[Unfortunately, the following, much as I might wish for it to be so, is not from the Third Galaxy -- and even if it were, the Alien Veggies are not coming in their strange ships of squash and eggplant, cucumber and melon to kiss our thumb and set everything right...]What's going to happen to us now?
Bilmon has announced up front that his posts will be coming infrequently and far, far in between. I've been able to live with his occasional unannounced hiatii, but this sounds serious, not as serious as the end of the world but I can feel the first twinges of withdrawal symptoms already...
What can/shall we do? Bilmon is more than snark, more than an incisive political commentator, more than a quick and cutting wit or an intelligent satirist of the satanic and infernal drift of the spiritus mundi.
Well, we, that is all them little bloggers out there are just going to have to hone our pens, wash our keyboards, put our cheetos behind us and wail our own little songs.
In his (hopefully not) farewell post, Bilmon left us with a link to what I assume to be his personal bet on doomsday -- accelerated, out of control global warming. I live not all that far south of the Arctic Circle, so I suppose I could live with that -- that is, if I don't consider the fact that my house is only some 10 meters above (present) sea level. Should I get a boat, do you think?
My readers know of course, that my personal bet on what ushers in the nightmare is Total War with the extravagant use of weapons based on nuclear technologies. I admit, of course, that my particular brand of pessimism is in large part due to my being a Child of the Bomb -- my borning day is the same as that of the Hiroshima bomb, so perhaps I do over stress the significance of the nuclear beast, ignoring the chemical and biological technologies. Furthermore, one should not ignore the instability and chaos enabled by the extensive distribution of the so-called Weapons of (Slow) Mass Destruction, that is "small" arms, when- and wherever the social structure collapses for one reason or another.
Unfortunately, a consequence of global warming will be the total breakdown of social structure here and there in the world. The same is perhaps even more true of the consequence of the breakdown of the supply of energy to the electric grids of the industrialized world in general and mega-cities in particular. This is Joe Bageant's "favorite scenario".
Efforts to maintain power to the grids will lead to further ravishment of the world's resources and the dictatorial regimes and martial law necessary to continue the plundering.
All of the above and others will enforce the global warming. We face a number of elements which all feed positive feedback into each other -- the result of all of this positive feedback is of course quite negative as far as we are concerned.
As I read the story of what we've done and do,
my heart breaks in sorrow, my head bows in shame.
We have killed all our yesterdays and tomorrows
and today -- today is busting into flame
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