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Also see today's Rich column.

A Lethal Combination

"Medical ventriliquism" indeed. The onset of a condition associated with loss of sexual interest, among other things; a new generation of people allergic to their own mortality; and a pharmaceutical industry that works nights and weekends devising new ways to separate you from your money.

Along the way, television commercials positioned hormone drugs as treatments for more than hot flashes and night sweats — just two of the better-known symptoms of menopause, which is technically defined as commencing one year after a woman’s last menstrual cycle.

One commercial about estrogen loss by the drug maker Wyeth featured a character named Dr. Heartman in a white coat discussing research into connections between menopause and heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and blindness.

...

The suits also assert, based on recently unsealed court documents, that Wyeth oversold the benefits of menopausal hormones and failed to properly warn of the risks.

When I started this last month, I thought it might be somewhat difficult - meaning it would test my own ability to exploit the subject consistently and over time... exactly the very reasons to pursue it. But it's turning out that you don't even have to scroll down the page of the most-read news site - one that treats its readers in a generally childish fashion - to find glaring examples of gross obscenity. Which is itself...

damn.

Amounts of Stuff

Do we even realize this is happening? What does the level of abundance imply? is it mere and innocuous prosperity? Is there such a thing?

The self-storage industry has published its own almanac since 1992.

It's industry trade group proudly touts that "There is 7.4 sq.ft. of self storage space for every man, woman and child in the nation; thus, it is physically possible that every American could stand – all at the same time – under the total canopy of self storage roofing."

And of course, this is not counting our houses.

Daniel Pink, in an infomercial-type presentation that I uncomfortably recommend, broaches this little-talked about subject that is a creeping symptom of our nature. The way it encapsulates what we are doing to ourselves and the landscape is uncanny. It's the flag of slothful indulgence.

Not to mention, bigger than the film industry? What does it mean when the markets with real growth potential are prisons and self storage?

Masterpiece

Of finance, or art... or whatever it was.

In a gear-changing sign that the art market is shaking off the recession, Sotheby's auctioned off $134.4 million worth of post-war and contemporary art earlier tonight at its Manhattan salesroom, including a smoky sheet of dollar bills by Andy Warhol that sold for $43.7 million. The sale total surpassed the auction house's own goal of $67.9 million to $97.7 million - and outperformed its $125 million sale of contemporary art last November.

After a year of cautious bidding, the mood in the salesroom Wednesday night grew increasingly upbeat, with fashion designer Valentino Garavani and jeweler Laurence Graff among the winning bidders. The night unquestionably belonged to Warhol. The Pop artist is a household name, but his early 1960s silkscreens rarely surface at auction. That's why at least five bidders, including dealer Jose Mugrabi, chased after the artist's "200 One Dollar Bills," a seminal 1962 piece that Sotheby's last sold more than two decades ago for $300,000. A telephone bidder got it tonight for $43.7 million - over three times its $12 million high estimate - or $218,812.50 for each silkscreened dollar bill in the painting

.

Just stop and start anywhere.

Rigged, The Game Is

It means getting consulting advice on a war strategy from the people who are going to help you sell the war strategy.

When Gen. Stanley McChrystal decided to launch a sweeping review of Afghanistan strategy, he reached out to a small, but influential, group of national security wonks.

McChrystal’s “strategic assessment group” included Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and his wife, Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations; Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrew “Abu Muqawama” Exum of the Center for a New American Security; and Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution.

It wasn’t a particularly unusual move: The military — like corporate America — likes to bring in consultants for an outside view. Take the Joint Campaign Plan for Iraq, the document that lays out the U.S. military’s near-term and long-term goals. That document gets a fresh look every year, and the most recent review included input from think-tankers.

But as our friend Laura Rozen observed, it was also a way to win the hearts and minds of an important constituency: The foreign-policy pundits and op-ed writers who would help sell the new strategy to the public.

With apologies to The Clash, this indecision's killing them.

The 116

Via HUMNews, Juan Cole offers up this little gem.

Of 237 countries and territories in the world, the 4 largest newsgathering and distribution companies that supply the world with 90% of news do not cover 116 of them.

These 116 countries or territories contain 4 billion people over half the world.

63 of these media-ignored countries and territories are desperately poor.

All this has security implications for the United States. What do you want to bet that in the late 1990s, Afghanistan was in the 116? Hard to know an attack was being planned out there if you don't know the place exists.

What HUM does not say is that the ignoring of the 116 comes from the news corporations' profit motive, which is increasingly driving them to ignore most real news in favor of infotainment. Desperately poor 4th world countries? Not entertaining.

We definitely live in a fishbowl of athlete/celebrity scandals and missing white women, but things are actually much worse than you might imagine. You could take the FT and be better informed about extra-border issues, greatly ignore cable news to remain aloof about such things as balloon hoaxes and Michael Jackson. But this should be what the intraweb is all about - allowing you to peruse aljazeera.net and your local paper within the same 30 minute window.

I still think that anyone taking two weeks off of American television - which itself requires at minimum a trip abroad, to a remote locale - would be, upon seeing it again, so appalled by the advertising alone that they would be loathe to return to levels of former usage. But absent the fifteen days off, we're not availed to that little window of contempt our corporate overlords have for us, or we should have for them.
Damn.

Gobsmacked, Bloodthirsty

It could be offensive to be so characterized, especially when you don't normally think of yourself in this way. For example, we think of ourselves as a peace-loving society, only interested in defending our right to profit from the interlopers of regulation and taxation. All the while, we subsidize a build-up of the most awesome armaments known to man. Plus, we're fascinated by them.

Here is Wolf Blitzer and Barbara Starr talking last night on CNN about the Iranians and what the U.S. might to do them; it's really pitch-perfect:

BLITZER: Regarding Iran, a new report raises some disturbing possibilities about its nuclear program, and that's prompting fears from the United States over how to respond.

Let's bring in our Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr.

Barbara, what are you learning?

STARR (voice-over): Iran's once secret underground nuclear fuel enrichment plant. The Pentagon is worried Iran is now burying weapons factories so deep, that the current arsenal of bombs can't reach them, leaving the U.S. with no viable military option if a strike was ever ordered.

This new Air Force 15-ton bomb may change that calculation.

JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: We'd certainly be able to take this out with a massive ordnance penetrator, the 30,000-pound boss.

STARR: This is the massive ordnance penetrator, or MOP, now being rushed into development to be carried on B-2 and B-52 bombers. The most likely targets? Iran and North Korea, which are believed to have buried weapons facilities hundreds of feet underground or into the sides of mountains.

PIKE: Some of those would probably require this massive ordnance penetrator simply because they are buried so deep and no other bomb would be able to certainly destroy them.

STARR: At 30,000 pounds, the MOP, some experts say, will be able to penetrate 650 feet of concrete, a significant boost over current bunker-busting bombs like the 2,000-pound BLU-109, which can penetrate just six feet of concrete, and the 5,000-pound GBU-28 which can go through about 20 feet of concrete.

GEOFF MORRELL, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: This has been a capability that we have long believed was missing from our quiver, our arsenal, and we wanted to make sure we've filled in that gap.

STARR: No air strikes against North Korea or Iran appear to be in the works, but Iran says it could start enriching uranium here in the next two years, and both the U.S. and Israel want to ensure that Iran cannot manufacture and assemble a nuclear weapon.

All of this has now led to more funding for the MOP. The Pentagon plans to have the first bombs available by December 2010, two years earlier than planned.

STARR: Now, the Pentagon likes to say it's not helpful to speculate on future military targets, but certainly this weapon gives the Pentagon, Wolf, an option it hasn't had before -- Wolf.

BLITZER: It's a huge, huge bomb, Barbara. Thanks very much for that.

Emphasis mine... theirs... somebody's.