Santa, Please Bring Me a War for Christmas
James Howard Kunstler

So, you expected “Joe Biden” to serve up a neat little Christmas-time World War Three, lobbing ATACMS into Russia and all, but instead, surprise surprise, you got The War of the Worlds: mysterious drones hovering on-high over the endless muffler shops, manicure parlors, mafia palazzos, and mosques of New Jersey. But there seems to be more to this than, say, the stunt that Orson Welles pulled in 1938, scaring a few rubes over the radio. This ain’t no foolin’ around.

It’s been going on for weeks. And not just in New Jersey. But around New York City, up the Hudson River Valley above Stewart Airport, over in Massachusetts, down in Pennsylvania, and out in Ohio in the vicinity of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton Ohio. Howls of “WTF” echo all over the cable news channels. The US government — that is, the twilighting “Joe Biden” admin — plays dumb.

Alejandro Mayorkas, our unimpeachably frank Homeland Security chief told ABC-News on Sunday “that there’s no question that drones are being sighted.” I’m sure that told you a lot. He went on to explain that the FAA changed its rules last year allowing drones to fly at night. Are we to suppose that avid US drone-owners waited until the very last month of this year to start flying their pet aircraft after dark? Pentagon spox John Kirby, added helpfully at a news conference that federal investigators had been “unable to corroborate reports of any unauthorized drones above New Jersey.” (Translation: DARPA and other Pentagon ops are too busy figuring out new ways to surveil and kill you to bother with these drone swarms.)

Theories abound and multiply. One is that these are US Govt drones seeking signals of radioactivity emanating from a nuclear bomb supposedly purloined out of Ukraine’s old Soviet arsenal — and possibly stashed in a shipping container or some-such other hidey-hole along our east coast. It’s a good story. It’s rumored that some-60 Uke nukes from that era have gone missing in the decades since. Of course, the theoretical owner of such a device would have to be pretty dumb to not stash his nuke in a lead-shielded casket to prevent detection. In the meantime, what else can be said or done? Standing by on that mushroom cloud. . . .

Blogger / Author and former White House stenographer (2002 – 2018) Mike McCormick had a neat theory: that shipping interests were testing drone deliveries of imported goods from offshore in an attempt to work-around the longshoreman’s union contract negotiations currently underway. The union has been fighting against automation that would eliminate the good-paying jobs of 85,000 dock-workers. Any takers on that one?

Of course, it’s difficult to swallow the govt’s statements that, basically, they dunno nuffins ‘bout no drones. There are enough of them flying over enough varied terrain that surely the USAF could find a way to shoot one down over a cow pasture in, say, Orange County, New York. I’m frankly a little surprised that some enterprising civilian marksman hasn’t popped off a few 7mm Remington mag loads into the hovering lights. At least they haven’t said it’s Santa Claus testing a new high-tech delivery system that would put his old-timey sleigh-and-reindeer out of business.

The theory I lean toward is the notion that “Joe Biden” (meaning the DC blob) is desperately seeking some way to obstruct or fend-off the January 20th inauguration of Mr. Trump. Because, well, to put it bluntly, a whole lot of blobistas are worried about going to jail when the likes of Kash Patel, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi-G, and Pam Bondi get their mitts on the levers of power and start opening up the files. They’ve got thirty-five days to. . . to do something! (Somebody, please do something!!!)

There was a lot of chatter all year long about a coming space alien emergency. I know, sounds preposterous, and even more so when you consider that the military arm of the blob would be so dumb as to try to pass off drones as alien spacecrafts — like something out of a 1950s horror movie when the “special effects” had to be done with puppets and balsa-wood models flying on wires. Maybe it’s actually come to that in this super dumbed-down age. (Are you aware that the main diminishing return of our magical computer tech is that it’s made our society an order-of-magnitude dumber across the board? Well, it has.)

The situation remains fluid, with ongoing investigations and public discourse about the implications and origins of these drone activities. The FBI is on-the-case (so never fear!) along with Mr. Mayorkas and his outfit, and maybe even the US military. Chill. They got this — as Hollywood loves to say. Go shopping. Have a goshdarn eggnog. Shut up.

 

 

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

 

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