“The Revolution Will Not Be Handmade” is one of the most refreshing things I’ve read in a while. I spent Monday night listening to classmates discuss new green buildings and whether plastic bag bans and recycling are a necessary, sufficient, or even worthwhile condition to satisfy environmental needs. Once you learn a certain amount about just how screwed we are vis-à-vis atmospheric CO2, finite hydrocarbon resources, and ecological resilience, and you’ve picked up enough knowledge of science/engineering and geopolitics to avoid being a useful idiot to anyone, you become a bit jaded about the possibility of our society making any changes necessary to avert eventual emergencies. Compare our responses to predicted events which may happen on a certain date (eg. Y2k, or elections) and which will definitely happen on an uncertain date (eg. financial corrections as we just experienced, technological obsolescence, peak oil).

The ‘manifesto’ manages to at least articulate the urgency and the scale of the changes needed to ensure that my great-grandkids and their contemporaries around the world enjoy a better quality of life than I do – which is one of my basic definitions of a ’sustainable’ civilization.

A concise snippet:

We can no longer afford to mistake the symbolic for the effective, or put our hopes in the mystical idea that if enough of us embrace small steps, our values will ripple mysteriously out through the culture and utterly transform it. We’ve been saying that for more than 40 years, it hasn’t happened and we need to stop lying to ourselves that it will. Live the life that fits your values, but don’t mistake that for changing the world.

Finally got some posting time once again, and updated to the newest version of Wordpress.

I begin to see what other blogs are dealing with, spam-wise.  I’ve had an approximately exponential rise in (moderated) spam comments over the last few weeks, and I expect that 200 a day for a new blog equates to 200 million a day for a popular one.  Akismet is wonderful thus far, but I expect if I get anywhere traffic-wise I’ll institute ReCaptcha or one of the more original captchas (a domain in which there are perhaps an infinite number of interesting ideas).

A DKos diary by gjohnsit points out that shipping cost indexes have dropped off a very vertical cliff, and the cost to rent a given model of freighter is down 98% – while the price of oil has dropped significantly, the demand for shipping has dropped precipitously.  It also shows off some similarly L-shaped graphs dealing with the modern-day federal reserve, which has approximately nothing to do with the federal reserve of six months ago.

The Baltic Dry Index of oceanic shipping costs: