Wide is the Gate and Broad is the Road to Destruction..

The Manic In Man.

 On Sept. 16:  Ice covering the Arctic Ocean melted to the smallest areal extent ever recorded, falling to 1.3 million square miles at its lowest point: that's less than half of the normal area covered by ice at summer's end.

Meanwhile, the only method that's being discussed to get the global economy from being flat on its back is to increase the burning of energy resources, commonly referred to as fossil fuels, which results in pouring more CO2 into an atmosphere that's already so besotted with it that even the oceans are becoming so acidic from absorbing it that sea creatures are having trouble forming shells.

Our response? Drill, baby, drill! Where? Why, in the Arctic!, of course. The Chinese are already building ice-breaking container ships so as to use the Arctic Ocean as a transit route in order to cut down on their transport costs, which will have the effect, since smaller, broken up pieces of ice melt faster than a solid one, of increasing the rapidity of the rate at which the albedo effect disappears and the dark ocean waters can then absorb yet more of the suns rays, warming the Arctic even faster.

Because burning 90million bbl's of liquid fuels each and every day and, according to data from the just-released BP Statistical Review, doubling the amount of coal burned since the turn of the century (from all those coal-fired plants built in the Midwest to turn food into ethanol, burning fuel to create fuel that has 25% less energy-intensity than the fuel burned to create it), to 3,724 Mtoe (tonne of oil equivalent), is not enough to get the world's economy humming again.

It's possibly plenty enough, though, to cause the total disappearance of the summer ice in the Arctic within the next 5 years (by which time those Mtoe's will have doubled again, if global economic growth goes as planned).

Yet, the only thing that the Presidential candidate from one of the Sole Superpower's major political party's, the one that's been taken over by people who fervently believe that Global Climate Change is a hoax, can wonder about, is why airplane windows can't roll down?

And since he cannot even mention the possibility of anthropogenic climate change being the culprit, the intractable nature of this problem will not even be discussed during the upcoming presidential debates. Because the rabid attack dogs of the Right are so vociferous and full of venom, his opponent doesn't dare to touch that particular third rail, either, essentially allowing a small minority of evil-minded, selfish, deranged psychopaths to dictate what can even be discussed on the national stage.

The assumptions we've lived with and now use to plan the future are fatally flawed. Yet, like gay men in the 80's who protested Mayor Dianne Feinstein's closing down gay Bathhouses in San Francisco, we insist on continuing down, what should be now apparent,  the path of self-destruction, as though nothing has changed, acting as if our behavior has nothing to do with the calamity being visited upon us. But what was true then, is true now. Ronald Reagan never even said the word AIDS, and the result was that a disease that may have been able to have been  limited in scope, was allowed to enter the very blood supply, just so the delicate sensibilities of his "moral  majority" (it was neither) base wouldn't be offended.

And like the financial crisis itself, the plan is to let the worst happen, and then bemoan our lot as we incredulously ask, "Who could've seen this coming?", even though the internet and print media have been warning about the very event that no one, supposedly, saw on the horizon. Instead of being thankful that someone's in the masthead shouting LOOKOUT!, we pelt them with stones until, that not being effective enough, we cut down the mast, though it assures the eventuality of us aimlessly wandering so that, unable now to chart our own course, we have rendered ourselves helpless to prevent our own destruction.

And this is how the world's greatest Democracy functions? This is the form of government we're stalking the world to impose on every country, demanding that they "Live Free or Die"?

The arrogance and aggressiveness of this Empire is as great a threat to our own future as it is to the rest of the world's, but like Hitler's Germany, the rest  of the world is ill-prepared to stop it. They can only depend on us to do that. And we still can ... I think. We are not Nazi's yet (No ... but they are). But we would do well to remember that the Nazi's were never a majority in Germany. They were just so cruel and their methods so barbaric that it took the opposition's breath away, making it easier to push it to the ground and stomp it into submission.

America has become so besotted with militarism, testosterone-soaked worship of masculinity, and might-is-right philosophy, with a VP nominee spouting adolescent, Ayn Rand phrases that reveal a comic-book mentality, preaching hatred of the weak and urging destruction for the poor, that we are now too far gone to even notice that compassion has become something that is just too expensive.

Thus We are left, wandering "Between two Worlds": one dead, the other powerless to be born.