Crayon art.

Christian Faur's crayon art is not made with crayons, but of crayons.

Spend some time wandering around his site. Also recommended: Faur's Just Paper.

"A 78 inch by 48 inch paper sculpture made from 12,000 strips of shredded paper. The strips are glued onto a light weight foam backing and assembled in such a way as to make an image that is known in the media to represent the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The entire work is made from shredded versions of the United States Constitution rendered in different font sizes and kernings to appear darker or lighter."

Via The New Shelton Wet/Dry.

Quick hits.

That's one honking huge stingray, and this newly discovered frogfish species is the aptly named Histiophryne psychedelica.

It's beginning to look a lot like fishmen.

For just $300,000, you can buy a 15,000 square foot house in a cave on eBay. Here's the back story.

The mayor of Los Alamitos, CA announced he will resign after forwarding an email showing a watermelon patch growing in front of the White House. Now, even if you find that sort of thing amusing (despite having all the originality and wit of an audible fart), how dim do you have to be to send it to a black businesswoman and community activist?

"The catwalk became the ratwalk thanks to this bizarre creation on the fringes of London Fashion Week. The bijou headdress is made of dozens of real mice and rat carcasses. It covers the full face – leaving just a gap for the eyes – and is complete with rat tails hanging down the front."

Here's hoping that this is the beginning of the end of marijuana prohibition. It's certainly long overdue.

The pro-life movement in a nutshell.

We hope some babies get AIDS so that we can use those babies to scare other people out of having sex.

Think I'm exaggerating?

Sen. Dave Schultheis, of Colorado Springs, on Wednesday opposed a bill requiring pregnant women to be tested for HIV so that if they are infected their babies can be treated to prevent the virus's transfer.

"This stems from sexual promiscuity for the most part, and I just can't go there," he said. "We do things continually to remove the consequences of poor behavior, unacceptable behavior, quite frankly. I'm not convinced that part of the role of government should be to protect individuals from the negative consequences of their actions." [...]

"What I'm hoping is that yes, that person may have AIDS, have it seriously as a baby and when they grow up, but the mother will begin to feel guilt as a result of that. The family will see the negative consequences of that promiscuity and it may make a number of people over the coming years ... begin to realize that there are negative consequences and maybe they should adjust their behavior."

(via)

WANT

Meet the barreleye.

"Check out the fish Macropinna microstoma. It has tubular eyes and a see-through head. [...] Its eyes can actually rotate within its 'skull,' so the transparency allows the wary swimmer to keep a literal eye on happenings above it, as well as to the sides and directly in front."

The green globes are the lenses and the bumps above its mouth contain its olfactory organs. Cool video here and, of course, the obligatory Wikipedia entry.

(thanks dob!)

Update: The MBARI press release about the photos has lots more information. (via)

More gloom and doom.

"As the global economy melts down, so is the planet, with droughts threatening food production and industry across the world." (via)

Have a good weekend!

Are you feeling hopeful yet?

Let me just take care of that for you.

The Five Stages of Collapse

I was born and grew up in Russia, and I traveled back to Russia repeatedly between the late 80s and mid-90s. This allowed me to gain a solid understanding of the dynamics of the collapse process as it unfolded there. By the mid-90s it was quite clear to me that the US was headed in the same general direction. But I couldn't yet tell how long the process would take, so I sat back and watched.

I am an engineer, and so I naturally tended to look for physical explanations for this process, as opposed to economic, political, or cultural ones. It turns out that one could come up with a very good explanation for the Soviet collapse by following energy flows. What happened in the late 80s is that Russian oil production hit an all-time peak. This coincided with new oil provinces coming on stream in the West - the North Sea in the UK and Norway, and Prudhoe Bay in Alaska - and this suddenly made oil very cheap on the world markets. Soviet revenues plummeted, but their appetite for imported goods remained unchanged, and so they sank deeper and deeper into debt. What doomed them in the end was not even so much the level of debt, but their inability to take on further debt even faster. Once international lenders balked at making further loans, it was game over.

What is happening to the United States now is broadly similar, with certain polarities reversed. The US is an oil importer, burning up 25% of the world's production, and importing over two-thirds of that. Back in mid-90s, when I first started trying to guess the timing of the US collapse, the arrival of the global peak in oil production was scheduled for around the turn of the century. It turned out that the estimate was off by almost a decade, but that is actually fairly accurate as far as such big predictions go. So here it is the high price of oil that is putting the brakes on further debt expansion. As higher oil prices trigger a recession, the economy starts shrinking, and a shrinking economy cannot sustain an ever-expanding level of debt. At some point the ability to finance oil imports will be lost, and that will be the tipping point, after which nothing will ever be the same.

Social Collapse Best Practices

So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to supplying these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers many valuable lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many economic negatives become positives, and vice versa. Let us consider each one of these in turn.

I know they sound gloomy—and believe me, they are—but they're fascinating reading.

That's not likely to help.

"Police say an upstate New York television executive who sought to improve the image of Muslims in the media beheaded his wife after she filed for divorce."

Update: The story has been updated and no longer contains that awesome quote.

The best and the brightest.

Where do they get these guys?

First it was new RNC chair Michael Steele insisting that "never in the history of mankind" had government created a job, which must have come as quite a shock to the defense contracting industry, not to mention the 1.8 million federal employees (or the vastly more state, county, and municipal employees). Then he helpfully clarified that those weren't "jobs," but just "work," because government jobs always end, but private sector jobs always come back. Like all those textile jobs that should resurface here in North Carolina any day now.

Now, it's Congressman Steve Austria (R-OH), with this history lesson about why we shouldn't pass a stimulus package.

"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria said. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."

That's just history, see. Here's more just history. The Great Depression started in October 1929. FDR took office in January 1933. Careful observers will notice a 3-1/4 year gap between those two dates. That's just math.

Better order now!

Because by Christmas, every parent in America is going to be frantically trying to find a living doll made of cancer for their kid, too.

Via Warren Ellis, who sagely notes than in three years' time, people in LA will be having sex with RealDolls made out of cancer.

Barack Obama is tired of your motherfucking shit.

And he'll tell you so.

(thanks, Karyn)

It's going to be an entertaining four years.

You know who's really pissed off about Michael Steele getting elected to the head of the Republican National Committee? David Duke, that's who.

I am glad these traitorous leaders of the Republican Party appointed this Black racist, affirmative action advocate to the head of the Republican party because this will lead to a huge revolt among the Republican base. As a former Republican official, I can tell you that millions of rank-and-file Republicans are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore! We will either take the Republican Party back over the next four years or we will say, "To Hell With the Republican Party!" And we will take 90 percent of Republicans with us into a New Party that will take its current place! [...]

Obama is bad enough as President, we will not stand for Obama junior to be head of the Republican Party. [...] Let's make this abomination in the Republican Party the last major party of White redoubt, as a rallying cry of resistance!

I can't quite make sense of that last sentence, but it's pretty awesome all the same.

For Owlmother

I was thinking about you today...

Tell your kindred I've got a couple of rooms for rent.

Briefly

Immortal jellyfish:

The Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form once it mates after becoming sexually mature. Marine biologists say the jellyfish numbers are rocketing because they need not die. The jellyfish are originally from the Caribbean but have spread all over the world.

It is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self. Scientists believe the cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it potentially immortal.

Going in the opposite direction, I've been haunted by the picture accompanying this depressing story:

It starts with a phone call made by a man who said his friend found a dead body in the elevator shaft of an abandoned building on the city's west side.

"He's encased in ice, except his legs, which are sticking out like Popsicle sticks," the caller phoned to tell this reporter.

Nancy Nall's post on the building in which he was found is worth reading too.

And finally, Google Maps hits a deer and spots the extremely rare Pittsburgh samurai.