Man, that Thorstein Veblen was such a cut-up.

Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of conspicuous waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are one or two details which merit specific mention as showing how it may exercise an extreme constraint in detail over men’s sense of beauty in women. It has already been noticed that at the stages of economic evolution at which conspicuous leisure is much regarded as a means of good repute, the ideal requires delicate and diminutive hands and feet and a slender waist. These features, together with the other, related faults of structure that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be supported in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she is consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength.

It results that at this cultural stage women take thought to alter their persons, so as to conform more nearly to the requirements of the instructed taste of the time; and under the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the resulting artificially induced pathological features attractive. So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so wide and persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture, and so also the deformed foot of the Chinese. Both of these are mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense. It requires habituation to become reconciled to them. Yet there is no room to question their attractiveness to men into whose scheme of life they fit as honorific items sanctioned by the requirements of pecuniary reputability. They are items of pecuniary and cultural beauty which have come to do duty as elements of the ideal of womanliness.

Although he doesn’t mention them, high-heeled shoes also belong to this category, as do tattoos and piercings.

Thorstein’s favorite pick-up line: “Hey baby, your unquestionably repulsive mutilations are really turning me on.”

All of us here at Wad’s Place are completely habituated in our reconciliation of these matters.

While traveling abroad, perhaps the first things an American will recognize are the fast-food joints, the meals from which possess dubious nutritional value and may be hazardous to your health. The next things from home he or she is likely to see are cigarettes, the use of which provide no noteworthy pleasure and are certainly hazardous to your health, nearly as dangerous as heroin. The export of pop-stars to foreign countries is too depressing to discuss, as are the gangster-fashions, wardrobes, and lifestyles that go with them.

But even with that sordid assortment of offerings, the latest profoundly tragic United States export still stands out starkly and has already proven to be hazardous and possibly fatal to the nation of Georgia; it has already proven fatal to many Georgians.

Manufacturing a crisis out of lies as justification for invading a sovereign nation, overthrowing it’s government, recklessly killing its populace and destroying its infrastructure simply because you want to remove its leader from power is surely the most gruesome and shameful thing the United States has ever peddled overseas.

Which is why George W. Bush, certainly no stranger to looking like an ass, may as well have jammed his head straight up his own ass rather than try to scold Vladimir Putin for invading Georgia; that at least might have impressed a few people.

Unfortunately, Georgia is a strong ally of the United States and could have used our support in this crisis. Last year, Georgia doubled its troop presence in Iraq at a time when we needed support. Sucks to be them. They clearly made a huge tactical mistake in choosing The United States as an ally.

Russia is in ascension and Putin knows that America can’t do shit to stop him as all our troops are already committed to spreading democracy elsewhere.

Remember when The United States of America was all about Truth, Justice and Liberty? Or did I just dream that?

Conservatives these days don’t conserve. Indeed, they clearly want the unfettered right to use all of our resources most liberally. Liberals, on the other hand, are most often heard trying to save various parts of the world in which we live from the un-checked greed of corporations.

So, let’s stop talking nonsense. You folks that like to think of yourselves as conservatives as you drive around in your gas-guzzling Reagan-mobiles should start calling yourselves Nationalists, because that’s what you are.

And the others, the tree-huggers, the dirt-worshippers that want everyone to just get along and enjoy the general welfare, you call yourselves Socialists, because that’s what you are.

And you’re all a bunch of assholes.

Watch how this mealy-mouthed weasel dances around making any statement at all. He is the very picture of a dissembling liar, which of course, makes him the perfect replacement for Dan Levin, who was fired when he spoke out against torture.

Duplicitous ass-clowns like this will have to be behind bars before anyone can, once again, take pride in being American.

To the critics, I ask them this: when we, within the law, interrogate and get information that protects ourselves and possibly others in other nations to prevent attacks, which attack would they have hoped that we wouldn’t have prevented?

You really have to respect the man’s progress. Considering how much trouble he’s had in the past with speaking simple English sentences, this one’s a veritable tour de force. He and his handlers must have rehearsed it for days, maybe weeks.

It also shows how desperate they are. This torture thing is seriously going to bite Bush and his friends in the ass. As soon as the people of the United States decide we were better off when we possessed a sense of nobility based on our embrace of the concept of justice, the torturers (Bush, Cheney, and all their weasely minions) are going to face criminal trials.

Sure, it will be complicated because of all the shitty immunity bills they managed to ram-rod through congress, but it will happen.

Don Siegelman, Wes Teel, and now Sue Schmitz, a 63-year-old retired social studies teacher from Alabama. All being aggressively prosecuted with unusual ferocity for questionable crimes. (Sue Schmitz is accused of not punching the clock for her job that started at 37k and ended at 53k.)

Last time I heard, when employees perform poorly they are spoken to or fired, not apprehended like violent criminals (Mrs. Schmitz was pulled from her shower in the early morning before being frog-marched to jail). But the Bush Administration wants desperately to make Democrats appear corrupt because they have no better hope of hiding their own corruption, which is legendary. Alberto may be gone but the stink just keeps getting stronger.

Why is it that not a single crime has been investigated among the mercenaries and contractors in the war in Iraq? Simple: those companies are all Republican campaign contributors. And why have the above mentioned three (and probably others) been treated like violent criminals for what appear to be very petty indictments? Simple: they are guilty of being successful while voting democratic.

Make no mistake, the attorney scandal was, at its heart, all about rigging elections. The attorneys fired were let go for not aggressively prosecuting the democratic targets handed down from Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Karl left when it got too hot, but he’s probably not gone far, as his signature mendacity continues to thrive in the Justice Department.

The attorneys that were not fired are the real problems. Most of them are hacks with little or no talent for practicing law, but all of them are loyal Bushies. And that’s the real crime here.

We currently have a Justice Department that is far more concerned with political attacks than anything even remotely to do with justice. Attorney General Mukassey can’t even identify waterboarding as torture for that would incriminate his real boss, George Bush, not justice. It is clear: nothing is more likely to win you an indictment than being a democrat. You can rape, steal, torture and waste tax dollars by the plane-load, as long as you pay the right party.

The Bush Administration is doing so well. It’s amazing.

Sure, many of the big players have had to quit in disgrace, but that’s no big deal. Republicans today embrace all duplicity. You can be a convicted felon, a bigot, a racist; you’re still welcome in the GOP. You might even say you’re at home.

And to really appreciate the success of the Bush Administration, you need to ignore traditional measures like GDP and the strength of the economy, and don’t concern yourself with education or middle class wealth (of course).

Just focus on how much fun the president and his friends are having, how much they enjoy what they’re doing: abusing the power they stole, running up huge debt with the world’s largest credit card (the US Economy), sending other people’s children off to die far from home, playing with guns, wrecking the Justice Department and every other single government agency, and of course, awarding truckloads of no-bid contracts to all their friends, war profiteers like Haliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater.

George has a painting of a horse thief up in his office; he says it’s his favorite. Plenty of folks have made a lot of hay over his apparent affection for this depiction of a criminal; plenty have defended him for his simple enjoyment of a pretty picture. I think we should stop defending him.

He’s doing just fine, really. Stop defending him, stop listening to him, stop paying any attention to him at all, and he will go away. I promise that’s true.

Here’s something to cheer you down: Life in a Post-Carbon World was written over a year ago, so it’s not exactly news. But its message gets more pertinent everyday. Fuck all the debate. Fuck the oil companies, their record profits secured via the blood of our fighting men and women, and fuck their friends in the Bush Administration. None of that shit matters because no one has the balls to stop them, not you, not me. Their pernicious rampage will continue, aided and abetted by all of our docile, complicit, and sorry asses.

But one day, maybe sooner, maybe later, that shit’s gonna’ dry up, and when it does a sizable chunk of the world’s human population is going to die off. Hoping that it will be otherwise is ideological naiveté. Read about Peak Oil with as many grains of salt as you like. It’s only a question of time. Obviously the poorer you are the worse off you’ll likely be.

Ironically, for many of the other species of animals on this planet, the end of our petro-chemical era will be fantastic news.

Here’s a funny article; it says that oil recently discovered in the Gulf of Mexico could swell US oil reserves by 50%! Woopty-fuckin-doo. We’ll go from having a tiny fraction of the world’s oil reserves to a slightly larger tiny fraction. We were the world’s largest producer of oil up until the 50s, when the wells in Texas and Oklahoma started to run dry. Now we just consume the stuff like we have plenty. Needless to say the wheels of our economy are starting to wobble. The Canadian dollar just reached parity with ours and a Euro costs us $1.40 to buy. Oops, so much for that trickle-down effect. I guess giving free money to the super-rich doesn’t actually benefit anyone but the super-rich. Stunning.

Our choices would seem to fall into two categories: business as usual and let’s start doing research now.

Smart people will start doing research now. Most of us will be the business as usual types because we’re lame and we suck.

To start, what we need is a list of things in our lives that currently depend on petroleum. This is going to be a very long list and for most of the items there simply won’t be any alternatives. But we need to figure this out and soon.

But we won’t. Cuz we suck.

Harpers.org has posted a fascinating piece by Naomi Klein called Disaster Capitalism that delves deep into the way disasters no longer bring the country together, but instead are simply appropriated by the ideologically extreme to advance their ever-more radical notions about privatization, driving the wedge between the haves and the have-nots deeper and deeper in the process.

There will be more Katrinas. The bones of our states—so frail and aging—will keep getting buffeted by storms both climatic and political. And as key pieces of the infrastructure are knocked out [bridges collapse, subways flood], there is no guarantee that they will be repaired or rebuilt, at least not as they were before. More likely, they will be left to rot, with the well-off withdrawing into gated communities, their needs met by private suppliers.

Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Today they are moments when we are hurled further apart, when we lurch into a radically segregated future where some of us will fall off the map and others ascend to a parallel privatized state, one equipped with well-paved highways and skyways, safe bridges, boutique charter schools, fast-lane airport terminals, and deluxe subways.

To read it in its entirety, you’ll need to subscribe. But it’s worth it, not only for thoughtful and informative articles like this one that continue to get published every month, but also for access to Harper’s over 150 years of archived stories from world-class authors all available online on a world-class site that makes cross-indexing authors and subjects a breeze. Harpers.org is truly an American literary institution.

Both countries are led by an unpopular, ideologically extreme president with strong ties to fundamentalist religious wing-nuts.

Both countries have strong liberal yearnings for freedom and justice among the populace.

Both countries are populated in part by vain individuals who often place higher value in superficial traits than genuine attributes like honesty and integrity.

Both countries would suffer great, long-term harm from a war with the other, but the fringe extremists running those countries would exact short-term gains by, once again, taking advantage of the knee-jerk, jingoistic enthusiasm that always follows conflict (the same trick they used for stealing a second term).

We’ve all been listening to those who botched Iraq demonize Iran ever since it became clear that Iraq was a failed state with no hope (shortly after the “Mission Accomplished” stunt). Word on the street is that, in their desperation, they will be marshaling all of their toadies and complicit media/propaganda outlets for an intense blitz of disinformation designed to push for war with Iran starting the week after Labor Day.

Consider how bad Iraq has gone; Iran will be much worse. Iran actually has an army.