THE PROBLEM WITH THE #OCCUPY MOVEMENT — NO EXIT STRATEGY: “You come, you conquer, and then time passes, protesters get dirty and ugly, internal divisions crack them up, the nearby residents get disgusted, the local businesses get mad, and then what? There’s isn’t going to be a revolution. It’s not Egypt. In the end, they’ll have to break up and go home. Or hope the cops come in and bust them up so they can end with a bang.”

Well, that’s one problem. The other is that the value of the sword of Damocles is that it hangs, not that it falls. Obama told Wall Street that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. That scared them into line for a while. But now Wall Street’s sick of him, and doesn’t care. They’re not playing ball like they used to.

So he unleashed the pitchforks and what we got was the #occupy movement, a pathetic, and totally non-scary, embarrassment for the Democrats. Republicans are now hoping they’ll stay in place until November of 2012.

You just can’t get good goons these days.

Meanwhile, Andy Kessler reports from San Francisco.

Maybe this is all really about disappointment. I spoke to a young woman who had clearly bathed more recently than most. I asked her why she was at OccupySF. She told me she’d done all the right things. Studied hard. Graduated college. (She was an art major.) And now she can’t get a job. It didn’t matter. It’s all messed up. She was lied to.

Of course she was. She’s a member of the Trophy Generation. Win or lose, you get a trophy. We embraced mediocrity to an entire generation of kids during good times who are now finding themselves mediocre in bad times. There still is that American dream: Go to college, get a job, buy a Prius. But like it or not, studying art or humanities or gender studies won’t get you there. Marissa Mayer at Google complains she can’t find enough computer-science majors. Civil engineers are getting hired sight unseen.

Educating the whole child was bad advice. So was follow your passion. California spends months teaching ninth-graders how to build a waste-treatment plant with only a day or two on natural selection. I think Occupy Wall Streeters are as much disappointed with the route they all took as they are with “fat cat” bankers.

Plus, how to really occupy Wall Street — with, you know, actual skills and value added and stuff:

I must have rolled my eyes because Aaron introduced me to the guy. He had long hair, a scruffy beard and was holding an iPhone in one hand and a 5-hour ENERGY drink in the other. All entrepreneurs are trained for the elevator pitch, the 30-second description of what they do in case they are ever on a short elevator ride with a venture capitalist.

“I’ve taken the best of social networking and high-frequency trading and built a system that beats those Wall Street thieves at their own game. Users input their portfolio, it could be stocks or bonds or even derivatives and then we log each trade and anonymously share the spreads so everyone is on an even keel. First it’s just about information, but then we can start matching trades away from Wall Street. Its over for those guys, the status quo is toast.”

Apparently there’s more than one way to Occupy Wall Street.

Indeed.

THE HILL: Sen. Reid spends heavily in political capital in effort to help Obama. “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has expended a heavy dose of political capital in recent weeks to help President Obama, despite grumbling within his caucus about the administration.”

TODAY ONLY SALE: “Alfred Hitchcock – The Masterpiece Collection” on DVD.

IN OTHER WORDS, BUSINESS AS USUAL, I GUESS: Strauss-Kahn ‘sex soirees paid for by businessmen.’ “A police probe into pimping at a French luxury hotel has uncovered evidence that Dominique Strauss-Kahn attended sex soirees with prostitutes paid for by businessmen, newspapers reported on Friday. Police investigating the case are also looking into trips made by the businessmen and a city police chief to Washington when Strauss-Kahn was head of the International Monetary Fund there, the Liberation and Le Figaro dailies said. The last such trip ended on May 13 this year, the day before New York police arrested Strauss-Kahn for the alleged sexual assault of a hotel chambermaid.”

ANGLETON AND THE CIA, revisited.

FORMER REP. ARTUR DAVIS: I’ve changed my mind on voter ID laws — I think Alabama did the right thing in passing one — and I wish I had gotten it right when I was in political office. “When I was a congressman, I took the path of least resistance on this subject for an African American politician. Without any evidence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation. The truth is that the most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African American community, at least in Alabama, is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.”

MAYBE HE SHOULD QUIT DRIVING IT INTO THE DITCH: Obama calls for Congress to ‘get our economy moving again.’

MATT YGLESIAS’ “DECEPTIVE” NUMBERS? “Peter Schaeffer shows why Yglesias’ graphs are pretty much completely deceptive. It turns out we’ve lost more private jobs than public jobs, even as a percentage, and even after ‘public sector jobs grew much faster in the run up to the crash.'”

PROFESSOR JACOBSON: “Herman Cain is bringing out the worst venom from the liberal media and entertainment complex, and the left-wing blogosphere.”

CANADA: CBC running scared: State broadcaster’s false attack ads demonstrate how financial probe is desperately needed. “The non-partisan information commissioner has given the CBC a grade of “F” for its secrecy — but it still violates her order for it to disclose the truth. It’s spending millions in legal expenses to hide how it’s spending billions in other expenses. This bad behaviour was coming to a head last week when Parliament was going to turn over some rocks and see what was going to go scurrying. And so it panicked. . . . If any other government department had done something like this, whoever responsible would be fired immediately. It wasn’t just unprofessional. It wasn’t just outside of its mandate of what it is given its government money for. It was an attempt to destroy a private-sector competitor.”

Turn on the lights, and the cockroaches scurry.

DON’T WANT YOUR CREDIT DOWNGRADED? Make downgrading your credit a crime! “This week alone has seen a ratings downgrade for Spain as well as a threat by agencies to review France’s AAA status — and the markets have taken notice. Once again, it would seem, ratings agencies are making things difficult for European countries. Now, the European Union is considering doing something about it.” Yeah, that’ll solve the problem.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “The social contract exists so that everyone doesn’t have to squat in the dust holding a spear to protect his woman and his meat all day every day. It does not exist so that the government can take your spear, your meat, and your woman because it knows better what to do with them.”

UPDATE: Ah, it’s from commenter Dagny at Ace’s place.

DON SURBER does the Washington Post’s homework for it. You know, the sort of thing that real newspapermen do . . . .

EUROPE FAIL: Eurozone summit – despair and backbiting in the corridors of power. “Just when the eurozone governments thought it could not get worse for Europe’s single currency, it did. Shell-shocked EU finance ministers meeting in Brussels on Saturday were already reeling from the worst Franco-German rift for over 20 years and a fractious failure to resolve the problems that have brought Greece, and the euro, close to the brink. But then a new bombshell hit as a joint report by the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that, without a default, the Greek debt crisis alone could swallow the eurozone’s entire €440 billion bailout fund – leaving nothing to spare to help the affected banks of Italy, Spain or France.”

TODAY ONLY: 50% or more off on Rembrandt tooth-whitening products.

(Bumped, because I think my readers should look nice. And for cheap.)

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Flashback: Obama’s Failed Stimulus Cost More than 9 Year Iraq War.

ATF GUNRUNNING UPDATE: Slain ICE agent’s family still searching for answers.

In the eight months since Jaime Zapata was killed in an ambush in Mexico that also wounded another ICE agent, his parents say they have been proud to see his life eulogized by top U.S. government officials and to see a highway, a road and even a boat ramp named after their son.

But they also have grown increasingly frustrated in their quest to get answers about his death. They want to know why he was in northern Mexico when he initially was told that his assignment was intelligence gathering in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.

They want to know more about the guns used in the attack, and whether any of them were tied to the U.S. government’s Operation Fast and Furious, which failed to track weapons that ended up in the hands of Mexican cartel members.

“I feel like I’m not getting the truth,” his mother said Friday in an interview with the Houston Chronicle.

I feel the same way. . . .

ORTHOSTATIC TACHYCARDIA: Ailment Can Steal Youth From the Young.

Patrick Fox, now 14, considers himself lucky. It took only a year to find out why he was always tired, his heart raced and he ached all over, why he became overheated easily and had terrible headaches almost every day. Once a happy, active child and good student who enjoyed school, by age 12 he could hardly get out of bed. Various medical specialists — pediatrician, cardiologist, rheumatologist and geneticist — failed to find a physical cause for his symptoms. Some said he should see a psychiatrist because he was a malingerer, lazy, depressed, manipulative or overly anxious.

Instead, after his racing heart caused chest pains that felt like an impending heart attack, his mother whisked him off to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where in just two hours he learned he had a form of autonomic dysfunction known as POTS, short for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.

It has taken some youngsters with the syndrome as long as a decade to get a proper diagnosis, by which time their teen years are a washout.

In my experience, whenever medical doctors offer a psychological diagnosis, it’s a copout. I’m sure that’s not always the case, but it has been my experience. After Helen had her heart attack, she got all sorts of psychological diagnoses, when she was really suffering the after-effects of an undiagnosed heart attack.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste emails:

In 1971 my father complained constantly about increasing pain in his abdomen. The doctors did the usual tests and didn’t find anything, and eventually recommended that he be put into a psychiatric institution to treat what they thought was an imaginary pain.

A few days after that began, some test came back that they hadn’t bothered waiting for. What they found out was that he had advanced cancer of the pancreas. An exploratory operation determined that it had spread to his liver, and there was no hope.

In 1972 it finally killed him.

I’m with you on this: “In my experience, whenever medical doctors offer a psychological diagnosis, it’s a copout.”

(I should mention that it didn’t actually cost him his life. By the point where he finally got doctors to start trying to find out what
was wrong, it was already too late.)

So they just added insult to injury. Okay.

VOIP UPDATE: Researchers uncover privacy flaws that can reveal users’ identities, locations and digital files. “Ross, the Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science at NYU-Poly, explained that the team uncovered several properties of Skype that can track not only users’ locations over time but also their peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing activity. Even when a user blocks callers or connects from behind a Network Address Translation (NAT) – a common type of firewall – it does not prevent the privacy risk, he said. The research also revealed that marketers can easily link to information such as name, age, address, profession and employer from social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn in order to inexpensively build profiles on a single tracked target or a database of hundreds of thousands.”

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in digital cameras.

UPDATE: Reader Jerry Huling writes:

I want to call your attention to the Sylvania HD1Z SD/SDHC/MMC 720p HD Pocket Video Digital Camera/Camcorder.

I bought a couple of these under the “Emerson” brand name at Big Lots for $25 each. With an 8-Gig SIMM card, they’ll record about an hour of video and audio or store about a zillion snapshots.

They’re certainly not “high-end”, but for turning on and dropping in your shirt pocket while being “interviewed” on the side of the road by the highway patrol, I don’t think they could be beat.

Here’s an example of the Emerson. Even the Sylvania model, at thirty-seven bucks is not a bad deal for a simple, rugged, and cheap video/audio/still camera.

As I said quite a while ago, what’s really impressive isn’t how good the expensive cameras have gotten. It’s how good the cheap cameras have gotten. And if you plan to shoot video in rough-and-tumble circumstances, there’s a lot to be said for having one that’s cheap enough to be expendable.

TURMERIC FOR JOINT PAIN? “A study published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2009 compared the active ingredient in turmeric, curcumin, with ibuprofen for pain relief in 107 people with knee osteoarthritis. The curcumin eased pain and improved function about as well as the ibuprofen. Another study, by researchers at Baylor University Medical Center in 2008, reported that taking curcumin daily in moderate doses for up to three months was safe.” I just use it in cooking whenever I can.

DESTROYING ANGEL: “It appears that killing people is easier than creating jobs. Is Barack Obama morphing into the foreign affairs president, having determined that there is no chance of the economy turning around before the next election?”

FROM SPACE, IT’S your weekly volcano report.