You Might Want to Check Your Hat (and Assumptions) at the Door...

• Via the sidebar at Ian Welsh's blog, The Archdruid Report takes a long and not optimistic view of the future.

  In the last years of the nineteenth century, it was common for politicians, pundits, and mass media in the United States, the British empire, and other industrial nations to discuss the possibility that the advanced civilization of the time might be headed for the common fate of nations in due time. The intellectual history of the twentieth century is, among other things, a chronicle of how that discussion was shoved to the margins of our collective discourse, just as the ecological history of the same century is among other things a chronicle of how the worries of the previous era became the realities of the one we’re in today. The closer we’ve moved toward the era of impact, that is, the more unacceptable it has become for anyone in public life to point out that the problems of the age are not just superficial.

  Yes, it is long, and yes, it is presumed you know history.  Deal.  There's more, and it is not reassuring.
• I was there because I followed a link from Avedon's Sideshow to an Ian Welsh (aha!) article on East Germans twenty-five years later.  Katarina Witt was not alone.  Plus a mention of comparative surveillance.
• I have the makings of a rant coming on.  You may want to assemble protective clothing now.