Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Shit to Hit Fan: Film at 11

Holy crap! You thought I was depressing? Well, today Salon has an article about Kevin Phillips, the Nixon campaign worker who predicted in 1969 that Republicans would become a dominant force in American politics, and who is now arguing "that imperial overstretch, dependence on obsolete energy technologies, intolerant and irrational religious fervor, and crushing debt have led to the fall of previous great powers, and will likely lead to the fall of this one."

According to him, we're soon to face global warming, hurricanes, peak oil, economic collapse, theocratic stupidity, avian flu and increased war, likely all at once. The good news? With all of that going on, Paris Hilton will be completely forgotten! Life is about trade-offs, you see.

Do I think he's right? Well, doomsday scenarios usually presuppose that nothing will be done until it's too late, and thankfully, people do tend to wise up. So, he's probably only right about the global warming, hurricanes, and economic collapse. Isn't that reassuring?

2 comments:

SecondComingOfBast said...

I hope you watched 60 minuts tonight, there was a NASA scientist, an atmospheric specialist of some sort, who taked about how the Bush Administration censors any information pertaining to global warming by marginalizing it though inclusion of terms of uncertainty, changing whole sentences to downplay the threat, and removing whole sections altogether. He wasn't even suppossed to be allowed to be there, but he stuck his neck out for this interview. Jim Hanson was his name, I just remembered it.

More evidence that the Administration cherry picks evidence to suit it's agenda and lies about, disregards, hides, or minimizes evidence to the contrary.

Rufus said...

Actually, the New Yorker just did a startling piece on this subject last month that I think has gotten a lot of people talking. It's just astounding how these people will politicize anything. They don't believe in the objective status of truth and so everything becomes "your argument" as opposed to "our argument."