You’ve seen me talk here before about the delicious rise of monster metaphors, specifically zombies and Frankenstein‘s monster, to describe the apocalyptic economic troubles of the past few years. Now a writer for The Motley Fool — always a useful and amusing site for its combination of investment advice and cheeky humor — has invoked…
Category: Economy
Peak Oil: Time to shut up as the conversation goes global
Okay, I officially don’t have to talk to anybody ever again about peak oil. Today U.K. energy minister Lord Hunt made the whole thing an official topic of front-table discussion: Energy minister will hold summit to calm rising fears over peak oil Lord Hunt calls UK industrialists together to discuss government response to any early…
Our task: Envisioning and creating a new relationship with money
The following comes from a truly wonderful Jan. 25 essay by Charles Leadbeater at New Statesman titled “The best things in life are free.” No comment necessary, other than to express gratitude for such a lucid and moving exposition of a truth so crucial it hurts (and one that’s just as true for the U.S….
MSNBC explains how Goldman Sachs stole billions from U.S. taxpayers with government help
Unbelievable. Not the news that Goldman Sachs used its no-strings-attached government money from Hank Paulson’s bank industry bailout last fall to earn inconceivable amounts of money in a titanically underhanded manner, but the fact that mainstream media heavyweight MSNBC would feature such a raw exposĂ© as this one: The quick version (quicker than watching the…
‘Green shoots’ a lie, Greater Depression still unfolding nicely
Like a lot of other people, I have been alternately galled and amused in recent months to hear all the talk of economic “green shoots” that started back when Ben Bernanke first used the term in February during a 60 Minutes interview (and thereby became the first Fed official ever to do so, even though…
An Economic Day of Reckoning for America’s Colleges
Interesting video from The Chronicle of Higher Education showing speakers and attendees at the Chronicle‘s Leadership Forum, held on June 7-8 in Washington, D.C., hashing over the question of just how worried colleges ought to be about the economy, and how they ought to respond to the crisis. Their bottom line: Brace for serious change….
Religion, voluntary poverty, and cultural survival in an age of collapse
Or actually, what I present here are quotes of the day, plural. Both are from John Michael Greer, he of the liquid prose and fearsome erudition, and one of the most important writers about the civilizational trajectory we’re pursuing right now. [Toynbee’s insight] that religion very often serves as the conduit by which the cultural…
The last generation’s successes become the next generation’s problems
An interesting recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that explains one effect of California’s epic budget crisis on its college system spells out a principle with much wider applications for our culture and civilization at large. “California’s ‘Gold Standard’ for Higher Education Falls Upon Hard Times” (June 15) explains how the fabled California…
Kunstler channels Lovecraft, or, Cosmic Decay in Upstate New York
How very, very fascinating to see James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand, and one of contemporary America’s most visible, forceful, caustic, and eloquent prophets of doom (via peak oil, economic collapse, climate change, and more), turning to none other than H.P. Lovecraft for a properly evocative literary reference…
America’s Colleges at a Crossroads – Part 3
You might want to catch up on Parts 1 and 2 of this series before reading this final installment, although this one, like the others, can stand on its own. In the first post in this series, I talked about the economic crisis that will force and is currently forcing the realignment and, in many…