Oh Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, you have saved us all from the bourgeois excesses of ancien-regime effete post-modernism and perverted capitalist abstract-expressionism fit only for the entry foyers of corporate stooge front organizations and corrupt businesses grown fat like ticks from sucking the people’s blood and vital theoretical praxis! Down with the navel-gazing parvenu honi soit qui mal y pense mademoiselle from Armentieres, parlez vous! If understanding art can increase tractor production, then we will all understand art until we lie dying in the trenches, happy of our privilege to sacrifice for Dear Leader!

Unfortunately, it is with bitter regret and sorrow that one of us must inform Dear Leader that the mission to kidnap Bob Ross has failed, due to the fact that his instructional videos are rather old and he is dead. But we believe Thomas Kinkade will be an acceptable substitute!

I read the Olduvai Theory links. I’ve had the same thought for some years, although I didn’t know there was a name for it. My pet name for it was the ‘low-hanging fruit’ problem; i.e. we use resources that are easy to get, and as we use those up, it gets harder to extract resources. It takes millions of years to make coal, gasoline, etc. and we’ve extracted the ‘low-hanging fruit’ in a very short time. If civilization collapses, only some of the technologies would be usable, even assuming the know-how is preserved, because so little of the easily reached resources remain. But I had thought that, perhaps, after a longish time (thousands or millions of years) the resources would refresh themselves. Vain hope, it seems; we’re well into the Sun’s lifetime. Even another hundred million years from now, things get severely overheated hereabouts.