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Tag Archives: james howard kunstler
Bang, You’re Dead
Bang, You’re Dead Apropos of the recent Roseburg, Oregon, school massacre that left nine dead, President Obama said, “we’re going to have to come together and stop these things from happening.” That’s an understandable sentiment, and the president has to say something, after all. But within the context of how life is lived in this […]
Syriasly
Syriasly Senior administration officials say the new offensive holds promise and may change the dynamics on the ground. — The New York Times Whew…. That’s reassuring. Finally, a Middle East policy you can believe in. It’s apparently based on a joint Kurdish-Arab army that our side (the USA) is pretending to assemble around the ISIS stronghold […]
Tick Tick Tick
Tick Tick Tick Did Charlie Rose look like a fucking idiot last night on 60-Minutes, or what, asking Vladimir Putin how he could know for sure that the US was behind the 2014 Ukraine coup against President Viktor Yanukovych? Maybe the idiots are the 60-Minutes producers and fluffers who are supposed to prep Charlie’s questions. Putin seemed startled and amused by […]
Fed Cred is Dead
Fed Cred is Dead The economy is a two-headed monster. One head is the trade in real goods and real services. The other head is the financialized traffic in swindles and frauds that surrounds banking. There is some deception and overlap about which is which. For instance so-called health care might be perceived as a […]
There Goes Europe
There Goes Europe The desperate wish in what is loosely called the West to at least appear morally correct is unfortunately over-matched by the desperation of people fleeing unstable, overpopulated places outside the West, and it is a fiasco beyond even the events of the moment. The refugee / immigrant crisis around the Mediterranean is a preview of […]
Say Goodbye to Normal
Say Goodbye to Normal The tremors rattling markets are not exactly what they seem to be. A meme prevails that these movements represent a kind of financial peristalsis — regular wavelike workings of eternal progress toward an epic more of everything, especially profits! You can forget the supposedly “normal” cycles of the techno-industrial arrangement, which means, in […]
True Believers
True Believers There is a special species of idiot at large in the financial media space who believe absolutely in the desperate and tragic public relations bullshit that this society churns out to convince itself that the techno-industrial high life can continue indefinitely, despite the mandates of reality — in particular, the fairy tales about […]
The Spectacle So Far
The Spectacle So Far Yes, there is such a thing as “the public,” a term that derives from the ancient Latin, populus (the people), via publicus (of the people), via old French, public — pertaining generally to the mass of adults dwelling in a polity, a society under (political) governance. In the USA, government is vested as […]
Where Candidates Fear to Tread
Where Candidates Fear to Tread That the snarkier circles of political commentary thrill to the elephantine bellowings of Donald J. Trump only shows the pathetic limitations of the snarkists. They enjoy Trump’s filterless mouth, his harsh goadings of the other presidential wannabes, and his supposed telepathic empathy for the suffering public outside the magic kingdom […]
Potemkin Party
Potemkin Party How many of you brooding on the dreadful prospect of Hillary have chanced to survey what remains of Democratic Party (cough cough) leadership in the background of Her Royal Inevitableness? Nothing is the answer. Zip. Nobody. A vacuum. There is no Democratic Party anymore. There are no figures of gravitas anywhere to be […]
Greek Pudding
Greek Pudding The proof of the pudding is in the eating, the old saw goes. This one, alas, is a mélange of several old shit sandwiches bound in a liaison of subterfuge and seasoned with political absurdities. Having been fooled in this bistro before, citizen-patrons leave the table resigned to yet another bout of food […]
Systemic Turmoil, Structural Reform
Systemic Turmoil, Structural Reform “The problem with the post-2007 world is that we are not in a cyclical recovery; we are in a structural depression defined as a sustained period of below-trend growth with no end in sight. The U.S. has caught the Japanese disease. Structural depressions are not amenable to monetary solutions, they […]
History in Free Verse
History in Free Verse History might not rhyme, exactly, but it’s not bad for free verse. Greece is this century’s Serbia — a tiny, picturesque backwater nation blundering haplessly into the center stage of geopolitics. And the European Union is, whaddaya know, Germany in drag, on financial steroids. Nobody knows what will happen next in […]
Future Shock and the Greening of America
Future Shock and the Greening of America What I find fascinating is our limited ability to make sense of trends unfolding in real time. During our recent breakfast meeting in Berkeley, author/blogger Jim Kunstler suggested that the coherence of eras waxed and waned, and the present era was incoherent. By this he meant the narratives being […]
Twenty-Three Geniuses
Twenty-Three Geniuses If there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in awarding it to The New York Times’ Monday feature, The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. The former “newspaper of record” wants us to assume now that the sky’s the limit for human activity on the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and […]
