Collapse
Slum nation
My dystopian posts on truthalyzer.com appear optimistic compared to James Howard Kunstler’s weekly Clusterfuck Nation, as this excerpt illustrates: “It’s sad to be a citizen of a nation that can’t do anything right. . . . We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a [...]
Signs of collapse?
“The next stage that’s coming is political collapse which I believe will be triggered here when the nation realizes how bad the Deepwater Horizon leak really is and how it has been misled. . . . No more deepwater drilling and oil prices will spike for sure. — Or, it might come when Freddie and [...]
Earth Day(dreaming)
This 40th annual Earth Day — April 22, 2010 — follows last month’s 4th annual Earth Hour and 12th annual World Water Day. Forgive me, but this blitz of environmental days is leaving me dazed. It’s not that I don’t concur with Earth Day’s high-minded objective “to advance climate policy, energy efficiency, renewable energy and [...]
That word “collapse” keeps popping up
“That word, ‘collapse,’” writes Paul B. Farrell in MarketWatch, “keeps popping up in news and literature: Jared Diamond, anthropologist, in his best-selling ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’ … Hedge fund manager Barton Biggs in ‘Wealth, War and Wisdom’ warns of the ‘possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure’ … Financial historian [...]
Guest essay: Life after growth
Life after growth by Richard Heinberg What if the economy doesn’t recover? In 2008 the U.S. economy tripped down a steep, rocky slope. Employment levels plummeted; so did purchases of autos and other consumer goods. Property values crashed; foreclosure and bankruptcy rates bled. For states, counties, cities, and towns; for manufacturers, retailers, and middle- and [...]
Searching for intelligent life on Earth and beyond
Sometimes I wonder if Earth’s leading candidate for an “intelligent” species, Homo sapiens, is really any smarter than yeast. For the purposes of this post, however, I’ll concede that humans qualify as intelligent, because my subject today is extraterrestrial intelligence. Does our failure to find even one other civilization in the cosmic expanse tell us [...]
Industrial civilization is killing the planet
“It should be clear to everyone by now—even those with a vested interest in ignorance—that industrial civilization is killing the planet. It’s causing unprecedented human privation and suffering. Unless it’s stopped, or somehow stops itself, or most likely collapses under the weight of its inherent ecological and human destructiveness, it will kill every living being [...]
A new Dark Age
Are we already in “a new Dark Age”? Here’s what Michael Minnicino says: “The people of North America and Western Europe now accept a level of ugliness in their daily lives which is almost without precedent in the history of Western civilization. Most of us have become so inured, that the death of millions from [...]
Infinite monkeys, finite resources
Ever heard of The Infinite Monkey Theorem? It goes something like this: Given infinite time, a monkey banging randomly on typewriter keys would reproduce a given work, such as Hamlet. Variations of the theorem add more monkeys to reproduce more works, such as the complete plays of Shakespeare, or all the books in the British [...]
The end of the era of American possibility
“We may be approaching the end of the era of American possibility,” writes Orville Schell in TomDispatch. He despairs over “the best” of America’s public educational institutions “driven into the ground thanks to devastating, repeated budget cuts; a national energy system . . . terminally strung out on oil and coal . . . the [...]
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