'Kunstler.com' J.H. Kunstler [WEB]

Guest

Reading Kunstler probably works best if you do it chronologically-

1/ Geography of Nowhere
2/ Home From Nowhere
3/ The Long Emergency

They do follow a natural progression.

It was mentioned that suburbia was hated back in the 50's....
wow.
That hatred sure produced positive results, didn't it?
(implying that there may be such a thing as "positive" hatred?)
as opposed to stupid bias.

Any good stand up comedian (in the tradition of a Lenny Bruce, a George Carlin)...or a Lily Tomlin, for that matter-
could get up on a stage somewhere and do a Kunstler...........
and the crowd would find it brilliant.

America needs a good kick in the pants.

References to sunbelt cities...these cities have experienced an enormous amount of their growth post-WW2.
A city like Houston couldn't possibly have a mass transit system like a Chicago or NYC. Is anyone really surprised?
That was some traffic jam.

So an author is the bearer of bad news. Get over it.
Many will write (and have written) about possible solutions....
We have hardly scratched the surface.

Pick up a copy of a book called "The Energy Balloon" co-authored by
Stewart Udall, Charles Conconi, and David Osterhout.
It's a remarkable book. Reads as if it were published yesterday.

It was published in 1974.

Yes, it was published in the wake of the first oil crisis.
We didn't listen then, and we certainly didn't learn.

Angry? Cranky? Why shouldn't we be pissed off? We've been duped.
Joe Six-Pack didn't read that book back in 1974, but a lot of high-priced well-educated Reps could have.

Ask yourself...why was an SUV even invented?
It made sense perhaps when a Texas oil glut provided 10-cent gallons.
Since 1973 it would never make sense again.

Most of the worst wastefulness of energy use in America has grown up over the past three decades.

The soccer mom truly is the handmaiden of the corporate plan.
To hell with her apple pie.
Meanwhile nobody seems to care much about the lost independent mobility of America's kids (and why that is.)

Kunstler was one of the first authors to actually address that problem.
(many don't even see it as one.)

Solutions?
His latest book is full of them.
Contraction, contraction, contraction.
Walkable communities.
Trains.
Localization of everything possible.
Emphasis on agriculture again, (as opposed to agribusiness.)

And while I'm at it....good old Texan Jim Hightower wrote much of what we needed to know about agribusiness in a book published back in 1975.
We didn't listen then, either.

Cranky?
We wasted a fortune we may never have again, on something that isn't going to work in the future, because it is not sustainable.

It isn't as if every American is now standing up shaking their fist and demanding that we stop this foolishness.
Many are still too busy demanding 5% annual growth.
Doesn't matter how we grow, just as long as we do.
"Keep the country strong! Go shopping!"
Buy buy buy all the cheap effluent of cheap oil.

We could have jumped off that bandwagon 30 years ago, and stayed off.

I dunno - authors aren't there to worship as celebrities anyhow.
They do what they do, and possibly help you focus, hone in on a murky idea or two that maybe wouldn't have taken shape otherwise.

In closing-
I always thought there was something weird and anti-social in my makeup because I spent my whole adult life, from the age of 18 on....hating suburbia, with all its accoutrements...
Not the people who live there (many friends and family live there)
but I never really understood why I felt the way I did...just a feeling in my bones.
Beginning with Geography of Nowhere, it all started to make sense.
I have spent my entire adult life downtown urban. (in cities that actually have downtowns, not hollowed out donut holes.)
It still makes sense...is making more and more sense every day.

threadbear · Expert Joined: Jan 22, 2005 Posts: 7265

Why thank you, Mr. Kunstler! Laughing

EnviroEngr

I diverge from Jim's point of view on occasion, but here's one with my highlighting I find particularly apt.

Says Jim:

November 14, 2005
- Years ago, President Nixon nominated a legal nonentity named G. Harold Carswell for a seat on the supreme court. Derided by the newspaper columnists as "mediocre," Carswell was defended by a conservative Nebraska senator, Roman Hruska, who said, memorably: "There are a lot of mediocre people in America who ought to be represented."

- Now Hruska has been reincarnated in Senator Charles ("Chuck") Grassley of Iowa, who said the following a few days ago:

"You know what? What makes our economy grow is energy. And Americans are used to going to the gas tank (sic), and when they put that hose in their, uh, tank, and when I do it, I wanna get gas out of it. And when I turn the light switch on, I want the lights to go on, and I don't want somebody to tell me I gotta change my way of living to satisfy them. Because this is America, and this is something we've worked our way into, and the American people are entitled to it, and if we're going improve (sic) our standard of living, you have to consume more energy."

- Like the true-blue mediocre Americans of the Nixon era, American consumers (as we like to call ourselves) have the representative they deserve today in Senator Grassley. He expresses perfectly the dominant thought out there, which is as close to being not-a-thought as any thought can be. And this kind of proto-crypto-demi-thought is exactly what is going to lead this country into a world of hardship.

- Instead of preparing the public for changing circumstances that will inexorably require different behavior on our part, our leaders are setting the public up to defend a way of living that can't continue for practical reasons. The question remains: are our leaders doing this out of cynicism or stupidity, or some other reason that is hard to determine?

- Cynicism would mean that they know exactly what the score is with the global energy situation and our predicament in relation to it, and don't trust the public to deal with the truth. Two weeks ago, I was on a speaking program in Dallas with investment banker Matthew Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert, an alarming book about the state of the Saudi Arabian oil industry. I asked Matt what he has encountered the time or two that he has had an audience with George W. Bush. Apparently, the president's reaction to Simmons' message (which is that we are in big trouble) is a kind of curious incomprehension, as in the old expression, is that so?

- Personally, I don't believe that Mr. Bush or the people around him do not understand that oil production worldwide has about topped out, and that whatever oil is left belongs mostly to other people who don't like us very much. But public acceptance of this reality would mean the end of many illusions supposedly crucial to our national life, most particularly that we can continue to be an easy motoring society, and continue running an economy based on its usufructs.

- But the psychology of previous investment is a curious thing. It compounds itself insidiously, and now we not only suffer from our misinvestments in an infrastructure for daily life that has no future, but we also suffer from the political investment in continuing to pretend that everything is okay. That is, if Mr. Bush went on TV tomorrow and told the public we have a problem, the public would want to know why they weren't told sooner, and why they were not directed to some purposeful adaptive behavior, and Mr. Bush's team, the Republican party, would be discredited for failing to do so.

- While I doubt that the President and his posse are too dim to comprehend the energy trap we're in, there certainly is plenty of plain stupidity in the rest of our elected leadership, of which Senator Grassley's remarks are Exhibit A. To be more precise, actually, Grassley's statement displays something closer to childishness than sheer stupidity. It comprises a set of beliefs or expectations that are unfortunately widespread in our culture, namely, that we should demand a particular outcome because we want it to be so. This is exactly how children below the age of reason think, in their wild egocentricity, and it is the hallmark of mental development to grow beyond that kind of thinking. But the force of advertising and other inducements to fantasy are so overwhelming in everyday American life that they may be obstructing the development of a huge chunk of the population, something that becomes worse each year, as proportionately more adults fail to grow up mentally. This state-of-mind is made visible in Las Vegas, our national monument to the creed that people should get whatever they want.

- What I wonder is: when will my fellow citizens discover that their thinking and their behavior are unworthy of their history? That we are entering a time when these things simply aren't good enough, aren't enough to meet the challenges that reality now presents. Or are we too far gone? It's possible that we are. After all, life is tragic, meaning that happy outcomes are not guaranteed and that people who forget that usually come to grief.

http://kunstler.com/mags_diary15.html
_________________
--------------------------------
| Whose reality is this anyway!? |
--------------------------------
(-------< Temet Nosce >-------)
____________________________

SarahC1975 · Tar Sands Joined: Feb 10, 2005 Posts: 52

Hi all. I regularly read Kunstler's blog over at http://www.jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com

His last two postings have me thinking he has either been threatened or he simply see the writing on the wall and wants to distinguish himself from people who will be rounded up and herded into camps when the time comes. (IE, people like Michael Ruppert)

What are your thoughts?

Sarah C.

coyote

Daryl · Intermediate Crude Joined: Oct 10, 2005 Posts: 914

You guys in this forum are way too PC. You should welcome conservatives to the board.

americandream

pstarr

savethehumans · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Oct 20, 2004 Posts: 1541

The Neocons don't HAVE to get to Kunstler. Kunstler's always felt this way. The only surprise is that people are surprised by it.

His correct view of suburbia's doom and the idiocy of economics doesn't mean he's not blind in other areas. We are ALL only human; we ALL have our strengths and weaknesses.

NONE of us can see the full picture of what's happening now, or what's going to happen. If anyone did see it all, I doubt they could handle it. And even if they could, why wouldn't they do what they knew they had to, so they'd avoid the worst fate? Or, maybe, the worst fate (death) would be preferable to what's coming.

Should we listen to Kunstler's warnings about the coming socioeconomic upheaval? You bet! Should we listen to his--or anyone's--politics? Heck, NO! Politics ain't gonna mean squat. And TPTB don't give a flip about anyone's politics, really. They use people till they aren't useful anymore, then dump 'em. NOTHING new in that! If they find Kunstler useful, they'll use him. Nothing indicating that they do find him useful, though. So unless and until they do--well, our only responsibility is to warn people off his (or anyone's) politics, and just attend to what he's saying about the coming crash. What else CAN we do?

killJOY · Fission Joined: Feb 21, 2005 Posts: 2386 Location: ^NNE^

Gary

I find the remarks of Kunstler and others regarding "the silliness of 911 conspiricy theories" to be silly.

Any time 19 (or 20) people conspire to carry out a terrorist attack and do so, one has a conspiracy.

If one reads "The New Pearl Harbor" by David Griffin, for example, one finds careful analysis and reasoning by a well-respected scholar. Or read journalist John Pilger's article at Global Issues on the topic:

http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/WarOnTerror/NewPearlHarbor.asp

A number of well-respected folks have asked good questions that have not been answered. Those who openly hoped, prayed, and spoke of a desire for "A New Pearl Harbor" have been deeply entrenched in our government for years -- Cheney, Pearl, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and all.

These people believed that they would benefit from such a catastrophic event. Their association with Leo Strauss makes it eerily likely that some of these people would nudge terrorist groups to attempt such action.

The people who believed that they stood to benefit from a high-exposure attack on the USA are the ones we ought to think of as "Crazy" or "mad" in some way. They have declared "total war" (Perle under Reagan 20 years ago or so) and "full spectrum global dominance" and have loudly lamented the lack of "A New Pearl Harbor." So when it comes along and so many serious questions go unanswered, one does have to wonder who was involved in the conspiracy.

The question is not "Was there a conspiracy?" but rather "Who was involved in the conspiracy and in what ways?"

To bring this back to Kunstler -- yes, I think he's always been a bit of a neoconservative politically. But, like all the Democrats who voted for Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, Kunstler seems to be unable to connect the dots between "neocon" and "warmonger" even though the neocons have stated clearly (Project for A New American Century, Cheney's many speeches, etc) that they plan to provoke and win a global war that will last for generations.

Once again, any time people fly commercial passenger aircraft into buildings, there was a conspiracy. Any time people openly state their frustration that such an event has not occured but is necessary, the question must be raised when such an event occurs "Who benefits? Who wanted this?" and then "Why are so many lines of investigation simply stopped without explanation?"

Kunstler is oddly reluctant to ask probing questions about this -- always has been, as far as I know.
_________________
pedaling for peace and ecojustice -- Gary

BO

Great analysis Gary, I had to skip through some parts of "The Long Emergency" because he really does think like a "NeoCon" in regard to terrorism.

After his last two posts, I also have given up on him. Rupperts book is 800 pages full of verifiable facts. Anyone who says it is "silly" has simply not read it. As Kunstler says in the opening of "The Long Emergency" Americans can't handle too much realty. Similarly, Americans can't deal with the FACT that our own government is willing to kill American citizens to further their goals. Read the "Northwoods Documents". It has been done over and over again. Make the connection to "Peak Oil" and it makes sense. Why are so many unwilling to at least look at the evidence.

Here is the bottom line, if you have refused to look at any of the hard evidence of complicity in 9/11, than you can call the movement "silly".

If you have read David Ray Griffins book, or Michael Rupperts or any other, than you know the truth, or if you still think it is silly, have a learning disability.

Bandidoz · Heavy Crude Joined: Mar 02, 2005 Posts: 150 Location: UK

At the end of the day, there are people around who are willing to confront Peak Oil but don't (want to) believe in 9/11 conspiracies. Kunstler serves a good purpose with his philosophy, because it gets published. I have read both "Rubicon" and "Emergency". However I've only ever seen "Emergency" in the shops. Someone has to be pallatable.
_________________
The Olduvai Theory is thinkable http://www.dieoff.com/page224.pdf
Easter Island - a warning from history : http://www.dieoff.org/page145.htm

BO

Very True Bandidoz, To the really extreme conspiracy theorists, Peak Oil is a conspiracy by big business and oil companies. (which of course is ridiculous).

When most people hear the word "conspiracy" they automatically stop thinking critically, and roll there eyes thinking of tinfoil hat people. This is a programmed response. There really are crazy conspiracy theories out there, there are also massive disinfomation campaigns orchestrated by the CIA, like COINTELPRO. And somewhere in between, are real, terrifyingly true conspiracies.

As Noam Chomsky says, If you don't think there are powerful people, who meet secretly, and make decisions which direclty influence ours lives (for better of for worse), than you just don't understand the power structure that has always existed in human history.

Conspiracies are happening all the time, the trick is to be intellectually honest, and try to seperate the garbage from the truth, instead of dismissing every one of them out of hand as bunk.

The same thing everyone here did in regard to Peak Oil. How many of us would know about PO, if we just listened to the "official" story from the government, from CERA, and EIA, who say everything is going to be fine?

rogerhb