Hi Candid,
Yeah, I am of two minds too about everything. I wasn't even trying to be objective or anything, but I read a lot of books and it seems that most of these books, nonfiction doomsday books, will go until the Last Chapter about how horrible everything is, listing problems on every side. But then in the Last Chapter they will give explicit instructions on how to Fix Everything. WHAT!? "Didn't the Idiot read his own Book!?" I always seems to be the case that, given all the other chapters, the program delineated in the Last Chapter would be impossible, in all practical terms. The only reason I still hang onto any vestige of Religiousity is because the World requires a Miracle. BUT it's not like I don't understand the Mentality of these authors. You know, we can't just give up. Fight to the End and all of that. BUT, when you think of it, it is extremely hard to imagine how EVERYBODY would die, or even if they did, well, the Planet Earth would stabilize again after just 10,000 years and Intelligent Life would start over again, evolving another species with Oppose-able Thumbs. I had read something about this problem before, about the evolution of Intelligence, and that is that it takes Less Intelligence to build a wildly dysfunctional Civilization that will destroy itself, then it takes to build a Viable Sustainable Civilization, and THEREFORE it is unlikely that any Viable Sustainable Civilization will ever appear even in the entire Universe. Oh! The Whole 12 Year Thing. YOU KNOW WHAT!? The Best Thing would be that if one could snap one's fingers that the Economy would just have a super nasty collapse. Billions of People would die, BUT it is highly conceivable that the World would be saved.... and it would give us a respite that could allow of the Evolution of More Intelligence, so that next time the Global Civilization would be significantly less Dysfunctional. Hmmmm. The Front Idea would be for a Positive Revolution to FIX everything, but the Subtext of it would be that the Revolution would screw up everything so badly as to lead to a Global Economic Collapse which would allow the Earth to heal. The trouble with that is that One can't write the Book without giving away the Plan. .