Have you ever heard of Whipple Van Ness Jones, III?

Probably not, unless you watch the CBS daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.

You see, according to Wikipedia….

Whipple Jones III is a fictional character on CBS’s daytime drama The Bold and the Beautiful. He had been portrayed by Rick Hearst from February 13, 2002 to August 29, 2002 and was absent for nearly seven years before returning to the show on July 17, 2009….

However, what they don’t tell you is that Whipple Van Ness Jones, III is a real person.

Whip resides in NW Florida with his wife, 3 children, and pets.

The problem is that when the BP oil spill happened Whip and his family lost their family business in Seaside, Florida the name of the store was Molly Caroline’s named after his two daughters Georgia Caroline and Molly Catherine (Whipple Van Ness Jones, IV wasn’t born yet when they opened their store).

Whip loved the idea that The Bold and the Beautiful named a character after him, he thought it was fun because obviously how else would they come up with the EXACT SAME NAME for the show.

Whip contacted the show early on (sent a copy of his birth certificate and drivers license), they didn’t offer any money (and Whip didn’t ask for any), just an autograph from the star portraying him.

The problem is NOT that Whip has a character on a show, the problem is Whip and his family lost their main source of income due to the BP oil spill.

Now when Whip applies for a job, and the employment places run a reference check on him and find a Wikipedia article calling Whip a fictional character on CBS’s daytime drama The Bold and the Beautiful, they claim he is using the name of a soap opera character…

What Whip did was start his own dot com….and is allowing people to post blogs on his site for free, just to show that he is a real person.

Google does give Whip a TINY amount to have ads on the right hand side of his webpage.

Please pass this along to your friends to show that Whipple Van Ness Jones, III is not only a real person, but a man trying to keep food on his family’s table.

Thank you!!

PS- Whip and his family did put in a claim with BP, they just haven’t heard anything yet. AS OF MARCH 24, 2011

PPS- Also, some people consider CBS to have BORDERLINE stolen Whip’s identity. Whip doesn’t see it this way, but how would you feel if you couldn’t get a job based on what Wikipedia says about you????

Excellent emphasis on the interplay between technology, economics and energy as the key framework for understanding our current situation. While many aspects of our system can be individually analyzed, the emergent property called resilience is probably the closest we can get to an overall indicator of our system’s health. As you say, it’s the ability to cope that is important, and it is already almost exhausted.

On the rare occasion that I broach the subject of peak oil, usually with one of my scientist peers, I find the concept of resilience the most difficult to convey and grasp. One-dimensional thinking seems to abound, especially when it comes to energy issues. A frequent counterargument to the “doomer” view is that alternative or currently unimaginable technologies will maintain our growth trajectory. “When we relied mainly on wood, we could not have predicted the adoption of coal, oil, nuclear, etc.” But I don’t think this argument holds in a depletion scenario. The US didn’t start using oil because it ran out of coal and became desperate for a substitute. From what I can tell, we adopted oil because it was a higher quality fuel and we did so during a time of economic growth when the coal flow was not constrained. Do you know of anyone who has studied the wood-coal-oil transition with this type of analysis in mind? More specifically, is there historical precedent for the success of a new/alternative energy technology in a society experiencing the decline of its main energy source?

Thanks for your excellent commentary. I would also like to thank you for your tireless work in general, were it not for your confession that you sometimes do get tiered. .

Mihai

As for all the changes we should have begun making decades ago…ain’t gonna happen. Perhaps the collecive mind has it that humans need to leave so another, less destructive species, can rise, and that’s why they’re sitting on their asses, waiting for the axe to fall.

I’ve seen this coming for years, as have many. I’m nearly 60 now and I don’t plan to live through what is coming. I’m too tired to deal with it all. And even if I did somehow survive, to what point? A struggling society doesn’t need old people to take care of. They’d get rid of me in a flash.

So I don’t garden, I don’t stockpile food, and I’ve given up talking to my friends about massive-change preparation. Everything happens as it should, even if that means the end of our culture as we built it.

These days, I’m waiting for some government to release a deadly virus that is projected to kill off 70-80% of world population. I figure they, like me, are starting to see this as the only possible way for anything to survive.

We prep, trying to make our lives as simple as possible, and I crystal ball gaze , trying to see what climate change will bring for our local area and how we can adapt to it. The economic crisis has already hit us, DP lost his job a few months ago.

We have young children, and it worries me slightly to think of what the future holds for them. I second the request for your thoughts on that, most of the mums I know aren’t really interested, you know?

Cheers, Naomi

(your future – give it up, you’ve been posting that everywhere…)

they will be homeless, jobless, busted, in jail or dead soon
90% of the world’s fish are extinct
the planet is almost dead already
humans will soon be killing each other over the last scraps of food

there will be no rescue
there will be no divine fucking intervention
there will not be a ‘better day’
better days already passed long ago

there will be ‘worse days’, and ‘worser days’ after them
there will be killing, murder, rape, rape of children, killing and eating of children
there will be acts committed that we don’t even have words for yet
and that will be just the beginning

just the beginning of a new deathlife for the survivors
their own private horrorshow filled with coming attractions