Iron nuts. Nuts that clang when you walk.Impenetrable testicles with built-in airbags:

Executives of Detroit's Big Three automakers traveled to Washington on Thursday to press their case for more financial aid from the federal government because of the bleak prospects for their industry.

Wow, lets see.

Global warming, the destruction of community in America, the murder of various mass transit systems, massive death from pollutants, global warming, lobbying against fuel efficiency, a history of technology suppression and oh, did I mention global warming?

Yes, they DO make balls in Detroit. 

Its kind of shocking to read some of these stories and realize how, well, how shocked I don't feel. Is the modern nervous system so overstimulated as to be insusceptible to such outrageousness? 

No doubt the nine banks into which the US is planning to inject billions in capital - again, all taxpayer dollars - have their lawyers searching for those escape hatches. ...the Institute for Policy Studies calculated that last year the CEO's of those nine banks took home "on average, $32.2 million each, nearly triple the average CEO pay at the 500 biggest US companies. This is more than $600,000 a week." Apiece.

I mean, this is just utterly incomprehensible, this volume of money. And yet my emotional reaction is "meh."

About five years ago I created some Flash animation for this website... a bold, but flickering statement "IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE EMPIRE." (You can still see that when launching the media player.)

While obviously prescient, I had no idea how profoundly overstated this Empire would flaunt itself. Hence, perhaps the deer in headlights feeling while reading these stories as of late. Its so brazen that one actually can't process it fully.

OR, I've just gotten so used to the idea of the "end of the world as we know it" that these things no longer surprise. Truth has certainly out-stranged fiction and this hazy incomprehensibility is in need of a new word.

In my song "Los Angeles" there's a line that goes:

there's a river flowing over me
a subtle kind of knowing
that soon we all may be refugees

The following article describes in literal terms what I was trying to convey. The notion that our planet, due to our harmful mismanagement, is creating a new type of refugee -- one displaced by climactic disruptions:

Chew on this word, jargon lovers. Envirogee.

    It carries more 21st century buzz than its semi-official designation climate refugee, which is a displaced individual who has been forced to migrate because of environmental devastation. Maybe the buzzword will catch on faster and shed some much-needed light on what will become a serious problem, probably by the end of this or the next decade. That light is crucial, because so far envirogees haven't been fully recognized by those who certify the civil liberties of Earth's various populations, whether that is the United Nations or local and national governments whose people are increasingly on the move for a whole new set of devastating reasons.

    In short, immigration is about to enter a new phase, which resembles an old one with a 21st century twist. For thousands of years, humanity has fled across Earth's surface fearing instability and in search of sustainability. But that resource war has kicked into overdrive thanks to our current climate crisis - a manufactured war with its own clock.

The rest of the story.

...about Climate Change. Michael Pollan asks some significant questions about personal responsibility for climate change. Here's a few paragraphs from the article. Highly recommend reading the rest.

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.