I find it most interesting this tack that HARM is taking, the deliberate use of guilting tactics to drag in hot button social issues implying that Marinites are opposed to the lower classes and thus any social agenda that actually helps the poor must be ignored.

This insidious tactic is a well-worn right wing ploy that we will, unfortunately, see more and more frequently in the coming years, if not months, as we speed towards the brick wall of collapse.

The truth is corporations could give two hoots about you, the environment, the world. They are in it for the profits, the rest of us be damned, including the right and left wing rich people.

It is precisely HARM's sort of argument that will result in nothing significant being done to prepare the planet for the upcoming catastrophe. We will not see a coordinated effort to stop the one thing that is causing the problem (development, growth, etc.) because, while the top hatters scream at the people in steerage and vice versa, the ship goes down.

It is too late. The time to get serious has passed. No amount of social, technological, economical, or ecological tinkering is going to prevent an extremely gruesome and painful crash.

Obama is tied to the status quo and speaks of restarting the growth engine, the very thing that got us in this predicament.

I know the crowd here thinks itself the cool-tempered scientific elite, that their thinking is unmarred by the emotional messiness of the liberal arts, but the truth is they are just as committed to the underlying faulty paradigm as the rest of the world.

The Marinites (lovely name--reminds me of "The Ancient Mariner" in many ways) will suffer as much or more than the hoi polloi in the flats of that desert city L.A., just as much as the S.F. intelligentsia, because there are no walls in an ecology. There are only flows.

The one thing that is certain, everyone gets to participate in the collapse.

Ain't we got fun?