Dick Cheney & "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter"
-> Why would they want to be responsible for the end of
-> industrial civilization, especially since they were the last
-> best chance to help us convert to something sustainable?
> Such as perpetual war for perpetual plunder, for instance?
Doesn't wash.
The end result of deindustrialization is subsistance villages warring with clubs to plunder each others' fire wood, and the dried animal dung used when the firewood runs out.
There was, maybe still is, still time to perpetuate the remarkable body of knowledge this culture built up. For all our faults, (and the irony that when the common man was given the Internet, a medium more powerful than any King ever had, his main message was "what are you wearing?"), we've achieved a lot that even Cheney should want to see perpetuated if only to plunder things better than dung. Peak oil makes sense to me as a conspiracy only as a plot of King Modred, nostalgic for the good old days of swords and serfs.
As to Carter being the victim of a military conspiracy... have you a shred of proof? Conspiracy theories without proof are a kind of optimism that there is order in the world, if only an evil order. An old businessman once told me that greed, stupidity, and the urge to sneak out for quick one (quick beer, screw, nap, whatever) explain a lot more of human history than carefully coordinated 10 year plots.
If we were so capable of conspiracy, how the ____ did we wind up 30 years after the publication of "The Limits To Growth" in a mad rush over the cliff? Now that we've so globalized, when the train goes over, it takes everyone, Cheney and his progeny included, with it.
The funny things are...
- I believe peak oil is real, and may be here now, and once we pass peak we may not have the resources to build a sustainable society, at least unless most of America dies
- I believe Cheney knows that
- I am skeptical that GWB doesn't know (like Reagan-Bush, you'd have to think this another Alzheimer's puppet; but the danger to the string pullers is the puppet could act on his own. I'd rather believe we are in fact ruled by idiots, than believe we are ruled by a conspiracy, and even GWB is in the dark about it) (on the other hand, if he was on vacation for a month, maybe that gave him the cover to work on 911 full stop? Oh-no, now I'm talking that way!)
- I cannot reconcile these points. Either there's reason to believe peak won't be so bad (doubtful) or that Cheney has a plan (maybe, but what?). Or are these just apocolyptic Christians, taking us down with them on a hellride to armagedon?
- And my excuse for Carter? Just another idiot, gulled with the rest of us when oil in 1999 was the cheapest it had been in over 20 years. No, on second thought, he could not have been so dumb...
The final irony is the cover of an album from 1968, "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" knott32.fsnet.co.uk, which showed some very odd youth living in the woods. I was young then, and loved staring at that picture, imagining I would find them when I grew up and join them in the woods. Guess I will, wind up in the woods, anyway; but I expected a different road.
- Charles |
