All hands on deck!

Hello to friends of denverthen. 'Estimologist' here. My brother has roped me in to his one-man effort to get the Communitarian revolutionaries out of Downing Street, with a piece of flattery that probably isn't true. But if it turns out I'm an idiot, I hope I'm a useful one!

The purpose of this blog, as I understand it, is to try to help our struggling country to its feet again, in whatever small way we can, so I'll try to keep it along those lines.

I'm not sure if this recessionary situation we're in is in fact the Big One that people have been rumbling about since the 18th century, starting I suppose with Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, and in our own era 'The Limits to Growth' (Club of Rome, 1972) and latterly many scholarly (and many more totally useless) articles on the internet about subjects such as Peak Oil. (I've not read these wiki articles thoroughly, they are offered as a starting point for the more interested digger, but one I find interestingly general and enlightening is a paper called 'How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse' by a chap called J M Greer.)

If it is (the Big One), and it's not entirely Gordon Brown's fault, there is probably absolutely nothing that any number of well-intentioned rants by me is going to be able to do about it, but hey, it might not be, and even if it is, maybe it won't be so bad as all the Twenty-twelvers are saying. (Notable physicist and author Fred Hoyle thought that living in a dark age, post-catastrophe, would not be too bad, and that it might even be an age of liberty and innovation).

That said, the most effective approach I can think of to the Big One scenario is to try to make as many people as possible believe that this is it, on the basis that they will adapt their behaviour to avoid it, and maybe make it a bit less of a bother if it does happen.

One thing Mr Cameron is right about, either way, though: We can't go on like this.

~Estimologist.