A fatally weakened political system?

Mr. J.R. Nyquist wrote an earlier piece about Thomas Gold's theory that oil is not a fossil-based fuel but it produced by an abiogenic process. In the article referenced below Mr. Nyquist writes that he is not worried about "peak oil," i.e., the world's oil production supposedly having reached its historic high, but about moral and intellectual mediocrity:

The West’s intellectual decline is also real. . . . The intellectual confusion we find today, and the collapse of general knowledge (as shown on the Tonight Show by Jay Leno [link omitted]), is not a myth. It is simple fact. . . .

If we are running short of oil, the fault does not lie in a scarcity beneath the earth, but a scarcity between our ears. . . . The leaders of our political system . . . do not seem to know what a nation is, what preserves or disintegrates social order, or how to recognize an enemy.

When will peak oil overtake us and send civilization spiraling downward?

The downward spiral has already begun. An economic crisis is upon us. The political fallout, and the growing weaknesses of the political system, will likely to bring revolutionary consequences.

The immediate political and popular responses to the recent oil price rises were, respectively, demagoguery and whining. The politicians hurled themselves in front of any video camera they could find between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol in their haste to excoriate (say bad things about) the oil companies (U.S. corporate Blue Meanies). The moratorium on off-shore and ANWR drilling, as well as the failure to build any new nuclear power generating plants in the last two or three decades were inconvenient facts lost on these prescient worthies and they stampeded in the direction of an "windfall profits" tax as fast as a bunch of jihadis rushing to sign up for a course in making explosives in a Cuisinart.

So far as the populace was concerned, something had to be "done" to bring the price of gas down to levels that Americans are "entitled" to enjoy. That higher prices would stimulate the opening up of marginal oil wells and more aggressive oil drilling, that they would make alternative fuels more profitable to produce, or that they would be the spark plug that would fire the entrepreneurial imagination to devise alternatives were not concepts willingly embraced by any but the most exceptional observers.

And just forget about a sensible discussion of oil company rates of return on investment over time.

Mr. Nyquist is right. Our leaders don't know what a nation is and they sure as heck don't know what an honest to gosh enemy looks like. If they knew what makes for a nation they would stop illegal immigration at the border without falling over themselves to reward the very people who have held our nation's laws in contempt and broken them with their first footfall on our soil. Their leadership attitude is identical to that of any individual homeowner who doesn't have the stomach to deny entrance to his home to all and sundry passersby. An individual unable to maintain a distinct boundary between (a) himself and his family and (b) all other humanoids would rightly be considered to be in the grip of a neurosis of some kind, or worse. Is a national leader who can't manage to deploy more than a few hundred National Guardsman on the border any different?

The latest word is that the Border Patrol is having to assign agents to . . . we are not making this up . . . protect the unarmed Guardsmen who do make it to the border. How utterly sick is this, all in the name of not militarizing the border? Heaven forbid that the national government, whose primary responsibility it is to protect the nation from invasion, should spend any "defense" dollars on, well, defending the $%#$^@* borders!

When it comes to recognizing enemies, our federal leadership is similarly out to lunch. If Muslims were confined to the Middle East, Iran, and Pakistan, is there any doubt that the ability of Muslim fanatics and Muslim losers would have an inordinately hard time operating in the U.S. and raising money from within the U.S.? No there is not. But, natch, our leaders have made it possible for huge numbers of Muslims to come to this country and take up residence. Their communities are safe havens for whatever visiting jihadi wants to drop by for a little terrorism.

Not to mention the fact that Saudi Arabia is still doing a yeoman's job of ensuring that the climate of Middle East fanaticism is fostered and nurtured right here at home. Saudi Arabia is funding the construction of Wahhabi mosques in the U.S. as you read this, Eighty percent of U.S. mosques are Saudi funded and all of those mosques are distributing hate literature.

There's certainly no need to have a little chat with the Saudis on that small point, now is there?

Just what we need in our country – lots and lots of people in thrall to a religion that has meant nothing but the death of innovation and free inquiry and the establishment of the vilest of oppressive domestic and national regimes, borderline failed states at best. Rotterdam in the Netherlands is presently 40% Muslim. Are our leader capable of doing anything to ensure that that never, ever happens to us?

Mr. Nyquist fears revolutionary consequences for our present course and that may be prophetic. We are not happy with Mr. Bush's maddening failure to stop the flow of illegal immigration and even as late in the day as yesterday he was almost incoherent on the issue of our involvement Iraq and the war's place in the war on Islam Islamofascism.

Nonetheless, we trust Mr. Bush's instincts. Like Ambassador John Bolton at the U.N. and Sen. Lieberman, he appears to have a visceral desire to safeguard the interests of the nation. Just as Mr. Bush does not delight us in all matters, Sen. Lieberman is a flaming liberal when it comes to matters other than Iraq. But one can depend on him to want to safeguard the nation at all costs.

It's extremely difficult to identify large numbers of such people in the Democrat Party, the "Mainscream Media" (as Larry Elder puts it), the academy, or the government schools.

While we are recording this litany of ways in which we are behaving short-sightedly, selfishly, ignorantly, and neurotically, we cannot not mention the colossal indifference or ignorance of the citizenry when it comes to the multitude of ways in which the original constitutional scheme of the country has been stood entirely on its head. The federal government has become the one preeminent government in the country with constitutionally unlimited powers; the states, no longer sovereign entities, act merely as administrative subdivisions of the federal government. Americans still like to speak of the home of the brave and the land of the free, but they effectively live under a government that is all but untouchable by the voters and election contests have the illuminating power of a candle in an abandoned spaghetti mine.

Nobody seems to much care.

Do you think this augers well for the country? Do any but a minority of U.S. citizens have that visceral, automatic, protective instinct when it comes to their country?

Are the majority of citizens too fixated on never, ever "offending" anyone? On seeing every Third World country -- no matter how benighted -- as the by-God equal of the U.S.?

It's hard for the Colonel to believe that Americans are a serious people and that they take their citizenship and their birthright seriously.

"Peak Oil Addendum and Errata." By J. R. Nyquist, Financial Sense Online, 5/12/06 (emphasis added).