Introductory Post

This is a spin-off of another blog that I was kinda in the process of shutting down anyway, and will be chronicling my sentiments regarding these, the End Times. And yes, I know that when I get going I sound exactly like one of the religious whack-jobs I tend to rant about, but if you look around, listen to the laundry list of things that are going wrong ecologically (how much damage is occurring, how quickly, and how soon the fit will hit the shan), and recognize just how little is being done to fix it (too little too late and too slowly, a Band-Aid^tm on a fatally hemorrhaging wound), you gotta recognize that civilization as we know it is going to end in the (relatively) near future.

I give it 10 years, 20 max, before things start seriously deteriorating. The problem is that a crisis is necessary to force change, to shock people out of their complacency. The people in power are now, finally, recognizing the necessity of and conceding to the measures that environmentalists have been kicking and screaming about for the past decade. But it's too late already, we're now at the point where many additional measures are necessary, because all of the changes that are being applied now weren't applied ten years ago. And by the time it's recognized that these additional radical changes have to be implemented, it'll be too late again.

I'd been having these kinds of thoughts for a good long time, but it was really brought home this summer. Daniel Quinn's Ishmael was a big part of it. A few weeks ago, I attended a screening of What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire. Think Inconvenient Truth, except that it was actually done well.

As an aside, I have to say that after having listened to the commentary track on Inconvenient Truth, the bad parts of it (Gore's backstory, the stupid mechanical lift, etc.) were not there because of Gore, they were pushed by the director, producer, and other administrative marketing bozos. Furthermore, Gore was pushing to get more and more material into the movie, while the corporates were cutting it down.