'"One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse," warns anthropologist Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed. Many "civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power."

Now, Harvard's Niall Ferguson, one of the world's leading financial historians, echoes Diamond's warning: "Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice." Yes, America is on the edge.' (MarketWatch article).

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This sourced from Dangerous Minds:

'Touted in their day as the next Stooges, Death came to an abrupt end after refusing to change their name. But renewed interest in the proto-punks is ensuring their incendiary legacy lives on.

'The once-flawless credentials of Detroit's late-60s garage-rock scene took a considerable dent recently thanks to Iggy Pop's badly timed car insurance advert. And let's not forget the readiness of MC5's surviving members to exchange their manifesto of "dope, guns and fucking in the streets" for casual denimwear a few years back. However, one power trio from the city can claim 35 years without selling out - a feat made considerably easier by the fact that Death's debut album was nixed by the Man before it even made it to the pressing plant.' (Guardian article & Isohunt torrent download).

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'It's January 2009 and David Letterman is making a public apology. The American chat show king is talking about an error of judgment he made years earlier, a mistake, he says, born out of his own feelings of insecurity. He hasn't been caught with his pants down.

'No, the person he's making an apology to is Mary Hicks, the mother of the American stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, whose final performance was controversially cut from the Letterman show, making Hicks one of the first comedy acts to be fully censored on the CBS network. It's a decision that ultimately denied the American public what would turn out to be their final opportunity to see Hicks on mainstream television. Less than six months later, on 26 February 1994, Hicks died from pancreatic cancer at the criminally young age of 32.

'To be fair to Letterman, no one outside Hicks's immediate family knew he was sick. But considering the jokes had been pre-approved several times by the network's standards and practices committee, the decision to drop the routine was devastating for the comedian, who knew what he was facing and just wanted his material to have another shot at penetrating the American mainstream that had ignored him for much of his career. "It was a hard time for all of us. I just need you to know that," Mrs Hicks later told Letterman sternly on that January 2009 show, stunning him into silence. After screening the routine - in which a painfully thin and bearded Hicks takes hilarious sideswipes at the pro-life lobby, mediocre celebrities and peculiarities of religious iconography - Letterman acknowledged how timeless the material seemed and sheepishly wondered: "What was the matter with me?"' (Scotsman article).

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During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the sixth and final part of a series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'Financial security and widespread acclaim were things Philip K. Dick had spent his career waiting for, always on the verge. He compared himself to the tramps in Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.

'“If it does come for me, will it matter?” Dick wrote in 1976. “Will it make up for 25 years of shivering with fear as to whether, when I get up in the morning, the electricity will still be turned on?”

'During those years, Dick’s health problems continued, sometimes coinciding with money woes. After a 1976 heart attack that sent him to the county hospital and left him with a $2,000 bill, he had only 40 cents to his name. He was only saved from having his utilities turned off by a royalty check from France. “Here I am,” he wrote, “after twenty-five years of professional SF writing, getting notices that they are going to turn off the water and gas and electricity if I don’t pay in three days, and I say, What has it all been for?”' (L.A. Times article).

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During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the fifth part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'Though Philip K. Dick was not, on the surface, a writer of place - he was driven more by sweeping ideas than by locations or even local cultures - his time in Southern California had a profound impact on his work, in sometimes complicated ways. Dick wrote - in a 1973 letter to Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem - “there is no culture here in California, only trash. And we who grew up here and live here and write here have nothing else to include as elements in our work. The West Coast has no tradition, no dignity, no ethics - this is where that monster Richard Nixon grew up.”' (L.A. Times article).

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During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the forth part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'Of course, for all the action of Philip K. Dick’s Orange County years - the marriage, the divorce, the birth of his son Christopher, the suicide attempt, the bouts of depression, the new novels, the development of Blade Runner - the most significant is surely what the author came to call "2-3-74". Those months of 1974 were when Dick either lost his mind completely or was visited, ravishingly, by God.' (L.A. Times article).

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During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the third part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'While in Orange County, Dick often fell back on the reflexes of Bay Area types who move to Southern California. He joked often about the artificiality of it all, the local slang. “He kept comparing Southern California to Disneyland,” remembered wife Tessa Dick, “and said it was plastic, wasn’t real. He was used to real cities like Berkeley and San Francisco and Vancouver.” To a writer whose primary subject was the slippage between the real and constructed, the place surely also fascinated him as well.' (L.A. Times article).

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During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. This is the second part of a six part series where freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'Philip K. Dick arrived in Orange County in 1972 by flying to LAX, where he showed up in a sport coat he’d outgrown, hauling the Jehovah’s Witness translation of the Bible and a cardboard box, doubling as a suitcase, tied closed with an extension cord. Dick - who has been described, alternately, as paranoid, hilariously funny, childish and deeply empathetic - was in some of the weirdest shape of his life.' (L.A. Times article).

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During the last few years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land. In this six part series, freelance journalist Scott Timberg looks at Dick's final years.

'When author Philip K. Dick called Tim Powers to ask him to come by his Fullerton apartment for a drink one evening, the Cal State student expected the kind of night he and other aspiring writers often spent with the science-fiction titan. That is, a wide-ranging bull session about religion, philosophy and the glories of Beethoven - along with some incongruous chatter about car repair - over wine and beer.' (L.A. Times article).

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'Here’s where we’re at folks. The end of the line.

'“The end of free-market capitalism”

'I’ve heard it called.

'“The sub-prime mortgage crisis”

'Some blame it on.

'“A global economic meltdown”

'Time for some major change.

'So, our entire way of life is exposed as a rickety, weak, hollow, card house that collapses in a heartbeat, so what do we do? We throw money at it! We actually try and prop this mangled, pathetic card house back up with the exact cause of the collapse!

'Kind of like tossing a bucket of water on a tsunami.

'Kind of like throwing a candle at a forest fire.

'Sort of the equivalent of throwing a snow ball at an avalanche.

'Bail outs? Our solution is bail-outs?!?! And regulation? But please, don’t get me wrong, the other side of the coin is just as, if not more retarded. Tax breaks and the same freewheeling market that got us here? Those are the only two “solutions” on the table. Let me give you a hint. They are both wrong.

'Here’s my solution. It’s time to re-think where we’re at and where we need to be going and what we need to do to get there. It’s time to realize that money got us to where we are, and it was helpful in doing so. The market pushed us to produce, innovate and it kept us waking up in the morning. It served a purpose at a time, but that time has long passed. And no government or bank or wall street finance expert or CEO will ever realize that. They will fight with every fiber in their being to defend the only thing they know. They will scratch and claw to keep themselves important.

'They are all irrelevant.' (Danny Mendlow article).

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'In the universe as we experience it, we can directly affect only objects we can touch; thus, the world seems local.

'Quantum mechanics, however, embraces action at a distance with a property called entanglement, in which two particles behave synchronously with no intermediary; it is nonlocal. This nonlocal effect is not merely counterintuitive: it presents a serious problem to Einstein's special theory of relativity, thus shaking the foundations of physics.

'Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock - or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be indirect - the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition - say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air) - it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.' (Scientific American article).

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'A terrible thing, a recession. Inexorably, unemployment has climbed from 1.2 million to 3 million. Counting methods have altered, but some say joblessness is heading towards 3.4 million, others to 3.8 million. Across the country, it's carnage, misery and there is no end in sight.

'If you believe the Opposition, the government of the day has a lot to answer for. In under a year, GDP has collapsed by 3%, industrial production by 9%. The well-off have had their essential tax cuts, but still the national burden is increasing. An expansion in the tax take of fully 4.5% of the country's income is inevitable. And somehow, despite all the bold words from the politicians, public spending continues to climb.

'Grim, isn't it? Grim enough, certainly, if you still entertain hopes that there is such a thing as progress in British political life. After all, each of the statistics in the preceding flurry is drawn not from newspapers excoriating Gordon Brown, but from the history books. They are part of the record of the first Thatcher government, the one that saved Britain - it says here - from stagnation, humiliation and permanent decline.

'30 years ago, when she got to Downing Street she uttered some "awful humbug", in the words of one of her new ministers, purporting to be a prayer by St Francis of Assisi, but in fact a nineteenth-century invention. "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony," she said. Margaret Hilda Thatcher did not specify why discord might arise.' (Herald article).

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'With any luck, the economy will never recover.

'In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

'Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.' (Arthur Magazine article).

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'Alligators basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.

'Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world.

'The good news is that the survival of humankind itself is not at stake: the species could continue if only a couple of hundred individuals remained. But maintaining the current global population of nearly 7 billion, or more, is going to require serious planning.' (New Scientist article).

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'It is a time of strange bedfellows and bizarre contortions and extraordinary responses to extreme situations, all overslathered with gobs of panic and dread and oh my God, I might have to sell the Range Rover. In other words, it is a time - like you don't already know - of plentiful alarmist rhetoric, resulting in weird outbursts of ingenuity and wanton ethics-loosening, all in a desperate effort to suck up some much-needed cash.

'Translation: Money's tight, baby. City's in trouble. State's deep in the hole. Nation's broke. Solution? Upend the system. Think differently. Get creative. Demolish Ye Olde Ways. And maybe get a really nice buzz on while you're at it.' (SFGate article).

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'The RAF has tried to shoot down suspected UFOs as part of a Government directive, it has been claimed.

'Pilots have apparently fired upon the unidentified objects without success since the 1980s, according to Nick Pope, who used to run the Ministry of Defence's UFO project.

'Mr Pope claimed that the RAF only attempted to engage when the mysterious objects were perceived to be a threat.' (Telegraph article & video stream).

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