China’s kind of like Wal-Mart in that while it’s obvious to any thinking person that its practices are supremely destructive and unsustainable and bad for human bodies, you want to believe that it’s vast enough that some people with solutions might clamor their way towards positions of power, and change course.
Also, China is probably lying [...]

I swear to God, the man’s a social Darwinist.  I’m sure he doesn’t want to see China or the Chinese perish from this vale of tears, but why does every argument he make have to be couched in a soft(-ish) clash of civilizations?  Apparently, everything the US does first requires boasting about our prowess in [...]

Without wading into an area in which I’m completely unqualified to mouth off, except to say that I find it totes fascinating, I’m increasingly bearish–and increasingly sanguine about my bearishness–on human beings surviving into the 22nd century without major, mostly negative changes.  An Islamist-controlled nuclear Pakistan would be a really bad thing for the future [...]

When the Republicans are in charge, the rate at which we career towards oblivion speeds up.  When the Democrats are in power, the pace of “socioglobal” destruction decelerates.  We’re still falling apart, only more slowly now.  Although the jury is still out on whether or not the destruction of everything can actually be reversed, a [...]

Well, fuck me in the ass, Tom Friedman wrote something worthwhile.  Yesterday’s column on environmental sustainability was cogent and hopeful without immediately making me think he was eliding oodles of inconvenient facts.  Even if the title, “(No) Drill, Baby, Drill” is grammatical nonsense and only comprehensible as the simple negation of a catchphrase, it’s the [...]

Oh, Mother Nature.  We know she’s a single woman, which is why she sometimes rains men.  These days, though, Tom Friedman is raining her.  She’s the subject of today’s op-ed, which encourages a new system of corporate accounting that factors environmental devastation into the true cost of a product.
She’s riding high in his oeuvre nouveau [...]

For today, I refuse to get worked up about cartoons in the New York Post where the punch line is apparently “Black people are monkeys” or how depressing it is for the Obama Administration to continue some egregiously malevolent Bush anti-terrorism policies or how Goldman Sachs executives are openly stealing bailout money or how Detroit [...]

Aside from a Justice Department that tortures people because they believe the president is some kind of Sun King, there’s probably nothing worse than an EPA that actively works with Big Coal to destroy the environment.
I can see two trends.  One, Bush uses his remaining month and a half to issue fuck-you’s with varying consequences [...]