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

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
xpost

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
xpost

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
xpost

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

I think that one guy may be indicative of larger anxieties about the price of gas, though.

esp with regard to tom's highlighted stolen tanker story.
glad i don't drive.
not even going to take the subway much anymore once i get a few parts for my bike.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/06/13/flood.jpg

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa, June 13 -- The sun finally broke through the layers of clouds on Friday, a reassuring presence after a week of rain. But as residents in and around this eastern Iowa city surveyed their waterlogged landscape, they did not like what they saw.

"It looks like Katrina," said a man in a pickup truck who declined to give his name. He was stuck in traffic that was at a standstill for 10 miles on the interstate north of the city, gazing at the Quaker Oats factory and buildings sitting in several feet of water.

Locals said the flood that hit Iowa's second-largest city is far worse than the deluge of 1993. About 25,000 residents have had to leave, and hundreds of homes and businesses have been damaged, many of them severely.

More than 400 blocks of downtown were evacuated, including a jail and a major hospital. Water flowed like a river through downtown streets blocked off by National Guard members, and warehouses along the Cedar River were nearly submerged. Floodwater gurgled around treetops and lapped just feet below electrical wires and billboards. The Cedar River crested at 31.2 feet Thursday, 15 feet above flood stage and breaking the record from 15 years ago.

"We thought the crest would be 20 or 22 feet, and we thought we would be okay, but it was 31," Cedar Rapids Mayor Kay Halloran said.

The flooding that hit this city of more than 120,000 is just part of the hammering the Midwest has received from severe storms during the past week. Floodwaters have submerged parts of Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Authorities have been forced to close a nearly 300-mile stretch of the upper Mississippi River to all traffic. According to the Associated Press, scores of bridges across nine overflowing rivers have been weakened or swept away.

The floods have destroyed acres of corn, soybeans and other crops, prompting worries about a spike in food prices at a time when they already have been rising. "I have real concerns about our agricultural sector," said Gov. Chet Culver (D), who declared 83 of Iowa's 99 counties disaster areas. (...)

Carpenter Phil Leidigh, 53, a Cedar Rapids native, wondered where homeless people downtown would go and said flooding hit low-income areas of the city the hardest.

"Where the flooding is, it hit the people who are already struggling, who worked their whole lives to get where they are and now have to start over," he said. "It could take years for the city to recover.

What was that film with Tina Turner where she wore all that leather and studs? Did I dream that? Are we talking about the same film? I'm really drunk.

It had to do with the apocalypse so I'm not THAT drunk.

When I went to a William Gibson reading/signing the other night, somebody asked him about the tendency to describe his books as "dystopian." He gave pretty much the same answer in this interview to io9:

"None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme, a literary device. No one lives in dystopias, they just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl."

"None of us ever live in dystopia?"
LOL LOL LOL

Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

this seems a salient point

The US does seem fairly prone to "extreme weather events" as the news people seem to love calling them, so maybe as that increases then it might encourage a particularly recalcitrant country to do something concrete about climate change. Not that I'm wishing them ill or anything, but New Orleans-style events are more likely to prompt action than Bangladesh vanishing under the sea.