What I can’t stand is how the media reports these ‘black Friday’ incidents, denounces them, but then, in the next moment, cheers up and starts talking about what’s on sale at Such-and-Such. Accompanying this plastic concern for the sanity of society are the minute-by-minute meters that measure sales, to remind us how much this crap matters to our economic future.

Tis all a necessary devil, you see. But the irony is… for all these ragin’ sales, money is being lost, not gained. Discounted prices being paid for by plastic cards containing money that doesn’t exist, nor will ever will exist outside of the context of debt… Well, you tell me how this can forecast economic health. As for the apes that go around shooting, trampling, and pepper spraying people…

Call me old fashioned, but I much prefer the times when the day after Thanksgiving (or Thanksgiving, for that matter) was a quiet day. I’m old enough to remember that on TG, about the only businesses you’d find open were gas stations and convenience and/or liquor stores.
Streets and store lots were empty. People seemed to find content in the simple act of staying home. The Friday after TG, people that did go out shopping were mostly just getting out of the house, perhaps looking around for what they may or may not buy later, for Christmas. One might even say it was a boring day, and not the ragin’ big deal to the economy that it has become in the past decade or so.

Now, it is like rapid pitbulls, all of them just barely able to contain themselves at the ‘starting gate’. That is all there is to say about that. Compare that to the nice, long paragraph of things to be said about the better ol’ days. And yet, today is not just an abbreviation of what used to be. It’s a warped thing, one that, while most people and the media seem somewhat disturbed by the change, are willing to, in equally warped fashion, just shrug it off and treat the holiday season like it was always this way.

And _that_ is what I find most troubling. This past Thanksgiving, my neice, seeing these stories on the news, asked of no one in particular why people act this way. I explained that they hadn’t always, that over the last decade and a half has seen this transformation take place. She didn’t know what I was talking about because, being only 16, she has no other view of the holiday season. People have, in her experience, always been raging shopoholics, especially this time of year. And while she is disgusted with that, it is none the less a shame that she hasn’t grown up knowing better of her fellow human beings.

public policy – just another way to defraud populations?

“Until 2008, investors assumed that all euro- zone sovereign bonds, as well as bank debt, were risk-free and would never default. This made for a wonderfully profitable trade: European banks could buy government debt, finance it at less expensive rates through funding provided by the European Central Bank, and pocket the spread.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/the-euro-area-is-coming-to-an-end-peter-boone-and-simon-johnson.html

Is that the only purpose driving our current policy?

There has to be more meaning to life than this.

What do frauds spend their “spread” on? Politicians? Buying public offices? Desperate distractions?

Forget Black Friday & Cyber Monday. This has turned out to be more than one Black Decade & Fraud Culture. We’re losing our purpose.

“How” always has potential utility, but only in relation to “why”.

Banks started as a way to concentrate capital, which had value when information was even harder to concentrate.
Now that we can link more information, success follows our quality of distributed decision-making more than it does our concentrations of capital. Our decision should be to optimally distribute capital, in order to optimize unpredictably emerging asset allocation, for the purpose of exploring more group options, better/faster/leaner.

Concentrating capital has limited value. The rate of re-allocating capital for emerging purposes has far more value. All markets are ultimately “selection markets”, and adaptive rate trumps any static adaptive state.

Perhaps some of the 99%-ers realize their government allows wanton in-your-face lawlessness if the perpetrators are members of the 1%-er Class of Wall Street Gangster Banksters, so the masses conclude “hey, if those guys can get away with it …”

Why didn’t Jon “Sticky Fingers” Corzine spend his Thanksgiving Holiday in jail?

Remember Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF? He allegedly screws a hotel maid (a honey pot setup up, no doubt, to get him ousted) and he’s hauled off a plane and thrown in jail.

Corzine screws literally tens of thousands of individual investors and steals $1.4 Billion (and climbing) of their funds from so-called “segregated accounts” to meet the MF Global’s margin calls and that thieving bastard enjoyed a wonderful turkey dinner with his family over the weekend.

Why isn’t he in jail right now? It speaks to the corruption in Washington and on Wall Street to see this travesty of justice. After watching this example of crony capitalism, proving again that Wall Street Gangster Banksters control the Federal Government and its politicians, and Mainstream Media and its propaganda output, it should come as no surprise to find people in the streets and acting in increasingly lawless fashion themselves. They’ve been trained how to act by watching the Banksters and the Politicians.

….biting commentary JJ yet I’ll continue to take the other side of the coming collapse idea as extremely unlikely, when Rick writes comments suggesting he doesn’t think we’ll make it to the New Year before having such a collapse, I have to believe he’s enjoying sarcastic wit as by the way recently clearly evidenced by the upswing in retail sales this past weekend, well gee, somebody is out there spending money, eh? …the other problem I keep seeing with doomsday comments is that the whole “United States” is being plunged into a mess, etc. Generalization is the problem as I’ve said many times before; 50-100 million are heading down the tubes but the rest of the country is hopping along just fine thanks…Meanwhile a quick preview of the future comes from a recent speech in India by Pepsi’s CEO Ms. Nooyi stating that the global economy will over the next 40 years go from the current 63 T to 200 T, with China’s economy rising to 70 T…other tidbits I don’t have right in front of me but I’ll agree with her, I’ll defer to the doomsdayers on the collapse scenarios and I’ll assume she did a semblance of respectable research before making such statements on a platform. Of course none of us really knows, but to generalize, I’ll stick with believing the inflationary and therefore bullish pattern will continue across the globe for many more decades. You (plural) don’t really actually think that the USD is going to “collapse” and plunge the world into financial armageddon, do you? Gimme a break, there are dozens of other ways this financial scenario can play itself out with such an extreme outcome. And besides, doesn’t an expanding global economy actually need a few trillion extra currency assets injected into its financial system as it grows…?? The fact that more and more struggling Americans are starting to share home/rent costs finally hit the MSM with a recent article by Ruth Mantell over at Marketwatch, just like I said here the trend would be as is routine here in Asia, and indeed, that and related trend will continue… The biggest issue I see back in the states, re previous commentary is the problem of medical costs… but isn’t it the case that just about every state has a public hospital with cheap rates for people who are unemployed…? Like in Phoenix, I know a poorer person can go to Maricopa County Hospital… The U.S. will need them as the frustration driven violence continues to rise…Cheers, Mario