New York
James Howard Kunstler has a new column on The Great Unwind in Europe:
“Now we get to the really fun part of the global unwind where even money flowing into supposedly safe havens turns, presto change-o, into an evaporation of wealth, and all of the lawyer-lobbyists who ever double-parked on K Street in the sorry history of this frantic era will not avail to contain the demons of their own design.
The world is waiting to re-learn an old lesson: that untruth and reality exist in an adversarial relationship. Sad to say, there isn’t enough legal infrastructure in the world, nor enough time, to pass judgment on all the lies and misrepresentations that burden the current edition of what passes for civilization. This goes especially for money matters, where currencies, certificates, and contracts actually have to represent what they purport to stand for. When those relationships fail, as they have been doing for some years now, everything falls apart.”
It seems to be finally happening in counties like Greece and Spain.
They’ve managed to kick the can down the road for several years now in Europe and America. Obama must be terrified by the possibility of history repeating itself. John McCain declared that the economy was “fundamentally sound” on the same day that Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008.
It was the collapse of Lehman Brothers that sunk the McCain campaign and put Obama in the White House. So what happens to Wall Street and the American economy if the euro collapses between June and November?
Kunstler’s new book is pissing people off:
http://www.amazon.com/Too-Much-Magic-Thinking-Technology/dp/080212030X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338829202&sr=1-1
Kunstler is not a serious thinker, nor does he have any sort of a track record in adequately predicting events through current understanding.
And, no, the Euro will not fail, not even in Greece.
Kunstler’s failed stock market predictions, while hilarious, can be weighed against ethanol, flying cars, Solyndra, “green energy,” “the green economy,” “the hydrogen economy,” switch grass, T. Boone Pickens’s windmills and natural gas powered cars, etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNC8I3Vw-JM
What happens? The Best Thing Ever, in the Modern Era. Hell breaks loose!
If you’re saying that Kunstler is no more laughably wrong than current mainstream USG thinking, I can only agree with you.
Yet, it remains the case that until and unless the Euro-American nationalist movements attain a level of political maturity to accurately assess possibilities from current conditions, that won’t help us.
If there is any constant in American politics, it is that in almost every State of the Union address from Nixon to Obama, an American president has gone on television and promised cheap and abundant energy, an end to our dependence on foreign oil, and that technology was going to solve the problem.
I’ve only been listening for about a decade now … and in all that time, while Kunstler has made hilarious failed stock market predictions, we’re still going to the pump and filling up the internal combustion engine with 87 regular unleaded, which is more expensive now than it was when I was in high school.
“Open the Gates of Hell.”
Norman paean at Hastings1066.
US Factory Orders Post Surprise Fall in April
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47674033
Spain is in ‘total emergency’, the EU in total denial
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2891185/posts
Hunter,
I suspected you’d repost the 6/4/2012 Kunstler CF nation.
Did you notice that he went from calling doom from Peak Oil to calling doom from Financial Overreach (or whatever you want to call it)? In other words, his own tribe is bringing on doom! To paraphrase Adolf, “There was only one good Jew, and he lives in upstate New York.” Read his online book “A Christmas Orphan.” there’s no question he’s an anti-semite, though he denies it himself. He’s like the guy in American beauty who hates fags, hates fags, hates fags, whoops, he tried to kiss Kevin Spacey, guess he’s a fag himself. Kunstler is allergic to conspiracy theories and objects to anti-semitism, telling us all how he’s a Jew himself, he objects and objects and objects. Someday, he’ll realize the biggest anti-semite he’s ever known is staring back at him in the mirror. A Christmas Orphan is about a boy who denies his own Manhattan Jewish parentage and runs away to Vermont. A police chief takes him in and lets him have Christmas with the family and shoot his son’s .22 rifle Christmas present, all the while finding out who he is and contacting his parents. The Jewish Manhattan parents show up, the Christmas orphan’s cover is blown, they take him home. The police chief family invites him to come back in June, but he’s not going back, because his cover is blown. They know he’s a Jew now, so he doesn’t want to go back. He wanted to not be a Jew, and if peole know him as a Jew, it’s all ruined! Ruined I tell you!
Also, World Made By Hand. Robert Earle. The magical fat woman tells him “your real name is Robert Ehrlich.” A Jew! The whole time he wasn’t a Jew, he was a regular citizen, but the magical fat woman blew his cover. Kunstler has an identity crisis — he hates Jews, even though he is one.
I’ve met the man in person, twice, at his speeches. It’s impossible (for me) to dislike him. Heck, I decided that I hated being forced to own a private car the same year that he published Geography of Nowhere, even though I didn’t know anything about his book and I didn’t hear of Kunstler until around 2004. He also doesn’t like to see white kids adopt negro behavior/clothes/mannerisms (and by extension, he doesn’t like miscegenation).
You missed the point of his last CF Nation post. It was about a (implicitly racialist) White cult in his town. He doesn’t call it that, and they don’t identify themselves as White nationalists, but go read it:
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/05/ponzis-end.html
He likes them! They are smart enough not to wave a WN’ist flag — good for them!
The other thing about Kunstler that I really like is hating the private car.
The scam that bothers me is the idea that, just to live a respectable life, I have to pay for the ownership, maintenance, insurance, taxation and fueling of a consumer good, a private automobile. According to a study by the federal gov’t, average annual cost of ownership of a private automobile is $8,000.00 8 large a year, for people who earn maybe twice that after taxes.
I recently posted at my blog an idea that any group of friends or family should designate one person to be their “driver,” either a retired or unemployed person. The designated driver gets a livery license from his state and operates a general taxi service, while giving priority to his friends and family. So if a friend or family member is driving you in his taxi service, every mile you are driven is .50 cents tax deductible. It’s too bad that taxi expense isn’t also tax deductible! But even so, having a taxi service is likely to be cheaper than a private car.
One last point. I sure hope the price of food goes way up. I sure hope people feel hunger. Then we can get on with the business of agricultural relocalization. I’m already doing it in a small way. I know a poor family that lives near me. I gave them a piece of land to use for a potato patch. They will have about 500 pounds of potatoes to get through the winter. I’ll also give them some tomatoes and peppers ansd squash from my own stash, and I’m trying to plant the idea in them of becoming food processors such as doing pickling/canning/brewing and the like.
When Americans go hungry, they will get pissed and start producing food locally in earnest. I have a book called “Forty Centuries of Agriculture” by a White man who travelled to Asia around 1900 and saw how Asians did agriculture without depleting their soil. Here’s the book on amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Farmers-Forty-Centuries-Organic-Farming/dp/0486436098/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1338846906&sr=8-2
Basically, how to wring out as much edible calories as possible out of a piece of land, year after year. it may not be “white” but we’re going to make it work for us.
I have often thought, while working my garden, “Suppose I had nothing to do but this, every day? From dawn till dusk? What would I do? What could I do?”
And I tell ya, I could do a lot. Every volunteer potato that poked through the soil, would get lovingly cultivated. Every volunteer tomato would get somewhere to go. Soil would be carefully tended and amended. Human excrement would be boiled with a Fresnel lens to kill pathogens and then applied to the soil. All urine would go on the soil. Through the winter, I would constantly have fires going over the garden areas, because ashes and biochar are very good for the soil. I would hoard seaweed if I could get it (I’m about 30 miles from the coast).
And every bit or harvestable food would be either eaten immedately or processed for storage. I would probably do some kind of grain, maybe tritical. Definitely corn. Sorghum. Sugar beets. I would definitely make booze.
“And, no, the Euro will not fail, not even in Greece.”
So we should stop crying wolf here about imminent collapse? The Controllers, whoever They are, still seem to be doing a SUPERB job of controlling the global economic “downturn.”
Digression, re: “Norman paean at Hastings 1066”: What were the Saxons singing?
And, no, the Euro will not fail, not even in Greece.
Even if it does, it’s hardly some sign of impending doom. Hunter can’t help himself. He reads so much significance into minor events because he sees only what he wants to see (what he desperately wants to believe is occurring), not because there’s a reasonable objective basis for it.
I dunno. They sang/chanted “Holy Cross” according to some sources. And: “Out!”