Merry Christmas  

I'm going to be offline for the next 2-3 weeks, so if you are looking for peak oil and related news then the "Essential Peak Oil" links to the right are the place to go.

Given that the festive season is approaching, I may as well launch into a brief rant about one toxic meme which appears around this time of year and is becoming increasingly annoying - the one which goes something like "such and such a group is trying to abolish Christmas".

While most of the TV coverage here this week has been concentrating on race riots and gang violence, the morning news still managed to get a few segments in on this theme, based on the extremely flimsy pretence of one grumpy person in Queensland who wrote to the local school complaining about them referring to Christmas too often in in the school newsletter.

So is this worthy of multiple segments on the national news ? I wouldn't think so but it appears this sort of nonsense (its not like people complaining about Christmas are easy to find, let alone in any danger of getting it abolished) is just anther facet of the culture war that Bismark launched so long ago (although it was called Kulturkampf back then).

Thom Hartmann wrote about this last year, and I've seen quite a few bloggers commenting on it this week as well - check out Digby,
Seeing the Forest, Scrutiny Hooligans, Ron Beasley and Past Peak for various examples.

Just another example of why wingnuts should be exiled to the fringes of society - you should never let the opportunistic and paranoid grab control of any sort of power, lest they end up getting to the same stage of the culture war the Germans eventually reached.

I'll close with a quote - and wish you all of you who've been reading my rantings this year a Happy Christmas or Hanukkah or Holidays or Winter / Summer Solstice festival...

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
~ H. L. Mencken, "Women as Outlaws"