold, and a tragic wishfulness strains to sustain the unsustainable. Our expectations are inconsistent with what is happening to us.

It will be very painful for us to walk away from the car-centered life. Half the population faces the ugly obstacle of being hopelessly over-invested in a suburban house and all the life-ways associated with it. There will be no easy way out for them, whatever they chose to do politically, whatever noise they make, whomever they scapegoat, whatever fantasies they cultivate about what the world owes them, or who they think they are.

Mr. Obama should not waste another week pretending that we can keep this old system going. The public needs to know that we will be making our livings differently, inhabiting the landscape differently, and spending our days and nights differently — even while we suffer our losses. The public needs to hear this from more figures than Mr. Obama, too, from leaders in the state capitals, and the agencies, and business and education and what remains of the clergy. But somebody has to set in motion the chain of recognition, or events will soon do it for us.

Peace, love and happiness...until next time...