"Is It Thunderdome Yet?" A Rolling Looming Apocalypse Thread

i'll have a wheaty avian fluskie plz

I like mine hoppy and peaty.

Forget oil, the new global crisis is food

A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club's 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday.

"It's not a matter of if, but when," he warned investors. "It's going to hit this year hard."

full

Hooray @ headline/lede alarmism. Point of the article: what with more people on earth, we probably oughta be growing more food, eh? Let's get on that right quick.

HOOpocalypse now

The US has many flavors of hucksters working the doom industry. Some are crackpots. Some are our leaders. Some are scholars pimping books. It's a great racket and I've covered it for a number of years in print. It's hard to lose money predicting doom.

See a Lexis search I did a couple years ago on prediction of terror attacks.

Or flogging it.

A running tabulation of invocations of imminent mushroom cloud in daily newspapers.

Ack, mushroom clouds in the press.

'but it's got electrolytes!'

xposts

lol rrobyn

Ethanol Fuel Will Kill Us All

"Using good cropland to expand biofuels will probably exacerbate global warming," concludes the study published in Science magazine.

RUN TOOOO THE HILLLLLLLLS

Capitalism in an Apocalyptic Mood

Skyrocketing oil prices, a falling dollar, and collapsing financial markets are the key ingredients in an economic brew that could end up in more than just an ordinary recession.

RUN FOOOOOOOOR YOOOOOOOUR LIIIIIIIIFE

Richard Dawkins is Optimistic About Something

"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color and bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?"
- Richard Dawkins

tl;dr

BIG KINS aka the cheerleader

<a href=http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803u/uranium-smuggling>;Russian Uranium Smuggling</a>

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but who can resist panicking about Russian Uranium Smuggling?

two pieces in this month's Harper's bring the o_O

"Numbers Racket: Why the Economy is Worse Than We Think"
"Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits" about how teh center can't hold cause of peak oil omg

Rolling UK Economy Into The Shitbin Thread
Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread
Real Estate bubble bust may be worse than Dot Com bubble bust

eeg so i guess i'm kinda glad this month's harpers has become buried in a pile of random objects on my desk
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The Economy piece in Harper's didn't really include any new information.

I mean most of what it says was true ten years ago, granted that it's important to remember that all that is true.

Last month's Harper's cover about the potential contagious cancer made me laugh a little. They should just change their name to Looming Apocalypse Monthly.

If the "Numbers Racket" article is about how the US gov skews its own economic statistics in order to manipulate markets, understate unemployment, and circumvent the intent of certain US laws (eg indexing Social Security benefits to the CPI), then I would like to read it.

haha
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confession: i never read any of the american politics/economy articles in harpers

i try sometimes but

the "Numbers Racket" article is about how the US gov skews its own economic statistics in order to manipulate markets, understate unemployment, and circumvent the intent of certain US laws (eg indexing Social Security benefits to the CPI), then I would like to read it.

-- Aimless, Saturday, April 12, 2008 2:13 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

That's what it's about, but your post pretty much sums up everything that's in the article.

There was a time when these numbers weren't corrupt. It is good to keep track of how widespread the area of corruption has grown and who benefits from it, if only to keep one's sense of reality from becoming too distorted by the powerful Untruth Waves bombarding us from all sides.

It has some neat graphs.

Yeah, I see your point. It is important to stop once in a while and remind yourself that the statistics you're hearing have little bearing on whether the typical American living standard, or even your own living standard, is actually getting better.

Got any faith in humanity left? Trash it.

Wait, sorry, I'm supposed to lose faith in humanity because someone did something kind of stupid and got killed?

I guess you're right, but it still pisses me off real good.

I do think it's a little saddening that this woman undertook a project that relied on a certain degree of basic human decency, and then those expectations were horribly violated. I'm also a little saddened by the jaded reactions I'm seeing all over the place.

Was it a naive project? Maybe. But it's depressing nonetheless.

lol Gawker's scifi blog (lol) had a roundup today on "12 Ways to Prepare for Our Dystopian Near-Future" or something, and even I thought it was some alarmist bullshit.

and i'm already stockin up on non-perishables and shit

man drop in a reference to ghostface and that's the most in-character pair of posts i've ever had

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_cox/2008/04/precautionary_principles.html

lol

CIA chief: 'Get ready for Children of Men-style funnies'. Admittedly I paraphrase.

I think it's just wonderful that the deterioration in the world situation from overpopulation will occur at a slow enough pace that we can adjust to each new level of chaos as normal and expected. This means that, however bad things get, life will still seem commonplace and acceptable. Humans are amazingly good at this.

Was it Obvious Day at the CIA?

i kinda suck at it
but yknow, go humans
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Debates, debates.

lol just had a half hour convo w/an old friend about how we're both getting a creeping sense of doomq

but fuck it i'm happy today

doomq

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/as-diesel-price.html

Earlier this week in Houston, Texas, a veteran driver was carjacked at gunpoint and his diesel tanker stolen. The truck was recovered today, undamaged, but minus its liquid cargo.

"is it thunderdome yet" indeed

I should have put this on this thread to begin with, but this story just kills me. they just caught the kid yesterday, he came back a third time and security jumped him. crawling under cars and powerdrilling into fuel tanks should have earned him a darwin award.

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local&id=6117572

Police say the thief drilled a hole into the gas tanks of two SUVs and stole the gas. The first time it was a Chevy Silverado pick up truck, the second hit was on a Jeep Liberty SUV - that time the thief got scared off and left a bucket of gas just sitting there.

There have been a total of 10 reports of gas thefts in San Jose. Police in Daly City are just shaking their heads - they can't believe this has happened. They say it's a wonder that the thief or thieves didn't kill themselves because using drills around gas is not the safest idea.

One guy stealing gas seems a bit lightweight for a thread about the looming apocalypse, don't you think?

right now it's certainly just a curio story. I know the first guy who was hit, which made it personal. imagine an entire building's office chatter revolving around steel lined gas tanks for 12-gallon cars the week gas cleared $4 in SF.

but you're absolutely right, it smacks of recreational panicking