Tag: American Decline

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

If you could go back and live in 1973, would you do it? 

To me, that is not an easy question to answer.

I think that for many of us it would be a real challenge to adjust to a world without the Internet and so many of the other technologies that we enjoy today.  But I also think that if we were suddenly transported back to that time we would be absolutely shocked by how freely people lived.  In 2023, there are literally millions of different laws, rules, regulations and ordinances that constrain how we behave down to the smallest detail.  A lot of us still think that we are “free”, but that hasn’t actually been true for a very long time.  In addition, the values of our society are completely different from what they were in 1973.  Over the past 50 years our culture has been completely turned upside down, and we can see the nightmarish consequences of this cultural revolution all around us.

Continue reading “Most People Believe That Life In America Is “Worse” Than It Was 50 Years Ago”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Spring is always convulsive, with new things heaving into life. Under every dead leaf, something stirs and seeks light, the old must make way for the new, and to some degree the earth is not quite the same place as it was the last time it turned, though the scene looks superficially familiar. Winter’s torpor is, at least, a cold comfort, but springtime’s warmth and movement rattle the nerves. Things unseen shift ominously beneath us. Everything is pending and tending, and nothing is resolved.

Having wrecked its latest business model —hypertrophic financial fakery — Western Civ stumbles into the blinding new reality that it takes real stuff to run an economy, and that money itself is not an adequate replacement for the stuff. The trillions supposedly vested, for instance, in stock market valuations mostly represent mere wishes and promises, and for what? Why, for more money — which responds by losing value, so that we’re racing ever faster toward a receding horizon.

Continue reading “Thralldom and Its Uses”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Back in the quaint old days of the George “W” Bush admin, White House political advisor Karl Rove famously said, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.” He was actually bragging on it, a little bit, I think.

Didn’t that set the tone for the years that have followed? The part that even the perspicacious Mr. Rove missed, though, is that the viziers of empire are perhaps even more apt to create their own unreality, which explains a lot about these fretful present days of American collapse. Is there anything the government tells you now that is not some sort of fabrication? One thing for sure is that the elite colleges churn out thousands of certified bullshit artists every year — with no other skills — and many gravitate to the power centers national life, where they rise in the ranks spinning metaphysical simulacrums of their boss’s purviews — the Jen Psaki types, who ricochet between the DC political bunkers and boob tube news central. The less glib and physically unpresentable become mere “fact-checkers,” the network of casual liars who toil in the trenches of official unreality.

Continue reading “Leviathan Floundering”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

What you’re actually seeing in the rhetorical hoo-ha over the January Sixth capitol riot is the main cattle-prod driving mob madness — fear of Covid-19 — losing its power to terrorize the public. The Party-of-Chaos put on a grand opera of lamentation Thursday to celebrate its unity in victim-hood — we wuz so traumatized by the riot! — but in the background, they can see their dearer dream of total vaccination — and total control of the population — fade in the winter mists.

This is the crisis of a managerial class that has lost its ability to manage anything, including all of us. Thus, the hysteria in the blue precincts of America, where they are concentrated. And, as I’ve averred before, the madness probably has its roots in the slow-motion train wreck of our techno-industrial economy. The managerial class can surely sense it and see it coming, but they don’t have a clue what to do about it. So, in desperate need of some signifying ritual, they’re left performing a grand-scale Chinese fire drill like drunken sophomores of yore — a flurry of pointless, attention-seeking activity.

Continue reading “When That Ol’ Mojo Stops Workin’”

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

In the event you are unaware that insanity now encompasses the US Supreme Court, the Court ruled in 2020 with only three dissents that a person’s gender is self-declared and unrelated to biological fact. The consequences of the Supreme Court’s elevation of fiction over fact are now showing themselves.

Continue reading “America Is Erasing Herself”

Guest Post by Simon Black

In early 2007, the brand new District Attorney for Milwaukee County, Wisconsin gave an interview to a local newspaper spelling out his ‘progressive’ approach to crime.

He told the reporter:

“Is there going to be an individual I divert [i.e. release back onto the street] or I put into treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”

(Actually his approach is invalidated by the data; rape, homicide, arson, aggravated assault, and other violent crime have risen dramatically in Milwaukee. His approach is clearly not working…)

Continue reading “This is a leading indicator of a civilization in decline”

Via Gen Z Conservative

This was not supposed to happen. At this point, we should not have to worry about the future of our nation. We have had 244 years to work out the kinks of this beautiful experiment. Where have we failed?

We have certainly been tested. We have faced previous insurrections, a civil war, riots, foreign terrorist attacks on our own soil, and presidential assassinations. Each time, we have rebounded, stronger than before. Why must we now fear attacks from our own citizens?

Continue reading “Why is It We Can’t Recognize Our Country Anymore?”

Guest Post by Jeff Thomas via International Man

Increasingly, both Europeans and North Americans whom I meet are expressing their concern that the social structure of their countries appears to be breaking down.

Americans and Canadians speak of people of who, for making an off-handed comment that could possibly be interpreted as racist, can lose their livelihoods as a result. In the UK, it’s worse, with people being sentenced to prison for publicly denouncing rapes of children by Muslims in UK cities.

Continue reading “The Final Blowout Sale”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

The very fine people of the Progressive Left believe many things: that men can be women (and mostly should be); that two plus two should equal how you feel, not the same darn thing every time; That “Joe Biden” is not just president but the greatest one since Barack Obama (and the 2020 election proved it). The very fine people on the Left don’t believe in a couple of things: reality and the law. This is getting to be a problem in what’s left of the USA.

Continue reading “The Very Fine People of a Civilized Society”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Questions du jour: Can the US government make itself even more untrustworthy? Has it become an enemy of the people? Just wondering. What would be worse, actually, is if we learn that American culture is untrustworthy, since politics is downstream of culture. It would be the equivalent writ large of a human personality at war with itself, unable to trust its own thoughts and actions.

Which perhaps explains the seeming psychosis raging through our society at the moment. The hallucinatory delusions of the day are exactly what you’d expect in the kind of personality undergoing a psychotic stress fracture, like the character Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s classic horror movie, Psycho. Poor Norman (or “Mister Bates,” as Hitch playfully had the other characters call him), developed the unfortunate habit of dressing up like deceased Mother and slashing to death any other female for whom Mister Bates had impure thoughts. That was the 1960s version of the Transsexual Story Hour. We’ve come a long way, baby, since those innocent days.

Continue reading “National Horror Story Hour”

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

I was born in the spring of 1939.  I was a few days shy of 5 months old when Germany invaded Poland on September 1.  The British and French governments responded to the invasion by declaring war on Germany, thus initiating World War II.

Germany always gets the blame.  Germany’s invasion of Poland is always said to be the event that triggered World War II, never the British and French declaration of war on Germany.  This is because the victors write the history.

Continue reading “I Have Outlived My Country”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

We’ve been tapping maples this past week; installing mainlines, fixing harnesses or fitting lids. The drilling, the tap, tap, tapping of spiles into maples, the plonk, plonk, plonk of each drop falling into the antique bucket, one after another, outdoors in the freezing blue air under an azure sky.

While most people scurry from one building to another faces swathed in cover, in the greater world outside, we work shoulder to shoulder with our friends and family, each one busy with a task, moving with purpose from tree to tree, one grove to the next, across the ice polished snowbanks.

Continue reading “KEEP TAPPING”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

“Here is a rule to remember in the future when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not ‘This is misfortune’, but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune.’” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Somewhere between elementary school and fifth grade my parents bought a townhouse in a brand-new community built on a former farm field in East Windsor. The development was named Twin Rivers and it sat about a half a mile from Exit 8 of the New Jersey Turnpike. The project was designed to capitalize on commuters to NYC fifty miles to the north and young Boomer families fleeing the urban jungle of the late 1960’s.

The word townhouse makes it sound sophisticated, but it was just a plywood box in a long string of plywood boxes banged out under the Mid-Atlantic sun by the last of the old-school tradesmen that dominated the sprawl of suburbia; Italian masons, Polish plumbers, Piney carpenters. In the field in front of my house they built a monstrosity of a school, a squatting, gold, geodesic dome fixed to the ground like a cross between a UFO and a Bucky Fuller fever dream.

Continue reading “The Ship of Theseus”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Don’t the Democrats know that we can do better than mail-in voting? How about a national show of hands? Say, around four p.m. on Tuesday, November 3 — just after lunch for west coasters and after nappy-time back east? Ready, set… hands up (don’t shoot!). Or maybe just a voice vote: all in favor of blank, say aye…. Wouldn’t that be the most heartwarming moment since Michael Jackson led the all-star chorus of We Are the World?

Continue reading “A Week of Wonders and Marvels”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

The NFAC warriors on the march, led by Grand Master Jay.

On our way to becoming a nation of hobos, the Democratic Party’s Antifa shock troops brought out the lethal weapons this weekend, hoping to provoke a Kent State 2.0 type bloodbath that would clinch the election for the mummified remains of Joe Biden, currently reposing in his basement sepulcher. How’d that work out?

In Louisville, Saturday, just after lunchtime, the self-styled Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC) was mustering for action and “inspecting firearms” (according to NFAC comandante Grand Master Jay) when one of said weapons accidently discharged and mowed down three NFAC warriors — nicely demonstrating the hazards of fucking around with loaded weapons.

Continue reading “The Insane Leading the Blind”