Re: introduction

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> wrote:

This is very good! Two things:

I don't get this phrase?

- I guess it has two steering wheels

And don't you think this makes you sound like you are gay?

make it to our destination, which is a gay bar.

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together.

                                                                                                                               - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

    In 2002, the Pulitzer Prize in the category of commentary was awarded to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In 2004, Friedman was made a member of the Pulitzer's board of directors. Our nation is killing itself from within.

    Every nation is always killing itself from within, though. Every golden age occurred some fifty years previous to whatever year it is today, and every such golden age could have gone on forever had it not been brought to an end by some misguided contingent of one's own countrymen. It should also be noted that one's political enemies are always in control of the state; in the modern age, they've branched out into the media for good measure.

   Crime, as the reader may recall, spiraled out of control in the 1970s, increasing exponentially until such time as the federal government ceased to function altogether. Wealthy citizens moved into self-contained arcologies defended by private mercenary armies, while the poor organized themselves into communal military tribes, some seizing territory within the ruined cities, some taking to the highways in order that they might launch raids upon

    On another occasion, the proliferation of nuclear power plants throughout the United States resulted in the accidental destruction of several major cities. Likewise, the proliferation of evolutionary theory and the decline of Biblical literalism resulted in the inevitable rise of a global government, itself led by a New Age tyrant who demands to be worshiped alongside some unspecified mother goddess.

    The sexual revolution led to an epidemic of lesbianism and infanticide. Welfare reform led just as inevitably to mass starvation in the inner cities. The New Deal continued to snowball until 90 percent of the U.S. workforce was employed by the Works Progress Administration, digging trenches and putting on Eugene O'Neil plays. Megacorporations replaced most national governments in the late '90s. Everyone is now a crack addict.

    Eight hundred thousand years from now, the human race will be divided into two species - one shall live on the surface, and the other beneath the ground.

    To the extent that we look back and examine the predictions of our predecessors, we find ourselves confronted with a great deal of nonsense. This is a fine thing, as nonsense merits our attention. In studying nonsense, we find certain common characteristics that we may use to identify further nonsense of the contemporary sort, the nonsense that plagues us just now. We may determine, for instance, that many of the foolish predictions that have been made in the past are quite clearly the result of ideology. One opposes nuclear power, and thus nuclear power will lead to disaster. One opposes the theory of evolution, and thus the theory of evolution will lead to immorality. One opposes the sexual revolution, and thus let us ignore him.

    If we are to divide the causes of poor predictions into two categories, we would probably make ideology one of them. The other category, just as probably, would be that of extrapolation, the act of making determinations about the future based on the trends that have reached us here in the present by way of the past and which, one assumes, will continue their growth into the future.

    The main problem with extrapolation is that it is entirely necessary. When we drive a car - I guess it has two steering wheels - we drive a certain speed in a certain direction. A tree is straight ahead. We extrapolate that, if we are to continue on our present course, we will hit that tree and then the cops will come and they'll probably find what we've got stashed in the glove compartment. But having extrapolated this tree-hitting scenario from our present course, we will probably just turn the car a bit so that we are no longer headed for this problematic tree. Perhaps we will get back on the highway, where there are considerably less trees to hit, but at any rate we have in this case successfully used the art of extrapolation to avoid hitting the tree and thereby we are more likely to successfully make it to our destination, which is a gay bar.

    If some pedestrian is observing the car at such point as it is headed towards the tree, he might very well make an extrapolation of his own - that, because the vehicle has been heading in a particular direction, this trend will continue until the car hits the tree. This is, of course, not the best bet to make, as cars are almost invariably driving in the direction of some object that it ought not hit, yet their drivers almost invariably turn before such time as their cars would otherwise hit such an object. In this case, the observer forgot to consider another extrapolation - that cars rarely hit things due to drivers making extrapolations of their own, and that this car is thus not likely to hit anything either.

   Cars do sometimes hit things, though, and this need happen only once for everyone inside to be killed.


   The purpose of this book is to convince the reader that our republic is in the midst of a crisis of its own making; that this crisis is so fundamental as to have been partly responsible for many of the failures that have brought our republic into decline; that for all of its gravity, the crisis is largely unknown to the citizenry; and that, barring an unprecedented and concerted campaign of information, boycotts, and other methods by which to bring pressure to bear on those most responsible, the crisis will likely spell the end of our republic as a credible superpower.