It's the same blog, except now it's in a great new place with a lot more space, and fewer cobwebs under the stairs. Head over to http://www.cuivienen.org/gondolin and check it out.

Be sure to update your bookmarks and your feeds. 'Cause I aint posting here no mo'.

The details are boring -- they involve my dissatisfaction with the one-click wordpress installation my hosting service offers. It really shouldn't bother me. The installation is actually fantastic, and if I prioritized blogging above futzing around with mysql databases and css stylesheets, I'd have a beautiful new blog already. But it does bother me. I want more control over the files than I have under the one-click installation.

So now, I'll have to take time to learn how to do a manual installation, and probably do it wrong a few times, before you'll see my new wordpress blog. But I'll be a better human being for having figured out how to install everything myself. And in the meantime, this blog here is perfectly adequate.

Via Deliberate Agrarian, this gem:

Currently, myself and many of my friends are on varying forms of state aid [...]

With this in mind, I've compiled a simple list of rules (or perhaps, "guidelines") to help minimize the embarrassment and discomfort of taking public assistance.

1. Don't be dirty. Present yourself in as hygenically-perfect a condition as possible. [...]
2. Don't be clean. But remember, you are poor. You shouldn't be able to afford things like shampoo, or fresh laundry, etc. [...]
3. Never engage in any luxury activity at all, ever. Remember, you are currently taking public aid, which means of course that you must never, ever, find any way to enjoy your life that costs any amount of money at all. [...]
3a. In addition to money-costing activities, also remember that free activities that you might enjoy are also forbidden. [...]
4. Never possess any item which could be construed as you spending money. [...]
4a. To maintain the personal moral indignation of the taxpayer to our situations, it is acceptable to on occasion breach rule #4 in limited fashion. This allows the taxpayer to continue with their prejudices, which is crucial for our status quo. [...]
5. Only purchase things deemed appropriate by the surrounding consumers. [...]
6. Maintain an acceptable number of children. [...]

The right-wingers would agree with me, I think, but they would say that the solution is simply to cut taxes and end public aid, relying instead on private charity. I'm not a right winger because I think too many of us are like little Lloyd Blankfeins, convinced that whatever greedy and selfish habits they've adopted are entirely sufficient to discharge whatever obligations they may have to others. The virtue of public assistance programs is that it makes helping others a legal obligation, and not merely a moral one, which people find too easy to rationalize away.

And oh, I have such big plans! This blog is going to be the best blog there ever was. Fame and fortune will be mine. I will demonstrate the awesome power of the internet to transform my solitary musings into brain candy for people from all walks of life who have the good fortune to read my posts.

Will you be one of these lucky people? All you have to lose is your time, perhaps five minutes a couple of times each week. It'll be worth it, though. Nothing in life is free.

Here's a few things that you can look forward to:

• a new visual format, as I try to find out for myself why everyone seems to be using WordPress these days
  
• more focused series of posts that surround a few obvious themes. I'd like to use this blog to support some other things I'm doing, and that means you'll get more sustained posting on a few issues that matter to me.
  
• a commitment (admittedly sarcastic) to adhere to some of the popular blogging fads du jour, for example, including a bullet-pointed or numbered list in every post.
  
• Friday catblogging, which is an honorable tradition and not a fad.

So why am I blogging again? One, I miss it. Two, I'm starting to feel constrained by the limited amount of text I can put up at one time on Facebook. Three, I'm very suspicious of Twitter as a low-yield time-sucking black hole of Internet dependency. And four, I want to write something every day, even if it's inane and unhelpful to anyone else (but posting this writing online magically makes it significantly helpful for someone).

So subscribe to my blog with your Google Reader, or whatever service you use, and let's see what happens.

Protectionism? Yeah, it's an interesting piece:

Of course, the economists for the global financial institutions and the big multinational corporations know this, but because their loyalties are more to their institutions and less to our nation, they continue their calls for ever more "free trade" and for continuing U.S. trade and current account deficits.

The irony is that economists learn in their very first class in school that it was a trade war which brought us our initial freedom as a country, and that semi-protectionism later helped build the United States. England started a "trade war" with the Colonies by adopting the Navigation Act of 1651 that required all trade be carried in British vessels. Manufacturing was forbidden in the Colonies, even the printing of the Bible, and then the Townsend Acts drafted by Adam Smith placed heavy import duties on a wide range of items. All of this precipitated the Boston Tea Party that started the Revolution.

While we obtained our freedom in 1776, it wasn't until 1787 that we empowered Congress, in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, to regulate commerce, both domestic and foreign. President George Washington's first message to the first Congress in 1789 warned that, "A free people should promote manufactories to render them independent of essential, particularly military, supplies." Thereafter, the United States was financed and built for 100 years with semi-protectionism, and we didn't even pass the income tax until 1913. At the advent of the Transcontinental Railroad, it was suggested that the needed steel be obtained from England - but President Abraham Lincoln strongly objected and required the steel to be produced in the United States. And Edmund Morris, in his remarkable book "Theodore Rex" about President Teddy Roosevelt, has TR exclaiming at the time the United States won the trade war with England, "Thank God I am not a free trader."

Under the new phenomenon called "globalization", the so-called "comparative advantage" which underpinned the early centuries is no longer God-given or determined by the weather, as was the case, two centuries ago, with David Ricardo's English woolens and Portuguese wine. Now commercial success is largely created, or not, by government policies, and the United States government refuses to compete for such success, even though, as The Economist magazine reported recently, "Business these days is all about competing with everyone from everywhere for everything."

I wonder if the Big Three's pitiful performance can be blamed in any way on the American system of corporate governance? Were the incentives to maximize short-term profits to blame for Detroit's ills?

I'm thinking of how GM and Chrysler (and Ford to a lesser extent) were so eager to give up on the small car market in favor of big SUVs. They had to know that low gas prices were unsustainable. SUVs were profitable, but didn't anyone worry about long-term profitability if gas prices rose and SUVs became less attractive?

It isn't that I don't support a vibrant American auto industry, or that I don't want to cushion the blow of all the layoffs that a collapse of the carmakers would entail. It's just that throwing money at the Big Three won't do either of these things. It'll be like flushing money down the toilet. And even if it would postpone the inevitable, I want my guilty pleasures now, dammit. I want to watch Rick Wagoner go down with his ship.

The carmakers aren't in this mess because of a little liquidity crisis, or a run of bad financial decisions that leave them short of cash. They're about to go belly up because their basic business isn't viable anymore. I have to admit, it gives me a sort of perverse pleasure to see GM going down the tubes after decades of building crappy cars. Perhaps its products aren't as inferior to their competitors as they were in the 1970s, but if you peruse Consumer Reports at all, you know that Toyota and Honda are still flogging GM on reliability even now. Oh, free market, work your magic.

It's also sinfully delicious to see the Big Three begging for money after the bottom fell out of the market for gas-guzzling SUVs. All the lobbying muscle that once went into fighting increases in the CAFE fuel economy standards tooth and nail may not be enough now to get the government to help them build better small, fuel-efficient cars. Too bad, so sad, Rick. You bet the company on the Hummer when you had to know that gas prices weren't going to stay low forever.

I'm also a little giddy about the failure of Detroit's carmakers after years of watching them do too little to push for national healthcare. They like to whine about their high health care costs, but they did far too little to push for the government-funded national health insurance that would have relieved them of many of the financial burdens they're complaining about.

Of course, none of this is going to make up for the real pain of a failed American auto industry. But that pain should be treated with something other than a bailout for the Big Three's shareholders.

That cat sure does love to snuggle on cold winter nights!

Some workers who saw what was happening fought their way through the surge to get to Mr. Damour, but he had been fatally injured, the police said. Emergency workers tried to revive Mr. Damour, a temporary worker hired for the holiday season, at the scene, but he was pronounced dead an hour later at Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream.

But if it's the latter, I have a small request. Use me.

Washington is all about the status-quo, so if Obama wants to change anything he'll have to draw on reservoirs of support outside of the beltway political class. George Packer puts the problem thusly in his New Yorker piece:

Transformative Presidents -- those who changed the country's sense of itself in some fundamental way -- have usually had great social movements supporting and pushing them. Lincoln had the abolitionists, Roosevelt the labor unions, Johnson the civil-rights leaders, Reagan the conservative movement. Clinton didn't have one, and after his election, [Robert] Reich said, "everyone went home."

In the meantime, we'll try to hold on until Bush is gone. First things first.

UPDATE: I meant to link to the transition team's site, http://change.gov, which shows a lot of promise as a way for the Obama administration to communicate directly with citizens.

Goddamn right, and amen to that.