I've been on a mental dive down the ant hill lately. Ant hill? Don't I mean "rabbit hole?" No, I do not. I strongly suspect we get that term "down the rabbit hole" from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and if so, that would mean that a logical, rational exploration of a topic would be simply to run along with the Red Queen; the faster you run ( Read more... )

At the tail end of my last money-ish post, I quoted L. Frank Baum's opening to his topical money allegory The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many ( Read more... )

Lenny loves to tell stories about his old Barracuda. One, I just realized, helps to illustrate the potential -- and more than a few problems -- with biofuels. ( Click here. You know you want to. )

Here's a video. You've probably seen it already.

Click to view

I tripped across it some time ago and dismissed it as, well, wrong. When you base your criticisms on elements that are factually inaccurate, you fail. It's as simple as that. Sadly, last night I caught up a bit with my podcast list and heard kmo chatting with Jim Kunstler about the current ( Read more... )

Dear Mr. Davidson,

Let me congratulate you for your role in producing the best financial news for laypeople, I think, available on the podcasting web. I've been listening to your Planet Money podcast now since pretty much its inception. Your award-winning This American Life collaboration "The Giant Pool of Money" explained more of the current ( Read more... )

I mentioned a few weeks back that I had finished Douglas Rushkoff's Life, Inc., a book with far too many tantalizing tidbits to share without pretty much transcribing the whole tome. I settled on simply mentioning that teabagger thing. Rushkoff really chronicles not only the rise of the corporation, but also of the monetary system that supports ( Read more... )

kmo had another great podcast over at the C-Realm the other day, interviewing long-time guest Albert K. Bates. This time Bates talked about something of which I've heard not even a peep: Biochar.

From one of his blog posts on the topic, Bates describes biochar as a charcoal formed from inactive, crystalized carbon. The end result of the biochar ( Read more... )

Whenever the people are well-informed,
they can be trusted with their own government;
whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice,
they may be relied on to set them to rights.

-- Thomas Jefferson, 1789

In this installment of my saga, I'd like to suggest a corollary to Mr. Jefferson's observation: "Whenever the people are ill- ( Read more... )

kmo delivered another great podcast the other day, interviewing economist Frank Rotering. Prof. Rotering has an interesting take on human progress and the limits the planet itself places on our expansion, part of which resonates well with what I accept ( Read more... )

Jim Kunstler whipped out another gem in which he wrote:

For decades we measured the health of our economy (and therefore of our society) by the number of "housing starts" recorded month-to-month. For decades, this translated into the number of suburban tract houses being built in the asteroid belts of our towns and cities. When housing starts ( Read more... )