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You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and there are sirens and flashing lights outside and you have trouble getting back to sleep?

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This is my new favorite post.

the overload

The last thing I remember talking about last night was a sense of accumulating crisis that I share with a lot of my friends. emmacrew said "pretty much everyone i know is basically horrified" and greyaenigma added "I think I may have progressed to advanced horrified". I pointed out the This Modern World strip that's been on my mind lately: Outrage Overload. All of this probably contributed to my 4AM jitters.

Matthew Yglesias writes, further, that "the aggregate quantity of crisis in the world appears to have surpassed the information-processing capacities of both the US government and the world's media organizations". The U.S. government, he suggests, has become a bottleneck in the handling of crises worldwide.

But here's a relievingly different take on the state of the world, from Robert Muller, who "has worked in support of or inside the U.N. ever since" its founding:

Dr. Muller proceeded to say, "Never before in the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war".

The whole world is in now having this critical and historic dialogue--listening to all kinds of points of view and positions about going to war or not going to war. In a huge global public conversation the world is asking-"Is war legitimate? Is it illegitimate? Is there enough evidence to warrant an attack? Is there not enough evidence to warrant an attack? What will be the consequences? The costs? What will happen after a war? How will this set off other conflicts? What might be peaceful alternatives? What kind of negotiations are we not thinking of? What are the real intentions for declaring war?"

Both of these links are well worth reading in full, as is pretty much everything on Body and Soul, where I got them from.

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dongle wrote "I probably don't agree with all of James Howard Kunstler's politics", so of course I made a beeline for Kunstler's politics. Turns out I still don't agree with a lot of what he says, either, but I think his March 6 post on getting used to an oil-poor world is worth reading.

(no subject)

Speaking of reading, I mostly enjoyed Nike: A Romance, a novel about a man in love with a statue (sort of).

Also, check this out: booksfree is Netflix for books. ("Free" is another word for "6.99+ per month.") Weird. Have any of you tried this?