data point.

Exurban crunch: "windows covered only by tarps that can be heard flapping in the wind; coyotes and raccoons seem to have taken up residence."

Because, you know, you couldn't prop your camera on a table. "Comes in a padded carrying case with a handy belt clip. Imported. Wipe clean."

fairly effective Iraq/us war of independence parallel.

'One Friedman Unit = six months ... From Thomas Friedman's repeated use of "the next six months" as the time period in which, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War.' w/ list of F.U. pronouncementss

GWB achieves near consensus from Scowcroft to Chomsky: he sucks. Good run down of a creaking empire.

Owner of Expedition, after explaining how it's useful bc. he has 2 (!) kids and goes to the mountains: "I'm concerned about global warming. We try to do as much as we can. ***We try not to drive that far.***"

graphic: 92% favor more energy efficient cars, paying more for energy.

How to destroy a house and lost $230K in 6 months

Entertaining diary. Also deeply wrong. 'Number of Times Stopped for Meals, National Parks, National Monuments, Roadside Attractions, Places of Historical Interest, Fruit Stands, Antique Stores, or “Beautiful views”: 0'

'Dr. Seager said that it was “silly” to put golf courses in the region’s desert areas.' prediction: Populations of AZ & NV begin to drop by 50 years from now.

"[W]e will wake up one morning to discover that our city has become as helpless and useless as a stranded whale, unable either to swim back to the sea or crawl forward on land." (it feels awful to tag end_of_rome on something nearly 50 yrs old)

'Steve Diomopoulos, 22, a student from MI, called it “a weird time to be doing this. It’s an inconvenience to people like myself who came from out of town and want to do some Christmas shopping. I don’t think that’s what people came here to see."

"As a result of the chemicals going [directly] into Diaz's arms [rather than a vein], he had an 12-inch chemical burn on his right arm and an 11-inch chemical burn on his left arm"

Fucking knot of tariffs & price props helps Agribiz, Big Sugar & Big Oil. Hurts environment, consumers, 3rd world sugar cane growers. I blame Illinois!

USDA to use "very low food security" in place of "hunger." Buried lede: "the [annual] report [on hunger] didn't appear in October as usual." USDA sez delay wasn't due to the midterm elections: "This is a schedule that was set several months ago."

Extending the 'partition Iraq' argument ad absurdum. Redraw the nation-states of the Middle East, adding 'Islamic Holy State' and 'Free Baluchistan,' etc. West Bank status unresolved, just to let us know that the map doesn't have internal logic. (via rc3

"Our civilization is decadent and our language ... must inevitably share in the general collapse."

harder to find via casual googling than I would have thought. (LULUCF = Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry)

harder to find via casual googling than I would have thought. (cdiac = Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, part of the DOE)

...til the last capitalist is hung from the entrails of the last Post columnist...

valvoline, gasoline, all the ones in between: more on the oil we eat. via estee.

Report from West Point on Qaeda tactics & possible counter-tactics, drawn from Qaeda writings. Contradicts most everything about the GWOT. "The US should avoid direct, large‐scale military action in the Middle East."

awesome charts... love it.

the burbs are looking to be the worst place for peak oil + global warming.

apposite Q: Is an explicitly noneconomic gathering/prank enough of a protest? Should such events be didactic anticapitalist actions / an 'exhange of ideas'? Does the writer believe that there are folks who spend all their time pillow fighting [via 18b]

Holzer's artwork "is also a security amenity, screening the public from the private precincts of the building, and acting as a blast shield in case of terrorist attack"

NYT: for "at least half a dozen men ... the "relevant data" considered by [Guantanamo's] annual review boards included the possession ... of a Casio model F-91W watch."

a long wait for 51 pages of Scanlan's lost Guerilla war issue to load in flash, but worth it. via the Whitney Biennial, for god's sake.

the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet,"

delicious oil: "In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year anyone checked), that ratio was 1:1"

george bush text adventure

"Kaplan reports a National Guardsman in Afghanistan describing his tour of duty: "You get to see places tourists never do. We're like tourists with guns.""

opinion piece by Anatol Leiven originally in the FT.