[trespam]

Must read. A tour of American consumption. [link].

"What do they want?" one of the survivalists asks. Another answers thoughtfully:

They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember they want to be in here.

What the hell are they?

They're us, that's all.

[BabyPeanut]

Some stuff by Knusler on Malls.

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/cur ... erica.html
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he task facing America -- which nobody in politics or the media wants to talk about -- is the necessary downscaling of all our activities. The Big Box discount retailing economy cannot survive a world of non-cheap oil, or even of disturbed markets.

I was in Syracuse, New York, yesterday on one of those "Future of the City" panels. The city officials there are hell-bent to support a proposed super-giant-mega mall project to be called "Desti-NY." Get it? It would be an extension of the already humongous existing Carousel Mall, and is designed to be an eastern rival to Minnesota's intergalactic-sized Mall of America. The overly-hopeful idea is that recreational shoppers will come from as far away as Worcester, Massachusetts to buy the same kind of Nike Sneakers they can get at their own mall -- thus bringing jobs jobs jobs to Syracuse. Meanwhile, Syracuse has four other malls that were put to death when Carousel Mall arose out of the toxic muck on the shore of Oneida Lake. Not surprisingly, the proposed Desti-NY project has got something on the order of $30 million in federal grants and subsidies attached to it.

I didn't hesitate to opine that the proposal sounded flat-out insane. Incidentally, even if the Desti-NY were issued its permits tomorrow, it would be years until the giant mall opened, that is, after the world had passed global peak oil production. This mall would be a pitiful, ridiculous obsolete mega-folly before it opened. The panelists who boosted it were not stupid people. They're just going along with the American Dream -- sleepwalking version.