Other news to start your week

Another recognition that we are at the end of "Cheap Oil"

The “post-peak” world clearly does not imply the End of the World: but it implies an extremely volatile one, whose dynamics will be difficult to predict. It is a world not of easy abundance, but of declining – and increasingly expensive – carbon-based resources. If we are to develop sufficient resilience to the various price shocks and converging crises of the “post-peak” world, we will need to recognize that they are symptomatic of an inevitable civilizational transition toward an emerging post-carbon age. There is no time for denial. Governments and communities need to start adapting now.

The State Department seems to be ignoring the plight of Iraq's Christians.

A full-scale genocide is under way in Iraq: a well-planned, well-financed, deliberate plot to cleanse the country of its Christian citizens. And thus far, neither the Iraqi government nor the United States is doing anything to stop it.

In an opinion piece Rabbi Shmuley Boteach suggests that the small government sought by the Tea Party is, or at least could be, conducive to the promotion of human dignity.

The very premise of dignity is something acquired through personal effort. Dignity is the human aura that comes through self-reliance. Its underlying premise is independence. A dependent life is a fundamentally undignified life. Self-respect is earned through the sweat of one's brow. An heir to a great fortune may travel the high seas in a hundred-foot yacht and soar through the air in a Gulfstream V. But he will remain fundamentally bereft of dignity so long as he is living on someone else's dime.

The effort to recapture the dignity that springs from self-reliance is what the tea party, at its core, should be all about.