One of the major contradictions of modern life is that the economy that seems so good for us may be doing us no favors. Exhibit 1: the recession, so awful in every other way, has graced us with a downturn in carbon emissions. Exhibit 2: the health consequences of Cuba's disastrous depression following the collapse of the Soviet bloc -- the so-called "special period," 1989-2000, when food was often non-existence and people lived seemingly on the edge of starvation. Turns out that, on the whole, the Cuban population not only survived but thrived: see M. Franco et al., "Impact of Energy Intake, Physical Activity, and Population-wide Weight Loss on Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes Mortality in Cuba, 1980–2005," American Journal of Epidemiology, September 19, 2007

(http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/166/12/1374 -- pdf).

It's worth pointing out -- or not, given that the trolls inhabiting this comments thread will going on trolling regardless -- that nobody is advocating a recession, a depression, a Marxist dictatorship, or the end of oil. What would be nice would be for people to notice that our oil-based economy is heading us off a cliff, both environmentally (global warming, deny it all you want) and individually (the obesity epidemic). We know it is happening, we see it happening, the best scientists in the country and around the world are warning us of the consequences of our action (and inaction), and we do... nothing. So far.

But keep fighting the good fight, and there is some slight chance that the public will hear and take the urgent corrective actions that are needed before the economy, and the ecology, and our health really do fall off that cliff.

Glen Beck isn't drowning in his own tears! Most inaccurate portrayal of him ever.

That's today's politics in a nutshell. Brilliant.

The long count is a fascinating if somewhat arcane subject; the Wikipedia article ("Mesoamerican Long Count calendar") is good enough for an intro, and much more detailed than what might fit in a Salon comment. But here are some nerdy corrections to the article:

1. The Maya are hardly an "extinct Mesoamerican civilization." There are nearly a million Yucatec Maya speakers today in Mexico, and several million more speakers of some 20 related Maya languages in Guatemala. Most Maya states used the long count in their historical inscriptions from about 292 BCE to 900 CE or so, and even though they later dropped most of the "long" part of the calendar (leaving a "short count," sort of like writing '64 instead of 1964), and though their states were later conquered and incorporated into the Spanish realms and later the republics of Mexico and Guatemala, it would be very contentious at best to claim that the Maya or Maya civilization ceased to exist.

2. It is true that "the 13th cycle of the Mayan long-count calendar will come to an end" on or about December 23, 2012 (depending on the exact correlation between the long-count and the Gregorian calendar, about which there is general agreement but some dispute); claiming that the end of the 13th cycle equals the end of the world, however, was never part of Maya cosmology and is purely an invention of people who quickly read about and misunderstood the idea of the long count. As one Mesoamericanist (Michael Coe?) explained, the calendar will just "click over" on the fateful date, and then it will simply start up again from 00000, rather like a car's odometer clicking over from 99999.9 miles to 00000.0. Nobody thinks the car will disapper when its odometer reaches 100,000 miles, do they?

3. Quetzalcoatl was a Nahuatl (Aztec, Mexica, central Mexican) deity. The Maya equivalent was Kukulcan -- and rather irrelevant to the whole calendar thing. Nice try, no cigar.

4. "Twelvers" usually refers to Shi'ites. (Again, Wikipedia article on "Twelver" is good enough.) I hope the new age hypists aren't usurping that term along with everything else! But the sidelong reference to Shi'ism brings up the question of why this list of apocalypses focuses so narrowly on Christian ones of recent vintage, when there are so many other juicy stories from throughout history and around the world to tell. So many ends of the earth, so little time!

...clueless or evil? I've reviewed the tape and still can't decide.

Conservatives are always ready to trot out the 10th amendment when the federal government tries to do something to help people, but given half a chance they turn around and pass laws that impose "conservative" "values" on the whole country, preempting state and local laws. Hypocrisy in action.

The importance of beer arguably goes back several millennia before Guinness. It has been argued, rather plausibly, that agriculture (hence civilization) in the Near East/Fertile Crescent began with brewing beer, which may have preceded bread as a use for grain (barley, rye, wheat). Similarly, archaeologists recently discovered that, in the Andes, the earliest use of corn (an imported grain that has been domesticated earlier in Mexico) was for brewing corn beer. In Mexico, according to one time-line, the first plant to be domesticated was the maguey or century plant, used there to brew a kind of beer (pulque) from its juice. (Today we in the US mainly drink maguey juice in the fermented-and-distilled form of tequila.) I don't know where China fits in this story, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that rice wine was older than sticky pots of boiled rice.

PS, I'm not much of a beer drinker myself, just interested in archaeology...