Paranoia Runs Deep  

James Kunstler has a new blog post up - I'm not sure why he thinks belief in a June attack on Iran is paranoid (you only have to read what Dick Cheney and Seymour Hersh have said, both of whom I think you can take at their word - at least when it comes to threats from Cheney - to come to that conclusion) - but there you go - I guess paranoia is in the eye of the beholder.

"Paranoia runs deep; into your life it will creep. . . ."
So went the lyrics to the old Buffalo Springfield song from the tumultuous Vietnam War years and now, as Yogi Berra also said around the same time, "it's like deja vu all over again."

I like to claim that I am allergic to conspiracy theories and the paranoia that attends them. But these days I'm not so sure anymore. The noise in the system is getting pretty thick, and the Internet is the perfect system for paranoia because any website can appear to be dignified and therefore to speak with some kind of authority. You have to sort out the reality from the noise the best that you can on your own. (So maybe it's not such a bad thing that this blog is so amateurish-looking, as many readers complain.)

The latest paranoid thread out there is that the US Military is waiting to commit a June assault on Iran's nuclear facilities, and that the Bush administration has been manipulating the stock markets up and the oil markets down in an attempt to to lull the public deeper into its coma of cluelessness by making the surface of American life seem placid.

I really don't know what the government is capable of doing to tweak the markets. It certainly has access to a lot of nominal "money," and I suppose that it is not to difficult to put that money into "play," by funneling it this way and that way through large institutions and agencies. The current crisis of capital derives from the fact that the American economy produces fewer and fewer things of enduring value -- and more and more fluff in the form of Star Wars movies

I'd also say that the Iran thread is an old "paranoid" thread now (i've been muttering about it forever), and that "Star Wars" movies are actually an example of one of the few industries that make money sustainably - intellectual output is something that doesn't require particularly cheap energy, unlike a lot of manufacturing industries that build tangible, yet useless, objects. Manipulation of the markets is less clear cut, but the rumours are quite intense lately - such as the notes on weirdness in the treasuries market I posted recently.

Still - there is plenty of paranoia and conspiracy theorising going on out there, if you know where to look...

Technorati tags: peak oil