Thursday, December 12, 2013

Kunstler on the Federal Reserve, etc.

Another Kunstler column on the Federal Reserve and financial shananigans.

Belatedly posted because Kunstler.com was down Monday, I was busy cleaning Tuesday, and had a molar extracted on Wednesday morning, from which procedure I had to rest the remainder of the day.

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I got the December issue of Harper's, which wasn't that special. There was a good "Easy Chair" column by Thomas Frank on Chicago: once a gritty working-class city that is now "home to the largest concentration of hipsters outside Brooklyn." But "beyond the perimeter of the nicer neighborhoods ... Chicago now leads the nation in homicides; just before my last visit, the crime wave crested in a South Side park, where a gunman unloaded his semiautomatic rifle into a group of kids playing basketball, hiting thirteen of them. Similar acts were occurring almost daily." (Frank doesn't mention that many Chicagoans refer to their city as "Chiraq", pronounced like eye-rack.) And a somewhat interesting account by Colson Whitehead of a 1991 road trip to Las Vegas he and two friends took. The best part of the article was the comparison of Vegas to a jellyfish flopping on the desert floor. Otherwise a standard contrarian piece proclaiming that the best thing about Vegas is its tackiness.

Compared with Joyce Carol Oates's recent story, "I Can Say Many Nice Things" by Ben Marcus was a letdown: a workshop-fiction kind of story about a fiction workshop held on a cruise ship. The author's new book will be published by Knopf next month. Based on what I've read, I don't think I'm missing much.

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