WORLD NEWS TRUST: Where We're At (James Kunstler)

[Tace]

(World News Trust) -- Every time I saw a car towing a motorboat this holiday weekend, I wondered what was going through the head of the towee. Did they have a sense that darkness was falling on their careers in motor sports? Did they have an inkling that an oil-and-gas crisis is upon us and just not give a shit? Or were they just going through the motions, following some implacable rote programming induced by, say, forty-odd years of TV addiction and a diet based on corn-syrup byproducts?

The holiday to me was a creepy hiatus from an ever more desperate reality overtaking the nation like a miasma. Meanwhile, the mainstream media's ongoing narrative has gotten stuck in the moronic groove of "drill drill drill." The belief of people like Larry Kudlow of CNBC and uber-mega-idiot John Stossel of ABC-News is that we could go back to $1.50 gasoline if only congress would open the offshore exploration areas and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This view is just plain erroneous. Nothing we get out of these regions will come close to offsetting the ongoing depletion of worldwide oil resources, or even arresting our own losses.

Larry King had a particularly dreary debate Sunday night between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and a grab bag of "drill drill drill" advocates. Kennedy took the position that the US could achieve a sort of energy independence by massive deployments of wind and solar equipment. It's an understandable wish, I suppose, but not something I view as consistent with reality. The unfortunate part of the Larry King presentation is that it gives the public an idea that these two fantasies are the only possible responses to our predicament. No one is interested in changing our current behavior.

In the background of these energy conundrums is the sickening spectacle of the nation's fatal insolvency, which remains partially disguised by the machinations of the Federal Reserve, using the various new loan "windows" to maintain the illusion that the major banks have not swindled themselves out of existence -- and in doing so, caused at least $3 trillion (so far) in capital to vanish in a black hole. This three-card-monte game has gone on for a whole year now, and the consequences are hitting home. No more money can be lent into existence now.

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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/wnt-reports/commentary/where-we-re-at-james-kunstler.html

[TheWraith]

1. It's Y2K!!!111

Really, why does anyone take Kunstler's completely fact-free ranting seriously anymore?

[arendt]

2. Because, however wrong he may be on the details, he is right about the big picture...

oil is peaking. Population and industrialization want to grow. Something has to give. And it has to be something BIG.

I think of him as a broken clock, but that this is one of the times when it is telling the correct time.

As long as no one addresses the issue, he is the only game in town.

The U.S. suburbia + autos model is down the crapper at $4/gal gas. And we have no plan B.


arendt

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. And the one measure that is never mentioned in the MSM is

making it possible for the average American to live without a car.

[arendt]

4. Right. mass transit is socialism (:sarcasm:)

And, alternate energy is a fairy tale - drill more oil; build more nuke plants.

Never, ever re-think suburban sprawl or subsidies for roads vs mass transit.

arendt

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. The advertisers wouldn't like it

and we can't have that. :sarcasm: