A pretty good indication of what we are in store for?

The world seems to be becoming one big snarl of mouse traps with ping pong balls on them. You know, sort of like they used to use in explaining chain reactions for fission events. The ping pong balls, of course, representing the neutrons, that start creating even more triggering neutrons, that made the original big stick bang.

This is so because so much instability has been pumped into both our social systems, and the geophysical systems, that sustain us, that we don't need a highly enriched sort of mouse trap to have as a triggerable source at all. All we needed were centuries of neglect, and the selfishness that fosters, and sustains, the inability to account for the full effect of the, apparently unanswerable, question: How much is enough?

Especially if you have amassed the personal power to start making your own definitions, and the rest of the world be damned if they get in your way.

And the thing is... The more time passes, the smaller the "last straw," or even less significant than that famous "butterfly's wing beat" somewhere, that it will take to set it all off. Leaving you with not only a surfeit of ignition sources, in our ever more dangerously competitive world (precisely because of Capitalism), but also quite likely providing logarithmic like increases in difficulty, every hour, every day, at the very least, in ever hoping to stop it, once it does start. And that precisely because something that was never supposed to be electrified has now been thoroughly infused with greed fueled, free radicals of "disruptive" intent, to mutate a system that did make, at least some sense, for a while there, a long time ago.

Images for a perfect storm of perfect storms

Images for cascade events in highly integrated, complex systems

See Also:

An island imperiled

The unnoticed collapse of big freshwater animals

Methane emissions advance climate change and Trump’s regulatory rollback matters

Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier may be thinning faster than previously thought

Draining Arizona -- Residents say corporate mega-farms are drying up their wells

The destabilizing effects of the Saudi-Iran conflict

And yet the "Streaming Wars" seem to be the conflict we're most concerned about now; with our interest and money. All the more shameful when we say we can't afford to help our desperate, any more than the other "Americans" (because they are of the Americas just as much as we are) at our borders, in desperate need, also asking for help. Because our disruptions are making them desperate, just as theirs are us, because everything is connected, whether we realize it or not, or like it or not. -- J.V.