Some dirty hippies would like to coddle them while they strum folk songs on their guitars about flower power and peace. But an enemy like this does not appreciate peace, or flowers. They are relentless, bloodthirty monsters who simply cannot be reasoned with. I speak, of course, of the greatest enemy we have ever faced: the walking dead, zombies.

Collapse is only possible in a vacuum,¹ so even with the loss of the complexity provided by outright European colonialism, Africa has not truly “collapsed.” Instead, it is caught in between, propped up by neocolonial elements, like the World Bank² and the IMF.³ In this position, it is forced to take part and contribute to the system of global complexity, while recieving very little in return for that contribution. Last year’s Lord of War and The Constant Gardener provided popular cinematic treatments of the mechanisms by which the First World exploits the Third, creating the economic situation there. One particular element of that situation is the sale of “bushmeat.”

For ten thousand years, civilization has waged war on the living world. It turned the Fertile Crescent into a desert, tore down China’s forests and terraced its mountains, bled the Great Plains until all that remained was the Dust Bowl, and sparked a mass extinction the likes of which this planet has never seen. Now, the living world is beginning to fight back. Global warming, terrible storms, and worse have shown us the damage that the living world can do to our vaunted civilization. The shock troops of this counter-attack, though, could hardly be more ironic or appropriate: elephants.

In 2004, a 13-year-old Chinese boy jumped from the top of a 24-storey building and died, after playing too much World of Warcraft; the parents filed suit against Blizzard.¹ Another couple neglected their child to play World of Warcraft, and the child died.² Of course, before Warcraft, there was “EverCrack,” as EverQuest is sometimes called, in reference to its addictive tendencies.³ “I’ve seen it destroy more families and friendships and take a huge toll on individuals than any drug on the market today,” one person said of Warcraft—the kind of statement one expects from legislators and activists today. What makes this surprising is that it comes from one of the most prominent players in the World of Warcraft, one month before the release of the Burning Crusade expansion.

The latest group to become native to North America came too late to cross the Bering Land Bridge, sailing instead in small boats from east Asia, and forming what anthropologists call the Thule culture in western Alaska around 1000 CE. Their legends preserved memory of the Dorset culture they displaced as giants called Tuniit. By 1300, they had reached Greenland, where Norse colonists called them, the Tuniit and the Beothuks skrælingar—”wretches” in their language. They called themselves “Inuit,” or “the people” in their own Inuktitut language. English speakers came to call them by a name of Algonquian origin of ambiguous meaning (often presumed to be “eaters of raw meat,” though this seems incorrect): “Eskimo.”

This article was posted on October 17, 2006, at exactly 7:46 a.m. ET—the same time that America’s 300 millionth baby was born. Our country joined the ranks of India and China as one of the few countries (and the only first world one) to have 300 million residents or more. For us “unreconstructed Malthusians“¹ who fail to see how overpopulation is a “cause for celebration,” as “[t]he United States is a dynamic, prosperous, thriving society and growth is necessary to keep it that way,” environmental concerns are inevitable.

In order to save space, programmers in COBOL and other antiquated programming languages from the 1960s and 1970s recorded years in a two-number format, and assumed the “19.” So, for instance, 1998 would be “98.” This same notation is often used popularly, and for early machines with major memory constraints, this kind of space-saver could have significant returns. Naturally, programmers did not expect their programs to still be in use in 30 years, and gave little thought to the turn of the century—until the turn of the century began to approach, and much of that software was still running in systems that banks, corporations and other organizations had never bothered to replace. Long unemployed COBOL programmers found themselves back in work again, auditing millions of lines of legacy code to change over to a four-digit year format, lest on 1 January 2000, the computers believe it to be 1900.

In the West, we have often nursed a romantic fascination with all things “Oriental.” We imagine the civlizations of the East to be older and wiser than our own. We mythologize them as paragons of ecological sustainability and grace. Indeed, there is as much to admire in Eastern cultures as in Western. Taoism can only be described as “ecological” in the emphasis it places on balanced forces, while Buddhism has as much to offer spiritually in its own way as Western Gnosticism. However, we have a tendency to take this much too far, and to gloss over the fact that these are still civilizations, and still bound by the same dynamics of constant growth as any Western civilization.

Well, today is Columbus Day proper (as opposted to Columbus Day Observed, which was last Monday when we first began this Columbus Week Post Extravaganza). Exactly 514 years ago today, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and basically fucked everything up. In much of Latin America, the celebration for his aforementioned fucking up goes by the name Día de la Raza or Day of the Race: