Kevin Drum

A FALL FROM GREATNESS....As American manufacturing prowess continues its long decline, even American crime is being affected. Secret Service agent Charles Green explains to the Kansas City Star:

More counterfeiters are using today's ink-jet printers, computers and copiers to make money that's just good enough to pass, he said, even though their product is awful.

In the past, he said, the best American counterfeiters were skilled printers who used heavy offset presses to turn out decent 20s, 50s and 100s. Now that kind of work is rare and almost all comes from abroad.

....Green pointed to a picture hanging in his downtown conference room. It's a photo from a 1980s Lenexa case that involved heavy printing presses and about 2 million fake dollars. "That's what we used to see," he boomed. "That's the kind of case we used to make."

....Green's voice sank as he described today's sad-sack counterfeiters. These people call up pictures of bills on their computers, buy paper at an office supply store and print out a few bills. They cut the bills apart, go into a store or bar and pass one or two.

That is just a sad state of affairs, my friends. Whatever happened to taking pride in your work? I guess all the real crooks have decided that identify theft and computer fraud are the hot tickets these days.

As an aside, though, I have my doubts that the good stuff all "comes from abroad." My guess is that it comes from right here in the U. S. of A. Just not from counterfeiters.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

CLIMATE CHANGE UPDATE....My morning paper delivers some good news and some bad news on climate change. The bad news:

In one of the report's most worrisome findings, the agency estimates that in light of recent ice sheet melting, global sea levels could rise as much as 4 feet by 2100. The intergovernment panel had projected a rise of no more than 1.5 feet by that time, but satellite data over the last two years show the world's major ice sheets are melting much more rapidly than previously thought. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are losing an average of 48 cubic miles of ice a year, equivalent to twice the amount of ice in the Alps.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this number grow further as more studies are done. But there's also good news:

The report is reassuring [] on the prospects for some potentially drastic effects, such as a huge release of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, that is now locked deep in the seabed and underneath the Arctic permafrost. That is unlikely to occur in the near future, the scientists said.

"It's unlikely that we're going to see an abrupt change in methane over the next hundred years, but we should worry about it over a longer time frame," said Ed Brook, the lead author of the methane chapter and a geosciences professor at Oregon State University....By the end the century, Brook said, the amount of methane escaping from natural sources such as the Arctic tundra and waterlogged soils in warmer regions "could possibly double," but that would still be less than the current level of human-generated methane emissions.

The release of methane from melting permafrost is one of the worst of the feedback-loop scenarios that could cause climate change to spiral out of control during the middle part of the century. If we really have a hundred years or more before it gets out of hand, that's good news.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

A VERY GRINCHY CHRISTMAS....There's just no way to sugar coat this. Retail sales fell off a cliff this year:

When gasoline sales are excluded, [retail sales fell] 4% in December.... The holiday retail-sales decline was much worse than the already-dire picture painted by industry forecasts, which had predicted sales ranging from a 1% drop to a more optimistic increase of 2.2%.

....A final burst of spending retailers hoped for last weekend never came. Shopper traffic fell 27% compared with the same time last year, while sales declined 5.3%, according to ShopperTrak RCT Corp., which tracks sales in retail outlets nationwide.

Christmas this year was pretty grim in China too. And they're expecting worse next year.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

YOUR CHRISTMAS EVE MIRACLE STORY....Our nation's news media is surprisingly devoid of feel-good Christmas stories for us today, so this will have to do: it's the tale of Bess, a little black cat who was, unbelievably, stranded underneath a window seat for nine weeks without food and water but then rescued and resuscitated.

This is not quite as good as the story of a cat who trekked 30 miles across town to find its owner. I'm not sure it's even as good as the story of my friend's cat, which had cancer and finally disappeared one night for good, only to show up two years later hale and hearty. What's more, poor Bess might have permanent neurological problems because of her trauma — though I'm not sure how you can tell in a cat anyway. But it's Christmas Eve, and she's back, and apparently she's happy and purring. Enjoy!

• Print
• Email
• Tweet