In On Thin Ice last week, Tom Selleck once again appeared as individualist Cop/Sheriff Jesse Stone. One of the odd notes in the show was that Stone apparently hates speed traps, going so far as to cut down the underbrush that concealed the Paradise town speed trap.

I recall driving with my Dad late one night on some highway. We got off an exit and saw a service station on the left, across lane dividers. As we approached the first break, naturally there was a No-U-Turn sign. They always put No-U-Turn signs where you might need to hang a Huey. My Dad wanted me to turn there, but I was suspicious. I turned left (not U) then came back down and only then did we see the trooper perfectly hidden to catch U turners. This was in the dead of night, mind you, no one else on the road, but folks getting off the highway for gas.

Here, TTAC contributor Caset Raskob sees more tickets as another downside to recession:

The Truth About Speeding Tickets and the Recession

For the last 20 years or so, I've been fighting traffic tickets in the New York area. My business is not "normal." No matter how easy I make the process, no matter what the outcome, half of my final client conversations contain the words "I hope I never see you again." (It's OK, I understand. You came in with a "gun to your head.") While the client kiss-off never changes, my ticket defense work fluctuates with the level of traffic enforcement. Weather, gas prices and terrorism alerts (post 9/11) all impact the number of tickets issued. I've survived a few up and down cycles. And with a steady client base and wide professional contacts I can draw a few conclusions. The recession is here. Government budgets are under threat. The word has gone out: write tickets!
...
The recession has made a few changes, even with the uptick in volume. Tickets are coming to my office later, or only after the Court Clerk has refused the client's third postponement attempt. They forget somehow to tell me this. More clients are price shopping.

Often, after doing one ticket, the client admits they have... two others. One of which is late. Denial again! Ticket fighting is a recession resistant business, but not recession proof. Lack of money, real or felt, is hitting all levels of society. Never mind the fact that a client was ticketed while driving the Range Rover up to the ski house. My pre-contractual client conversations are more strained than they were a year ago.

Courthouses are more full than last year, reflecting the overall increase in tickets issued. The word is out. Watch the medians, and watch your wallet. A hungry Government is very, very dangerous.

Update: Gov. Schwarzenegger Takes Action to Address California's Water Shortage:

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With Geithner's reticence to answer any questions on where AIG money flows, I am relinking to this article:

Was AIG Already a Part of the US Government?

Tom Whipple prepares us for some back room maneuvering.

Obama's budget.

A combination of President Obama's first budget, the recently passed stimulus bill and the impending climate-change bill could add up to a massive shift in US energy policy. The major energy companies are apoplectic over the proposed changes which impose heavy taxes on the old fossil fuels, largely by removing long standing tax breaks, and transfer billions to help develop renewable sources of energy.

The publication of the budget immediately polarized the debate, with Republicans and industry spokesman denouncing the proposals while Democrats and environmental groups were largely supportive.

As most of the proposed changes have to do with esoteric tax deduction and accounting rules, their impact is comprehensible primarily to accountants for the industries concerned. Some have to do with tax loopholes which allow the oil industry free or cheap access to oil on federal property.

A spokesman recently said that the oil industry pays about $152 billion in local state and federal taxes each year. Some are saying that the changes would increase this tax burden by only $3-4 billion a year which does not seem much given the size of the industry's recent profits.

One of the emerging issues seems to be the effect of the tax changes on the myriad of small producers who do most of the on-shore oil and gas drilling in the US these days. Unlike the majors who have massive cash reserves, these companies have been hit hard by the credit crunch and industry spokesmen insist they will be driven out of business in droves by higher taxes. This of course would add to unemployment and increase America's dependence on foreign oil.

Environmental organizations see the proposed changes as the end to the tax-payer funded feast that they assert the oil companies have enjoyed far too long.

The truth in all this is nearly impossible for an outside observer to fathom. The only thing we can be sure of is that there will be ferocious debates in the Congress and massive lobbying efforts by both sides in the days ahead.

NBC Today Show segment

A day after the Dow fell from 8000 to 6800, Matt Lauer brought on Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer to play good cop/bad cop:

JC We're going lower.

EB Not a panic, a controlled, serial killer economy, an overall malaise broader than the market.

JC complained that the Treasury Secretary had been invisible and hoped that today he wasn't going to throw another anvil at the drowning man. No reason to own bank stocks, banks only represent fear.

EB Accept reality, change in living standards, people are no longer in denial. Three positives: WalMart (sheesh) doing better than most, footwear and apparel still shipping from China (sheesh again) as people are still buying basics ...

JC WalMart where folk shop when having a tough time. Show me Neiman Marcus. (Hate to tell you Jim, but the working poor have been hitting WalMart for decades.)

EB ... and stimulus package to create 5000 jobs in California this week..

ML asked why "fast actions by Obama" haven't restored confidence.

JC says radical agenda and budget caused a level of fear that changed everything,

ML asked if the Obama policies were not "shareholder-friendly" (what a straight man)

JC (recoiling double-take, all he needs are the heavy eyebrows) Shareholder-Friendly! greatest wealth destruction by a President he's ever seen, "stock market is the country right now," this is where people's wealth is, IRAs 401Ks, pensions.

EB tempers that by saying stock market is part of the country, but half the country owns stocks.

ML Depression?

JC Mild depression, SS, FDIC in place, no civil unrest, Obama must change radical agenda to something slower.

EB thinks we can go back to making more than our fathers. (What happened to accepting reality?)

As I saw it, Cramer is there to attack the proposed budget while Erin Burnett is there to temper Cramer's histrionics. Cramer is selling the line that Geithner and Obama are killing the country by not reassuring the market, while Burnett is reassuring consumers and advertisers by selling the idea that things will get better eventually.

Update: The same duo, with Sheila Bair, as reported in a Baltimore Sun blog :

Matthews, Cramer, MSNBC and CNBC -- spare me!

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Copyright Challenge ... Excerpt

When ... blog ... quoted ... Peggy Noonan's ... column ... editor added ... "We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you."

But some ... are growing concerned ... that ... taking large pieces ... shaving away potential readers ...

We don't live very long, but some of us make up for it by predicting the future. In 1933's The Shape of Things To Come, HG Wells did better than most, correctly predicting a Second World War, but whiffing (so far) on a world plague and worldwide dictatorship. Things To Come, a loose film adaptation, was released three years later.

In 1992, while society blissfully marginalized those few pundits worried about climate change, population growth, peak oil, and fascism, Francis Fukuyama predicted "The End of History" based on the preeminence of free market democracy around the world.

The survival of the free market seems far less inevitable just now, and more people are fashioning their shapes of things to come. Having watched the collapse of his native Soviet Union, Dmitry Orlov populates his collapse scenarios with concrete examples:

(Nassim) Taleb is known for introducing us to black swans (reality-altering observations that invalidate earlier conventional wisdom) but another animal he should be rightly famous for is the Christmas turkey. Taleb says that asking an economist to predict the future is like asking the Christmas turkey what's for dinner on Christmas: based on its entire lifetime of experience, the turkey expects to be fed on Christmas, not to be eaten. As far as the turkey is concerned, Christmas is a black swan-type event.

But yesterday it occurred to me that this analogy extends to all professionals, and certainly to technologists and scientists: when asked about the future of, say, nanotubes, or nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, they will predict that it's bright, and continue to say so until the day their grants are canceled, their salaried positions eliminated, and their labs shut down for political and macroeconomic reasons they are ill-equipped to try to comprehend.

This is precisely what happened during the demise of Soviet science the early 1990s: one moment there was a great scientific establishment boldly predicting a bright future for itself, and the next moment you had experts in holography making little religious holograms to sell at outdoor flea markets in order to buy food, aerospace metallurgists reinventing the straight razor to get a decent shave because disposable razors had disappeared, graduate students dropping their research projects and going off to make some money doing manual labor, and the entire faculty at once trying to find a visiting faculty position abroad.

Writing for the American Conservative, Irish Journo Brian Kaller accepts Peak Oil, but sees Mayberry in our future instead of Mad Max.)

Americans can afford to trim down in many ways. Seventy percent of us are overweight, about a third of our food is thrown away uneaten, and we spend billions transporting food that we could grow a short walk from our houses. Much of our agribusiness energy is spent manufacturing processed foods and their packaging--Wheaties instead of wheat, vegetable soup mix instead of vegetables--that are less efficient and often less healthy. The same goes for other arenas: much of our electrical power is lost in transmission, and much of our heat goes out the window.

When breakdowns do happen, people are often more neighborly than Hollywood imagines. Recent blackouts in St. Louis and New York did not result in mass hysteria but in friends helping each other out. Even the stories about New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina mostly turned out to be urban legends.

(If only that was true.)

If Andy Griffith is too corny, pick your favorite portrayal of a simpler American life. It may not exactly map the future, but it is likely to be more accurate and hopeful than the images we've been given for generations and would be familiar, popular, and attainable.

I wonder about the future, too, but I think change will manifest differently around the world, and that disastrous changes have been happening for some time in the third world. Herbert recounts hideous combinations of raping and maiming in the remnants of the Second Congo War and other parts of Africa are dangerous.

There were more indications last week that the security, economic, and political situation in Nigeria continues to deteriorate. As more than 300 oil industry employees have been kidnapped in the last three years, foreign oil workers must travel by air or in military convoys, adding greatly to costs and reducing efficiency. In an effort to cut costs in 2008 Shell eliminated 1200 oil-worker jobs in the country and is likely to cut more this year. Shell, BP, and Total all suffered losses last quarter and the income of the other international oil companies operating in Nigeria was greatly reduced.

Even Mexico is beginning to be regarded as a failed state, unable to prevail against drug cartels that sell drugs to and buy assault weapons from the US.