I enjoy Don Peck’s attempt at capturing the zeitgeist of the American empire’s decline – the article over at The Atlantic Online includes more than a few choice observations and anecdotal truisms for a generation losing its grasp on the American Dream and its alternately apathetic and unprepared antecedents:

Some neighbors were at the Walmart a couple of weeks ago, he said, and he rang up their purchase. “Maybe they were used to seeing me in a different setting,” he said—in a suit as he left for work in the morning, or walking the dog in the neighborhood. Or “maybe they were daydreaming.” But they didn’t greet him, and he didn’t say anything. He looked down at his soup, pushing it around the bowl with his spoon for a few seconds before looking back up at me. “I know they knew me,” he said. “I’ve been in their home.”

- How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
by Don Peck for The Atlantic Online
March 2010

Economic Recession as Vampiric Entity

How does one invite such malaise? The boom years, the lives unexamined, the wrong prescription, and complacency.

Will the ignorance and susceptibility to manipulation cultivated in the US population finish sucking the value out of the dollar and lead the country to the relative wasteland of a developing nation?

… In closed markets and/or less-open cultures, corporations can have powerful identities. In Japan, for example, many people feel privileged to work for their corporations and attribute a great deal of identity and benevolence to them. In the United States, large corporations will also contain many people who treat “the corporation” as a specific entity, capable of rewarding or punishing them.

Just like religious and racial groups, corporations will do their best to influence the government for their own ends.

- God Wants You Dead
by Sean Hastings and Paul Rosenberg

Executive Summary

This document and linked multimedia describe the individual identity’s corporate identity sublimation and the brand-imprint process follow-up for new hires.

[Day 01] Agenda: Orientation Video

SNOG

[Day 02 - Dismissal] Agenda: Work Hard

The Faint

We’ve seen massive problems now with the election of state court judges from special interest groups that want to affect the election…That was the reason why we went to elections in the first place, to get rid of special interests. But now they’ve come back with money, and so we have to re-examine again how we need to fix that.

- Sandra Day O’Connor
1/26/2010 Interview

I’ve got an apartment on the beach and a decent job. But I honestly don’t think I’ve reached my full potential partially because after a long day of work, I just love dominating people in MW2 too much. I’d rather do that than come home from work only to continue working towards my other ambitions.

- What Parents Think Their Kids Learn From Video Games
by Stephen Totilo for Kotaku
2010-01-06

The Internet is Win: Random, pointless, and/or amazing things I would never have known about without an internet connection.