JC:

I apologize. Of course I meant JC but my mind is a steel - - - sieve.

I had a substitute teacher in English who taught us grammer using such test sentences to parse as: "We are living in a sick society." So I've been exposed to dire projections for some little while.

I'm not sure what you mean by "your people" and "you people" You've fallen into that habit in more than one thread.

Have you caught that recent film "The Death of Stalin"? I think it is English. It certainly has some top drawer English acting talent in it.

Again, my general point is about power with no limits. The Cold War gives us some great examples, as does WWII, WWI, Korea, and more recently, Crimea.

So does what's been going on in Venezuela, the Philippines, Poland, Hungary, the former Soviet Union, and unfortunately quite a few other countries. For instance, CHINA.

I'm going to go a bit more general and say that most democracy obsessed Westerners such as myself have a soft spot for capitalism in the sense that in the free market of ideas (products) we can vote (buy) for our preference with the franchise (dollars).

It doesn't take a genius to make the point that you can have a socialist society with democratic institutions, and you can have a capitalist society in a dictat.

And environmentalism is not guaranteed by any of those populations. Particularly during the Cold War we had two extremely different societies each with a many-times overload of nuclear weapons. A nuclear holocasust wouldn't have ended all life on earth, it would have changed the balance. But I don't think any of us would have regarded that as an improvement unless you're keen on those radioactive wolves mentioned above. And I have a soft spot for insects and reptiles, certain planaria and of course tardigrades.