If you are seeking some confirmation for your anxiety, look no further than the Channing-Murray’s Social Justice Forum tomorrow night, which will be screening The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream. The documentary explores the American way of life and its prospects as we face the decline of fossil fuels.

No, tonight’s debate is all about Palin. Collectively, we still can’t look away, even when it seems she is about to enthusiastically drive off a cliff. Perhaps especially if we think she is about to enthusiastically drive off a cliff.

No, the only honorable way out is at this point is to hand over control of the world to robotic overlords. I’m tired of my species being the one responsible for all the injustice in the world. I am now willing to be rounded up like cattle by a master race to ensure that it no longer happens. In the end, I’d rather fight evil robot overlords for control of a barren and ravaged planet than have to explain extraordinary rendition or golden parachutes to my kids.

What kinds of reality creation will no longer be available to us? Here’s a partial list:

• No more blaming terrorist attacks on countries we want to invade.
• No more climate change happy talk.
• No more tax breaks for the wealthy to help poor people.
• No more solving the energy crisis by invading other countries or drill, baby, drill euphoria.
• No more bankrupting government as a service to taxpayers.
• No more killing social security in order to save it.
• Most likely, not even another heckuva-job-brownie.

Nope, all we would have in front of us is the long slog of facing up to our problems and engaging in actual work to fix them. Yuck.

Perhaps that’s what God had in mind with commandments and sins. Think of it as a piping hot transgression of a commandment placed within the warm, toasted enclosure of a general sin. But there are too many commandments and not enough sins, which require you to go to church every week to try to reconcile them. God may get a lot praise for being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but in my opinion, people don’t praise His or Her marketing genius nearly enough.

I’m not depressed because Republicans now think the election is over, since it was a brilliant and game-changing pick. And it isn’t because Democrats now think the election is over, since it was an irresponsible and desperate pick. No, it’s depressing because it closes the circle of hypocrisy and now allows everyone enthusiastically to call everyone else a hypocrite until Election Day.

Ultimate Washington insider or not, I will always have an emotional soft spot for Joe Biden. It’s not because of his policies or his experience, or because he does such a good job of calling people out on their idiocracy — for example, his money quote on Giuliani: “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11”. No, Joe will always get the benefit of the doubt from me because he is an important part of my 9/11 story, which I hope not entirely to bore you with right now.

• Sports are more interesting and broadcast-worthy when Americans are good at them.
• The love of sport and competition is important, but the big endorsement deals don’t go to losers.
• Individuals need skill, determination, hard work and sometimes luck to win. Nations sometimes need forged passports to win.
• China is concerned with worldwide attention on human rights, but not so much that they are going to give Tibet back to the Tibetans.

These are all fine lessons, and I am wiser for having learned them. However, the single biggest lesson I learned from these games turns out to be one of my favorite Stephen Colbert lines: The market has spoken, and global warming is real.

But it just so happened that on bill day this month, I decided to buy a knife magnet, and remembered Coop America. By knife magnet, I don’t mean a magnet in the shape of a knife. That would be both useless and dangerous (unless there was a shiny, metallic robot coming after you, in which case you would have bigger problems than a magnetic knife could solve).

Michael Scott is the ultimate nightmare boss, played by Steve Carell on The Office. But he’s not the mean kind that yells at you and demands unreasonable production and hours. He’s the kind that wants to be your friend while being completely clueless about how to interact with others.

I had always thought of Michael as representing bad bosses or buffoons, but not necessarily representing (or caricaturizing) his race as a white person. Perhaps this is because I watched The Office only intermittently until this summer. Then the miracle of DVD season releases gave me a more complete picture of him. His main qualities seem to be 1) he wants everyone to like him 2) he’s unwilling to let go of any privilege or power that he has, and 3) he’s generally unaware how his actions negatively affect others. This is uncomfortably close to how a lot of white people generally behave towards minorities.

I say all this to provide some evidence, pathetic though it may be, that I do venture out into the country at times, and usually do not run screaming back to suburbia. And yet, I learned something this weekend that I feel I should have known, and also that I feel is kind of gross, in a city slicker kind of way.

This week’s entries are from Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and Cal Thomas, far right-wing Christian apologist.

As a married person, I think I should chime in. It is unfortunate that Ryan should get this message directly from the billboard. Married people often have long discussions on this topic in their monthly cabal meetings, and we all generally agree: The message that single people suck should be subliminal, so as not to arouse heated arguments. Heated arguments just distract people away from their sole purpose in life, which is to get married as quickly as possible to the nearest person they can find.

Every parade should be like the Washington Street Parade.

It should be led by a single fire truck, followed by a homemade sign.

The band should be filled with neighbors who value community and know only one song: “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

This seemed unfair to me. Asking me to reduce drug demand in the United States is about as realistic as me asking Colombians to ignore the profit on the supply side or to share it equally with everyone. We should do our parts on both sides, of course, but we shouldn’t be under the illusion that people’s desire for drugs and money is going to go away anytime soon.

Note that I would be perfectly willing to list the ten best Champaign-Urbana movies of all time, but I couldn’t even come up with ten movies that reference Champaign-Urbana, much less are set here. Perhaps local movie aficionados can weigh in with a good list.

And yet, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

My wife was driving us home from a game last week with the van window open. She felt a sudden sharp pain of something thrown into her leg, which she naturally assumed was the first volley of some kind of tantrum in the backseat. She yelled “Ouch!” then pulled the van over and glared into the backseat. While she found nothing amiss there, she did notice someone about a half-block down throwing stuff at us.

So, I’ve come late to the Iron Man party. Usually, when people shout at me or beg me to go to a movie that they swear is the best superhero movie they’ve ever seen, I mumble some excuse and slowly back away. And yet, after finally seeing this movie, I find myself on the other side, shouting at people, and begging them to go see this movie. Maybe it’s because the hero is over 40 and acknowledges the myth of redemptive violence. More likely, it is the neato, super-cool Iron Man body armor suit.

Strange as it may seem, a California State-Fullerton professor was recently fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. In fact, all 2.3 million California state employees are required to sign an oath promising to “defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Signing the oath is part of the California Constitution, instituted during the McCarthy red scare era of the 1950s. Yet, it just seems so…unconstitutional.

This was followed by a maelstrom of commentary, whose only endpoint could be a raving conservative talk show host revealing his basic lack of historical knowledge. Kevin James was on Hard Ball yelling over and over again that Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, while Chris Matthews was yelling at him over and over asking him what Chamberlain did that was appeasement. James obviously didn’t know, and it became a painful and sad spectacle to watch a man be so aggressively dumb. Matthews finally jumped in to explain that appeasement isn’t talking to one’s enemies, it is giving them things. Chamberlain wasn’t an appeaser because he talked to Hitler. His problem was giving away half of Czechoslovakia.

This is a trick question, of course, because it is likely that one is a Chiquita banana and the other is a Dole banana, and the moral choice would be to buy neither. Both were likely harvested and packaged by workers being treated like chattel, and the profits will likely go to someone who looks a lot like Boss Hogg.

A case could be made for buying the less expensive one, in order to reduce the profit of Boss Hogg, and also to increase the amount of money in your own pocket, that you swear you will use for charity. But let’s face it, Boss Hogg will still make money, and you will probably just blow your extra money on something unnecessary, like bottled water.

I have bad news for just about everyone: As of Monday, May 12, 2008, the rapture index hit 170. If this seems like an arbitrary number to you, like saying the cloud index is 67 or the UFO index is 329, then it is likely you are not quite ready for the rapture, and could use a visit to Rapture Ready.

Of course, this seeming unity can quickly fall apart once we decide to choose one method of achieving it over another. For example, most everyone agrees that poverty should be eliminated, but only some of us think that giving tax rebates to wealthy people is the way to get there. Child safety strategies can suffer from the same problem, especially if we work hard enough to shoehorn them into different political ideologies.

It’s pretty simple. You are presented with a word, and if you correctly guess the definition of that word from a list of choices, a hungry person somewhere in the world gets 20 grains of rice. If you get it wrong, the hungry person apparently gets nothing. You can play as long as you like.

If you’ve never been to an Ebertfest before, you can move along now, there’s nothing to see here.

Now that all the people with day jobs and lives have left the room, I’d like to make my nominations for The Quintessential Ebertfest Film, or the film that has best represented Ebertfest as a whole over the years. This can be followed by the rest of you telling me what a numbskull I am and how little taste I have. Then we can argue about film theory and other minutia. It’s all part of the Ebertfest experience, after all.

She was also at The Spurlock Museum Auditorium last Thursday, as the guest speaker for the annual Marjorie Hall Thulin Lecture by the Program for the Study of Religion at the University of Illinois. The lecture gives students and the general public a chance to interact with influential theologians of our day, such as Charles Curran and Stanley Hauerwas.

Horton Hears a Who is a Dr. Seuss children’s book about tolerance and care for all creatures. Horton is an elephant who hears an entire little city of people (Whoville) inside a dust speck on a flower. He is first ridiculed for his beliefs, then imprisoned in a cage, and then a mob of jungle creatures almost destroy the speck before the voices of all the Whos finally come together to be heard. The mob then realizes Horton was telling the truth, and they all decide to protect the little speck.

The tag line for the story is “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” and has long been a phrase used by pro-life groups. However, this was not Theodor Geisel’s intent with the story, and in fact he had threatened to sue these groups over the issue while he was alive.

This past weekend saw capoeiristas from around the world gather in Champaign-Urbana for the 6th Annual International Capoeira Conference. Over 15 capoeira masters from Brazil, Mexico, Paris and all points in between spent four days teaching capoeiristas new skills and techniques for this growing discipline.

If the previous paragraph does not make much sense to you, it is probably easier to see than to describe. Capoeira is a Brazilian dance-like, martial-artsy, game-like, cooperative interplay of two people set in a circle of drums, percussion instruments and Portuguese chants. People who enjoy this kind of thing are called, appropriately enough, capoeiristas.

I recently got back from a learning tour of Colombia that cost my church and me around $1500. Should I instead have just sent the money to a human rights or service organization in Colombia? There are certainly roofs that need to be built there and, perhaps more importantly, human rights workers who need money to do their critical work. I know people always talk up the “human relationship” benefits from such a trip, but I want to justify my trip in purely economic terms. Shouldn’t Colombia see at least $1500 of value from my trip since I allegedly went there not just to learn but to be of assistance?

One of the most disturbing things about the Northern Illinois University shootings last week (aside from the actual carnage, of course) was the lack of any warning signs. Steve Kazmierczak, the shooter, did not seem troubled and he wasn’t described by acquaintances as many mass murderers are: quiet, keeps to himself, kind of creepy. His colleagues and advisors at the University of Illinois School of Social Work, where he’d been pursuing a graduate degree since spring 2007, described him as personable, engaging and motivated — and no one, not even his girlfriend, had any idea he would be capable of such a thing. He also did not leave behind any hint as to why he did this, even going so far as to remove his phone’s SIM chip and the hard drive from his laptop. He apparently intended to take his mysteries to the grave with him.