Analysts estimate that from about 10% to 26% of all retailers are in financial distress and in danger of filing for Chapter 11. AlixPartners LLP, a Michigan-based turnaround consulting firm, estimates that 25.8% of 182 large retailers it tracks are at significant risk of filing for bankruptcy or facing financial distress in 2009 or 2010. In the previous two years, the firm had estimated 4% to 7% of retailers then tracked were at a high risk for filing. Retailers are particularly vulnerable to a recession because of their high fixed costs.

Here comes recession. Via Kevin Drum.

Links for your post-Christmas blues.

* In the future, all movies will have lightsabers.

* Rest in peace, Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt.

* Barack Obama is stupendously ridiculously popular.

* Al Franken is not quite so popular, but he's looking like Minnesota's next senator.

* Confidential for Mac users: the weird inability to change location in Finder dialogues is easily rectified.

* In the zeitgeist: people living life backwards.

* 95 Old School Games You Can Play Online. Via MeFi.

* So you're saying we need Batman? (Thanks, Kate!)

Happy Christmas, everyone.

The 12 Days of Zombie Christmas.

It's that time, so let's get in the spirit. First up: The Ramones, "Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight)."

I now wish to call attention to another form of addiction, which has not been previously identified. It is more like gambling than drinking, since the people afflicted are ravenous for situations that will cause their bodies to release exciting chemicals into their bloodstreams. I am persuaded that there are among us people who are tragically hooked on preparations for war.

Tell people with that disease that war is coming and we have to get ready for it, and for a few minutes there, they will be as happy as a drunk with his martini breakfast or a compulsive gambler with his paycheck bet on the Super Bowl.

The late, great Kurt Vonnegut, writing in The Nation about America's addiction to war, and more specifically the addiction to preparation for war. Given the date of the issue (December 31, 1983) and the content of the last few paragraphs, it seems to me that he must have written this in response to the invasion of Grenada:

Suppose we had an alcoholic President who still had not hit bottom and whose chief companions were drunks like himself. And suppose it were a fact, made absolutely clear to him, that if he took just one more drink, the whole planet would blow up.

So he has all the liquor thrown out of the White House, including his Aqua-Velva shaving lotion. So late at night he is terribly restless, crazy for a drink but proud of not drinking. So he opens the White House refrigerator, looking for a Tab or a Diet Pepsi, he tells himself. And there, half-hidden by a family-size jar of French's mustard, is an unopened can of Coors beer.

What do you think he'll do?

The invasion of Grenada, of course, was undertaken because of the fervent Communist desire to disrupt the world's supply of nutmeg and thereby ruin Christmas. Or something like that. An imminent threat. You can see we had no choice. Via MeFi.

One of the cooler presents I got this morning was a solar-powered cell phone and iPod charger from Jaimee's parents. I haven't used it yet, and I don't have any clue what the carbon footprint of a device like this actually is, but I think it's cool as hell all the same. I also got a copy of the first two Action Philosophers trade paperbacks to match my well-worn Action Philosophers T-shirt—also definitely cool as hell. Most notably, however, Jaimee bought me some jeans, a deliberatively provocative action calculated to neutralize one of my more irrational stupid quirks and taboos, the fact that I haven't worn a pair of jeans in almost nine years.

Am I ready? You tell me.

Happy Christmas, everyone.



* MetaFilter's got a huge post today with just about every very special Christmas episode ever aired.

* The Absorbacon compares Biblical canonicity with comic-book canonicity.

* SF Signal is celebrating a sci-fi Christmas with episodes of Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, and Buck Rogers (so far).

On this Christmas Eve, Americans are having trouble paying off their credit cards, with 30-day-late accounts rising 26% to $17.3 billion and defaults rising 18% to nearly a billion. There's a reason for all this, and you can find it in Bill Moyer's PBS interview with Benjamin Barber (via MeFi), a Galbraithian analysis of capitalism's production not of products but of needs themselves:

As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied.... Wants thus come to depend on output. In technical terms, it can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-round higher level of production than at a lower one. It may be the same. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.

The orgy of Christmas shopping that continues unabated today—to be followed by deep-discount post-Christmas sales on Wednesday, and on and on—is only the clearest proof that this is what capitalism has become in the post-industrial West and, increasingly, elsewhere as well. Barber thinks the productive energies of capitalism might somehow be harnassed, through willpower and ethical living, for better ends, but I'm much more skeptical that capitalism can ever really move in a direction other than the one it has. What we need is a new logic, a new organizing principle. Call it sustainability or call it permaculture, call it environmental Marxism or environmental capitalism if you want, it's all the same to me—what's important is that the world figure out some way to stop doing the things capitalism demands it must. We have to stop consuming everything, resources, the future, ourselves.

BILL MOYERS: When politics permeates everything we call it totalitarianism. When religion permeates everything we call it theocracy.

BENJAMIN BARBER: Right.

BILL MOYERS: But when commerce pervades everything, we call it liberty.

Merry Christmas.

(cross-posted to culturemonkey, which returns Jan. 2 with an all-new blogger and an all-new organizing principle of its own)

Excerpts from Ben Joseph's Rejected Script, Alien vs. Predator Save Christmas.

I think this was via Drawn!, but wherever I found it: vintage Soviet Christmas cards. Веселое рождество!

Christmas is hectic for all but particularly for Santa, who must live in Kyrgyzstan and make his rounds at lightning speed if he is to deliver gifts to all the world's children on time, a Swedish consultancy has concluded.

(1) All the world's Christian children.
(2) "Still no cure for cancer."
(3) That is all.

The View from My Neighborhood: This is perverse. It's October 7.