No more champagne and the fireworks are through

Some people like to play Ald Lang Syne every new year. I was an ABBA fan as a teenager, so this is my New Years Day song. It was written for the 1980 New Year, but of course we know that the new decade doesn't really begin until the year ending in "1". The lyrics are very Doomer-friendly, of course, as the Zeitgeist of the late seventies wasn't exactly optimistic. Of course, we buried our justified pessimism by blowing through our last stores of cheap fossil fuels in a massive growth-for-the-sake-of-growth binge, all the while doing nothing to prepare for the coming Age of Scarcity, so....

The torture report

What I found truly scary about the now-infamous Senate report on CIA-sponsored torture of terrorism suspects is that we became so torture-happy that we tortured our own informants.

Have we lost our way as a society, or what?

And of course, none of this evil activity did anything to make our country safer. If anything, it only made us that much more insecure.