Monday, July 25, 2016
Kunstler: The Odious Versus the Tedious
You thought the Republican convention was a ghastly spectacle of royal Trumpery (and Iago-style backstabbing featuring the arch-asshole Ted Cruz)? Now comes the Democratic Annunciation of I’m-With-Her-It’s-My-Turn, the incarnation of crony corruption in our late-state Republic of Racketeering. Remember that old movie, The Exorcist, with its demonic spewage of projectile vomit. Expect something like that on the grand scale in Philadelphia this week as the Exalted-Breaker-of-Glass-Ceilings steps forth to accept her victory tiara.
The New York Times is blaming the Ruskies for releasing those thousands of new emails disclosing the perfidy of the Democratic National Committee staff in pimping for Hillary against Bernie and trafficking with the major network news operations to manage and spin things Her way — and especially to rig the electoral machinery against Sanders. How much will his supporters Feel the Bern this week in Philly as the party attempts to put on an appearance of unity (Ha!) behind HRC? How can it conceivably be possible now for Bernie to stand by her side for the crucial unity photo op? I suspect he’d rather chew his right arm off.
For my money, the Ruskies should get the Nobel Peace Prize if they were behind the email release. What higher service to democracy than to expose the anti-democratic workings of the party that affects to call itself Democratic? The sudden appearance of 20,000 smoking guns made party chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Schultz vamoose faster than you can say Debbie Wasserman Schultz, though her replacement, Donna Brazile is every inch just another blatant HRC foot-soldier. Perhaps she’ll have to orchestrate the proceedings with smoke signals or invisible ink instead of emails.
As the conventions rolled out, the aggregate miasma we call the news industry resorted to that tired trope of Optimism Versus Pessimism. Translation: you can’t handle the truth so somebody please bring out the rainbow-leaping unicorns. The American zeitgeist is a tattered garment worn by a three hundred pound tranny in a diabetic coma. It’s probably beyond salvation at this point. Somebody please put it out of its misery. Hence: Trump Versus Hillary, the odious versus the tedious, the election to end all elections.
I derived scant enlightenment listening to the Republican nominee Trump’splainin’ just how he will make America great again. As sheer oratory, Trump made Warren G. Harding look like Pericles. “I am your voice,” he bellowed to the assembled delegates dressed in costumes that made them appear like rodeo clowns from another planet. And that speech was carefully crafted by supposed professionals and mounted on a telepromper. Now Trump will go forth speaking in his usual incoherent vernacular as he vies to become the first president removed by a military coup d’état for blundering incompetence.
Hillary countered by showboating her vice-presidential pick, Tim Kaine of Virginia, America’s new high school Spanish teacher. I was only surprised that she didn’t choose Lebron James. Ambition called and Tim Kaine answered and you wonder just how he will regret picking up the phone as the campaign heats up and he has to Kaine’splain the growing allegations of Hillary’s misdeeds. Can a running mate up and quit before the election? It’s never happened before.* But Kaine might be concerned about his reputation.
So, gird your loins for the awful pageantry of the week to come: kind of a road company version of The Manchurian Candidate. The election is now between the borderline personality Mommy and the arch-narcissist Daddy for the hearts and minds of a public sore beset by the initial spasms of economic and cultural collapse. Perhaps Big Brother is waiting in the wings.
*A reader reminds me that George McGovern’s running mate in 1972, Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri, stepped aside when it became public that he’d been hospitalized for mental illness earlier in life and subjected to electroshock therapy. My bad.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Jill Stein: Likely Green Party Presidential Nominee
GREEN PARTY:
Willita Bush (Missouri)
Darryl Cherney (California)
Bill Kreml (Illinois)
Kent Mesplay (California)
Robert Milnes (New Jersey)
Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry (California)
Justin Robert Murphy (Indiana)
Rhett Smith (Texas)
Daniel White (Georgia)
Jill Stein Wins #GreenParty Primary, Calls for Inclusion in Debates https://t.co/hGVPrvG7X3 via @democracynow • #Jill2016 #JillNotHILL #GPUS
— Bexar County Greens (@BexarGreensTX) June 15, 2016
Green Party Candidate Dr. Jill Stein Says, "Bernie and I Need to Talk" https://t.co/gW6FQBGqzF #FeelTheBern #JillNitHill #RunBernieRun
— CAForBernieAndJill (@VirginiaInCal) June 15, 2016
Clinton helped create Drumpf: Green Party’s Jill Stein blasts Hillary for already implementing Donald’s policies https://t.co/c0EJ1AYQZa
— Sundown Syndrome (@sundowncyndrome) June 15, 2016
Why Are Environmental Groups Ignoring Jill Stein? @farronbalanced https://t.co/C9ViCoavnL
— Ring of Fire Radio (@ringoffireradio) June 15, 2016
Dr. Jill Stein to Bernie Sanders: Run on the Green Party Ticket and Continue Your Political Revolution @drjillsteinhttps://t.co/9sWjnFIAU6
— #ForThePeople (@BernieVolunteer) June 14, 2016
Reason magazine: "Green Party Candidate Jill Stein Says Hillary Clinton Could Be Worse Than Donald Trump".
Monday, June 06, 2016
Kunstler: Nausea Rising.
Dear Patron,
As you may know, http://Kunstler.com is currently under an aggressive Denial of Service (DoS) attack. My web and server technicians are working to get the website and blog back up and live soon (though it's going to cost a pretty penny). In the meantime, here is today's blog. Please share this with any of your CFN friends so they don't miss out. Thank you for your continued support. -- JHK
Nausea Rising
Considering that the 2016 election looks like a Dark Age puppet show — Pantalone and La Signora smacking each other with dildos — we forget this spectacle is serious. Rather large matters are at stake, such as the continuity of governance, the legitimacy of the two major political parties, the credibility of our financial arrangements, perhaps even the durability of the nation as a united polity.
Most of the deliberate comedy comes from Donald Trump, whose super-long dangling necktie looks like it was designed for laughs by the Commedia dell'Arte prop department, not to mention the hair, which I have maintained for many years is actually a wolverine living on top of Trump’s head. Trump certainly represents a large and valid strain of sentiment in the zeitgeist — the frustration of many ordinary citizens at government-sponsored racketeering that is shoving them into pauperdom. But his utterances against all that are so childish and disordered that he de-legitimates his own mission every time he opens his mouth.
Hillary delivers her laughs mostly deadpan, for instance her Sunday morning ABC interview with the old 1992 Clinton “War Room” hand George Stephanopoulos, who grilled the Flying Reptile rather mercilessly over the recent report from the State Department Inspector General that said she was “not allowed” to use the private email server no, ifs, ands, or buts. As she struggled to deflect the question, the “uh”s started to stipple her vapid evasions like holes punched in a life raft. It was fun watching her sink, uh, uh, uh, gurgle gurgle — though surely that was not the effect she was going for.
Bernie, of course, is not so funny. He’s as serious as a heart attack, which suggests that a pretty sizeable portion of the public is sick of being diverted with slapstick comedy. The old bastard is determined to give the Democratic Party poobahs some schooling in ethical procedure. I admire the heck out of that — also, his record as a demonstrably non-griftable public servant, and his stance against the racketeering-as-usual status quo — though I’m not persuaded he would be an effective president (if such a thing is even theoretically conceivable) given his nanny government disposition. But the bigshots of the DNC still have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, and it looks like ole Bernie is going to beat it out of them at Philadelphia in July. What I wonder: is he strong enough to hold Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on his lap while he applies the rod.
The people of the United States have real grievances with the way this country is being run. Last Friday’s job’s report was a humdinger: only 38,000 new jobs created in a country of over 300 million, with a whole new crop of job-seeking college grads just churned out of the diploma mills. I guess the national shortage of waiters and bartenders has finally come to an end.
What’s required, of course, is a pretty stout restructuring of the US economy. And that should be understood to be a matter of national survival. We need to step way back on every kind of giantism currently afflicting us: giant agri-biz, giant commerce (Wal Mart etc.), giant banking, giant war-making, and giant government — this last item being so larded with incompetence on top of institutional entropy that it is literally a menace to American society.
The trend on future resources and capital availability is manifestly downward, and the obvious conclusion is the need to make this economy smaller and finer. The finer part of the deal means many more distributed tasks among the population, especially in farming and commerce operations that must be done at a local level. This means more Americans working on smaller farms and more Americans working in reconstructed Main Street business, both wholesale and retail. This would also necessarily lead to a shift out of the suburban clusterfuck and the rebuilding of ten thousand forsaken American towns and smaller cities.
For the moment, many demoralized Americans may feel more comfortable playing video games, eating on SNAP cards, and watching Trump fulminate on TV, but the horizon on that is limited too. Sooner or later they will have to become un-demoralized and do something else with their lives.
The main reason I am so against the Hillary and Trump, and so ambivalent on Bernie is their inability to comprehend the scope of action actually required to avoid sheer cultural collapse.
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Maybe when I have time later I can explore this more:
Clinton cultists are weirdly depressing https://t.co/Qcd5rnYV9D
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 13, 2016
Clintons, Greenwald, Coates--all shelter their riches in LLCs while scolding the rest of us https://t.co/waRVJ5ffg5
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 13, 2016
(Mark Ames has had a problem with Ron Paul for years. But his mention of Bernie means maybe he's not totally in the tank for him.)
The only person in Congress courageous enough to vote against AUMF & unlimited wars—not Ron Paul, not Bernie Sanders https://t.co/MGzFkls1bi
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 18, 2016
---------
Politico with a good case for nominating Sanders https://t.co/IrOLUW3JX0
— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) May 16, 2016
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Doug Henwood vs. Joshua Holland
Fan mail! https://t.co/GzeSiguSPY
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) April 12, 2016
He’s coy. Says nice things about HRC but then says he’s not a supporter. https://t.co/xqgpL4BtWx
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) April 12, 2016
We'll see, smart guy. https://t.co/aEJPGvmEQ1
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) April 12, 2016
.@DougHenwood's claim that HRC would rip up the #IranDeal shows that he doesn't grasp the consequences. I doubt even Cruz would do so.
— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) April 11, 2016
Yes. I said I'd never argue with someone who votes for the Horror. Can't do it myself though. https://t.co/Hg8KCMLgHP
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) April 11, 2016
Should Sanders supporters vote for Hillary in November? @JoshuaHol & I say yes; @RaniaKhalek & @DougHenwood say no https://t.co/d2VDhywHar
— Kathleen Geier (@Kathy__Gee) April 11, 2016
.@DougHenwood That would be just bonkers. A total disaster. You're not describing a policy diff. You're calling her insane. @noahkayray
— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) April 12, 2016
Monday, April 11, 2016
Kunstler: The Mystery Revealed.
The mystery is at last revealed: why does the field of candidates for president score so uniformly low in trust, credibility, likability? Why are there no candidates of real substance, principle, and especially of real charm in this scrim of political basilisks? (Surely there are many people of substance and principle elsewhere in America — they just don’t dare seek the job at the symbolic tippy-top of this clusterfuck of faltering rackets.) [There is at least one candidate of substance and principle--Jill Stein--but she's outside the Demopublican-Republicrat duopoly.--P.Z.] The reason is that the problems are unfixable, at least not within the acceptable terms of the zeitgeist, namely: the secret wish to keep all the rackets going at all costs.
This is true, by the way, of all parties concerned from the 0.001 percent billionaire grifter class to the deluded sophomores crying for “safe spaces” in their womb-like “student life centers” to the sports-and-porn addled suburban multitudes stuck with impossible mortgage, car, and college loan debts (and, suddenly, no paying job) to the deluded Black Lives Matter mobs who have failed to notice that black lives matter least to the black people slaughtering each other over sneakers and personal slights. None of these groups really want to change anything. They actually wish to preserve their prerogatives.
The interests of the 0.001 percent are obvious: maintain those streams of unearned, rentier, notional wealth as long as possible and convert them as fast as possible into hard assets (Caribbean islands, Cézanne landscapes, gold bars) that will theoretically insulate them from the wrath of history when the center no longer holds. The poor (and ever-poorer) formerly middle class suburban debt serfs, for all their travails, can’t imagine living any other way or putting less of their dwindling capital into the Happy Motoring matrix. The Maoist Social Justice Warrior students are enjoying the surprising power and thrills of coercion, especially as directed against their simpering professors and cringing college presidents anxious to sustain the illusion that something like learning takes place in the money laundering operations of higher ed. The Black Lives Matter crowd just wants to be excused from their failure to follow standards of decent behavior and to keep mau-mauing the other ethnic groups of America for material and political tribute.
It must be obvious that the next occupant of the White House will preside over the implosion of all these arrangements since, in the immortal words of economist Herb Stein, if something can’t go on forever, it will stop. So the only individuals left seeking the position are 1) An inarticulate reality TV buffoon; 2) a war-happy evangelical maniac; 3) a narcissistic monster of entitlement whose “turn” it is to hold the country’s highest office; and 4) a valiant but quixotic self-proclaimed socialist altacocker who might have walked off the set of Welcome Back Kotter, 40th Reunion Special. These are the ones left standing halfway to the conventions. Nobody else in his, her, it, xe, or they right mind wants to be handed this schwag-bag of doom.
On Saturday, the unstoppable Democratic shoo-in Hillary lost her 7th straight contest to the only theoretically electable Vermont Don Quixote, Bernie Sanders. This was a week after it was reported in The Huff-Po that her campaign crew literally bought-and-paid for the entire 50-state smorgasbord of super-delegates who will supposedly compensate for Hillary’s inability to otherwise win votes the old-fashioned way, by ballots cast. Wonder why that didn’t make nary a ripple in the media afterward? Because this is the land where anything goes and nothing matters, and that’s really all you need to know about how things work in the USA these days.
The Republican mandarins are apparently delirious over loose cannon Donald Trump’s flagging poll numbers in the remaining primary states. Should Trump fall on his face, do you think they’ll just hand Ted Cruz the Ronald Reagan Crown-and-Scepter set. (They’d rather lock Ted in the back of a Chevy cargo van with five Mexican narcos and a chain saw.) The GOP establishment insiders are already lighting cigars in preparation for the biggest smoke-filled room in US political history, Cleveland, July 20. But what poor shmo will they have to drag to the podium to get this odious thing done? Who wants to be the guy in the Oval Office when Janet Yellen comes in some muggy DC morning and says, “Uh, sir (ma’am)… that sucker you heard was gonna go down…? Well, uh, it just did.”
As for the Dems: they are about to anoint the most unpopular candidate of our lifetimes. The BLM mobs have promised to deliver mayhem to the streets of the party conventions and don’t think they will spare Hillary in Philary, no matter how many chitlins she scarfed down last month in Carolina. The action in Philly will unleash and reveal all the deadly power of President Obama’s NSA goon squads when the militarized police put down the riots, and Hillary will be tagged guilty by association.
And that is how Kim Kardashian gets elected president.
Tuesday, February 09, 2016
Shrove Tuesday (a.k.a.Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras)
Lent commences tomorrow, so I'll prepare some food ahead of time. I see using up the various beans, spices, and similar things over the next forty days (excluding Sundays).
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Alexander Cockburn, Thou Shouldst Be Alive at This Hour...
A warts-and-all review of A Colossal Wreck by Paul Berman.
