solid, air, etc.

My National Novel Writing Month project began with a simple premise. What if major corporations decided that planned obsolescence wasn't aggressive enough a strategy for provoking consumer purchases of new goods. What if, instead, they had teams of people who broke into our houses, broke our stuff, and made it look like normal wear and tear?

I wrote a brief scene of this last summer sometime, and then it turned into this novel.

And then the novel turned from being a goofy little satire on consumerism, into a black comedy about corporate capitalism. It's become a Kafkaesque satire, which is to say, it's funny in the way that things are funny when your choices are laughing or doom. It's the kind of funny people will appreciate who also appreciate the humor of these lines from the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

I know! And that's Karl Marx, not Groucho!

legal nooz

Also from the Chronic, renowned Roseville scholar Jeanne Caldwell and her husband Larry's lawsuit against UC Berkeley for hosting a web page (that's a page) noting that evolution could be compatible with religious beliefs was turned down without comment by the US Supremes.

The Caldwells are very disappointed. No word yet on whether they'll reconcile with reality at some point.

a grass-roots understanding of economic fundamentals

I would never be confused with an expert in finance. For one thing, on my campus, those people make waaaaaaay more money than I do. But I also have a very simple-minded conception of economic activity that has almost no relation to what goes on in The World Of FinanceTM.

Take this line from the Reuters story about the financial bailout summit held this weekend:

"The weekend produced the hoped-for result, a broad assault on the main problem, undercapitalized banks," said ING Bank economist Tim Condon.

See, I think the main problem is something different, not related to banks.

When John McCain was caught saying he thought the "fundamentals" of our economy are strong, and then later saying the economy was at risk, he had the story partly right, but as usual, didn't tell the truth about it. Mere hours after he said the economy was sound, the finance and credit universe was sucked into a black hole, and so McCain looked foolish. To cover up, his campaign started to back-pedal and say he meant that the basis of economic growth - labor, ingenuity, commitment, etc. - was sound. Obviously, that wasn't sincere. But more to the point, it was also false.

The economy is not what the Dow Industrials or the S&P 500 measure. They measure a large-scale high-stakes poker game that the vast majority of us will never, ever win.

The people with a stake in the poker game are trying to make large sums of money by tricking the system (that's what poker's all about), so they do things like buy companies, sell their assets, and hope to come out with a profit. They don't care about productivity or people eating. They sell loans to people in order to make money off of those people's productive labor. They don't care whether that labor really produces anything; they just want the profit from it. They're not responsible.

So, here in the US, this game has resulted in the systematic de-skilling of millions of people, the outsourcing of millions of jobs. Now that selling stuff to one another on credit is becoming a less sustainable form of employment, we all may have to start actually doing things, making things, growing things, and so forth. And we don't know how.

If, as no more socialist a thinker as Adam Smith theorized, human labor is the source of economic wealth, a workforce that has un-learned how to produce anything actually consumable simply can't create any wealth. If that's the "fundamentals" of an economy, then all the cash anybody wants to give to banks in the 1st world won't make any difference, because we can't make anything.

update on real estate madness

Our friends and neighbors, Christina and Guerin, also received a notice of termination, for the "common area" and driveway. Their garage is attached to their unit, and ours isn't. Could this be some weird seizure of the garages?

There's a backstory here. A few weeks ago we started having difficulty with our garage door opener. We used to be able to click the button and open the garage from the head of the driveway, at least 100 feet away. Suddenly we had to be right in front of it. The door also wouldn't close properly. Eventually it stopped working altogether. They changed the sensors, then the drive unit, and finally the remote.

Then the next-door garage door opener stopped working. Then two more. Then all them along that row. Last time the garage door guy was here (for the fourth time), last week, he said it had something to do with interference from the airport. I don't know what that really means or how it could be, but that's what he said.

So, scenario 1: The owners have realized that unlockable, nonworking garage doors are an insurance liability, and they're responding in the only way owners can think of, which is to take them all away. Why they would need to terminate our tenancy on the driveway and parking space, I don't know. It doesn't follow.

Scenario 2: The post office has only delivered the first round of letters, and everyone's tenancy is being terminated, because the dump is closing. That could be plausible, if, say, the owners are being foreclosed on, or if they want to take advantage of the high level of foreclosures and sell these as individual units, sort of condo-like (they once were, we've heard). This makes sense because people who are being thrown out of their $400,000 mortgages could still feel the pride of ownership of a $200,000 mortgage here. Perhaps.

We don't know. We've put in numerous calls to the manager, but it's the weekend.