Have you placed me a bit high on the gloomer scale? Maybe. I do admit to having a fondness for homosapiens (“Their my SPECIES!”) but I don’t particularly see them as in any way more entitled than other creatures or the planet we’re successfully wiping out. I’m also, of the 3 E’s, most terrified by what’s happening to the planet in reports I get from trusted sources. I feel totally unqualified to write intelligently about them, as well, so I don’t.

I HAVE written about the curious emotional split I see between the way climate scientists talk in private and write in public about what’s going on. Climate collapse is much more frightening to me than the collapse of industrial civilization. I say “leave me spots on my industrial economy, but leave me the birds and the bees, PLEEEASE…” (I’m also freezing cold in my home most of the time, to show my solidarity…)

Regarding censorship, I have not posted a few comments that I found down right mean-spirited toward other commenter. Flame me, not my contributors. I also don’t debate the existence of the 3 E’s, so that’s censorship of a sort, but I say so right up front, so maybe its not.

The “signing up to the blog in order to comment” is also the fastest way to eliminate endless spam. I spent hours one day cleaning up the “Buy Viagra!” comments when I experimented with shutting it off, so it’s a hassle commenters go through, but not readers (or me), so that’s the way it is.

I think a wide-spread economic crashes will happen a lot sooner than the collapse of other elements of civilization (I agree with Greer on that one) but much has to do with what you define as “evidence” of civilization’s collapse. My family got whacked up side of the head good this past year, so I’d say we’ve already crashed economically in this hacienda. I don’t think we’ll see wide-spread roving hordes for a while, but they’ve around now in some places, and will get more common world-wide as time goes by.

Too long-winded a comment. Sorry That’s enough, I’ll stop here.

Too many of these reports of reports etc turned out to be fabrications, misunderstandings, etc, to make following more worth any time at all.

Today the world is groaning, oil is teetering on the brink of decline, there’s all these utterly real problems that are being brought to light in places more respectworthy than youtube, and you focus on this stuff? Why? What’s the point? Bolivia’s glaciers are melting, no water for their overpopulated cities, and they just barely managed to take control of their water from Bechtel if I remember right, who was trying in a seriously cynical bid to control resources at the most basic levels, to control the very water of our lives. What’s up with this wasted time and mental energy? What do you hope to achieve? Where is the mental disconnect from? Where are serious sources, not internet flakes? They aren’t there, so why bother looking for them when you can find a world filled with serious research about serious topics, not this nonsense. Aliens too? Chemtrails? What else? Sorry, I’m with Kunstler on this, keep the discussion focused on reality that can be demonstrated in empirically verifiable ways, and if you want to follow other stuff, fine, but don’t expect others to go for it until you have actual real data that can’t be overturned by a 45 second google search, sometimes I’ll admit it takes longer, it took me a while to find the original source of the chemtrail nonsense, that guy hides himself well.

Science has its uses, as does its method.

Then there’s the fairly severe implicit racism in the idea that those hijackers couldn’t possibly have done that stuff, being arab and all… that’s I think the real essence of that whole idea. But that’s ridiculous, it was simple, get money, check, head to flight schools, check, hijack planes, using a security hole, check, fly planes into buildings, check. Just give them the blame or credit, depending on your perspective, they earned it. Remember, if you are readjusting your theory to as each alleged ‘fact’ is refuted, then you’re not looking for the truth. But conspiracy thinking is a very old phenomena, with repeatable and quite tiresome characteristics, so much so a few books have been written on it recently.

But reality is really quite enough at the moment, no need to colorize it in such bland ways as internet based myth propogation. But each to their own, no accounting for taste. The belief structures required to engage in such pseudo thinking are interesting, but not that interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyKR2-A0KPU&feature=video_response

Many Americans don’t even know WTC7 collapsed on 911 (three towers in all), and yet we had 2 reports of its collapse prior to its demolition. Go Figure. Where’s Occam’s razor fall on this. The simplest explanation is prior knowlege.

Unlike peak oil, which is based on actual work by actual geologists, much of the current internet fueled conspiracy stuff is based on bad readings of incorrectly understood data, or when that fails, on simply invented data.

So it’s hard to blame Kunstler for not allowing that stuff in his comment threads, it’s a slippery slope that leads nowhere. Now Kunstler’s huge blind spot: fairly extreme anti-arab sentiments, is another story, but I just put that down to him reading the New York Times far too often, and from being from NYC in the first place.

Most conspiracy theories give far too much credit to the people who allegedly created the conspiracies, people like the Bush group, who had for example failed at every single thing they’d ever tried to do in their lives, up to and including the Iraq fiasco, but then these same losers suddenly were supposed to get magical powers to plant and plan a complex demolition timed to the microsecond…. don’t blame Kunstler for insisting on at least some standards, sure the rich and powerful tend to focus on their interests, and tend to manipulate the system in their favor, but they aren’t magicians, and that’s the dividing line Kunstler insists on.

To really get this, the basic idea is pretty simple: if something can be done by a few people getting together and talking it through, it might, or might not, get done, say cracking regulation support of financial lobbying. If however that direct, sort of thuglike activity, then requires highly complex technical planning in addition, and perfect timing in ways that really defy any common sense view of reality, that’s a conspiracy theory, and that drags down the rhetoric to a pointless babble level.

And so on. It’s easy to see which is which, operations that are very complicated often fail, simple military type operations often succeed, thugs are good at being thugs, but they are not good at being smart. Have you ever read the actual writings of these alleged masterminds? They are not smart people, to be very very polite about it. So any time you are tempted to give them more credit than they are due, resist the urge, think mafia type action, not complex planning type actions that requires huge webs of secrecy and advanced planning and scheming.

Personally, I really wonder why, when so many complex systems are beginning to creak, groan, and crumble, and the collapse is already hitting parts of the third world now, as we speak, anyone feels the urge to worry about subtle conspiracies etc, especially when huge scale theft is going on globally, etc. I’ve never met a 9-11 conspiracy type who paid any attention to the junk on wall street, for example, and that was where all the action was going on. When I let myself drift to conspiracy type thinking, my favorite thought is that there is no finer way to distract people from the real stuff going on than to have them focus on non-real stuff, chem-trails, etc… odd way the human mind works, someone should write a book on it, it’s interesting.

[sarcasm]Guy McPherson is clearly one of the web’s foremost techno-optimists. [/sarcasm]