“I don’t believe it’s too late to change course, but it will be if we don’t take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years.”

So declared President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday, explaining why the nation needs an extremely aggressive government response to the economic downturn. He’s right. This is the most dangerous economic crisis since the Great Depression, and it could all too easily turn into a prolonged slump.

focused on a 25 percent drop in overall drug use among youths since 2001, when he took office.

2008 survey found that at least one in eight high school seniors reported abusing prescription painkillers and stimulants obtained from friends, relatives or schoolmates.

A recent Rand Corp. report . . . estimated that 19% of the troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, or more than 300,000 people, have come back with traumatic brain injuries. It estimated that treatments for such injuries and the loss in productivity have cost the nation, conservatively, about $554 million.

There's something wrong with the numbers in the Brain Damage story. Assuming that 19% of the US troop returning from Iraq is about 300,000 people would lead to the total number of the US troops deployment at around 1,578,947.

More than 1.75 million servicemen and women have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. [There are only 25,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan, as opposed to 150,000 serving in Iraq.]

1,750,000 * 19 percent (with brain injuries) = 332,500

. . . from probably the most right-wing of all the authors in the book -- a man whose cubicle wall, in the Senate office building where he worked, was adorned with a poster of Mussolini when I met him in the early 1980s. He is discussing the overall balance between the US Navy and the Russian and Chinese fleets -- especially the looming Chinese "menace" that drives the need for new US ships:

Overwhelming any comparison of fleets is the fact that war with either Russia or China would represent a catastrophic failure of American strategy. Such wars would be disastrous for all parties, regardless of their outcomes. In a world where the most important strategic reality is a non-Marxist "withering away of the state," the United States needs both Russia and China to be strong, successful states. They need the United States to be the same. Defeat of any of the three global powers by another would likely yield a new, vast, stateless region, which is to say a great victory for the forces of the Fourth Generation. No American armed service should be designed for wars our most vital interest dictates we not fight.

What was the true meaning of the Russia-Georgia conflict? It concerned the fate of multi-billion dollar US Cold-War era defense procurements: cargo planes, fighter jets, ICBMs, warships, tanks, etc. Such defense contracts will be up for grabs soon after the new US administration takes office. For example, the question as to whether the US should undertake massive upgrades to the nuclear forces will top the defense policy planning. As the Northrop Grumman website explains, "the Air Force is already looking ahead to consider future enhancements to ensure that Minuteman is viable to 2030 and beyond." . . .

. . . the policy to expand NATO and the belligerence of US leaders towards Russia can easily be viewed as part and parcel of an overall defense industry marketing strategy. These initiatives will help to create the impression that the US will have continued need for Cold War era defense industry products and services. The US military-industrial complex had been at a loss for a genuine a long-term raison d'être.

But it may have found one in Russia. . . .

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• $12.7 billion, $115.3 billion* - Marshall Plan
• $15 million, $217 billion* - Louisiana Purchase
• $36.4 billion, $237 billion* - Race to the Moon
• $153 billion, $256 billion* - S&L Crisis
• $54 billion, $454 billion* - Korean War
• $551b, $597 billion* - Invasion of Iraq
• $111 billion, $698 billion* - Vietnam War
• $416.7 billion, $851.2 billion* - NASA
• $32 billion (Est), $500 billion (Est)* - The New Deal

$3.92 trillion* - TOTAL
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* Inflation adjusted cost

Yes, it's certainly a lot of money. Getting out of this mess is likely going to cost more than that, partly because the people now charged with spending it seem clueless.

However, those who are questioning the need for deficit spending at a time like this are standing on shaky (macroeconomic) ground.* We don't want another Great Depression. And it wasn't until the governments funded World War II that the world finally dug its way out of that one.

This time, the idea is to spend as if we are in a war now -- lifting the global economy -- so we avoid going through another depression. A depression would likely create all the conditions for real wars to happen. Either we "spend smart" now on something worthwhile, or "spend stupid" later on wars.

The money has got to be spent wisely. Governments should help citizens to invest in productive activities that will create new assets, rather than just prompting consumer spending on wasteful throw-away goods. Now is the time to build the infrastructure necessary for the energy-efficient global society of the future. That's surely what it means to spend smart.

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* I heard Republican Pat Buchanan say on television today that "high US government" spending created the financial mess we are in. That's rubbish. Financial deregulation, the growth and bursting of a financial bubble, and -- attendant to all this -- the creation of dodgy paper assets lies at the root of the financial mess.

Hat-tip: Sullivan

The five Algerians were joined for most of their stay at Guantanamo by Al Jazeera camerman Sami Al-Haj, who was abducted in 2001 while attempting to enter Afghanistan to cover the war there for Al Jazeera, imprisoned at Guantanamo without ever being charged with any acts of terrorism, questioned almost exclusively not about Al Qaeda, but about the work of Al Jazeera, and then, after more than six years, unceremoniously released with no charges or findings of any wrongdoing whatsoever. As Reporters Without Borders summarized:

Regularly tortured and subjected to close to 200 interrogation sessions by his jailers, Sami Al-Haj began a hunger strike on January 7, 2007, in protest against his detention and to demand that his rights be respected. In retaliation, his jailers force-fed him on several occasions. His lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, who visited him in July last year, said he had lost about 40 pounds and was suffering from serious intestinal problems. He was also subject to bouts of paranoia and was finding it increasingly difficult to communicate normally.

The same bipartisan political class which endorsed all of this and which -- to this day -- wants to deny detainees in U.S. custody any rights to challenge their detention in a court of law, now all agree in perfect unison that it's time to let bygones be bygones; that any high U.S. officials who broke the law in spawning these injustices should be immunized; and that the crimes that were committed by government officials over the last eight years should be ignored.

“The French are no longer eating and drinking like the French. They are eating and drinking like the Anglo-Saxons,” the British and the Americans.

“They eat less and spend less time at it,” Mr. Picolet said.

People grab a sandwich at lunchtime and eat as they walk or sit at their desks. They stand in line to buy prepackaged espresso sachets, to drink coffee at home, or have coffee at the office, at the boss’s expense.

North Korea may stage a military provocation against the South if Seoul's conservative government does not comply with its demands.

The Navy has conducted training exercises off the Southern California coast for more than 40 years. It argues that its current training exercises have taken on added significance since the United States has been engaged in ongoing hostilities.

By the end of this year the American government is supposed to have erected 670 miles of fencing along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Roughly half of the barrier is designed to stop everything bigger than a jackrabbit; the other half will let people through but stop vehicles. It is just part of a drive, stepped up in the past two years, to clamp down on illegal immigration and drug-smuggling. The Border Patrol is swelling from fewer than 6,000 officers in 1996 to more than 18,000 by next year. Unmanned watchtowers bristling with cameras and heat sensors are being developed. Finally, checks at proper border crossings are becoming more rigorous.

How about from Canada? That's what worries me. Why don't we build a wall up there too?

I don't like walls. I remember we had a president who said,"tear down this wall." Now we are building a wall against Mexico. And the Israelis are building one against the Palestinians. And I've seen it too. And I don't like 'em. I think we need a world where people can go back and forth as they want to. . . .

Eighty percent of Americans think rudeness is a serious national problem, but 99 percent of the same people say that they themselves are not rude.