The bailouts demonstrate that climactic politico-economical collapse will never occur.People literally will make shit up in order to prevent the unimaginable. This is also the fundamental lesson of Hobbesian theory of state of nature. None of that to say we aren't undergoing a process of collapse. It's just that it's trajectory of decline is going to be very slow and incremental. The environment will probably collapse before we legitimately experience politico-economic collapse. Some people can see the winds of decline and are taking the self-sustainable route since relying on government guaranteed quality of life will kill you first (for a long time now the governmental allowed corporations to do us physical harm). The real question is: are you one of those people?
Left sidebar and search field are crunching the calendar, the actual thing I'm using, into a corner on my Gateway EC1803U netbook. I'm pretty sure the left sidebar can be assimilated into the row of shit under the search field.
There's actually room here to mention Michel Foucault as a hidden partner in the discussion in two ways:
* The political debates between Foucault and Chomsky in the seventies: Chomsky wholeheartedly believes in the application of justice to injust actions, Foucault was interested in how an act becomes just or unjust.
* The revolution in historical method effected by Foucault lies eliding the descriptive apparatus with which we usually explain the transmission and transformation of ideas (author, book, oeuvre, influence, tradition, consciousness); or, imagine if we did history as if consciousness and its attendant concepts were disqualified as descriptors.
The key to comprehending Foucault here is to suspend the following ideas:
* There exist a particular set of universals regulating historical description of a domain of knowledge
* "Consciousness", whatever that is, is a constitutive principle for that historical description
* The particular set of universals and consciousness exist inextricably, the latter buttressing the concepts of the former
Basically you can sketch a considerable amount of human history without reference to any human subject. You can accomplish a lot just by looking at what was said. What's more, you'll discover a completely set of rules and regularities when you do.
So I have a speculative interest in what discoveries for linguistics might be discovered with Google's method.