“In New York City alone, there’s about $70 billion worth of commercial mortgages — some of which have been sold off as mortgage-backed securities, naturally — coming due this year,” Kevin D. Williamson writes at National Review Online. “The national total is more than $150 billion, or a bit more than 1 percent of U.S. GDP:”

Trepp [a commercial mortgage-backed securities analysis firm] gets to the real concern here, which is that these mortgages and mortgage-backed securities are sitting on the balance sheets of a bunch of still-wobbly banks. How wobbly? About 100 banks went under last year, and about 250 are expected to go under this year. Trepp finds that, of the banks that went toes-up in 2011, bad commercial real estate accounted for two-thirds of their failing loans.

This is a textbook case for the Austrian business-cycle theory: Artificially low interest rates and loose money produce overinvestment, by both bankers and builders, in a bubble — this time, offices, apartment buildings, and retail space — that can’t be sustained once the artificial stimulation comes to an end, as it must. In this case, that malinvestment has to be worked out at two levels: At the financial level, among the lenders and borrowers, but also at the physical level: There’s going to be a lot of dark storefronts out there, with serious long-term consequences for nearby neighbors and for local real-estate markets: Foreclosures will put more property onto the market, driving down rents and subsequently making existing loans less tenable as the cashflow of commercial properties is diminished. They called the Depression-era tent cities “Hoovervilles.” The next time you see a mile of half-abandoned strip malls, think “Obamaville.”

Not as bad as 2008? Probably not — and let’s hope it is not even close. But there’s a $3 trillion commercial-mortgage market lurking out there, and a lot of CMBS investors — banks and insurance companies in particular — that Washington thinks are “too big to fail,” a problem we persistently refuse to address.

Related: “Shipping Rates Go… Negative.” I’ve seen this movie before.

More: James Lileks kicks off a new section of his sprawling Website titled “Malls of Yore.” There coming years will provide the opportunity for far too many potential additions.

Meanwhile at Ricochet, George Savage explores how brutal — and brutally slow — it can be to get a retail business off the ground in über-blue San Francisco. Satirizing the warped priorities of the “mostly violent” Occumutants he asks, “Why Not Occupy City Hall Instead?”

The book’s Amazon description claims:

Analyzing the movement’s deep-seated origins in questions that the country has sought too long to ignore, some of the greatest economic minds and most incisive cultural commentators – from Paul Krugman, Robin Wells, Michael Lewis, Robert Reich, Amy Goodman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Gillian Tett, Scott Turow, Bethany McLean, Brandon Adams, and Tyler Cowen to prominent labor leaders and young, cutting-edge economists and financial writers whose work is not yet widely known – capture the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in all its ragged glory, giving readers an on-the-scene feel for the movement as it unfolds while exploring the heady growth of the protests, considering the lasting changes wrought, and recommending reform. A guide to the occupation, THE OCCUPY HANDBOOK is a talked-about source for understanding why 1% of the people in America take almost a quarter of the nation’s income and the long-term effects of a protest movement that even the objects of its attack can find little fault with.

Since it’s likely still in pre-production, for completion’s sake, here are some helpful suggestions to flesh-out the book:

• Which police cars have the smoothest surface to excrete against.
• What not to say to the media when you’re interviewed after an altercation with the police.
• Why David Duke totally digs OWS.
• The camp rapist: misunderstood soul?
• How to be the first protest dedicated to preserving the status quo.
• How my $90,000 in student loans for a degree in deconstructionist lesbian poetry led me to spend 93 days sleeping in a tent in downtown New York.
• #Occupymobiusloop: How to run up your student debt even more studying #OWS.
• Occupy Your Backyard! It’s not just for ten year olds playing GI Joe anymore.
• How to win friends and influence people by terrorizing minimum wage bank tellers.
• Those who attempt to appease you are simply showing weakness — attack! — whether it’s 1939 or 2011.
• Radical Chic: look sharp — look Soviet!
• Left-wing anti-Semitism: the hot new trend for the 21st century.
• The Bible: Like the Constitution, it’s over 100 years old and outdated. Best to discard by throwing it at your enemies.
• Churches too are part of the 1 percent. Steal with impunity.
• JFK was a plutocratic One Percenter. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country can do for you!
• If we’re so hip, how come the people supporting us are so damn old?
• Why is a prominent spokesman for General Electric supporting OWS?
• If we’re so radical and dangerous, why do establishment media sources like the New York Times, a major publishing house, and Time magazine think we’re so cool?

I’m sure there are numerous other topics that could help make this title the best it can be, so feel free to add yours in the comments. Or maybe just occupy the Hachette Book Group’s New York offices, since they’re giving such protests their blessing by going all in with them.

(Headline suggested by the eminent Abbot H. Hoffman.)

Numbers Six and Seven have fascinating social ramifications (as does everything else on the list, come to think of it):

6) Driving to a store to rent a movie.

My daughter recently found my wife’s old Blockbuster video rental card and asked why she was keeping it. My wife didn’t have a good answer, of course, because there’s no need to drive to store to rent a movie anymore with online delivery and video on demand available over so many platforms. Incidentally, just six years ago, Blockbuster, the largest video-rental chain at the time, abandoned an effort to acquire rival Hollywood Video after antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission threaten to block the deal.It serves as another example of creative destruction at work and also as a cautionary tale about regulatory shortsightedness.

7) Buying / storing music, movies, or games on physical media.

Some of us dinosaurs still haul around crates of CDs and have shelves full of our favorite movies on DVDs. That’s increasingly alien to digital natives. They won’t keep much of anything on physical media in the future. Media content will all be accessed via remote storage or just streamed in real-time, as is increasingly the case today.

With Borders, Tower Records, Sam Goody’s and other “software” retailers having rapidly bit the dust, and with Best Buy apparently teetering on the edge, are we slowly moving towards an age where all purchases — at least of books, music and movies — will primarily occur online? For those of us who grew up in the Axis of Shopping Malls (Cherry Hill, Moorestown, Burlington, and Oxford Valley in my case), that has some pretty big implications for both the future of retailing and consumer leisure time.

Around 1977, when New York City proposed a convention hall on the Hudson River, Dirk Lohan, Mies’s grandson, heading Mies’s successor design firm, responded by transplanting a virtually identical copy of the old 1950s design from Chicago to Manhattan. As architect Stanley Tigerman noted in the 1986 book Mies Reconsidered, published in the centennial year of Mies’s birthday:

By doggedly repeating the brilliant Chicago exposition hall proposal in another location because he was requested to do so, Lohan makes a joke of the earlier proposal by implying that one concept destined for the Chicago lakefront is equally useful on New York’s West Side. Ironically, by such an action, Lohan confirms the long-held popular suspicion that Mies’s “glass boxes” are, after all, repeatable.

Sadly, for too many of today’s self-described “liberals,” it’s the most of the ideas from the 1970s that seem repeatable, long after they’re proven outdated. As E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute writes in Newsday, “Cuomo’s big idea looks like 1970s:”

‘The largest convention center in the nation, period” — in Queens? Is he kidding?

Nope. In his State of the State address Wednesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo did, indeed, tout the same sort of white elephant already being chased by states and cities across the country.

Cuomo envisions a “state-of-the-art” facility at Aqueduct Racetrack nearly 20 percent bigger than the 3.1 million square foot McCormick Place convention center in Chicago — which, as it happens, is reported to be running at only 55 percent capacity after a costly expansion of its own. In fact, as Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute think tank points out, there was already a nationwide glut of convention-center capacity even before the recession put a big dampener on the entire sector.

Elsewhere in the country, taxpayers are being stuck with the bill for underused, publicly subsidized convention-center and hotel space. Cuomo, however, said the state would pursue the Queens project as a $4 billion joint venture with the private operator of the Aqueduct racino.

This expectation, in turn, is surely based in part on the governor’s hope that New York voters in 2013 will approve a constitutional amendment expanding casino gambling — one of his other top economic development priorities.

“It will be all about jobs, jobs, jobs, tens of thousands of jobs,” the governor said.

As job-creation strategies go, convention centers and casinos are straight out of a 1970s playbook. In this respect, Cuomo’s “New NY” agenda looks more like “Old NJ” — Atlantic City, N.J., that is, if on a much bigger scale.

Without specifically addressing Cuomo’s proposal, in City Journal, Steven Malanga describes it as little more than “Convention Wisdom — Cities keep squandering money on hotels and meeting facilities:”

Boston exemplifies double-down madness. The city shelled out $230 million to renovate its convention center in the late 1980s. After the makeover produced virtually no economic bounce, Boston concluded that it needed a new $800 million center, projecting that it would help the city rent some 670,000 extra hotel rooms a year by 2009. The new center, which opened in 2004, fell far short of expectations: the actual number of room rentals that it generated in 2009 was slightly more than 300,000. Now Boston tourism officials are proposing to spend $2 billion to double the center’s size and add a convention hotel, to boot. The officials optimistically predict that the expanded facilities would inject $222 million annually into the local economy, including an extra 140,000 room rentals a year. Despite these bullish projections, officials claim that the hotel needs $200 million in subsidies.

Boston is far from alone. Hoping to help its limping convention center, Baltimore paid $300 million to build a city-owned convention hotel, which opened in 2008. The hotel lost $11 million last year and has barely been able to pay its employees or its debt service. Yet Baltimore is now considering a massive $900 million public-private expansion that would add a downtown arena, another convention hotel, and 400,000 feet of new convention space. The projected cost in public money: $400 million.

Rinse and repeat ad nauseum, until the tax payers are too broke to shakedown for more building funds. Or not. After all, New York’s proposed convention center in 1977 came only two years after the New York Daily News’ infamous “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” cover.

Curious isn’t it, the disparity between how broke a city or state is, and its ruling class’s ability to dream gigantic collectivist projects to help take their mind off the ongoing fiscal nightmare they created?

Click here to view the embedded video.

After watching this video, it seems obvious why Iowa is the only state in the Union where Mandom is both legally sold — and required by law for men to wear. As for the rest of us, as Jim Treacher writes, “Can you handle this? (Hint: No. You cannot):”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh and speaking of Iowa, President Obama weighs in on his success there in 2008, and how he’s followed through on his campaign promises:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the original introduction to Against the American Grain (1962), from which Summers selected most of the pieces in the new book, Macdonald saw two solutions to the “problem” of “everyone getting into the act,” culturally speaking: We could make “(a) an attempt to integrate the masses into high culture; or (b) a contrary attempt to define two cultures, one for the masses and the other for the classes.” He favored the second option, thinking the first was a fool’s errand. But a third option never occurred to him: that high culture would cease to exist, or at least disappear almost entirely from the general scene.

And that’s what happened. High culture and the middlebrow died one after the other. Both were victims of relativism—the quasi-religious faith of post-sixties eggheads, who abandoned any notions of objective excellence as culturally determined, or as mere artifacts of exploitation, or as mechanisms of social control, or as all of the above. When the idea of objective merit—one thing is better than another, and here’s why—went away, the aspiration to seek it went away, too.

The embrace of relativism meant that the second-rate would be conflated with the sublime. In the years after Macdonald’s essay, Menand writes approvingly, “a great river of pop, camp, soulful, performative [?], outrageous, over-the-top cultural products flooded the scene, and Macdonald’s system of cultural judgment was left stranded on the far shore.” As premier examples of this “culture of sophisticated entertainment,” he mentions  such unwatchable movies and TV shows as Bonnie and Clyde and All in the Family and the vastly overpraised music of Motown and Bob Dylan. In an amazing coincidence, all this sophistication matched the taste of Baby Boomers like Louis Menand and his peers. (Funny how that works.) Soon enough, being overschooled and undereducated themselves, they could take up their tenured professorships and apply tools of criticism that had been built for Henry James and Maurice Ravel and apply them to Alice Walker and Lou Reed, until the latter seemed as worthy as the former. I mean, who’s to say?

Relativism has the effect of Gresham’s law: The bad sooner or later drives out the good, and the low the high. Its triumph would have horrified Dwight Macdonald, to judge by the essays, while it bothers the Harvard professor not at all. Macdonald’s chief complaint about Midcult was that it would fudge distinctions between the genuinely beautiful and profound and its slipshod imitators. Macdonald always considered himself a man of the left, but in this collection you’ll find passages of surpassing right-wingery. In 1962 he published a furious protest against the just-published Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, in which the lexicographers officially abandoned the attempt to distinguish between the correct and incorrect usage of words.

There are several reasons that it is important to maintain standards in the use of a language. English, like other languages, is beautiful when properly used, and beauty can be achieved only by attention to form, which means setting limits. .  .  . The kind of permissiveness that permeates [Webster’s Third] results, oddly, in less rather than more individuality, since the only way an individual can “express himself” is in relation to a social norm—in the case of language, to standard usage. .  .  . If the very idea of form, or standards, is lacking, then how can one violate it?

I doubt that Macdonald knew the destructive power of his mockery of the middlebrow. He wasn’t a nihilist, as passages like this one prove. But he was a trendsetter, and when he and the other left-wing highbrows of his generation assailed bourgeois aspiration so devastatingly, so amusingly, the fashion-conscious intellectuals who followed him were bound to find all that striving for excellence infra dig—just too terribly middle class.

Read the whole thing. I was going to include this in the California post that just went up, but it seemed like it would be forcing it. But the demise of middlebrow culture in the mid-to-late 1960s did tremendous damage to America’s overculture — when all culture is pop culture, there’s little need to strive for greatness. One who championed the demise of middlebrow in the late 1960s was Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film critic. As Canadian journalist Robert Fulford wrote a few years ago:

Kael, whose critical reputation was in its early stages, used Bonnie and Clyde as the opening shot in what turned out to be a war against middlebrow, middle-class, middle-of-the-road taste. Her New Yorker piece began: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it.”

She announced no less than a revolution in taste that she sensed in the air. Movie audiences, she said, were going beyond “good taste,” moving into a period of greater freedom and openness. Was it a violent film?

Well, Bonnie and Clyde needed violence. “Violence is its meaning.”

She hated earnest liberalism and critical snobbery. She liked the raw energy in the work of adventurous directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. She trusted her visceral reactions to movies.

When hired as a regular New Yorker movie critic, she took that doctrine to an audience that proved enthusiastic and loyal. She became the great star among New Yorker critics, then the most influential figure among critics in any field. Books of her reviews, bearing titles such as I Lost it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down, sold in impressive numbers. Critics across the continent became her followers. Through the 1970s and ’80s, no one in films, except the actual moviemakers, was more often discussed.

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: “Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline.”

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film’s worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. “It was fun watching the applecart being upset,” Schrader said, “but now where do we go for apples?”

Where indeed?

“The Frankfurt School of philosophers emigrated from Nazi Germany and became dyspeptic critics of American culture. Several landed in Southern California where they were disturbed by the consumer culture and the gospel of relentless cheeriness. Depressive by nature, they focused on the disappointments and venality that surrounded them and how unnecessary it all was. It could be paradise, Theodor Adorno complained, but it was only California.”

– Adam Cohen in The New York Times in February of 2010, a newspaper that drunk deep from the Frankfurt School’s Jurassic-era political correctness.

Flash-forward nearly three-quarters of a century and the punitive worldview of “progressivism” stands still:

For almost 20 years I’ve lived in Iowa, where as a professor at the University of Iowa I’ve taught thousands of university students. I’ve written a couple of books on rural Iowa, traveling to all 99 counties, and have spent much of my time when not teaching, visiting with and interviewing Iowans from across the state. I haven’t taken up hunting or fishing, the main hobbies of rural Iowans, but I’m a fan of University of Iowa Hawkeye football, so I’m a good third of the way to becoming an adopted Iowan. I even have a dog, born and bred in Iowa (more on that later).

– “Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life” in the Atlantic this month by Stephen G. Bloom, whom the magazine describes as “Professor and Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar at the University of Iowa. This year, he is the Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan.”

James Lileks proffers a handy annotated version of Bloom’s Frankfurt School-style cri de coeur from the heartland — best read over the veal scaloppine marsala in the Olive Garden.

Related: While Bloom is sending out an S.O.S. from Iowa to his fellow “liberal” elites in the Northeast Corridor, the Washington Post is busy having similar palpitations over another Midwestern state with locals far more conservative than their “progressive” betters can stand. After all, their self-professed diversity and tolerance for a multicultural society have their limits, you know. “WaPo’s Gowen Hits Hard at Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s First Year in Charge,” Tom Blumer writes at Newsbusters.

Still though, look at the flip-side:  linking to the same hyperventiling Post article, Jim Geraghty paraphrases, “The Tea Party Is Now ‘Completely in Charge’ of Kansas!” Running a whole state? not bad for less than three years work. Take that, OWS!

Come Dec. 1, you can still buy the Happy Meal. But it doesn’t come with a toy. For that, you’ll have to pay an extra 10 cents.

Huh. That hardly seems to have solved the problem (though adults and children purchasing unhealthy food can at least take solace that the 10 cents is going to Ronald McDonald House charities). But it actually gets worse from here. Thanks to Supervisor Eric Mar’s much-ballyhooed new law, parents browbeaten into supplementing their preteens’ Happy Meal toy collections are now mandated to buy the Happy Meals.

Today and tomorrow mark the last days that put-upon parents can satiate their youngsters by simply throwing down $2.18 for a Happy Meal toy. But, thanks to the new law taking effect on Dec. 1, this is no longer permitted. Now, in order to have the privilege of making a 10-cent charitable donation in exchange for the toy, you must buy the Happy Meal. Hilariously, it appears Mar et al., in their desire to keep McDonald’s from selling grease and fat to kids with the lure of a toy have now actually incentivized the purchase of that grease and fat — when, beforehand, a put-upon parent could get out cheaper and healthier with just the damn toy.

Of course comparatively speaking, there aren’t all that many kids left in San Francisco clamoring for the toys. But one issue at a time.

* A paper — and city — where the Butterfield Effect reigns supreme.

We interrupt our usual blogging for a look back at how we spent our Thanksgiving vacation. There are a bunch of photos here of Your Humble Narrator meeting some of his Imaginary Internet Friends in person on the following page. They’re somewhat big files, so I’m putting in a page break to keep them off the homepage to minimize bandwidth if you’re not on a peppy broadband connection.

Packing for a two week trip in two very disparate climates is quite a challenge. Fortunately, my wife approaches these things in much the same detail that Eisenhower planned continental invasions and Von Braun approached lunar landings. Multiple Excel spreadsheets and pre-flight checklists are involved. (You think I’m kidding.)

And they’re needed, too, since we were about to head off to first a week on the National Review Caribbean Cruise, and then a week in South Jersey to visit my mom – and then a weekend excursion to New York before finally returning to California.

We flew out of San Jose Airport, where some bright spark has gotten the idea of placing a player piano in the parent/child waiting area just before the TSA line. Picture in your mind music by Hieronymus Bosch, and you begin the harmonic possibilities of nervous, fidgety five year olds banging on a player piano. It’s just what you need to hear while you’re worried about the TSA-induced small horrors to follow. You can feel the contempt of the TSA agents as you make your way through the line. They hate us – they really hate us!

Our flight from San Jose to Dallas was relatively uneventful, but the next leg, from D-FW to Miami was interesting. The stewardess had an unusually anal retentive briefing, perhaps because of how little Miami-bound tourists pay attention when it comes to opening the emergency exit in the unlikely event of a water landing. She started the briefing by referring to the Boeing 737 we were encased in as the “Lamborghini of the skies” – considering the aircraft’s high horsepower, low gas mileage and cramped leg space, I guess I can see that.

Nina has written her cruise notes, and James Lileks has plenty of notes on the NR Cruise, so I won’t rehash the trip at sea, except to provide some photos, which start on the next page.

What a few days it’s been for Tina Brown. First she got a journalistic colonoscopy courtesy of WWD, which burrowed deep into the dysfunction at the merged Newsweek/Daily Beast. Now Brown has been named one of the 25 least influential people alive by GQ magazine, which grouped her in with the likes of Marcus Bachmann, Hosni Mubarak, Hank Williams Jr. and Leo Apotheker. (And, okay, President Obama.) Not exactly the kind of press you want when you’re a professional shaper of opinion.

The article’s not online yet, but here’s what GQ had to say about her:

Brown spent 2011 transforming Newsweek from a magazine no one reads into a magazine no one reads but everyone despises. That’s what happens when you star-f**k the corpse of Princess Diana by Photoshopping her at age 50 for your cover, then do a separate Photoshop of her holding an iPhone, and then create a fake Facebook page for her that includes wall posts from Deepak Chopra. Did you know Tina and Di were friends? They were! This Photoshopped image of them having lunch with Stevie Nicks is proof!

Bercovici’s post is titled, “GQ Names Tina Brown One of the ‘Least Influential People Alive.’” And when it comes to being non-influential, that’s a topic the sclerotic men’s fashion magazine has long been expert at.