On my last day blogging under these auspices (now you can find me here), I yield the floor to fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, from The Country of Marriage (buy it, you won't be sorry). Years ago, this one resided on the wall of our downstate outhouse, which looked out on just such a tree: 

THE OLD ELM TREE BY THE RIVER

Economist and blogger Brad DeLong talks about his favorite economist:

"Marx saw that the coming of capitalist economies destroyed all feudal, traditional, and patriarchal relationships and orders. [Joseph] Schumpeter saw farther: that market capitalism destroys its own earlier generations. There is, he wrote, a constant 'process of industrial mutation -- if I may use that biological term -- that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in, and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.'"

Not to mention its employees. 

The late congressperson Henry Hyde, speaking at Notre Dame 24 Sep 1984:

"Many of the same voices who hailed the American bishops as 'prophetic' when they tacitly endorsed the nuclear freeze now find the bishops 'scary' when the issue turns to abortion. This is hypocrisy."

An excellent point. Of course, it applies equally the other way around -- these days, to those who talk about the pope's opposition to abortion but ignore what he said about the US war in Iraq.

Henry Hyde was well qualified to speak of hypocrisy, having managed the impeachment of a Democratic president for perjury and then kept quiet about the far more consequential perjuries of his Republican successor. His legacy is that of a partisan first, with patriotism and morality trailing well behind.

H/t Jameson Campaigne for the link.

Thanks to Whet for pointing me toward Penelope Green's NY Times piece on "eco decorating." Among other extreme weirdness, she describes conceptual event planner David Stark, who was commissioned to do the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's awards gala in October. He "directed the museum to shred its office paper for six months, producing a harvest that he augmented with 12 years of his personal tax returns and his own office’s papers. He then turned the resulting 6,000 pounds of paper strips into giant topiaries and chandeliers, floridly archaic shapes fashioned from trash. It was the language of excess -- those topiaries recalled the gardens of Versailles -- expressed in the material of frugality."

And that's as good as it gets in our "Prius culture" -- James B. Twitchell's word for the situation in which "We know things are wrong. We don’t know what we can do. We can’t know. And so we do what marketers encourage us to do to get those feelings we want to have."

Joel Makower at Two Steps Forward reports on a survey of green marketing that TerraChoice Environmental Marketing made at six big-box stores. Their research teams found 1,753 green claims made for 1,018 products. Most of them (57 percent) were misleadingly narrow, and 26 percent offered no proof either on the product or on its website. Fewer than 1 percent were actually false.

Neither Makower nor I would call this "greenwashing," as TerraChoice does. Would other claims made for products stand up even this well? I'll make a wild guess that, for the moment, green marketing is actually a bit more honest than marketing in general -- a low standard to be sure, but if the environmental movement could raise the standards of 21st-century capitalism in this area, it should count for something.  

The important thing about the mainstream media isn't whether they lean one way or the other politically on a particular occasion. The important thing is that they are deeply stupid. Jamison Foster at Media Matters:

"No moderator [in the candidate debates so far] has asked a single question of a single candidate about whether the president should be able to order the indefinite detention of an American citizen, without charging the prisoner with any crime.

"But Tim Russert did ask Congressman Dennis Kucinich -- in what he felt compelled to insist was 'a serious question' -- whether he has seen a UFO.

"No moderator has asked a single question about whether the candidates agree with the Bush administration's rather skeptical view of congressional oversight.

"But Hillary Clinton was asked, 'Do you prefer diamonds or pearls?'"

Admit it. You've always wanted to know where Chicago's last wood-block pavement, tied houses, and black-on-yellow street signs are -- not to mention what became of Almond Street and DeKalb Avenue. Now you can, because the folks at Forgotten Chicago remember. (The "tied houses" are a parable of do-gooder regulation backfiring.) The site is Not Safe For Work...because if you are a true Chicago geek you may well forget to do any.

H/t to the Newberry Library.

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. Reviewing two recent books on the Great Depression and FDR's response to it, Benjamin Friedman in the New York Review of Books ($) adduces some numbers that call into question the right-wing revisionist historians' contention that FDR did nothing (or less than nothing) to end the nation's greatest economic catastrophe, and that only WWII saved us. From 1929 to March 1933, total economic production dropped steeply and repeatedly.

"March 1933 marked the bottom. Total production rose 11 percent in 1934, 9 percent in 1935, and then 13 percent in 1936 -- just enough to regain the level reached in 1929. But by then businesses in many industries had learned to make do with less labor, even if they now produced just as much." The one-year decline in 1937-38 was smaller and quickly ended.

World War II didn't start until 1939.

These numbers seem to be incompatible with the assertions that FDR's policies perpetuated the Depression and discouraged business innovation. Is there some good economic reason why they're wrong or irrelevant? 

From the website of the Chicago Reporter:

"Nearly half of Chicago police officers sued for fatally shooting civilians were previously sued for misconduct. Some say that should be a warning sign, but is anyone paying attention?"

For those who are, the Reporter and ColorLines magazine have developed a database of police shootings since 2000.

Lead reporter Jeff Kelly Lowenstein:

"The Chicago Reporter examined 85 fatal police shootings since 2000 and identified 17 wrongful death suits filed in federal court using the victims’ names. Though the Chicago Police Department does not disclose the names of officers who shoot civilians, the Reporter found the names of 20 officers who were identified in the lawsuits as a shooter. The Reporter’s investigation into the officers’ previous litigation history found that nine—or 45 percent—of them had been sued previously in either federal or circuit court."

Bear in mind that there are 13,000 Chicago cops. So this group is neither characteristic of the department nor too large to get the careful attention it deserves.

"These police officers’ actions, which have cost the city more than $7 million, resulted in lawsuits that were filed at the same time when most fatal police shootings appear to be declared justified."