Thanks for your article, Gail. I tend to see this as a motivator to get on with the future of more and better conserved oil and whatever alternatives can come and to get ready for the crash of the credit marketers without the citizens getting creamed by saving their skins. I think the economy could handle the credit crash or an enormous oil price spike independently but together they would be a world catastrophe, much as the article makes clear.

You are exactly right that the credit markets gone mushroom, a lot like an atom bombs cloud. It needs returned to reality and decent behavior, hopefully a sensible congress would address it but the twin risks of the lobbyists making things even worse or a regulatory framework that comes loaded against the consumer keep me from looking that way.

Let's just bankrupt them like anybody else. Then the survivors would learn something.

I don't know how useful it is, but I see the problem in two parts. There is a failure to reach the intellectual level, and there is a failure to reach the emotional level. We see these failures as CRABS, and the UNDEAD.

CRABS, the Classic Retarded American Blank Stare that you receive when you try to address these issues with those unfamiliar. The issues are complex, wide, and deep, and most people can't even begin to put what we try to convey into any personally relevant context.

And the UNDEAD, the Universally Neglected and Deceived, Empty of the American Dream. These people largely don't care about the serious issues because they are largely unable to care. After X number of years of being sold false promises and exaggerated claims about a bill of goods that included suburbia, upward mobility, and a prosperous future, or having been continually pushed down, ignored, and lied to on their attempts at climbing Mount Capitalism, they are now perpetually discouraged and unfeeling. These people would agree with George Carlin's observation, "It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it."

Why aren't other people thinking things through thoroughly? The issues are extremely complex and people don't take the time, or they have scant energy left to care about anything except getting through today.

And I think the way to address this problem is counter-intuitive.

How do you get people who don't care, to care? How do you get people who don't think enough, to think enough? By addressing their weak spots, the counter-intuitive part. The person who doesn't care has weak spots in how they think that can be addressed. The person who doesn't think enough has weak spots in how they care that also can be addressed.

I don't know what to do about someone who appears to neither think about the problem, nor care about it.