David Brooks on Midlife Crisis Economics: "The Country is Middle-Aged but Self-Indulgent"

David Brooks
at the New York Times
has astute analysis about

Midlife Crisis Economics

writing inter alia:

"[I]n the progressive era, the country was young and vibrant. The job was to impose economic order. Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated. Interest groups have emerged to protect the status quo. The job is to restore old disciplines, strip away decaying structures and reform the welfare state. The country needs a productive midlife crisis."

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to CaryGEE.

Copyright Orange: A Rapidly Ticking Clock of Coming Massive Copyright Problems

Randy Kennedy has the story at The New York Times Art & Design Section
in Art & Leisure, Apropos Appropriation,
stating that the Richard Prince Lawsuit Focuses on Limits of Appropriation,
and writing inter alia:

"[I]f the case has had any effect so far, it has been to drag into the public arena a fundamental truth hovering somewhere just outside the legal debate: that today’s flow of creative expression, riding a tide of billions of instantly accessible digital images and clips, is rapidly becoming so free and recycling so reflexive that it is hard to imagine it being slowed, much less stanched, whatever happens in court."

Read the whole thing with a discussion of the case, etc.

2012 and America Still Lives in Denial of Energy Realities via Excessive Consumption of Oil and Gas

Henry Blodget at Business Insider has the story at It's 2012--It's Just Absurd That We're Still Addicted To Middle-Eastern Oil, where he writes, inter alia:

"[T]he United States still consumes about 20%-25% of the world's oil production, 50% more than the entire European Union, more than twice as much as China, and more than twice as much as we produce."

Yup, that's right. And little has been done about massive and senseless overconsumption of energy for decades.

Read more at Business Insider:

We posted about this quite apparent problem some time ago at LawPundit at Oil & Gas Cartels and American Inertia on Energy Issues : Major Culprits for the Current Economic Situation in the World?