I don't know about you, but it seems for a small slice of the people in the World, the realization that its all headed down the drain is sinking in AND they want to get a little bit more of the good life before it does, even if it means making it worse for all the rest of us.

Here's one more example, Japan has decided to withdraw fro the International ban on commercial whale fishing.

"Japan to Resume Commercial Whaling, Defying International Ban"

"Japan said on Wednesday that it would withdraw from an international agreement and resume commercial whaling, a defiant move to prop up an industry that still has cultural significance there, despite plummeting demand for whale meat. Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, said the country would leave the International Whaling Commission, which established a moratorium on hunting whales that took effect in 1986. The international agreement never stopped Japanese whaling, because it allowed the country to continue killing whales for scientific research while selling the meat. Critics considered the research a sham, little more than a cover for commercial whaling.

I'm dumb founded...WHY? There is about 1000 people in Japan whose livelihood depends on whale fishing. You'd think a modern nation like Japan could find 400K US$ to give each of those workers a decent yearly income and take whale meat off the sushi menu. I like sushi but add a bunch of wasabi and some soy sauce and the fish on that bit of rice all tastes the same. Cultural significance can jump off the roof, you don't hunt and kill animals that have been shown to have almost as much intelligence as humans for anything other than "I Don't Care".

American have their own stupid moment going on.

"‘Rolling Coal’ in Diesel Trucks, to Rebel and Provoke"

There is a new menace on America’s roads: diesel truck drivers who soup up their engines and remove their emissions controls to “roll coal,” or belch black smoke, at pedestrians, cyclists and unsuspecting Prius drivers. Sgt. Chris Worthington of the Montrose Police Department here is out to stop them. “You can hear those trucks across town, driving like idiots,” he said on a recent Friday evening patrol. He is among the first law enforcement officers in the country to be trained at “smoke school” to pick up the skills to police the coal rollers.

He lost sight of one truck cruising in the opposite direction, trailing plumes of smoke. But another, a Ram 3500 fitted with two steel smokestacks, was parked in a Walmart parking lot. The owner, Pryce Hoey, insisted his truck was emissions compliant, but nevertheless agreed to demonstrate its smoke-generating prowess. “I just wanted something different,” Mr. Hoey said, revving the engine and releasing two black pillars of smoke into the evening air before Sgt. Worthington shut him down. “People who see it giggle. They think it’s funny.”

NO, we think you are a juvenile idiot!

We are at a point where where the environment is literally collapsing around us and "wantabe Neros" want to fiddle.

"Building blocks of ocean food web in rapid decline as plankton productivity plunges"

They're teeny, tiny plants and organisms but their impact on ocean life is huge.​ Phytoplankton and zooplankton that live near the surface are the base of the ocean's food system. Everything from small fish, big fish, whales and seabirds depend on their productivity. "They actually determine what's going to happen, how much energy is going to be available for the rest of the food chain," explained Pierre Pepin, a senior researcher with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in St. John's. Pepin says over the past three to four years, scientists have seen a persistent drop in phytoplankton and zooplankton in waters off Newfoundland and Labrador. "Based on the measurements that we've been taking in this region, we've seen pretty close to 50 per cent decline in the overall biomass of zooplankton," said Pepin. "So that's pretty dramatic."

Think about that for a moment, that is a decrease in the ocean's base food, which all higher organisms feed off of BY 50 PERCENT!

Things don't get much worse than that.

Chris Martenson posted this week "The Ghost Of Christmas Future" where he asks these two things, "When did you know and What did you do about it?"

When did you know about the many problems and predicaments facing our world today? When did you find out about species loss, and peak oil, the generationally destructive policies of your peers, and the unsustainability of our entire economic model? And what did you do about any of it? Did you make any changes at all to your behavior, or did you close your eyes and slip into a strategy of false hope? Hope that ‘somebody’ would do 'something'? Did you fight at all for the things in which you once believed? These aren't easy questions to face, because they cut right to the heart of the matter. They put our integrity into question and threaten to expose whether we have any at all. Not easy stuff, to be sure."

There will come a time in the not too distant Future that our children and grand children will ask us those two questions. I hope that I can answer them truthfully that I tried to make a difference.