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Infinite monkeys, finite resources

Ever heard of The Infinite Monkey Theorem? It goes something like this: Given infinite time, a monkey banging randomly on typewriter keys would reproduce a given work, such as Hamlet. Variations of the theorem add more monkeys to reproduce more works, such as the complete plays of Shakespeare, or all the books in the British [...]

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The Grapes of Wrath II

“On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment. . . . In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” (The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939) “What goes around comes around. . [...]

Asides

• Are we already in "a new Dark Age"? Here's what Michael Minnicino says: "The people of North America and Western Europe now accept a level of ugliness in their daily lives which is almost without precedent in the history of Western civilization. Most of us have become so inured, that the death of millions from starvation and disease draws from us no more than a sigh, or a murmur of protest. Our own city streets, home to legions of the homeless, are ruled by Dope, Inc., the largest industry in the world, and on those streets Americans now murder each other at a rate not seen since the Dark Ages. At the same time, a thousand smaller horrors are so commonplace as to go unnoticed. Our children spend as much time sitting in front of television sets as they do in school, watching with glee, scenes of torture and death which might have shocked an audience in the Roman Coliseum. Music is everywhere, almost unavoidable—but it does not uplift, nor even tranquilize—it claws at the ears, sometimes spitting out an obscenity. Our plastic arts are ugly, our architecture is ugly, our clothes are ugly. . . . A majority of the population is losing the cognitive ability to transmit to the next generation, the ideas and methods upon which our civilization was built. The loss of that ability is the primary indicator of a Dark Age. And, a new Dark Age is exactly what we are in. In such situations, the record of history is unequivocal: either we create a Renaissance—a rebirth of the fundamental principles upon which civilization originated—or, our civilization dies." This excerpt is from a lengthy article published on The Schiller Institute website, reprinted from an article by Minnicino in Fidelio Magazine, Winter, 1992. #
• "We may be approaching the end of the era of American possibility," writes Orville Schell in TomDispatch. He despairs over "the best" of America's public educational institutions "driven into the ground thanks to devastating, repeated budget cuts; a national energy system . . . terminally strung out on oil and coal . . . the court system, overburdened and under-funded, but struggling to deliver justice. The federal government, essentially busted; Congress, increasingly paralyzed and largely incapable of delivering solutions to the country’s most pressing problems; state government, largely broke; the Interstate highway system . . . bridges and tunnels . . . dikes, water systems, and many other aspects of the national infrastructure . . . old and deteriorating; airlines, some of the sorriest in the world with the oldest, dirtiest, and least up-to-date planes and the requisite run-down airports to go with them; ports that are falling behind world standards; a railroad passenger system which, unlike countries from Spain to China, has not one mile of truly high-speed rail; the country’s financial system whose over-paid executives not only ran us off an economic cliff in 2008, but also managed to compromise the whole system itself in the eyes of the world; broadcast media . . . a grossly overly-commercialized, broken-down mess that has gravely let down the country in terms of keeping us informed; newspapers, in a state of free-fall; book publishing, heading in the same direction . . . a food industry which subsidizes sugar and starch, stuffs people with fast-food, and leaves 60% of the population overweight; basic manufacturing, like the automobile industry, evidently headed for oblivion, or China, whichever comes first; the American city, hollowing out and breaking down; the prison system, one of America’s few growth industries but a pit of hopelessness. . . ." His list is "just a gesture in the direction of larger-scale decline," he notes. "You’ll undoubtedly be tempted to add to it yourself." #
• "An Uneasy Feeling" is the title of an op-ed by Bob Herbert in the New York Times. "Staggering numbers of Americans are still unemployed and nearly a quarter of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth," he writes. "Forget the false hope of modestly improving monthly job numbers. The real story right now is the entrenched suffering (with no end in sight) that has been inflicted on scores of millions of working Americans by the Great Recession and the misguided economic policies that preceded it. . . . There was no net job creation — none — between December 1999 and now. None! . . . Middle-class families in 2008 actually earned less, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999. The data for 2009 are not yet in, but you can just imagine . . . . One in eight Americans, and one in four children, are on food stamps. Some six million Americans . . . have said that food stamps were their only income. This is a society in deep, deep trouble and the fixes currently in the works are in no way adequate to the enormous challenges we’re facing." #
• In "Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won," New York Times reporters describe how Goldman Sachs and other financial firms earned billions and cost their customers trillions "creating mortgage-related securities . . . intended to protect Goldman from investment losses if the housing market collapsed. . . . Worried about a housing bubble, top Goldman executives decided in December 2006 to change the firm’s overall stance on the mortgage market, from positive to negative, though it did not disclose that publicly. . . . Goldman created even more of these securities, enabling it to pocket huge profits. . . . Pension funds and insurance companies lost billions of dollars on securities that they believed were solid investments. . . . Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s — and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc., an investment company whose parent firm was overseen by Lewis A. Sachs, who this year became a special counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. How these disastrously performing securities were devised is now the subject of scrutiny by investigators in Congress, at the Securities and Exchange Commission and at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s self-regulatory organization . . . . One focus of the inquiry is whether the firms creating the securities purposely helped to select especially risky mortgage-linked assets that would be most likely to crater, setting their clients up to lose billions of dollars if the housing market imploded. Some securities packaged by Goldman and Tricadia ended up being so vulnerable that they soured within months of being created. . . . 'The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,' said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. 'When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.'" #
• In "Obama's Big Sellout," Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi says "the president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway" which could ultimately cost taxpayers $23.7 trillion. "And while the government continues to dole out big money to big banks, Obama and his team . . . have done almost nothing to reform the warped financial system responsible for imploding the global economy in the first place." Indeed, they have promoted legislation to protect credit-default swaps from regulation and to give the White House "permanent and unlimited authority to execute future bailouts of megaconglomerates like Citigroup and Bear Stearns" without congressional approval or oversight. "A president elected on a platform of change" ended up "institutionaliz[ing] the policy, firmly established during the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else." Such a result was predictable when the president appointed "an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes [with] absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich." #