So last night I noticed that James Cameron's "Avatar" was on On-Demand. So I figured, "Ok, what the heck. I might as well see what everyone was talking about." So I hit play and started watching. Yeah, the special effects were pretty spectactular, just like my friends said. Yeah, it's a lot like Ferngully, right down to giant, tree-eating machines cutting a path of destruction through an ancient, old-growth forest. But I detected something else as I watched. Once you get passed the…

A few months back, I started reading a kind of post-apocalyptic sci-fi series of novels by S.M. Stirling called "The Change". The first book is "Dies The Fire" and it's premise is that for some unknown reason at 6:15 pm Pacific Standard Time, on March 17th, 1998 all modern technology simply stops working. No internal combustion engines, no steam engines, not even gunpowder will work. Aside from all the shifts and struggles of the characters, it presents a REALLY interesting idea: A world…

I tend to spend a lot of time on message forums where I can talk things out with people. Quite often during the course of the discussion things will come up that make me think, that help clarify points. And then there are discussions that just turn sour and there's no point in continuing them. As Paul Graham said in his book "Hackers and Painters" a common tactic is to accuse the other person of being the heretic du'jour and after that no meaningful discussion can be had because you spend…

So Saturday night I'm sitting at home, watching The Discovery Channel, and I catch a show called "Collapse", an interview with a guy who use to work for the L.A.P.D. and a former CIA analyst by the name of Michael Ruppert. I'm sure plenty of people have seen it. He talked a lot about "Peak Oil" and the collapse of modern society, the collapse of the economy because of the use of "fractional reserve banking" and the fact that U.S.…