"I keep remembering the half-stunned, half-irritated looks on the faces of those car execs when they were chided for flying their company jets to Washington to beg. I felt sorrow for them. Truly. These guys are the captains of American industry at the top of the food chain. Of course they fly corporate jets. Corporate jets were *invented* for guys like the board of General Motors. And now they're getting skewered for that by a bunch of punk-ass Congressmen they can usually buy and sell? *That's* the issue at stake, a few jets? General Motors built the aviation industry in World War II. General Motors aircraft pounded Nazi Germany into a flaming ruin. Here they get this off-the-wall, total-hokum act of peanut-gallery gotcha humiliation about the corporate airplanes they've used for fifty years. That must have felt surreal, even nauseating." - ⓞnor

"Americans -- and Orlov's an American now, he's much too relaxed and funny to be a Russian -- love to imagine that America leads the collapse. If we're not the Shining City on the Hill, we've at least got to be the Smoldering Wreckage on the Hill. You know: as long as we're always the Hill." - ⓞnor

I think Sterling gives the auto industry leaders a little too much credit. If they had a real sense for the history and once glory of the American car industry, I tend to think that industry wouldn't be where it is now. All I get from them is a sense of fatuously bewildered entitlement. - ⓞnor

Good selection of quotes, ⓞnor. Bewildered entitlement, indeed. I hope we don't end up like that one day. - ana

"The people fighting climate change -- they look like Voltaire combatting Kings and Popes. They're still eighty percent witty comments. They have a foul, hot wind at their backs, but they don't yet have the battalions. " - ana

"When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable." - ana

"Financial "plans" are schemes of wealth destruction. Weird crap happens -- financial epileptic fits, basically. Reason fails. At length there's some return to a semblance of normalcy, and the economic witch-doctors assure us that the wrath of the gods is gone. It's safe to get greedy again. That's behavioral economics -- everything we claim we know about economics is astrology, it's pep-talk. We go for it in the same cheery way that Aztecs used to go for human sacrifice. A Human Sacrifice Bubble." - ana

"There's a reason why HP, Microsoft and Apple started in suburban garages rather than city center lofts." - ana