Blind Spot

Really nice production here, with most of our friends: Heinberg, the Bartletts (Albert and Roscoe), Tainter, Savinar, etc. Puts just about everything in perspective, with easy to understand explanations. In a different culture, works like these would be a wake-up call, but not in the US. Not too hard to realize why, and the film takes a pretty good stab at it.

A Funny Symbol of the Gilded Age

Try this hilarious article on how to survive a friend's expensive birthday dinner, when there are multiple guests with wildly differing financial abilities. As an amusing piece of fluff, it is quite successful, but a sobering step back is also possible if one ruminates on the excesses of a society in which events like this take place. If you need concrete contrast, have a look at this account of a couple attempting to live on $1.00 per day, the better to imagine how 1 billion humans on the earth survive.

Water, Water, Everywhere?

Taking a short break from observations of the current high and higher oil prices and their effects, we find our friend Lester Brown of the Earth Institute with this interesting article on how we are drawing down the world's supply of "fossil water" (that which has accumulated underground over oh, say, several million years). Anyway, a brief pondering of the implications will suffice to make one realize that goofy stuff about humanity's "footprint" is probably understated, and things are tending more towards the dieoff than you probably realized.

Rapidly Accelerating Global Heating Melts Antarctic: World Shrugs

From the "News That Just Keeps Getting Worse and Worse" Department (which, in itself, is quite a large department, encompassing as it does the Iraq "war," global heating, species and habitat destruction, healthcare, and US politics in general), comes this now familiar piece which in essence conveys that glacial melting due to global heating (oh wait, that's just an invention of Al Gore's to bedevil the Fox News crowd in the US, not an actual phenomenon, or maybe it does exist, but it's a natural occurrence, which shouldn't concern us, because 1. it's not our fault, and 2. we can't do anything about it anyway) is proceeding much much faster than our best scientific minds can project it. Just another day in Cheap Energy Wonderland, though, because nothing is happening to stop it. (To be fair, what really needs to happen is not going to happen for quite some time, most surely not until it is way too late; Chaos is speaking, of course, of a massive dieoff, but let's not talk about such depressing stuff, shall we?)