Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
The metaphysical question, what does Russia want, is sounding a lot like the cosmic conundrum posed by Sigmund Freud: what do women want? Is Vladimir Putin transitioning to “become” a woman? It seems like the hormones are getting to him. One day he’s got a crush on Donald Trump, the next day he’s mashed on Bernie Sanders. At least according to America’s Intel Community. Or was that just Rep. Adam Schiff’s spin on the sigint served up to his House Intel Committee by one Shelby Pierson, “a senior intelligence official responsible for overseeing the issues of election interference,” as The New York Times described her. It looked, for a moment, like Mr. Schiff was trying to tee up a new killer-diller impeachment shot. But as usual with Mr. Schiff, the ploy went all Acme on him and blew up in his face.
Amazing how quickly the narrative flip-flopped, though, by whatever supernatural means the news media employs these days — Ouija boards, astral vision, virtual warping, metapotence, psionic equilibrium distortion, consort with the ghost of Allen Dulles…. One might deduce that the Democratic Party nomenklatura realized in a flash of insight that Russia’s affections were far more useful applied to Mr. Sanders than Mr. Trump, whose status among the Dems these days ranks as “worse than Satan.” Not much to work with there.
They’ve been struggling to find some means to stuff Bernie into the memory hole. They tried hauling Michael Bloomberg onstage to call Bernie a communist. That bombed (along with Mr. Bloomberg altogether). Everybody already knows Bernie spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union waiting on line with the new missus for tin plates of kohlrabi soup. Sunday night, they duped Bernie onto a 60-Minutes workout, with Anderson Cooper playing inquisitor. Andy put the screws to him on the question as to how America will pay for all the free stuff Bernie proffers. The answers were embarrassingly inconclusive and nobody cared, perhaps because nobody believes it anyway, not even the most righteous Bernie Bros.
If nothing else, Bernie’s timing on free this-and-that couldn’t be worse from the vantage of history. Government health care and tuition-free college worked in some nations in the decades after the Second World War because of a steadily rising global GDP, which itself was pegged to a reliable and affordable fossil fuel supply. That’s over. The shale oil “miracle” has bamboozled the public for ten years. It was a great stunt, but that’s all it was, and it’s going to wither now for a lack of available capital, and there isn’t any combo of alt energy thingies to take its place. Neither the Woke half of America nor the MAGA half groks this situation. The money’s not there. And a lot of things that pretend to be money are figments of the banking-and-finance industry, soon to melt away.
And now the Corona virus steps onstage to ramify that situation, beginning with a virtual shut-down of the excessively complex, over-engineered, just-in-time global economy. Things are not being produced and supply lines are shutting down. Car-makers outside China have a couple of weeks before their production lines halt for a lack of parts. But, of course, every other industry will have similar problems and stoppages. Many working Americans are barely getting by from one paycheck to the next. How many missed paychecks will it take for genuine hunger to kick in and desperation with it? We don’t know because the US news media has been busy conjuring the many loves of Vlad Putin.
This is getting serious now. Some of you may have noticed this morning that the stock indexes are heading into the worst open in years. Today, Mr. Market woke up, like Rip Van Winkle, and discovered that the world changed while he was sleeping. There’s a fair chance that the conditions of daily life in America will deteriorate sharply in the months ahead. We’ve been remote-viewing the empty streets of Wuhan and other Chinese cities since January, thinking it was like one of our cable-network horror shows. It’s not inconceivable that an American City, or more than one, will be subject to quarantine, or that a whole lot of people just won’t leave their houses for a period of time. Will the truckers still truck things that people need? We don’t know. How do you hold a political convention in a situation like that, or even an election?
The situation in China may be too far gone already. The country’s finances were a gigantic game of pretend. In the old Soviet Union, beloved by Bernie, the joke was, “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” — not a great formula for enduring prosperity. In China, the updated joke was “we pretend to make loans, and you pretend to pay them back.” The China boom was a lot like the shale oil “miracle.” They were both great stunts. They produced a lot of stuff by borrowing from the future. Now we have all that stuff and we have to maintain it, keep if running, borrow more money to make that happen… and suddenly, that’s no longer plausible. The entire industrialized world has fallen for the debt stunt. Observers have been waiting to see what would finally provoke the unwinding of massive false promises. Looks like the wait is over.
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“This is getting serious now. ” JHK
Fed to the rescue, you can bank on that. 0% interest here we come.
Still unknown whether more free money for the 1% can arrest a global pandemic???
Get your popcorn and settle in.
Three months supply of popcorn.
” Looks like the wait is over.”
It’s just a primer.
If they wanted to unwind the thing they’d have unleashed cholera in calishithole by now.
I used to have these little sticky notes where a commode was directly linked by a pipe to a fan……..guess what……that first deposit is on “short final” to exit the pipe and hit that fan……
“We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Doom porn. I had thought Kunstler was more objective than that. Shale oil is viable if the price of oil is high enough, like any oil or anything. Lotsa coulds. We alt-right experts have been so wrong in the past, including you Jim Quinn. There is some dark matter or dark energy holding up this financial empire. It’s obvious now. We don’t know when and we don’t know how, but odds are it will be slow. The decline of the Roman Empire was a decline built upon a servile Christian population. The more things change.
On Shale oil: “Neither the Woke half of America nor the MAGA half groks this situation. The money’s not there.”
He misses the entire point of the Shale oil industry. It is the perfect financial vehicle to allow the ponzi scheme to continue indefinitely.
When all those petrol dollars come back to the US, as part of the maturing of Treasury bills held be foreign hands, what do you think would happen if the .gov sat on there ass and did nothing? does Wiemar Germany ring a bell?
With the Shale oil/gas industry, we can literally through all that extra fiat down a well, and we get back the strategic advantage of controlling the oil market.
The alternative would be uncontrollable inflation, and high priced oil due to OPEC.
There is a plan, you just need to understand what the game is, it is not about who is in office or what flavor of swine flu is sweeping through the world (there always is, and always has been, it has just never been used as a tool by the state, to achieve strategic goals)
it;s not the virus that has been weaponized, it is the response to the virus that has been weaponized.
anon.
Amen.
“if the price of oil is high enough”
+$100/bbl to cover extraction, the debt load and then some…..
The Roman Empire was just another tool in the hand of the Creator.
“The Roman Empire didn’t intentionally spread Christianity, but it did allow it to spread by giving the Christian Church certain privileges, rights, and freedoms that others in the empire had as well. Even though the empire was evil, God has a way of using evil for His own good purposes
(Gen 50:20; John 3:16).
The Roman government, for the most part, actually did a better job of holding down persecution than some governments of the world do today. God allowed the Roman Empire to be used as a means to take the gospel to the ends of the empire and beyond.
The ripples of that are still being felt today, and will be felt throughout all eternity. How interesting that God can use a pagan or evil empire such as the Roman Empire and an evil ruler (such as Caesar was) to His glory.
It is as Solomon wrote, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will” (Prov 21:1), whether the king knows about it or not.”
HOW DID THE EXISTENCE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE HELP THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY
The Top 8 Reasons Why Rome Fell
1. Invasions by Barbarian tribes
2. Economic troubles and overreliance on slave labor
3. The rise of the Eastern Empire
4. Overexpansion and military overspending
5. Government corruption and political instability
6. The arrival of the Huns and the migration of the Barbarian tribes
7. Christianity and the loss of traditional values
“The decline of Rome dovetailed with the spread of Christianity, and some have argued that the rise of a new faith helped contribute to the empire’s fall. The Edict of Milan legalized Christianity in 313, and it later became the state religion in 380. These decrees ended centuries of persecution, but they may have also eroded the traditional Roman values system. Christianity displaced the polytheistic Roman religion, which viewed the emperor as having a divine status, and also shifted focus away from the glory of the state and onto a sole deity. Meanwhile, popes and other church leaders took an increased role in political affairs, further complicating governance. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon was the most famous proponent of this theory, but his take has since been widely criticized. While the spread of Christianity may have played a small role in curbing Roman civic virtue, most scholars now argue that its influence paled in comparison to military, economic and administrative factors.”
8. Weakening of the Roman legions
this is all fascinating and true, but did you know that there is a missing century of Christianity?
from like AD 70-170.
a smart Jew got a hold of the writings of the apostles, specifically Johns, and then claimed to be the “the son of God, returned” (he was actually pretending to be the anti-christ). He was so good at deluding the early Christian people (sponsored by the temple) that Christianity was almost lost as a result.
imagine using the words of revelations during a time when no one had access to these writings, and then launching a propaganda campaign to discredit the entire religion.
it takes a real smart jew to do this to your competitor.
Damn mark, those 8 reasons could be applied perfectly to the US today. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
1. Invasions by Barbarian tribes (Mass immigration)
2. Economic troubles and overreliance on slave labor (Slave labor = Tax slaves aka Working Class)
3. The rise of the Eastern Empire (Jobs sent overseas, particularly to China)
4. Overexpansion and military overspending (Endless wars, military bases all over the world)
5. Government corruption and political instability (self explanatory)
6. The arrival of the Huns and the migration of the Barbarian tribes (Refugee resettlement)
7. Christianity and the loss of traditional values (also self explanatory)
8. Weakening of the Roman legions (women, queers, and trannies in the military)
don’t forget pensions as one of the reasons that rome fell–the romans paid pensions to their legionnaires–
Yea Ricky that ‘splains it’ buddy!
As JHK and I have both mentioned prior: Won’t coronavirus take Trump off the perception hook for the economy? Because the global financial elite could have crashed the markets and then blamed Trump (and Brexit) for the sins of nationalism, populism, tax cuts and trade isolationism.
But now, if coronavirus takes the blame, how can the Dem’s tack it to Trump before the November election?
What are the implications? Will they matter?
If a Democrat is elected, it will be the final straw and it doesn’t take a historian to see that. If Bolshevik Bernie would take us to Hell at 100 mph, the rest would do it at about 95. If the Communist lose and want to get nasty, Conservatives will send them to Hell at Warp Speed…
“Conservatives will send them to Hell at Warp Speed…”
They would send me to hell and call the decline solved. Conservatives don’t fight like men. They fight like Jobs and Esaus.
Shame knows a few bible stories, good for him. He’s also got a big hair across his ass, and it hurts.
“the ploy went all Acme on him and blew up in his face.”
Hard not to like that one. Creates an instant word picture to anyone who grew up watching Wile E and the RR.
nomenklatura – I had no idea what this was, so I looked it up:
(in the former Soviet Union) a list of influential posts in government and industry to be filled by Communist Party appointees.
“the system of nomenklatura, which reserves important appointments to the Party apparatus”
those people appointed to posts in government or industry under the nomenklatura system.
“most of the caviar was kept for the nomenklatura”