{"id":23141,"date":"2017-03-06T15:33:11","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T20:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23141"},"modified":"2017-03-06T15:33:11","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T20:33:11","slug":"great-expectations-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23141","title":{"rendered":"Great Expectations (Not)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Great Expectations (Not)<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Halloween\u2019s coming super-early this year and it will be a shocking surprise to those currently busy looking for Russians behind every potted plant in Washington DC. First, accept the premise that your country has lost its mind.<\/p>\n

This is what happens when societies (and individuals) can\u2019t face the true quandaries of a particular moment in their history. All of their attention gets channeled into fantasy: spooks, sexual freakery, conspiracies, persecution narratives, savior fairy tales. It\u2019s been quite a cavalcade of unreality for the past six months, with great entertainment value for connoisseurs of the bizarre \u2014 until you\u2019re reminded that the fate of the nation is at stake.<\/p>\n

The questions Americans might more profitably ask ourselves: can we continue living the way we do? And by what means? These matters of home economics have been sequestered in some forgotten storage unit of the collective mind for at least a year while a clock ticks in the time-bomb that sits on the national welcome mat. That bomb is made of financial plutonium and it\u2019s getting ready to blow. When it does, all the distracting spookery and freakery will vaporize and the shell-shocked citizens will have a clear view of the bleak, toxic, devastated landscape they actually inhabit.<\/p>\n

March 15 is when the temporary suspension of the national debt ceiling \u2014 engineered in a 2015 deal between Barack Obama and then House Speaker John Boehner \u2014 finally expires, meaning the government loses its authority to continue borrowing money. The chance that congress can pass a bill raising the debt ceiling to enable further borrowing is about the same as the chance that Xi Jinping will send every American household a dim sum breakfast next Sunday morning by FedEx.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Great Expectations (Not) Halloween\u2019s coming super-early this year and it will be a shocking surprise to those currently busy looking for Russians behind every potted plant in Washington DC. First, accept the premise that your country has lost its mind. This is what happens when societies (and individuals) can\u2019t face the true quandaries of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14964,195,9735,449,2202,865],"class_list":["post-23141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-clusterfuck-nation","tag-debt","tag-debt-ceiling","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-us-treasury","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23141"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23142,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23141\/revisions\/23142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}