actually, seeing it spelled out so clearly serves wonderfully to focus the mind, and led me to vote for the third, delusionally optimistic scenario.

does anyone here really doubt following his advice for 99% carbon shutdown to be true?

are we all really open to making it work?

under the daily deluge of insanity, are enough of us keeping a tiny window of faith-in-what-presently-looks-impossible?

if so, we are not alone....far from it.

folks smarter and more on the ball are working their tushes off to make what we dream happen, and to warn all the rest of us carbon-eers what is ahead, both in terms of the kind of changes to expect were we smarter than yeast and a more visionary than a tumour.

...and what to expect if we continue to hew to the species suicide plan we're presently on.

i try to put myself in the minds of those gathered around cheney during the secret energy conference at the beginning of gwb's presidency.

what were their conclusions, after a cold hard look at the stakes and possible outcomes?

lose it all gracefully and be recognised for public heroes and rescuers of humanity, or make the midnight heist of the drugstore that will flood their veins with one last rush of soma, while the rest of us achieve terminal auto-ignition!

kooking in our motor-karmas!

they think they have jails enough, plastic hearts enough, monkey-gland extracts enough, viagra enough, food and water and oxygen enough, vatican dispensations enough, to squat in their bunkers counting their digital gold, while the starving howl outside the perimeter fortifications, manned by coked up mercenaries, the last believing as long as they have food and firepower they have made the right choice...

then i think of all the eyes-wide-open crowd who have known this confrontation was inevitable since they shot the kennedys and king, and how we have found it impossible to take seriously the idea that the kind of political unity and will to change will come from the top down.

what were we to do?, then and now?

each of us made a traumatised choice to try and resist the lies, to speak truth when it wouldn't get us killed, and some even if it did...

to plan and reason as if these monsters weren't consuming the biosphere we live on, to try and love it all notwithstanding, because anything less turned us into them, and robbed us of the ability to live with ourselves and look our children in the eye.

too much cynicism leads to apathy and depression, so we looked for what brought us up, made us forget the madness, or tried to transform it into an existential letting go, a dionysian reply to the sterile, vapid dystopia-in-the-making the destroyers shared.

those that didn't kill outright or soon, are floating like lucky jetsam on a toxic sea, and darned if we didn't want to have the last laugh one day, so we bob and wait...

in case there come a tipping point, and what we have learned could come in useful, mostly about living in a cognitively dissonant reality, to find consonance by allowing ourselves to resonate with the few others through history who  have pulled the wool away.

operating on the assumption that this brittle farce we now see unwinding will never bring us the naive middle class shangri la our parents post war wanted for us....

peace and prosperity, steady job, good bennies, safe neighbourhoods, lotsa eddication, wine at meals, dusky help to do the shit work while we chattered...

the public is less stupid than cheney-crew would wish and is waking up faster than they can spin, but no spell lasts for ever, and mother nature has lost patience with our folly.

we see the reckoning arriving, for many it is already here, it is coming for us too, and while the clock counts down the last numbers, we trim our wicks here, because ultimately a funny last line may be the best thing we can hope for as we exit this vale of tears....

or somehow we cut the carbon by 99%! hahahahahahahaha!

we all hold cards in the greatest gamble humans ever have known.

and the only thing stopping us winning is our own ignorance!

...of how to do better....

it's not luck or chance, it's power our ancestors gave away gullibly, and evil men grown fat on evil, while most slept in sloth and sin.

christ, this place is great to vent...

off to pay for the panels....quixote would be proud of me...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty