" . . . Kotkin persuasively argues that the regimes in most of the bloc nations realized they were living on borrowed time by the late 1980s. . ."

Try by the late 1970s! The one thing I remember from the 1980 presidential campaign is John Anderson saying that the CIA had already done the math and concluding that the Soviet Union was finished because it was going broke. He refuted both Carter and Reagan on the issue of the Soviet threat, and was ridiculed.

Not much new here, and no mention of the Pope. Hmmm.... -- Watchdog38

Americans tend to see this all as some sort of idealism or a triumph of free-markets/Adam Smith. It definitely was not that--hence the genocides in the former Yugoslavia. -- Barnaby

Read Cafe Europa. Everyone wanted not just social freedom and food worth eating, but Levis and Michael Jackson posters too. Political freedom was somewhat meaningless - still is in Russia since they've never understood participatory government.

Pointing to what happened in Yugoslavia is a bit disingenuous since it was, like all the countries in the ME, cobbled together as a Western conveniences after WWI and was never really part of historic, post Enlightenment Europe to begin with being barely industrialized and populated by backward Catholic and Orthodox majorities and a Muslim minority.

I told you so, I told you so, I told you!

I now return you to your more temperate readership.

You should have just made a list of Miyazaki movies and then listed the others under "Also not bad."

Heck, I've been insulted in the past when a friend asked if my breasts were fake simply because of the way they sat on my slight build . . .

Care to prove this, or would that be (big air quotes) unprofessional?

Gremlins was actually a pretty good flick. What I was thinking (and not reading obviously) was Goonies, a truly dreadful movie that should have meant the end of Chris Columbus' career. Alas, he lived to work another day and, of course, was responsible for fucking up the first two Harry Potter films.

Just the PREVIEW for Coraline kept my 8 year old terrified for weeks. -- bingster

Our 12-year old, though having read the book, did not want to see the movie.

Patrick, Patrick, Patrick. JAL and ANA have been doing this for years. At least they used to be doing it beginning in the late 1980s through the late 1990s.

Everyone isn't. A minority of trashy Americans are fame whores, . . . -- Treeple

First is the 24-hour media circus that must be fed. The second feeds this.

All populations - American, German, Mexican, French, Canadian, whatever - have a certain percentage of the population that is pretty much trash. If you set this at an arbitrary 10%, as the population grows this 10% becomes more visible. This is where we find ourselves today. I think American society has become coarser over the last fifty years, but it's mostly a function of numbers.

I certainly hope the Henne's are billed for the police/emergency services they wasted. What a horrible family. Cable television didn't create them, but they certainly have a sick, symbiotic relationship.

The issue is not that so many other people are starved for fame. It's that we are starved — for famous people. -- Amity

We aren't starved for "famous people." We have a surfeit of famous. Though most are "infamous."

What we are starved for is people of true greatness and selflessness. You can't swing a dead cat in this country without cold-cocking "famous" people. But we can't hardly fill a proper dinner party anymore with Americans that really do anything decent without looking for a quid-pro-quo.

Fame in America is pretty much a function of how much your are on television or how "viral" you are on the Internet(s), not whether you do anything particularly worthwhile.

It's both. Most models are too thin and approximately 30% of Americans are overweight. Next tempest in a teapot.

Sounds like Anyschool, USA And people wonder why I home-schooled my child. -- human power

While there are lots of schools plagued by violence in cities like Chicago and LA, this is hardly the norm in 99% of American HS.

If you let this sort of idiocy slip in casual conversation, I doubt too many people wonder why you home school your children.

Do you truly believe that government efforts to increase home ownership and keep rates super-low had nothing to do with our current situation? -- LSUTigers#1

Haven't really been following the story, have you?

The problem was not that the rates, by which you mean mortgage rates, which the government has no direct control over, didn't remain "super-low." The problem was that all those "super-low" rates, those 2.5%, zero down mortgages, ballooned to "super-high" rates after a year or two. Had all those "super-low" rates stayed "super-low" we wouldn't be in quite the mess we are now because we wouldn't have had millions of Americans defaulting on mortgages.

What you're thinking of with rates that increase after a set number of years are actual mortgages. -- LSUTigers#1

I used work in mortgage banking, so I'm pretty well-versed in how ARMs work, and their low initial rate has nothing whatsoever to do with the Federal Funds rate, and what an ARM jumps to after X period of time has even less to do with the Federal Funds rate.

You point is that it was somehow the government's fault that we were in economic meltdown because of low interest rates. No, we are in deep shit because of lax regulation of banks, mortgage brokers and bond rating agencies, which the government does have authority over, but which has anything to do with interest rates. These businesses bear responsibility because of their dishonest practices (AAA rate, yeah right) and plain incompetence.