JAMES KUNSTLER: Call off the Dawgs?

[Tace]

by James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation

I rather admired George W. Bush's hard-boiled remarks Saturday about the secret snooping carried out by the National Security Agency. As if we could afford to do otherwise. I just wish he'd quit calling it the War on Terror, which is so imprecise.

The part I liked was his willingness to squarely confront the public's childish lack of seriousness. We want to be safe, but we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. We want to feel secure within our borders, but we don't want to go beyond vigilance-lite. This is consistent with our new national religion, which is based on the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing.

The public has a short memory. I maintain that, despite a lot of sentimental posturing, for most Americans the World Trade Center knockdown was just another television show, and few people can even remember the plot of an ABC Movie-of-the-Week from a few months ago, so why should they remember the details of 9/11/01? -- namely that a posse of Islamic maniacs flew airplanes into New York's biggest skyscrapers and collapsed them (as well as ramming the Pentagon and almost hitting another target except that the hijacked fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania). And maybe we ought to keep tabs on other potential maniacs of that persuasion.

By the way, I get indignant letters every day from people who are convinced that Dick Cheney headed a plot behind the 9/11 attacks. I regard these conspiracy theories as crazy, but the craziness itself seems to be increasing in breadth and amplitude across the land -- as a subconscious expression of our collective anxiety over a way of life with poor prospects.

more

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=1908

[roguevalley]

1. WTC a show? What an asshole. It must be a terrible burden single-

handedly carrying the conscience for a nation every day.

[Blue_In_AK]

2. Who IS this guy?

Is this satire? I don't think anybody's forgotten about the World Trade Center -- how could we when ** keeps going "9/11, 9/11, 9/11" ad nauseam?

[Tace]

4. Kunstler Wrote The Book "The Long Emergency"

It's a popular Peak Oil book.

[Tace]

3. Kunstler -- While A Peak Oil Doomsayer -- Differs With Ruppert Re 9/11

Kunstler has a different take on 9/11 than Michael Ruppert of FromTheWilderness.com, who believes Cheney is behind 9/11. They're both big Peak Oil doomsayers.

I met them both, and a lot of other Peak Oil luminaries, at the October Petrocollapse Conference in New York City.

From what I've been able to gather, I believe it's Cheney who's crazy -- like some kind of Dr. Strangelove. This is based on an assessment by John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who worked with Cheney in Wyoming. Here's an excerpt from an interview he gave this summer (BTW, Barlow wrote the lyrics for the Grateful Dead song "Throwing Stones"):

Aaron Davis: What is the story behind “Throwing Stones”? You wrote that in Cora as well, right?

John Perry Barlow: Yeah. That’s the only explicitly political song we ever wrote. And the story behind that was that I was having a serious argument with Dick Cheney at that point, who I’d help get elected and been a pretty good congressman for the stuff that I was interested in, which was environmental stuff. We’d helped stop acid rain in the Wind River Mountains and passed the Wyoming Wilderness Act together and worked out a lot of the necessary compromises. He fished on my ranch and…we were co-conspirators.

But then he got into this obsession with the Russians and this conviction that we had a clash of cultures that had to be resolved by whatever means, and so he helped base the MX Missile in Wyoming. The original idea of the MX Missile was that it was a second-strike, retaliatory weapon that could not be taken out by a first strike because it would be running around on a vast railroad system kind of like a gigantic shell game, so the Russians wouldn’t know where the MX’s were. And the MX itself is an extremely destructive instrument. It has ten warheads, each one of which delivers 550 kilotons of explosive energy. And just for purposes of comparison, the bomb that completely leveled Hiroshima and took out half a million people in a second had only seventeen kilotons to give you some idea. So you can to the math. That’s just one missile. And the plan was to base 100 of them. And Dick was instrumental in seeing to it that they were not based in the original basing formula, which made them explicitly second strike, but that they were basically first strike weapons. They were completely naked and stationary and they were all put on launch on warning. And had all of those missiles gone, because some cloud of geese flew over a radar in Greenland, that would’ve been the end of all like on the planet. And I got so freaked out that somebody was so determined to win a political battle that he was literally willing to endanger all the life on planet Earth, that I felt like I had to say something…so I wrote that song. And like I say, I owe Dick a lot for that song.

http://www.planetjh.com/davis/davis_2005_07_27.html

Anyway, I run Kunstler's weekly column on the World News Trust site and post it here on DU for your information. Cheers.

[Strelnikov_]

5. "If people Want To Keep Living In McMansions 50 Miles From Work . .

. . and shopping, they're going to have to get comfortable with killing and terrorizing Arabs -- cuz they're sitting on our oil."

To paraphrase Kunstler's overall theme of the last few blog postings: If we want to maintain our easy motoring lifestyle, we are going to have to get hard, since we are going to have to steal their oil, and they will be coming at us because of it. Both the left and right are culpable in not honestly discussing this fact.

In general, I agree. All the drilling in ANWR and the coastal plain will not maintain the energy level required for the Merican Way O' Life^TM. To maintain, we will have to lock out other countries from the world's dwindling energy resources, most of which are in the Persian Gulf region. Ever wonder how much natural gas will be left for others when we are importing LNG through 120 LNG terminals like they are planning?

So, we have two choices. Attempt to maintain the status quo by stealing what we need. Or begin the difficult transformation of our Way O' Life^TM to a sustainable system.

[Tace]

6. That's The Hard Choice We Must Make

Unfortunately, most Americans can't see past the ends of their noses... or wallets.

[Strelnikov_]

7. Kunstler Is Getting A Lot Of Heat On His Blog For His Recent Postings

People are wondering if he has gone neo-con.

My reading is that he is just spelling out the brutal measures we will have to adopt if we want to (try to) continue in our current path.