It Can't Happen Here: The Nazca caused their own collapse when they cleared their forests in order to make way for agriculture, thus exposing the landscape to wind and flood erosion, according to a study published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Wednesday night MetaFilterFilter.

* NASA climatologist James Hansen, recently arrested at an anti-mountaintop-mining demonstration in West Virginia, says we're almost too late to stop climate change. I wonder about that "almost."

* Nate Silver considers the legislative strategy at work in the upcoming Waxman-Markey vote.

* Mapping relationships in the X-Men Universe.

* An early Christmas present for my father? Corzine trails badly in New Jersey.

* Lots of talk lately about Robert Charles Wilson's anti-Singulatarian Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century. Here's an interview at io9 that takes up that angle, while Cory Doctorow highlights this blurb:

If Jules Verne had read Karl Marx, then sat down to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he still wouldn't have matched the invention and exuberance of Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock.

* Dancing plagues and mass hysteria. Via MeFi.

* How complexity leads to social collapse: some intriguing historical exploration from Paul Kedrosky. Also via MeFi.

* Roger Ebert explains how Bill O'Reilly works.

O'Reilly represents a worrisome attention shift in the minds of Americans. More and more of us are not interested in substance. The nation has cut back on reading. Most eighth graders can't read a newspaper. A sizable percentage of the population doesn't watch television news at all. They want entertainment, or "news" that is entertainment. Many of us grew up in the world where most people read a daily paper and watched network and local newscasts. "All news" radio stations and TV channels were undreamed-of. News was a destination, not a generic commodity. Journalists, the good ones anyway, had ethical standards.

In those days, if you quoted The New York Times, you were bringing an authority to the table. Now O'Reilly--O'Reilly!--advises viewers to cancel their subscriptions to a paper most of them may not have ever seen. In those days, if the wire services reported something, it probably happened. Today the wire services remain indispensable, but waste resources in producing celebrity info-nuggets that belong in trash magazines. Advertisers now seek readers they once thought of as shoplifters. If nuclear war breaks out, the average citizen of a Western democracy will be better informed about Brittny Spears than the causes of their death.

Discussion (where else?) at MeFi.

The headline reads, "Rusty superpower in need of careful driver: Obama built his campaign on a positive vision, but in reality he will be the first US President to manage an empire in decline." Are we already pretending the Bush presidency never happened?

Did climate change kill the Roman Empire?

My bank nearly failed and just got bought by Citigroup, my region of the country is out of gasoline and likely to remain so for another two weeks, and despite dramatically heightened public awareness of the climate crisis carbon release still increased by 3% last year, pointing towards a potential global temperature rise of more than 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Happy Monday.

A few more links to soothe (or cause) the post-Christmas blues:

* More depressing news from the credit sector: the current credit and liquidity crisis could make 1929 look like 'walk in the park.'

* Via Srinivas, an apropos-of-nothing Jared Diamond profile in the New York Times tries to get at the heart of our complicated understanding of collapse and reemergence.

* Also in the Times, this review of Best American Comics 2007 preempts any review I might have written about the ways in which the book failed to quite live up to its promise this year, due in large part to Chris Ware's strange over-reliance on autobiographical comics (though, as the review notes, there are still as always some really good bits).

* Shankar points to this Daily Kos diary that nicely satirizes the recent, incomprehensible spate of anti-Obama rhetoric in the blogosphere, originating just in the moment that he started to gain traction against Hillary, proving once and for all that the Left wouldn't allow itself to be happy even if they did have a good candidate for once.

* And, in the Telegraph, we learn that the universe may be running down, presaging yet another possible end for everything: total stasis.