Drain

I'm a little worn out...election,season's change(Pain),etc...and cannot keep a train of thought.
So I'm off reading,both real books, and online...
I'm deciding where my focus should be.
On the one hand, I've given in to temptation, and started lurking in Right Wing Land(Jane Goodall)...to try and determine which way that lot will go...in rhetoric, and philosophy, and possibly action. Very interesting things bubbling away in Crazyland.lol.
On the other hand, there's Doom.
Ha!
We Humans always....always...make the mistake of thinking that The Way We Do Things Now(tm) will continue on, indefinitely...that we are somehow exempt from History(or at it's Logical End).
This is a silly, and counterproductive, way of running a Civilisation, or it's various parts and pieces.
But we keep on doing it, anyway.

The first hand is given flesh by something the Odious Clown, Glenn Beck said, just after the election:beck, on the election
No need to lurk on Free Republic...unless, like me, you enjoy that sort of perverse Anthropological exercise.
The second hand....or at least the Thinking that goes with it...is summed up , comprehensively, by one John Michael Greer (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/)
The upshot is that the two could be connected....the Gun Nuts and Apocalypse Seekers, Tea in all it's forms, are already re-entering the Survivalist Mode that we saw in the 90's. The problem is their Approach...and the Belief Systems (Foundational, Unexamined Assumptions), that they use to arrive at that Approach.
Gearing Up for the "inevitable" arrival of Federal Troops(or Chinese, or UN,lol) in Mason...or Hunkering Down, so's the Forces of the Antichrist won't notice you....leads to certain forms of Preparation. Most of these Forms will be inapplicable to Real World Conditions.
That's where Common Ground can be found, I reckon.
They're right, about the fact that nothing lasts forever, change is inevitable, and we should expect large change in the near future...
They just have the Causes wrong.
Ergo, they're spending more resources on Bullets, than on Beans and Bandaids.
I think it would be in our interest to mitigate that trend...
Sustainability, for one, should be a focus of every little town and neighborhood...Got Garden?!
Got Seed Saving?
The Trucks won't always run, I'm afraid(Hurricane Rita)...the Grid won't always work(it's in a horrible state of disrepair)...and no one wants to Think about stuff like Triple Redundancy for Food, Water and Heat.
Doing nothing, despite the Logic of the Situation, will ensure Hell World....starvation, Warlordism, and all of that fun stuff.
I reckon it would also be a good idea to make some informal alliances with the 4 towns within 40 miles...in the event of a Catastrophe, a Collapse, a Sudden Systems Failure, it won't be the damned UN, let alone the Fedgov, coming to get us,lol...no matter the Fantasies of the Right....it'll be hungry folks from Menard.
Such tentative alliances must likely be Informal.....the current systems of governance Assume a continuation of what has gone before.
The City, or the County, will never even contemplate such things, until it's too late.
In a Perfect World, Decentralisation...Democratisation of Everything....should be a Liberal Thing...
With the Gun Nuts, et alia, relegated to the necessary tasks of Defense, and well under the control of non-Gun Nuts, et alia.
This is impossible with our current penchant, as Dems...Liberals...whatever...to leave such thoughts to the Right.
The phrase "Conspiracy Theory" should be stricken from the Lexicon...and a sober look should be taken at Possibilities....at What Ifs...
Doomers call our current Paradigm, "Cornucopian".
Those don't really exist, I'm sorry to report...and Civilisations who, for a time, pretend to such nonsense, are doomed to Failure.