Funny Endless Growth Stuff From The Onion

Readers wanting comic relief (because there's an upcoming post about the healthcare system) should check out this uproarious article from the masters of satire, The Onion. Exerpt:
"As we move into the 21st century, it is our responsibility to think of the future of the earth—not for ourselves, but for those who will inherit what my husband and I leave behind when we're gone. If we do not join together and do what's best for this, our only planet, there may not be an environment left in which my five children, and their 25 children's 125 children, can grow up and raise large upper-middle-class families of their own."

Enjoy.

Collapse Revisited: Tainter's Collapse (the abridged version)

Chaos somehow doubts that most casual readers will attempt to get through what is considered the definitive work on collapse, Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, since it is somewhat academic and scholarly, and let's face it, who reads these days anyhow (besides Chaos)? At any rate here is a much shorter link for those who wish to know why complexity leads eventually to collapse, or at least it has in the past...or is modern industrial civilization "special" and exempt from past historical experience, much like those who insist that civilization can keep growing (and destroying the planet as it does) forever, in defiance of the laws of nature, since humans are "special."