It did strike me odd that you chose to bring Court down a peg by suggesting that he needed 40 years of pay stubs in order to legitimate his written ideas. I liked his nice come-back about Ann Coulter’s success as a professional writer entitling her to serious attention by those still able to read, think, and make judgements. As if.

That said, I’m late to your blog (six month’s) thanks to a link from EnergyBulletin or CarolynBaker (?). I don’t read it as religiously as I do Dr, Kunstler ( your emittances are less regular [it does seem to affect our own attendance]), but I do have you flagged on my “favorites” list, and do manage to read most of your postings, AND I enjoy and appreciate your perspective. Not much you think or say that I disagree with other than that I have less hope than you do – that our species has a fair shot at a comeback. Opposable thumbs, maybe – but so much extra-capacity grey matter on top of primitive mammal and reptile brain structures — god help the species left standing after we’ve played this all out, if any of our kind are still around. It’ll be deja vu all over again.

Animal nature, with so much neural overcapacity, will come up with the same kinds of hell (OK – very roughly so), if we manage to sneak through the needle’s eye before us. Why wouldn’t it? Well…. Darwin got it. E.O. Wilson gets it. Wile E. Coyote didn’t get it. We’re outta here – ‘cept nobody knows quite when. We all do seem to love to make predictions though. Neils Bohr learned his lesson. Roughly: “I’ve learned, after some bad experience, not to make predictions – especially when they have anything to do with the future”, (roughly, I said).

I never noticed Dan Quinn or Derrick Jensen were so optimistic about our squeezing a few gametes through the eye of the needle. That’s probably because i can barely read, and don’t usually make it all the way to what Tim Bennett refers to as “The Happy Chapter”. You’ve got to have some sort of Happy Chapter if you’re going to collect and hold a following. Martin King beckoned that bullet to his head with his own sort of brilliant, poetic “Bring it!”. A courageous American Martyr, if ever there was. And, as persuasively as anyone in the last couple millennia, he caused people to believe there was a rainbow ay the end of the pot of suffering. Aside from being an atheist – still, I just don’t get it – how our kind might be around for another 10,000 years. We aren’t sustainable. We’re to GD clever. We’ll unwind whatever good things Nature leaves sitting out in the yard, no matter how much education anyone tries to pound into a human skull. If we were ever going to LEARN, it would have happened at least a few dozen empires back. Don’t we imagine that a few Mayans or Easter Islanders were socially mal-adjusted enough to see utter doom coming before the last bit of paradise was converted into detritus?

I dunno about you-all, but i still own and drive a car, and a truck-with-a-two-ton-brush-chipper-attached, and two motor scooters, and as many chain saws as I can keep out of the clutches of the unemployed scavenging class. Ninety-nine percent of my grub comes from the two grocery stores in our hood. My wife still files and pays her IRS protection money. We can’t save “Society”. It’s gonna be part of the bouncing rubble one day. But, yes, “one day” is an unknowably far date, out there somewhere.

Kunstler’s LONG EMERGENCY first tacked me. Then I watched Sally Eickson & Tim Bennett’s ‘WHAT A WAY TO GO!”, and finally got to Bill Catton’s OVERSHOOT a year or so ago. Catton’s essay “The Problem of Denial” then got me obsessed with that topic. I decided a few weeks ago, to prepare a talk on “Denial”, for a little “informal” study group i belong to. At first, I foolishly griped to my wife about how little there was, written about the subject of denial. Well, Howdy! – there’s all a body would ever want to read on the subject. It’s just not at the top of the “PBS News-Hour With Jim Lerher” table of contents. Or within 500 feet of any dentist’s waiting room coffee table. The subject of human denial, and its supporting cast, has to be one of the loneliest subjects in any kingdom on the planet. My presentation is tomorrow night ( 12/15/09 ), and I’m still finding articles and examples of how we are able to either delude ourselves or let it be done to us.

Smart as we are, we’re completely out-gunned, as a species, as a society, in the contest between rational thinking and emotional action. gOD help the planet’s other creatures if any part of our kind survives the sudden deceleration at the bottom of the falls.

I don’t hate our kind, any more than most people hate their children. I just don’t know what to besides warn them and watch what happens. ( If I have any children – they never call or write. ) I’m so smug.

Keep it up, Guy, et al. Every fire ought to have a few good fiddlers! I enjoy the heqque out of it!

Awaiting your moderation…

Dan

I say the weather thingie starts in five years, 2014, and goes to 2026 before calming.
Human population in 2026; 560,000,000. Ouch. And not really much to eat going forward.
Did I say optimism? Hmm.

Do we get extra credit for using all caps, Guy? Or is that just for outliers?

Where on the high plain are you? Last we heard from you was when you were in rural Thailand.

I’ve warned your Uncle Guy that the downside of our still being here in 2010 was that you would crow about it.

You’re wrong about the Dow.Psychology and symbolism is everything to the
human mass.When we take out the previous low under 6500 it will be a catastropic psychic blow,entirely out of proportion to the mere 30 stocks in the DJIA.

Technological achievements which could help with a relocalized restructuring of available resources (combined with renewables) and which would lead to a future which was a hybrid of 19th and 21st century technology and logistical allocation will, instead, be plowed into trying to maintain what JHK terms “happy motoring”. In all likelihood resulting in some kind of catastrophy.

I think it’s foolish to be too specific with regard to the timing or the form of this catastrophy. Again, looking at Rome, that whole enterprise collapsed under it’s own weight and unsustainable use of it’s resources – not to mention it’s highly unstable political structure. In the end, the Roman Legions themselves were just one (amoung many) armed groups fighting over the atrophied corpse of the empire. They centralized until they could centralize no more and then it fragmented – badly. But that fragmentation took GENERATIONS to occur.

The executive branch (and DC by extension) engages in a similar centralization of power. Will this work when we’re forced to squeeze oil out of shale and it’s 20.00 bucks a litre at the pump? Can we have “happy motoring” then? Certainly not. But what will take it’s place? It will very likely be a long period of instability and violence and famine, etc….but saying it will happen at the end of 2010 or next week Tuesday is just foolish.

While there will be pain before the final series of shocks it’s unlikely that it will be before the middle of this century. Not that there won’t be notable problems before then – I’m just saying that odds are stuff will unplug and unwind in fits and starts for quite some time. Wimpers, wimpers and not one big bang.

Our only response to the budget shortfall has been attempting to mortgage the state buildings and the natural treasures. (Kartchner Caverns is on the list.)

If anybody wants a toxic asset that can’t be foreclosed upon, let us know. -And pronto!

Well, you got the Broken Record of Doom, the Kunstler himself, to stop by. That counts for something, though I’m not sure what. I expect him to go on pathetically bleating as long as the interwebs provide equal ranting for all and purveyors of mediocre literature continue to murder masses of trees to inflict his writings upon a world already seething with drivel.

I’ll nitpick upon only one point: why this obssessive focus on Wall Street? What difference does the relative height of the Dow Jones have to do with civilization? Isn’t the Dow Jones just a bunch of made-up electronic numbers representing some fictional conglomeration of estimates of industrial health? How, exactly, is the fate of civilization tied by a noose to a bunch of flickering numbers in New York City?

Maybe it’s just that it was -19 when I started my car this morning, but such numbers don’t seem to have all that much bearing out here on the frozen high plains.