I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT
>>sigh« Haven’t even driven the darn thing today.
* * *
In other news, a bomb went off yesterday in Madrid during morning rush hour, killing 170 and wounding 600+. Several Islamic terrorist groups have emailed claiming responsibility.
This is a true wake-up call for Europe, IMHO. By and large, complacent European attitudes of appeasement regarding terrorism have led them to this low day. The EU (particularly Germany and France) don’t seem to care that the war on terrorism is a global war, a zero-sum-game of civilization versus anarchy.
Honestly, what we have here is a delaying action, a phoney war waged with conventional arms piecemeal. The real endgame begins when Al Qaeda acquires Chemical, Biological, or (God forbid) nuclear weapons, at which point they can annihilate by the millions to their “glorious” self defeating, cause.
* * *
Forgive me if I seem like a kook, but here it is in summation: Global energy reserves are waning, and our current population levels are unsustainable long-term. Essentially, we’re at the very peak of the greatest civilization the world has ever known, but like all those before it: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Hellenic Greece, the Hellenistic Middle East, and Rome, if you remove the small threads that weave it together (in our case transportation, communication, and social order), it will collapse. Civilizations are not immune to certain natural laws.
I look at it in terms of entropy: A system tends towards disorder. Simple law of thermodynamics. The only way to overcome that is through a vast input of energy and resources. Thus, Civilization builds order out of choas by harnessing several inputs: Human endeavor, natural resources, and a sense of altruism: Citizens sacrificing of themselves (either willingly or by compulsion) for the common good. However, remove any of these from a given civilization, and that civilization is doomed. Time and time again, a combination of natural changes, complacency, or civil unrest has done-in otherwise stable civilizations.
This is a (probably hackneyed) dissertation topic, but the parallels of modern Western civilization (particularly America) to that of the latter Roman empire are staggering. In both cases, a complacent, decadent populace in an empire that had lost its national identity in favor of “The Me Generation” found itself unable to fend off divisive forces. For Rome, it everything collapsed under its own weight, and that seems the inevitable conclusion. Here’s a basic course of events:
-
Economic collapse. Before any actual problems arise (e.g. we run out of oil), world economies that teeter on anticipating the future will have anticipated the occurrance and collapsed. Imagine: Gas, heating fuel, and jet fuel at 10 times their current cost. Consider: Everything you eat or buy at the store is delivered by truck. Thus, ripple the costs through the economy and the inevitable inflation, and you get a negative feedback loop that will lead to economic ruin on a Great Depression scale.
-
Social breakdown. I just don’t think our country can weather another Great Depression w/o a breakdown of fundamental services. We’re so overburdened with people that are absolutely useless (people on the dole) that getting people to fend for themselves for a few years while the government reacts (e.g. what happend in 1929-1934) will be much more damanging this time around
-
Famine. If America is poorly suited to deal with such troubles, what about the rest of the world? India, with nearly a Billion people? Africa, which is just a mess even today? This is just a shot-from-the-hip guess, but I’m thinking 2 to 3 billion dead from the famine after the economic collapse.
-
War. This is utterly predictable: Few remaining resources + people with nothing to lose = war. Rather than starve to death, many will spit themselves on the stake of war. Likely, large countries and regional governments will split-up into small fiefdoms around powerful military centers. This is what happened following the fall of Rome.
-
Knowledge drain (or as some SciFi novelists call it “The Knowledge Crash”). Given the above, people will be more worried about survival than writing that snazzy C++ program or curing cancer. Inevitably, this will cause us to lose knowledge and intellectual vitality over several generations. Literacy will disappear in some areas. Our reliance on electronic media (rather than permanet storage like paper or stone tables) will compound this. Where is the human genome mapped-out? On hard drives. What good are hard drives without 12 Volts of DC current an an IDE/ATA cable + computer? Paperweights.
Basically, look for a no-resources-left version of the Dark Ages: Trade at a standstill, small pockets of humanity, bandits + crime rampant, human populations that plummet initially and then maintain a reasonable level after that.
For the life of me, I can’t understand what’s compelled me to write the apocalyptic you read above, but I guess the Madrid attacks (and the larger terrorism problems we’re seeing) remind me that our civilization is basically at its crest, and there’s a long to fall once entropy takes command again…
* * *
And, I still want a 300C :D