This is good because it reflacts and amplifies the strategy of not having a fixed strategy.

Fixed strategies means taking sides. It’s better to to be fluid.

Like Michael Jackson’s moonwalk …

Nobody knows what is going to happen but it is safe to say that what is happening right this minute will continue, if only for reasons of enertia. If businesses were failing last year, there will be more that fail this year and even more next year. Unless some ‘great event’ signals an end to that continuum, there will be a constant stream of business failures until all of them have failed. (Sigh!)

I recall some analyst mentioning fusion in a bottle. I think I can stay up an wait for that …

I would have to say then, it is best to have a flexible attitude about starting a business. To be ready to change one’s mind. To not start a business but to retire to a life of contemplation and gardening. To eat one’s own peaches, if you know what I mean.

I think an obstacle to creative mind- changing is the fixed idea – supported by non- stop TV advertising – of material progress. This is often paired with some form of meta- spiritualism to create an analog of ‘harmony’ between the physical and the spiritual; amalgams of pseudo faith, pseudo hope, pseudo charity and love. the meta- spiritualism being some rehash of tent- bible fundamentalist race baiting or ‘get rich quick- ism’. Wow, what sort of materialism does that balance?

People in such a context are content to wait for their own flying cars, but not wait too long. In such a context the depressingly banal built environment has been created as an ecosystem for the current energy businesses and their underlings, the auto manufacturers. This is seen as a form of stairway to a future where everyone lives and works in buildings that look like Waring blenders (made in China) and where everyone dresses like a member of the Jetson family.

“Let’s all go to the tree museum and see what a tree looks like!” (Kids) “Yeaaaa!”

The idea of material progress is a simplification rather than a civilizing meme; accompanying religiosity gives it fangs. It defines enemies and amplifies the need for more and more stuff, even as it suggests that the same stuff would be useless for the abstract Jehu- like characters that inhabit it.

Who cares about contradictions!? We have real hypocracy we can sink our fangs into.

Nature does simplifications in its own genteel manner; it simply makes things a little warmer (See hand reach toward thermostat on wall …) That’s not so bad! I won’t have to shovel so much snow (and it will be easier to drive the car.) Nature is my friend. God is my friend, too. God won’t destroy His own creation … and if He does or allows us to do it … then it is His divine will. Pass the methamphetamines, please …

Change mind, maybe not so fast! Nature cuts off water, too, then what? We are comfortable – and fat and diseased and lazy and disinterested in anything that isn’t trivial or purile … the air conditioner hums. Normalcy exists in the mind until it ends on the ground.

That is the essense of this conversation. Will you change my mind? Will I turn around and embrace a Jetsonesque future complete with pedophile priests, gangster bankers, fraudulent politicians and crazy, totally insance mad scientists who give us marvels of selective poisoning?

Why not? You pay me and I will do it. If Dyson can do it and not look like a compleate idiot, I can too. ‘Que sera, sera’ What will be will be, anyway.

It’s better to move away from luxury and away from faith. Faith – hope – charity. How about curiosity, trust and responsibility? I will change my mind toward responsibility and not away from it, how about that? I am making a difference; I threw my TV in the trash fifteen years ago. What did you do in the war?

The war between humans and automobiles. The last war; the final war the war that ends all wars. The automobiles are winning, the humans will starve and the pitiful, few survivors will be slaves.

People to ask me all the time for proofs of this and that, citations of this and that. I tell people to go outside and look at things for themelves, not through the lying eyes of television. Go to a mall and look at all the boarded up stores. Look at all the for sale signs on houses and developments. Look at all the (still insane amounts of) traffic. Look at how ugly everything is. Count on your fingers how many foreign tourists you see in any suburbia or exurbia and compare to the tourists you see in an old city with life to it, like New York or Washington … or Paris or Venice or Florence or Budapest or Kyoto … Or go to an extinct town like Macchu Picchu or Pompeii. See how more appealing and beautiful they are than what we materialistic religionists embrace … or our Waring blender pseudo- future that we can never get to.

It’s always a bit out of reach. Industrialization has been this beguiling;.the blissful future is just one more development away. One more energy breakthrough, one more development site, one more highway, one more river dammed, one more forest cut down, one more country raped and pillaged. 400 years of ‘progress’ and what do we have to show for it? Landfills. A world full of rusting, poisonous industrial sites and butt- ugly buildings. Seven billion hungry people. One or two more billionaires.

A bargain with the devil, one cleverly disguised as God.

‘They’ had Giotto, Durer, Bach, Paladino, Carravagio, Titian, Corelli, Albinoni, Mozart. Our pre- industrial ancestors. We have Eminem. 50cent. Ronald McDonald. Jeff Koons. Madonna. Naz. ‘American Idol’. Real Housewives of New Jersey. Shoot me!

Downturns come and go but this is different. Change your mind about that?

Ask yourself what you think it’s going to cost in the way of energy to double and double again the suburbian- American experience world- wide – that is, just keep it afloat? Then, look at the price on a gas pump. Recall what that price was ten years ago.

No math, just add.