The Collapse of the US Dollar: 2007-08 Scenario: I think the chart above, showing the value of the $US against a basket of other currencies, is telling us that a collapse of the dollar is imminent. It’s time to lay out the scenario for what this will mean in the year and decade ahead. No I-told-you-so gloating: there will be no winners in this.

Birth Rates Rising Again: The Population Bomb Is Still Ignited: Some new data suggests that those who think population growth will stop on its own are dreaming in technicolour.

Why We Need a Public Persona: The journey to know yourself is the first step towards understanding how the world works and becoming truly yourself, which is necessary before you can make the world a little better. As de Mello said, this journey is mostly about getting rid of the everybody-else stuff that has become attached to us as part of our social conditioning, and getting rid of this stuff is perhaps what ee cummings meant when he said the hardest thing is to be nobody-but-yourself when the world is relentlessly trying to make you everybody-else. From birth, we pick up all this everybody-else stuff that clings to us and changes us, muddies us. We are rewarded by society for doing so. I find the ‘figments of reality’ thesis helpful in this hard work — realizing that our minds are nothing more than problem-detection systems evolved by the organs of our bodies for their purposes, not ‘ours’. That ‘we’ are, each ‘one’ of us, a collective, a complicity. What makes it so hard is that becoming nobody-but-yourself opens you up to accusations of being anti-social, weird, self-preoccupied, arrogant etc. So we end up, I think, having to adopt a public persona that is, to some extent, not genuine, not ‘us’ at all. That’s hard. How can we make this public persona as thin and transparent as possible?

Why are Gas Prices So Low?: Delayed until I have some clue as to what the answer might be. This has got me stumped.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #6.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: This week I’ll be publishing my narrated, edited interview of Chris Corrigan, which I recorded earlier this week, and recording a second interview on the same subject: “What is your model of a better way to live, and what capacities do we need to develop or re-learn to live that way?” Haven’t decided who the second interviewee will be, yet.

Possible Open Thread Question:

When the price of oil has risen 40% since May, why have gasoline prices gone down?