It was not the best of times. In fact, it may have been the worst of times. The golden boom that lasted from the end of World War II until the first decade of the twenty first century had come to an end. Hungry, angry Americans were standing in bread lines in the Midwest.

Throughout the southwest people watched the price of their houses plummet.

An unprecedented number of so-called "middle class" could no longer even afford to keep the lights on.

In the swank golf course resort community of Helendale, California, the for-sale signs went up. While over at it's doppelganger dirt poor, hayseed country bumpkin cousin the for-sale signs came down.

When I moved out here to Newberry Springs I became the laughingstock of the country club set at the office. I was mocked daily. I lived with the underclass in a hayfield next to meth labs and copper wire thieves. Everyone else at the office lived at Silver Lakes in Helendale or up in the granite boulders of Victorville or Apple Valley. Some proudly commuted daily from as far away as Hesperia. As new people came in they looked around Barstow, drove to the outliers, then bought in Silver Lakes even as the housing market started to slide. They paid close to $400,000 for houses on the water, an artificial sump, with about enough space to slip your hand in between their house and their neighbors. They sat out on their patios, watched their neighbors and laughed at them. They went golfing on weekends. And now the party's over. Almost every other house has a for-sale sign in front of it. People who can't sell either pay a huge mortgage while watching their asset rot or they rent it out. And you know what that means. Some nasty, dirty, miserable, brutish, mean, short Scotch-Irish moves in and down go the property values yet more. Now all the talk of the country club set in the office break room is about the crime wave. Rich helpless white people are being beaten to death in their McMansions by the have-nots. All the marks are crowded close together like ducks on a pond.

Out here in Newberry Springs I watch the wind blow the dirt of the Mojave River up into the Cady Mountains. I'm dirt poor, my neighbor is dirt poor, why would a thief burn $4.56/gallon gas to drive all the way out here to try and beat blood out of us turnips? If he did my neighbor has a big dog and my other neighbor has a pack of 'em. How many chain link fences would a burglar have to climb to check to see if anyone's home? And if he was wrong, how many of us would fill his arse full of buckshot?

Yup, I sit our here and watch the corn struggle to survive. I watch the beans and peas shrivel up in the heat and the grasshoppers gobble broccoli. But pity those rich white folks over at Silver Lakes. They don't even have enough yard to grow a squash. It still doesn't cost much to commute into town. Just get a hybrid and drive slow. I've been getting about 55 mpg driving at 55 mph. A tank lasts over 500 miles and costs about $44 to fill up even at the most expensive place in town. If you come up behind me either pass or slow down. It could be worse. You could live in Helendale.

We were told early in our education that humans and other predators are at the "top of the food chain." Coyotes eat rabbits, hawks eat rodents, bigger fish eat smaller fish, but humans have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" Some people are foolish enough to believe this late into life. Other people are foolish enough to move to the Mojave Desert and quickly learn that ants own this place. People are somewhere quite a lot farther down the food chain.

For the second time since I moved to Newberry Springs in 2004 my water well went dead in the first half of June. The first time it was the pressure switch so I got suspicious, looked closely at it, and sure enough, a long column of tiny insect communists were trailing in and out of the pressure switch. I called up Eagle and ask them to come out. I said I thought I knew what the problem was and, oh by the way, can ants get into the pressure switch and short it out or something?

"You bet, we must replace twenty of those a day this time of year." He said they pack them full of ant powder, which by back calculation I figured must last about two years. Eagle roared out in a big diesel truck and swapped out the part with a new one that was probably manufactured from pieces made all over the world and assembled in some place far away. Without them I would dry up and blow away. Now every year I'm sure to be out there waging chemical warfare at the wellhead right around the start of Varmint Moon.

It seems that lately dominion hasn't been going so well. In fact it may become necessary in the near future to renegotiate our covenant. Research departments of Big Pharma can't seem to come up with new antibiotics as fast as microbial pathogens can evolve tolerance to the old ones. These days you can go to a hospital in an ambulance with a bug and leave in a hearse with a superbug. Even some of the certain victories of the past, such as tuberculosis, have turned into losses. Then we have the hydrological catastrophes, Iowa following Katrina. In this changing climate we might rebuild the levees to withstand a 500-year flood only to be hit in the next few years with a 1000-year flood.

The question is, how do we rebuild cities with multibillion dollar damage using fewer, increasingly worthless dollars, replace grain shortages and ruined farmland using higher priced diesel and fertilizer, all the while growing the economy and fighting endless wars for oil? When do we either renegotiate the covenant or sign the surrender papers? I don't think the ants will even notice when we're gone.

June is the month when all of the difficult animals in the Mojave Desert come out. Round tailed ground squirrels annihilate every green plant. The houseflies get so thick you can't breath. Ants swarm through the house. I left a Ziploc bag of banana chips on the counter thinking it would be OK because it was sealed. Argentine ants chewed holes through the plastic bag. I opened a tool cabinet and reached in, stopping just short of grabbing a black widow spider. Sometimes I think the Mojave is about the second most difficult place to live in the world, second only to the dry valleys of Antarctica.

The political varmints are out this season, too. John McNasty is campaigning as a war hero, as if war were something to be a hero about. We learn that he, with no surprise, is most concerned about being an elite. Rather than suffering with the grunts in a POW camp as he would like us to believe, he collaborated with the enemy for special favors.

No wonder supporters of the horrid, power mad, and now finished, Hillary are lining up behind McCain. And what's to hope for in Obama but more of the same. Didn't he just go to the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and claim that Jerusalem was the undivided capital of Israel? If Dubya doesn't get Iran bombed before January he can count on Barry to get 'er done and then some. I truly sympathize with the downtrodden who sincerely believe that Barack will bring real change to this country. But Obama's change will be a few cents on the dollar. The sad fact is that the whole sordid business is a hollow façade and the only ones we can count on are ourselves. Whether it's floods and tornados in Iowa or high fuel prices in California  it's up to us to make do. Corporation America is concerned only with power, continuity of power, and projection of power

I'd like to offer practical suggestions. I put up screens to keep the flies out, sprinkle chemicals to keep the ants at bay, fence the round tailed ground squirrels out of the garden (which takes a bad enough hit from the wind, heat, and grasshoppers), and I look cautiously for spiders. But what to do about the politicians? I wish ignoring them would make them go away. What kind of democracy is it when Edward Dowling wrote:

"The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."

 The third greatest obstacle to democracy is our survival, which is the focus of our future.

In the broad sweep of history we are at a turning point. The daily slope of the long slide is given by the price of gasoline. At the station I commute past it ticked up another eight cents today to $4.599/gallon. It's all over the "news" but not a single source, none of the broadcasters, dare say that we stand on the brink of the Olduvai Cliff. Richard Duncan's leading indicator is rolling blackouts on the grid. But there are more demons lurking in the shadows beside electrical power outage. For no other reason than my own dark amusement I troll the daily headlines for other leading indicators and post them here.

Climate models indicate extreme weather as a consequence of global warming.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Flooding rivers across Iowa forced more residents to evacuate, with at least 10,000 people in Cedar Rapids among them as the rising Cedar River burst its banks Thursday

Rescuers had to use boats to reach many stranded residents in the city of 120,000, and people could be seen dragging suitcases up closed highway exit ramps to escape the water. It wasn't clear just how high the river had risen because a flood gauge was swept away by the swirling water.

It's not so good for agriculture and staple crops such as corn. So much for ethanol as a gasoline substitute.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. corn futures soared more than 4 percent to a fresh record high for the fifth consecutive trading session on Wednesday as flooding expanded in the U.S. Midwest, harming the 2008 corn crop.

If the price of gas doesn't go down soon we may see commodities traders tarred and feathered, riding down South Wacker street on rails. This is because a lot of people, looking for someone to blame, think speculators are behind the high prices. Pundits tell us that oil is in a "bubble" and will soon "regress to the mean" and become "normal" once again so that we can go back to driving our Hummers to the mall. They seem to have about three main arguments for this scenario. One is that the high prices will make a lot of marginal oilfields economic and will spur new exploration, which will bring new supplies to market. Two is that high prices will make alternative energy sources economically attractive. And three is that high prices will reduce demand. To me only the third argument makes sense.

Oil discoveries peaked in the U.S. in the mid thirties. This was in the days before environmental regulations. Drillers turned every promising patch of geology into Swiss cheese looking for the black gold. Despite this effort oil production peaked in the U.S. in 1970. Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, came online in the eighties and, although production went up for a few years, decline prevailed and made Alaska oil production a small hump on a downward path. Worldwide, oil discoveries peaked in the sixties. Now worldwide oil production is peaking and four barrels are burned for every new barrel discovered. It doesn't matter what the price is.

We are not looking for energy in general, we are looking for transportation fuel. Stuff to squirt in our Beamers to make them fly down the road at 80mph. So what if we have wind turbines. So what if we have solar panels, low grade coal, and steam on a stick. You can't put these in your tank. Sure your Beamer will run on moonshine but some poor schmuck farmer needs a lot of diesel to grow that corn, there's only so much farmland, and ethanol is really just a long-winded transformation of petroleum. So let the price go up, it doesn't matter. Your car still runs on gasoline.

Which leaves demand destruction and therein lies the rub. Destruction of demand implies destruction of the economy as we know it. The first to go is the frivolous – the Sunday drives, cruising Main. Then come the electives, the family vacation in the big Road Slug. Local economies dependent upon tourism suffer accordingly. As each wealth class gives up an elective, a lower class gives up a necessity. Food that farmer is growing costs more because diesel costs more. So does trucking it to the store. The cost of energy pervades every consumer item until people are forced to triage. Do I give up medicine, food, or transportation this week? And where does that leave us? Do we have anything left for an alternative energy Manhattan Project ? Can we even repair the damage to irrigation and infrastructure left by the devastating weather? Or do we simply drop down to the next level and wait for depletion to up the ante?

People need hope. But what does this mean when "getting ahead" becomes "not falling behind?" How will the daily mall cruiser cope when hope means staying alive? I see people somehow going on like we always have. Whether through the medieval Black Death in Europe or the earthquake last month in China, people continue on. Hope comes from the very act of continuing on.

The wind came up again today after taking a break for a few hours. Tornados are tearing up the Midwest. The stock market went down four hundred points and oil took a record two day jump to a new record high. All of the major trends are holding course. Unemployment also took a big jump. Israel has become exasperated with trying to goad Uncle Sammy into bombing Iran and so is fixing to drop U.S. bombs on Iran itself from U.S. planes flown by U.S trained Israeli pilots.

Oh and last month there was a tipping point of sorts. More people now live in cities than the country for the first time. These new urban poor are the ones who are going to have the roughest time of it. Country people have always had it tough and we're used to it. But the new urban poor just moved to the city for a better life. They have hope. It's the dashing of hope that makes things worse.

A few of the old reliable hands appear to becoming even more confused. Bill Bonner thinks oil is in a bubble and will soon "regress to the mean," that is it will become "normal" again. Even though Bonner read Taleb's book and talked him up, somehow it just didn't register. He hasn't come to grips with the notion that normal doesn't apply to oil anymore. It's a new normal just about every day now and Black Swans are flying in flocks.

Trends to watch for. States don't have the money to pay all of these new unemployment claims. It's like the Boomers and entitlements. Too many people are hitting under funded, looted insurance all at once. Hunger is working it's way up the food chain. Just like peak oil is the ultimate constraint on greenhouse gas emissions, so is starvation a sure cure for the obesity epidemic. But the media would have you think there's not much more to worry about than Hillary and Barry making up.

It's a dry wind that's blowing.

As I get older I'm able to remember less and less. And I've never been able to see into the future. So if I don't know what's going to happen and can't remember what just did happen, how can I even expect to know what's going on right now? At about age 12 or so I abandoned faith for reason and that looked for awhile like it might work. But then I started to see holes in that. There's all of this uncertainty. I got into statistics because it seemed to deal with uncertainty. Except, as Taleb shows, it only works with known uncertainty, like the variability in how tall people are. It doesn't work with unknown uncertainty, such as how rich people are. Suppose, for example, you have a bar full of beer drinkers and how tall they are is proportional to how much money they earn. A six foot guy earns $60,000 and a five foot guy earns $50,000. There's even a varsity basketball player pounding down stout who makes darn near $70,000. Then in walks Bill Gates and he's almost one hundred miles tall. You see normal probability distributions don't work with money.

It's all chaos. Though all chaos theory can show you is why even fully determined systems are unpredictable yet self-organizing. Chaos theory can't tell you what's going to happen next or predict the probability that Bill Gates will walk into the local bar. Besides, you can't possibly know what's going on right now because all of the information you get is filtered and sterilized. Most of it is outright propaganda intended solely for the purpose of controlling your behavior. As we wallow in this sea of misinformation, disinformation, and pure propaganda, clutching for straws of truth, may I offer this one small solace. You will know reality because reality bites.

Where is this leading? Us Baby Boomers lost our grip on reality in the sixties and never regained it. It's just been one fantasy after another: acid trips, disco, SUVs, dot.coms, house prices that only go up, no money down negative amortization loans. None of these things were real anymore than CNN is news. You can feel reality nibble at $4.50 per gallon gas. For most of us out here a trip into Barstow for groceries now costs at least ten or twenty bucks, and the cost of those groceries is directly related to oil. Oil has found new support at over one hundred dollars a barrel. Boomers are getting old and very few have saved for retirement. How could anyone save with real estate tanking and the dollar rapidly going south. So what's next? Debt slavery? Bring back the Sixties!

How long? It's the most important question. You may have been absolutely sure in 1980 that gas prices would go way up. But you would have had to wait almost 30 years to see it happen. About that time Howard J. Ruff wrote a book along the lines of 'Repent ye the End is Nigh' only to become a laughing stock for the next three decades. Though I see now that he has recently released a new version in time for our current oil related crisis. People who followed his advice in the seventies, and it was very good advice, would have missed out on the dot.com boom and the housing bubble. They're in their sixties or seventies now, hunkered down in their fallout shelters, eating stale MREs. If you bought gold in 1980 you would also have had to wait 30 years to get your money back. Timing is everything. If you bought in 2004 you would have doubled the cash value. Although, realistically, I think gold stayed even and the dollar lost by half.

Now we have the Peak Oil crowd coming into their own. Some, like Colin Campbell, have been gloomy for a long time. Others are recent converts. As the curtain draws we see these actors caste in two roles. One has the wheels coming off the wagon this year while the other has us in Kunstler's "Long Emergency." By the way, after reading James Kunstler's latest screed, "We Were Lied To" posted June 2, 2008, I began to wonder if the poor fellow has finally lost his marbles. You see the timing of this peak oil question is of critical importance. If we have twenty years then be calm. If it's more or less now, which seems from the evidence to be the case, then batten down the hatches or run for the hills.

The shape of the downward spiral is also important. For example, drought and water shortages are a serious problem in the Mojave River basin. Groundwater levels in Newberry Springs are dropping at a rate of about one foot per year. So you do a calculation of your probably life span, drill your well a little deeper, and you'll be fine. Climate change is a similar issue. I can't get really worked up about a few degrees by 2050 because death by that time will have interfered with my concern. But if the wind doesn’t stop blowing here in a day or two everyone I have to deal with will get a little irritable.

We're coming up on one of our faux turnovers in the quadrennial election cycle and a lot of people, especially African Americans and perhaps recently disappointed feminists, are looking forward to a sea change. I wonder how hard the truth will hurt when they realize that Obama is more of a president for Israel than America. You don't have to look very hard or far to see whose interests our elites are serving.

Madness on the cusp of desperation. I'm sure that's what a few million folks are feeling these days. You may not be able to squeeze blood out of a turnip but you sure can squeeze the piss out of poor people. Something like about 4.5 million poor people are getting ready to starve in Ethiopia, as usual. Just as long as it stays there on the teevee where it belongs, right?. Still we feel the squeeze as we squeeze the pump handle and watch those dollar signs spin. I drove by a sign yesterday advertising diesel for the low price of $5.04 a gallon. Then I came across this object lesson from the Pentagon. Don't even think about protesting.

Colonel Kirk Hymes demonstrated the weapon by staging what CBS somewhat oddly called "a scenario soldiers might encounter in Iraq" -- a handful of military volunteers, dressed as civilian protesters, who carried signs saying "peace not war" and threw objects at a small group of soldiers. A series of raygun blasts from half a mile away disrupted their chants and finally sent them running.

We're "into the Buck Rogers scenario," he gloated. Buck Rogers was the good guy, remember, and the good guys are the ones who want war, not peace as George Orwell foretold.

Then Joe Bageant posts this great story about his neighbor that illustrates well the points I was trying to make in my own brief run in with the justice system on the flip side of the coin. Joe's buddy slipped up once and now he's an indentured servant forever in the prison profit industry. You might read this and then watch out for that banana peel in your own life.

You don't have to look hard for bad news these days and I think the Pollyannas must be getting new extra thick prescription rose colored glasses. I wish I could tell you that life will be easier for those of us who have been expecting this now for several years. But the truth is that we'll suffer almost the same as those whose heads have been up their arses the whole time. It's like the difference between one who knows and anticipates the time of their death and one who lives for the moment. They both suffer the same fate, only the one who lives for the moment is happier while it lasts.

In his sixth book, Powerdown, Richard Heinberg lays out four alternative future scenarios for how society will deal with the energy crisis. His premise is that oil production is set to plateau then decline and that energy use by humanity will decline along with it. Note that even if alternative energy sources could offset depletion of petroleum reservoirs, per capita energy consumption would still decline due to increasing population. Heinberg's four scenarios are:

Last One Standing – where nations fight over dwindling resources.

Powerdown – where everyone cooperates to reduce resource consumption.

Waiting for a Magic Elixir – where everyone lives in fantasyland until the shit hits the fan, and

Building Lifeboats – where the ships of state go down and a few manage to survive on rafts.

I think another unacknowledged assumption here is nationalism. Heinberg implicitly assumes that nation states will continue to act as discrete entities. But to me it looks like that notion has started to become archaic over the past couple of decades. Look at the former Soviet Union, for example. It broke up into how many 'stans? Then Yugoslavia taught us about Balkanization. Over the same period all of the former warring nations of Europe decided to become a Union. So I'm going to dredge up another archaic idea, a class society, propose a fifth alternative future scenario, and call it Superclass.

Throughout most of civilization people were born into classes or castes and stayed there all their lives. In Western Europe there were the nobility. In Egypt the Pharaohs. In India the Untouchables. Hardly anyone ever went from peasant to software mogul. Nowadays, even though we cling to a Horatio Alger myth in America and idolize common folks – mostly athletes, actors, and musicians – who have made it big, nearly everyone is stuck pretty close to their status at birth. Apples don't fall far from the tree. We also see that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The minimum wage hasn't gone anywhere in decades while, at the same time, corporate executive salaries are on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In the U.S. less than 1% of the population controls over a third of the wealth. There are about 1000 billionaires in the world. Keep in mind that a billionaire is one thousand times richer than a millionaire. And perhaps 10,000 people control most of the resources on the planet. Members of this Superclass have much more in common with each other than they do with people in their own nation, country, and hometown.

Now if you look at dwindling resources on a per capita basis, there's plenty to go around for 10,000 people if the rest of us 6.7 billion all live in mud huts on a bowl of rice and cup of water a day. No doubt the Superclass can fly their Gulfstreams around the world to poker parties with each other until the sun burns out. Peak oil would mean nothing. All they have to do is concentrate the wealth and keep the masses pacified. And it doesn't have to be a conspiracy, merely a natural evolution. So what kind of evidence might you look for to support or refute this hypothesis? You would look for evidence of concentration of wealth and pacification of the masses. How about lots of people on mood drugs like Prozac? More money to big pharma and lots of happy zombies. How about millions of people addicted to teevee and all the broadcasters owned by a few big corporations? African Americans have been one class with a rebellious streak, perhaps because of their treatment, and hard to pacify. How about a lot of them locked up in prisons operated by big corporations? Debt servitude. How about lots of people in over their heads on mortgages and credit card debt they can't pay off and a bankruptcy law written by the bankers? Wars. Notice how most of the soldiers are people seeking economic improvement and big corporations get the multibillion dollar no-bid contracts? Dieoff. Starve a lot of the very poor and make health care too expensive for the rest. Here it seems almost as if Mother Nature is in cahoots with the Superclass. Every time there is a tidal wave, typhoon, or earthquake it takes another 100,000. Look around and I think you'll find more evidence.

In this scenario peak oil is not an issue for the Superclass. Maybe that explains why you don't hear much about it in the media.

Throughout the years I've been reminded repeatedly that democracy is the best form of government and capitalism is the only sure way to run an economy. On both of these points I have only two thoughts: one, I don't know, and two, I'd like to find out. Consider the argument for democracy here in the world's greatest. As I understand it, democracy is rule by the people. Or in a more modern sense, the people vote to elect representatives to carry their water at a parliamentary governing body. One person, one vote. But what have we this year? I hear on the news that Florida and Michigan are being "punished." You can't punish a state, you can only punish the people living in that state. So sorry people in Florida and Michigan. You don't get to choose between the woman whose spouse is a former president and the man of partial African American descent. You've been ruled out of the "democracy" by a small committee of powerful people somewhere. And what are these beasts called Super Delegates? It would appear as though the votes of some of the Superclass are worth more than hundreds of thousands of the votes of ordinary people. Unless you live in Florida or Michigan. Then your votes aren't worth anything at all. As Sheldon Wolin puts it, we live in a managed democracy where the façade of democracy is useful as it provides an illusion of legitimacy to those who hold power over us. Most of the common people have figured this out and don't even bother. But, wouldn't you know it, their apathy is also useful to those who hold power. It makes the system easier to manage.

For all practical intents and purposes it appears that our economy is more centrally managed than the Soviet Union's ever was. Adam Smith had this idea that individual buyers and sellers, each offering what they had and bidding for what they needed, was an invisible guiding hand that directed goods and services from producers to consumers in the most efficient possible manner at the right price. But you and I don't sell watermelons or buy shoes from the cobbler. We sell our time and buy our necessities from a few major, globalized corporations whose board members all sit on each other's boards. They give us options as a multiple choice. Coke or Pepsi? Would you like fries with that? They tell us what we should want on teevee, where they own all of the wavelengths. They set the prices and we can either pay or not.

Move up the scale and what's the most important price of all? It's the price of money. Is that set in the marketplace between buyers and sellers? No. It's set in a secret meeting of a small committee of bankers called the Federal Reserve. All of the other big players: Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan, etcetera wait outside the door for the whisper then the markets react. How is this all that different from the centrally planned Soviet system, which we were told caused that Union to disband?

Democracy and Capitalism are probably good ideas. I really would like to find out. But it's unlikely that we ever will. Scarcity will come because of peak oil. Hunger and want will stalk the poor. Foundations of McMansions will settle and crack on poor soil. And when it's time for the mask of Managed Democracy to drop and reveal its true face of Inverted Totalitarianism, the people won't resist. No, they will rush forward to embrace the new police state. If there is not an official place to rat out one's neighbor, who might be engaged in the subversive practice of growing watermelons to buy shoes, the people will demand that one be established.

Dmitry Orlov makes a recommendation in his new book, Reinventing Collapse, that is sure to win over the law and order crowd. Orlov claims we're going to have to release convicts from prison sooner or later so we ought to do it sooner and gradually rather than later and all in a big whoosh. His point is very practical. Once our complex society can no longer support a large percentage of our population on free room and board they're going to be cut loose. And when that happens there'll be a spree like we've never seen before.

How did America, land of the free and home of the brave, come to have the largest percentage of its population incarcerated of any nation in the world? Larger even than South Africa and Communist China. One factor is that politicians can always run a 'crack down on crime' campaign and get elected. Law abiding folks, who are most of the voters, want their neighborhoods to be safe and sane. Next the newly elected Congress Critters pass laws making common activities illegal. People get sent to jail for having a few seeds of a plant that grows wild along roadsides in the Midwest and happens to make you hungry when you smoke it. One strike you're in and three strikes you're really in, forever. Draconian sentencing laws can send someone to prison for life for borrowing a bicycle if they happened to have screwed up a few times in the past. Finally, we turned the prisons over to corporations to run in a businesslike manner. And what do businesses need most? More customers.

Yesterday I answered the call to perform my sacred civic duty to serve on a jury of an accused person's peers. As far as the legal system is concerned, I'm the flip side of the same coin. Just like the accused, I get told when and where to appear and if I don't show up on time then all of a sudden I'm on the other side of the coin. Most of the people who are summoned want nothing more than to be excused. You can see them visibly squirm as they lie to the judge. Anything to get out and get away, back to their mundane existences. The pool of potential jurors was so small in the courtroom, and so many people had excuses, that there weren't twelve people sufficient to start the trial. You could see the judge's frustration. Then I was the last one up and started an argument about a finer point of principle. Contrary the judge's instructions, I will decide the case on the basis of both the facts and the law.

"The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the facts in controversy."

 John Jay, First Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court, 1789.

"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts."

 Samuel Chase, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1796.

"The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact."

 Oliver Wendell Holmes U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1902.

"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided."

 Harlan F. Stone, Twelfth Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court 1941.

It looked like the judge wanted to come over the bench and strangle me. First I got a long lecture and then, when I persisted, another long lecture. I was dismissed and a jury wasn't seated.

More and more people live in prison, in a kind of graduate school for learning the criminal trade. When they get out they know more about their careers than when they went in. Having half of the criminal population in prison at any one time means the resource (i.e. the victims) can support twice the overall size of the criminal population. More people with a criminal record means fewer people qualified to serve on juries (and keep in mind the minimum mandatory ratio is 12 to 1). So when do we reach the tipping point or are we already there? Those same people who sit on juries also pay taxes for the upkeep of the convicted. If prison corporations aren't making a profit they can tell the politicians, "pay us more or we'll start opening cell doors." It looks to me like privately run prisons can both incarcerate the convicts and hold the people and politicians hostage. And if we don't pay up they will cut 'em loose and go into business posting armed guards around the mansions of the rich.

The ancient Greeks were so perceptive of the human condition that everyone since, from Shakespeare to the Ottoman Turks, has studied their writings. In the Aeneid as told by Virgil, Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, spurns the love of Apollo, god of light and reason. Out of spite he curses her to foretell the future but be believed by no one. Poor Cassandra foresaw the coming of the Greeks and the fall of Troy. She saw through the ploy of the Trojan Horse while everyone around her thought she was mad.

In every culture from ancient history on there are tales of those who said aloud that shit was going to happen only to find themselves mocked and ostracized or worse. Jeremiah told the Israelites they were about to be carried off to Babylon and the governor's son had him arrested. The story of Henny Penny comes down to us from the Jataka Tales of Buddhist Indian folklore circa sixth century BCE. Crying "wolf" too many times characterizes our disdain for the bearer, or worse prophesier, of bad news because we all know the boy was just doing it to entertain himself. For balance I'm looking around to find tales of someone seeing a dark future, everyone gathering around to do their best, work together, and forestall the worst of it. I'm still looking.

So why would anyone stick their neck out and say out loud in a public way that our multitudes swarming over the planet, our rapacious consumption of resources, our dominion over fish and fowl to the point of extinction, all the markers of our very success as a species, are the harbingers of our own doom? Some of these modern day Cassandras are tenured professors and more or less untouchable. But I know from observation that they take serious hits to their career by speaking thusly. I suppose one could make an evolutionary argument – groups that listened to the voices of doom avoided catastrophe and went on to propagate their genes yada yada. But if that were really the case then those myths would dominate our collective memories and not Chicken Little. Personally, I think the Greeks were right. We, the Cassandras, have been cursed by the god of reason.

In the months after September 11, 2001, I started to share with a few colleagues my thoughts on energy flows through our complex society and what that foretold for our likely future scenarios. "Look at this," I said as we bombed down I-40 in two tons of hurtling Chevy Tahoe. "Do you think that this can go on forever and what happens if it can't?" Needless to say, I quickly developed a reputation as a Conspiracy Theorist. That's our culture's way of marginalizing anyone who doesn't parrot the daily wisdom emanating from the teevee. Now a funny thing. Those very same people come sneaking back into my office wanting to borrow books on peak oil. They want to know how high the price of oil has to go before all of those alternative sources they've been promised suddenly come on line. They even listen to the subversive concept of "energy return on energy invested." You know what this means, don't you? This means it's too late to do anything about it. And when you hear about it on teevee, that means the horse got out of the barn.