Some good links to other people’s stuff here too

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death. The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle. A tree that is unbending is easily broken.

The hard and strong will fall. The soft and weak will overcome.”

Lao Tzu

The Art of War can be found online pretty easily.

Bush has done an excellent job of saving civilization. I mean that earnestly. With peak oil probably about now, Bush’s invasion of Iraq has given the oil market several years it might not have otherwise had in it. The price of oil has fluctuated and we’re seeing supply problems, but investors can’t disentangle if it’s a systemic problem like peak oil, or the “risk premium” because of the chaos in Iraq. It muddies the waters, and keeps investors from seeing that oil has systemically become a losing deal. This keeps them investing a little bit longer, as many of them presume this is a short-term problem to ride out. By the same token, Bush’s incompetence in Iraq translated into personal blame when Katrina hit New Orleans. Rather than see the writing on the wall with the kind of shortfalls Homer-Dixon writes about in The Ingenuity Gap, or see the difference between Galveston, 1900 and New Orleans, 2005 in terms of Tainter’s diminishing marginal returns curve on complexity (Collapse of Complex Societies) and see that complexity has become a losing deal, Bush’s incompetence muddied the waters. Was the response to Katrina because the system has become too complex and our ability to solve problems is diminished accordingly, or is it simply that Bush is incompetent? We’ve gravitated towards the latter, and that keeps us investing in complexity a little bit longer–sticking it out till 2008, when we can put in a competent president and all will be well.

But of course, it won’t be. The problems are systemic, and these tactics merely buy more time. They make collapse longer in coming, and in so doing, make it that much worse when it does come. The plan is likely to buy time for a new deus ex machina to save us (and of course, if one does, that too merely delays collapse–perhaps for a century or more, but still only a delay, and when that delay expires, human extinction will be fairly certain because of it).

As I discuss in the article linked above, even under the most effective terrorist scenario, the infrastructural impact can never outweigh the impact it has on us, the “investors” in complexity. It muddies the waters. It makes complexity seem like a good deal with a momentary setback. Collapse is always that tipping point where we realize that complexity has become a losing deal. When the waters are muddied like this–whether by Bush invading Iraq, or an eco-terrorist blowing up a dam, we push that tipping point farther into the future, and give civilization a little more time–a little more time to wipe out 200 species every day, a little more time to release enough CO2 to melt the glaciers and destroy whole ecosystems, a little more time to appropriate a little more of the planet for ourselves (we already take up 40% of it), a little more time for our population to rise exponentially, a little more time for our economy to grow. When that time runs out, as it eventually has to, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” So eco-terrorism is a self-defeating strategy. It makes civilization last longer, and that means it allows for greater devastation now, which will line up an even more horrific collapse to come.