I wonder how long this sorry gibberish will live on some server someplace. No way to know but throw it against the wall. And like a greasy bar rag, it'll leave a sticky trail of nastiness for some other sorry fool to clean up. Res Ipsa Loquitor. I think Charles Bukowski said that? I was listening to Mark Blyth's rap on a podcast and I have to say his smiting of the Austerity Cultists was impressive. What was frustrating to me was the he, like so many others with good intentions to try to ameliorate the condition of the working classes still operates under the assumption that strong growth is the way to get out of the mess global civilization's in. Sadly, I can only agree with those who say that growth economies are a dead end (barring interplanetary space flight - and, while I think that's desirable, we're ruled over by a lot of people who can't think past next quarter). You don't even have to believe in the peak oil idea to understand, if you'll be bothered to look at the situation objectively that there's not enough resources to sustain a market based, growth oriented consumer economy on a planetary scale. You can't promise all the people of India, China and Africa that they or their children will have even the standard of living of 19th century Europe. A lot of people cried 'wolf' a lot of times in the seventies about how resource depletion would take us all back to the 12th century. So here we are in the twenty-first and those who even remember the dire warnings of resource depletion versus the "Population Bomb" are sniggering behind their hands. They hoot and point their fingers at James Kunstler. "You heathen freak!" They howl, flinging their dung at the cassandra chained to the mast of the SS Peak Oil. And they're right in their way. Kunstler's vision of a world inhabited by neo-pagan Laura Ingalls-Wilder farmer types is about as realistic as any other polyanna paradise dreamed up by neo-hippy dreamers. Caught between these two poles however, what hope is there for those of us who sure could use some? more later...