Reply #2: Makes a great tombstone epithet

[PATRICK]

I am rereading War and Peace and not finding things as I expected. Instead it is like reading a new book entirely. Such is the experience of age. One jolting blurb by Tolstoy is about the surrender of Moscow.
Nothing that came before or after, all the plans, all the actions all the judgments by people intimately involved and educated and active- meant absolutely nothing. Sure it is part of Tolstoy's monumentally repeated theory of history, but why did I get the feeling it applied to us, me? Not Napoleon, not his enemies, not any event or single person meant more than the sum of the parts and the predictable, inevitable results, many of them uncritical instincts and seeming accidents. then history is supposed to analyze it was this person or that policy that moved history uniquely.

At least we are privileged to reflect upon this together in the open as group with SOME influence on the incredibly absurd jaded dramas unfolding naively around us. At least we share as a group that we don't matter because the knowledge of the truth has not been allowed to matter- which foredooms all the efforts by the dysfunctional entrepreneurs of imperial destiny in a world way too advanced down another path entirely.

The urge to act spreads throughout the large body of humanity in crisis. It begins to move and undercuts all the presumptions on the manipulators of civilization as chessboard. The suffering will be immense but perhaps the issue is already decided against them. The only difference today is that the very scale of crisis(ecological, WMD's, disease, etc) just might take all or most human with it down the toilet.

But despite all its pride, intentions, self justifications and apparent success- the water is swirling the out of place Nazis down even now as we post.

Alito? Permanent martial law? Huge fatalities? Possible, but it won't matter. There is nothing the other side can do except advance and utter defeat is steadily approaching.