I have, at times, spouted some of the most ridiculous crap ever spouted.

No one here actually has to be told to take me with a grain of salt, do they? Didn’t think so…

Call me crazy, but with all the craze around the Rapture, 2012, Disaster movies, Zombie plagues, and general news reports on how everything’s going to hell, It looks like some people actually WANT the world to end. I can’t be right, though. That’s a crazy thought, right? *cricket silence*

***Begin Quote***

The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of
traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological
progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that
you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the
economy of a society with out causing rapid changes in all other
aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably
break down traditional values.

Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.”
Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes
less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with
and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer
networks, highway systems, the mass communications media, the modern
health care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that
technology applied in one location often affects people at other
locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may
contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the
greenhouse effect affects the whole world.

Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of
government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For
one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated
because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the
deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so
that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it
to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that
government interference in his life is replaced by interference from
big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more
chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The
conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting
his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.

***End Quote***

Decentralize. Focus on making things that work when things ten miles away aren’t working. This applies to technology, politics, economics, and everything else. We need to come up with a system that has a lot fewer keystones in it.

The question that should be asked right now is “what’s the best way to get a lot more energy as quickly as possible?” So far, we aren’t getting very good answers. Come to that, we’re not getting the right answers for “what’s the best way to get a lot more money as quickly as possible” either.