We’re flying out of Las Vegas today after a week vacation in Utah and Arizona. Neither Sue nor I gamble, but we did walk down The Strip where the major casinos are. Acres of neon. Bigger is better is the ethos. Enormous hotel / casino complexes try to create a simacrulum of something else. Even more than Hollywood, Vegas is based on artifice, simulation, and phoniness. At least Hollywood has a core, but there’s no There there in Vegas, everything pretends to be something else.  I mean, the New York New York facade, with its portrayal of a skyline that never existed in the first place is quite possible the most ridiculous looking building ever.

The hotels have thousands of rooms, all air-conditioned of course. Arizona and Utah are currently mounting campaigns to stop Nevada from grabbing their water supplies. The power grid is straining to meet demand. Yet, mindlessly, hotels get blown up so newer, gaudier ones can be built, apparently without the slightest concern for energy and water consumption or for building efficiently and with green concepts.

How anti-green is Vegas? Walking down the Strip yesterday night at 9pm when it was still 100 degrees, some of the sidewalks had air conditioning ducts blowing cool air onto passersby. Is this not insane?

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Calculated Risk wonders how a retired investor thought he could get a low risk investment yielding 12% from a Bear Stearns hedge fund invested in mortgages when mortgages weren’t paying anywhere close to 12%. Thus, the hedge fund must have been leveraged and thus highly risky.

And in fact it was. The investor lost everything. What was he thinking? What was anyone involved in this thinking? That money could be generated risk-free endlessly from highly risky, leveraged “investments” apparently. Which is the classic definition of a bubble.

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Man swims at North Pole

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“If you think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will end with this Presidency, think again. These wars will likely outlast the next several Presidents” says John Robb, citing a number of reasons why this 4GW conflict will continue.

For those of us active in the antiwar movement, he offers little hope

Further, the ongoing fragmentation of national consensus we are experiencing (at all layers), due to a combination of globalization and alternative media conduits, makes it impossible for the opposition to mount any effort of consequence.

So, how do we mount unified, massive opposition to the war? A mass movement is needed, yet seems hard to create, even when the majority now opposes the war.

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