A timely reminder about the influence of Jared Diamond.

Guns, Germs and Steel may be Jared Diamond's signature achievement, but for unknown reasons, Collapse affected me more deeply. Both are due for rereading. So much to learn, so little time.

INFLUENCES: JARED DIAMOND, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

... A couple of years before the housing crisis, I came across his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which taught me again how to think systematically about places, people and societies. The mental image of the Norse Greenlanders, too stuck in the hierarchy of their culture to consider changes necessary to their survival, refusing to eat seal or fish and perishing from starvation while the Inuit, living in parallel, demonstrated a viable way to survive, was powerful. To think of the Eastern Islanders tearing, down every tree on their island (growth at all costs) until they could not even build a boat to leave when the society -- tens of thousands -- descended into starvation and cannibalism cutting their numbers to a few hundred, is chilling. These case studies are powerful because we're the same people with the same motivations and likely to make the same rationalizations until it is too late.

Will we see a "white-hot sphere" of GOP "Collapse", or a timely reinvention?

As usual, The Onion nails it.

After Obama Victory, Shrieking White-Hot Sphere Of Pure Rage Early GOP Front-Runner For 2016

But I'm in a mellow, post-coital ecstatic, counter-intuitive mood today -- in fact, I'm craving a cigarette, and I don't even smoke -- so read it here first:

I predict that in 2016, the GOP will have a Latino and a woman on the presidential ticket.

The party will have little choice; it's either reinvention, or extinction. I'd prefer the latter, but suspect that while Republicans are crazed and enraged, they'll not opt for self-immolation.

Or will they? Perhaps it is time to re-read a very good book:

Man vs nature: Jonathon Porritt appreciates Jared Diamond's timely reminder of our destructive instincts, Collapse (Guardian)

 ... How could this particular collapse have happened? Or, as one of his own students put it, what do you suppose the islander who cut down the last tree on Easter Island said to himself as he was doing it?