Contemplating the Hedgehog: Introduction

As I wrote in the first post in this blog:

I'll also post reviews of other blogs about societal collapse and what to do about it. There are plenty of them out there, and they all deserve a good meta look.

The first one was an obituary of Joe Bagaent as told through his interactions from a distance with Jim Kunstler. The second was supposed to be a review of Clusterfuck Nation. For some reason, I keep postponing that review. As I wrote in my second post on this blog:

[T]oday isn't the day for that review. It's not that I don't have a lot to say about him; I do, but I can always repackage my opinions on a slow news day.

Or when don't find another blogger that I think deserves more attention, which brings me to the subject of today's post.

My friend andelku on LiveJournal has been posting a series she calls Contemplating the Hedgehog. Why "the Hedgehog?" In the first post in the series, Welcome to the Hedgehog, she wrote:

When I was just a wee lass, me and my talented underachieving college friends spent large amounts of time sitting around kitchen tables and on back porches of our cheap apartments drinking bad wine and talking about how we all sensed this country, if not the world, was headed for some kind of crisis. Until finally one girl says "I'm tired of calling it the Big Awful Thing That Nobody Knows What It Is But Everyone Can See Coming. Let's call it The Hedgehog." And so we did.

In reality, she's looking at the same situations that I'm writing about here; it's just that she's doing it from a more global (pun fully intended) perspective than I am. That means her series is exactly the kind of material I should be reviewing. Besides, I rather like this conceit, so I'm looking forward to commenting on her posts. Not only will it get her writing the attention it deserves, it should be fun.