What would Lincoln think of all this?

[David Lockmiller]

(11-06-2020 11:44 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  President Lincoln was not aware of the possibility of thermonuclear war.

Confederate ironclads were the severest military threat of his day and the direst associated threat was solved by international diplomacy on the part of Seward and President Lincoln.


I read this morning an informative article in the New York Times Magazine on this subject: "How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?"

The New York Times Magazine author: Joseph Tainter walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988. “Civilizations are fragile, impermanent things,” Tainter writes.

Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.

[According to the article,] "U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980."

That is over a seven-fold increase, not adjusted for inflation (7 times $140 million is $980 million). This is year after year of exponential increases in the military budget.

But We the People of the United States cannot afford basic universal health care as the citizens of Europe are able to experience.

Other quotes from the article:

"Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars. In September, nearly 23 million Americans reported going without enough to eat, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Whatever problems those 686 billionaires may have, they are not the same as those of the 23 million who are hungry."

"Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered."

Finally, there is this observation made by the author of the New York Times Magazine article: "Recently, Tainter tells me, he has seen 'a definite uptick' in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit."