“The radar is picking up a line of thundershowers which extends from nine miles NNE of Sicorgus, New Jersey, along a line and six miles either side of the line to a point five miles SSW of Fonduloch.
However, the radar is also picking up a squadron of Russian ICBMs…so I wouldn’t sweat the thundershowers.”
— George Carlin as Al Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman

Yesterday’s political orgy of Super Tuesday was nothing more than a news-chomping smokescreen for other precarious shit that’s been shifting and sliding around on the back burner for ages.
And speaking of smoke and mirrors — carrot before the mule and Newt Gingrich last night: “And now it’s [Rick] Santorum and you just can’t quite get across to them. It’s alright, there are lots of bunny rabbits to run through. I’m the tortoise. I just take one step at a time.”

Not top-of-the-line political cool: Comparing yourself to a slow-moving reptile is probably not your strongest argument, Newt.

(Illustration of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Don Quixote‘ found here).

Even as all the political bullshit keeps puffing along, the planet is not in the best shape to just sit and blather for hours on nothing — we have to be creative.
Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield at the UK’s Bath Literature Festival on Monday (via The Independent):

“We will need three things: a strong sense of our own identity; the ability to form new meanings – to see the world in new ways; and a sense of usefulness, that what we do contributes to a bigger context than ourselves.”
…
Greenfield is more concerned with linkages than breakages.
She worries about the type of links we make, in an increasingly interconnected world.
The paradox is, she feels, that social networking in cyberspace may make those who rely on it feel increasingly lonely.
And she spoke movingly about Alzheimer’s disease.
“For sufferers, it’s like a reversal of childhood,” she said.
“Retracing the steps from the cognitive — all the things we’ve consciously learned — back to the purely sensory.
A truly frightening state.”
She is herself most saddened, she said, by fear of change:
“When people feel so threatened by what’s happening in their culture that they become hostile to it — in denial.”

Not shit — the entire US appears in denial.
Just look at Super Tuesday.

Beyond politics, and even climate change, there’s our energy/growth problem; all the speed of the rabbit is not going to help one bit, and the combo of a deteriorating environment and fossil-fuel depletion (what I call the Double Bitch Bang) will lay a heavy claw on the planet in the way-near future.
Although prices at US gas pumps dropped yesterday for the first time in 39 days (national average at $3.764 a gallon, down from $3.767 on Monday), the days of easy times are now in the rear-view mirror.

Michael Ruppert, subject of the 2009 docoumentary, Collapse, and a peak oil expert, says time is running out in the great chase between the turtle (humanity) and that Double Bitch Bang (rabbit) — gird thy loins is his advice.
From an interview this past weekend at  Santa Rosa, California’s Press Democrat:

“A tsunami is coming,” he said.
“Those of us who built on high ground hope we built high enough.”
Ruppert, an author and former L.A. police officer, is a prominent “peak oil” advocate who takes familiar notions of finite fossil fuels and gives them a sinister urgency.
Not only did world petroleum production max out about six years ago, he said, it’s now on an irreversible decline for which no amount of “clean coal,” atomic energy, alternative fuels or new fields can compensate.
“In order to order to offset the decline, we would have to find three or four new Saudi Arabias,” he said, cigarette in hand.
“There is nothing that will offset the decline.”
…
But Ruppert is unusually bleak in his predictions.
He’s not worried about $4 a gallon gasoline.
He’s worried about a societal collapse so imminent he sees little point in paying off debts.
“I would be making minimum monthly payments on credit cards now because the whole system is coming down in pretty short order,” he offers.
…
But Ruppert says he knows he’s far from alone.
In a world of spiking gas prices, global unrest and sputtering economies, people no longer think he’s crazy.
“People aren’t calling me a lunatic any more,” he said.
“People get it.
“I am no longer a voice crying in the wilderness.”

From NPR‘s review of Collapse: If nothing else, while watching Ruppert, you’ll believe he believes this stuff. He bursts into tears when discussing the need for “community,” and requests a break when he’s overwhelmed by the intensity of a new insight. But Ruppert’s emotion, like his evident command of economics and energy policy, doesn’t certify his direst prophecies.

One could mutter just hide and watch, but there’s nowhere to hide — f*ck that rabbit bastard!