RE: that’s curtains for all of us, isn’t it?
Well, you said it yourself, "This is exactly the kind of question one 
is never supposed to ask."


Scientists -- at least in the West -- are only doing what is demanded 
of them socially along with everyone else. In the corporate and 
academic world you cannot express negative ideas with any conviction. 
You cannot say there is no God, you'll become an outcast. A Weirdo. A 
Nutcake. And NOBODY wants that. You have been "socialized" or, as I 
prefer to say, "domesticated." Like a farm animal.

No newspaper would run a headline "Stock Crash Eminent" that would 
cause a panic, wouldn't it? So newspapers talk about "possibilities" of 
"corrections" and bury it all in dull articles on the Business pages. 
No, a newspaper's main focus is not on informing the public, the main 
focus is to keep the public docile, confused and lobotomized for their 
advertizers, so they can consume gleefully without asking pesky 
questions.

And it works. It works so well that Y2K incompatible computers were 
still on the shelves in the US for sale in June 1999.

I blame hierarchy -- as opposed to working cooperatively -- something 
that virtually nobody in the West agrees with. I could bore the list 
with 20 pages of arguments against organizing in hierarchies, but why 
bother. You either see it or you don't. If I had a thousand pages it 
would not be enough for the pro-hierarchist because their belief in 
hierarchy is founded on self-interest, not logical debate.

But hierarchy seems to be on the winning track because they have what 
no other organization has: a total lack of moral and ethical 
understanding -- they put their psychopathic personalities, or PPs, in 
the drivers' seat. And they have a winning strategy: they kill off the 
competition. It works, at least in the short term.
SEE: Custodians of chaos By Kurt Vonnegut RE: PPs
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13659.htm

Hierarchy is poised to dominate the globe, and like climate change, you 
will not hear dire warnings because dire warnings are taboo.

I bailed out of academia in 1976 and have enjoyed academic freedom ever 
since. So I can say things that virtually nobody in the West agrees 
with -- at least it's better than saying things that I myself don't 
agree with. So I don't have any problem with fatalistic notions (so 
long as they don't become self-fulfilling prophecies; excuses to do 
nothing) and that's mainly why I posted the article "Peak Oil & Black 
Holes" to the list; over the years of looking for solutions, what I 
have been finding instead is piles of evidence that humanity is either 
designed to self-destruct, or has become so flawed that 
self-destruction is unavoidable. I simply cannot see a way to turn 
humanity around. It seems to me like trying to change the tides with a 
teacup.


My on-line time is so limited that I doubt that I'll have time to post 
this at www.climatedenial.org, but you have my permission to do so if 
you like.



Walt
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