Comments for Right Now - Kunstler at http://atlanticfreepress.com , comment 1 to 2 out of 2 comments http://atlanticfreepress.com Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:53:50 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/1530-right-now-kunstler.html#comment-2147 Given the "high on oil", the sense of easy street--imagine it and it will happen mindset, America's man Bush is just following the collective addict orders in Iraq. His failure isn't that he went after it. (As an Atlantic article yesterday or so noted, the big media doesn't address the whole oil focus in Iraq as central.) For the addict mind, his failure is he didn't get it for US. So much of that stuff in Iraq is just waiting for us to use it as fast as possible. Forget about tomorrow, it doesn't exist. When you're riding speed, the only intolerable event is getting derailed from the acceleration. That consumer mindset--do it now, do a lot Now, receives tons of messages through TV, radio, billboards, magazines, on and on. Conditioning. Riding a high is hard to change without some kind of awakening or crash. There's such inflation to it. Ego inflation. America's the best. We know the Truth. Some awakening is happening. Some people are engaged in real projects to lessen personal and collective use of energy/water. The Global Warming Craze/Movement/Media Blitz is an opening. Yet the bizarre corporate spin finds messages like the one from Lexus: You don't have to give up luxury to help the planet. (ie. you can get a hybrid Lexus with everything including a 350 HP engine, etc. The message: Shoot up and still be a good guy.) The implications are impossible to grasp unless awareness expands beyond the need to get the next fix...of whatever kind. The addict mind fights tooth and nail to avoid gaining a perspective on the Big Picture... So... The other way: the crash. Momentum, karmic conditioning, would tend to indicate that short of a miracle, the crash is, as you have proposed, "is a coming". I wonder where the insiders will put their cash, the blessed Capital. What we currently do in our society to users who crash and become frenzied is to convict them of crimes and put them in jail (2.2 million in jail--half drug related). Imagine the boom in the prison industry when the crash happens. Forget about treatment, actual and metaphorical, for this consumer mind, this agitated needy mind. Our society has become conditioned to the likelihood that the winners demonize the losers and lock them up. Label them terrorists, etc. Anticipatory leadership might shift the yearning towards the project of a national movement to shift to other forms of energy, to needing less, etc. Maybe enough people are angry enough about the shoddiness of the pushers, that they not only shake things up, but take stock of how they promote them through their own participation in this addictive mind. No easy road ahead. Bubbles burst. Pop. Pop. Pop. As the Buddha so perfunctorily put it: Everything changes. - Bobby Enevoldsen Tue, 08 May 2007 23:06:06 +0100 http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/1530-right-now-kunstler.html#comment-2145 You point out that a system running out of balance will inevitably undergo a correction. Doesn't that assume that the system is governed by some sort of natural law, say, for example, the fabled law of supply and demand? Does that assumption hold when the system is corrupt, responding not to law but to manipulation? Shouldn't the question be asked: "Is it possible for players to jigger a market so that it keeps going up forever and there's NEVER a correction?" Or: "Is it possible for players to jigger a market so that it keeps going up forever because so-called 'corrections' are relatively shallow, and short-lived, and happen as part of a plan to keep new money flooding in so that old money can steal it?" Or how about this one: "What will happen to currency and stock markets if and when the U.S. does away with currency and operates entirely by means of plastic credit/debit cards?" Understand I had one college course in macroeconomics, most of which I long since forgot, and that's the sum of my economic expertise. If it wasn't for Quicken, I couldn't balance my checkbook. The stuff I've laid out here is just some stuff that I've been thinking about. So if I'm full of shit, by all means say so but please answer the questions I've asked. The poker player who knows percentages is way ahead in an honest game. But if someone is cheating, then all the honest player knows means nothing. Why wouldn't the same analogy apply to markets? - Jimmy Montague Tue, 08 May 2007 22:16:54 +0100