Differing visions for the post-fossil fuel future at recent Oberlin conference. https://t.co/Zf3XBBpxpV

— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) October 13, 2016

Peak Oil Review: A Midweek Update - 14th October 2016 https://t.co/3vemSLHedq (@buildresilience)

— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) October 13, 2016

Today on #TheReal from @EmpireFOX it's @BREZOFFICIAL !!! pic.twitter.com/ycECReYBF6

— Loni Love (@LoniLove) October 7, 2016

"He’s not Barack Obama, is he?" This is about Trump's ill-fitting suits, but that line sums up 2016 perfectly.https://t.co/3w8W761cUj

— Wendy Felton (@wendymfelton) October 13, 2016

Wendy Williams the other day noted his tie is too long.

Front 242, "Masterhit."

Front 242, "Circling Overhead."

Mazzy Star, "Halah."

Steve Angello, "KNAS."

Inspiral Carpets: "This Is How It Feels."

Kunstler: Wounded Elephant.

Kunstler: Wounded Elephant.

Last night’s debate raises some interesting questions, such as: would the Romans have elected Caligula if given the chance to vote? Can the Republican party recover from Donald Trump? If the party poobahs “pull the plug” on Trump, as some are threatening to do (that is, cut off funds to his campaign), will they go down the drain with him anyway? Is the USA a nation or just the world’s biggest comedy club? Where is the Deep State when you really need it?

That odor wafting across the land is the smell of Republicans with their hair on fire. Yet the gloat of astonishment on Hillary’s face as she witnesses the Queeg-like crack-up of her rival will eventually fade as she discerns the wreckage awaiting her in the oval office. Weep for your country!

The only good to come out of this sordid election is the certainty that a lot of political debris will be swept away in the Fourth Turning [Link added by me.--P.Z.] underway. Out of the miasma of idiocy and posture that is this election campaign, the hard-edged realities of our time will emerge and the TV audience will come to the stark recognition that it is not just another mere entertainment.

The other major nations of the world are not so much ganging up on America, as Hillary would have it, but reasonably attempting to ring-fence the mad bull that the USA has become — as the two candidates vie to start World War Three with China and Russia respectively. The last resort of the scoundrels in today’s version of the “yellow press” is to blame Russia for attempting to meddle in our election. War, children, it’s just a shot away.

It is getting to be too late to sort out all the confusion sown by this horrific campaign. From here on its really more a matter of the dust settling. In background of it all looms the train-wreck of global finance, which will be the true determinant of what the American people will have to do in the years ahead. During the weeks of the election distraction, the European banks struggle to conceal their insolvency while the politicians of Euro-land desperately try to paper over the cracks in these fracturing institutions. Few can tell what is actually happening in China’s banking system, but it’s sending out ominous tremors that are hard to ignore. But be sure it is all daisy-chained right into Wall Street and the US banks. The potential for wrecking markets and currencies around the world is extreme at this moment. It may only be a matter of whether it happens before or after the election.

Then we’ll see what happens when financial institutions can’t trust each other. Trade stops. Economies crumble. Pretenses evaporate. If it gets bad enough, the shelves of the supermarkets go bare in three days and you’re living in a permanent hurricane disaster without the wind and rain. Believe me, that will be bad enough. Hillary, if elected, will not get to play FDR-2. Rather, she’ll be stuck in the role of Hoover, the Return, presiding over a freight elevator of an economy with a broken cable. Expect problems with the US dollar. Expect “emergency” actions. Expect the unintended consequences of those actions.

If there is one outstanding upshot of these “debates” it must be their staggering failure to reassure the American public that they can expect effective leadership through the hardships ahead. There must be many others out there like myself wondering who will emerge from the rubble? I suspect it will be someone we haven’t heard of before, just as Bonaparte was unheard of in France in 1792. This is not entirely a nation of clowns, though it feels like that lately. [All emphases mine.--P.Z.]

Some Links on Russia

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov speaks on relations between his country and the West.

#SYRIA Report of the Russian Centre for reconciliation of opposing sides(October 9) https://t.co/os9y7sUIsk pic.twitter.com/IDhJyFy5NV

— Минобороны России (@mod_russia) October 9, 2016

Putin on current US-Russian confrontation. "This isn't about Syria. It began with Yugoslavia." I.e. this was years/decades in the making. https://t.co/FTMFQcSm06

— Roland Oliphant (@RolandOliphant) October 16, 2016

Today's Debate

My twitter feed is a mix of Republicans and Democrats. Those two camps are apparently watching two different debates.

— George Hawley (@georgehawleyUA) October 10, 2016

(I don't know if he follows Nall and Coulter. I'm only citing them as examples of the disparate response to the debate, which I am watching, actually, while I work.)

Can this team not find the Sudafed?

— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) October 10, 2016

NO MODERATORS AT NEXT DEBATE!

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) October 10, 2016

Work Ahead

Another debate between Clinton and Trump airs tomorrow at three, Hawaii time. I might watch, or not. What I see is lots of work, of all kinds, that everyone has to do. One thing I've done the last few months is weed and mulch some of our potted plants, almost every day. It's as simple as picking up fallen leaves and putting them in the pots to decay and enrich the soil. One day I pulled out stands of ferns that were choking one of the plants. They're doing nicely, and I know I have to take and post some photos of them.

Another major project is decluttering. The task of going through books, CDs, etc. and donating them, trading them in at the used-book store. I see others trying to pare down (hello, Hattie). Part of this: much too much stuff. And realizing that a great deal of content can be found online, or at the library.

The other work that everyone should do is learning about civics, history, current events. Again, a wealth of information is online, and at the library. And talk to others. Not everyone will be deeply involved in politics, but everyone should have at least a basic understanding of these subjects.

I enjoy work, actually. (And I like vegetables, too!) If I weren't busy with many other things, I'd post here daily with Nallian fluency.

Resort Architecture

With all the tawdriness in the news, let us look at nice things:

Binz, the largest resort on the German island of Rügen.

Resort architecture "or Bäder architecture (German: Bäderarchitektur) is an architectural style that is especially characteristic of spas and seaside resorts on the German Baltic coast."

Putting an End to "At the End of the Day."

Dailywritingtips.com: At the end of the day.

What the hell is a US Senator doing telling someone they "aren't welcome" to travel freely? https://t.co/oWAXPZ6BIJ

— Justin Raimondo (@JustinRaimondo) October 6, 2016

This is what it's like to live in an ideological bubble. https://t.co/Rh5buXS1mz

— Justin Raimondo (@JustinRaimondo) October 5, 2016

I said months ago that Weld is a stalking horse for Hillary, and I was right: https://t.co/oW5QBWAY5B https://t.co/PLZWa1H4Y9

— Justin Raimondo (@JustinRaimondo) October 5, 2016

Giuliani & Ailes in Cleveland theater district today. Is it a performance-art tableau vivant of Thomas Nast, George Grosz or Victor Juhasz? pic.twitter.com/yjb7xWKLVH

— Kurt Andersen (@KBAndersen) October 4, 2016

The Emerging Megaregions

By IrvingPlNYC (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons


Arizona Sun Corridor
Cascadia
Front Range
Wasatch Front (could merge with the Front Range)
Northern California
Southern California
Texas Triangle
Great Lakes
Gulf Coast
Florida
Piedmont Atlantic
Northeast

Proyect vs. Blumenthal

Get your popcorn.

Louis Proyect: "Max Blumenthal Follows Ben Norton Down the Bloody Primrose Path."

We'll see if Blumenthal replies to Proyect. Though he concedes anti-anti-Assadism has been "confined to marginal websites, including some very unsavory ones."

The fear factor is why analysis challenging regime change has been largely confined to marginal websites, including some very unsavory ones

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 3, 2016

Update: He does, sort of.

Cheer on Al-Nusra and bash the left for failing to do the same https://t.co/m6WVl1TvWh #WokeSyriaHandbook

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 3, 2016

Kunstler: Sizing Up the Endgame.

Kunstler announces he'll vote for Hillary, but he's not with her, and never will be with her.

Kunstler: Sizing Up the Endgame.

All Hillary had to do last week was show up and stand at a podium for ninety minutes without swooning while Donald Trump barked and grunted his way through the half-assed press conference we like to call a “debate.” It was all I could do to keep watching the nauseating spectacle. It made you want to reach out and whap your TV upside its head, or maybe just shoot the fucker, like Elvis used to do.

The torment of who or what to vote for has become unbearable. I’d considered casting mine for Johnson / Weld, until Gary Johnson demonstrated that the front end of his brain is missing. Aleppo? Wasn’t he one of the Marx Brothers? I sense that Jill Stein of the Green Party is more Social Justice Warrior than EcoWarrior, and the last thing I want is for the rest of America to become one big college campus rife with trigger warnings and micro-aggression persecutions. Vote for Trump? Not if you chained me to the back bumper of a Toyota Landcruiser and dragged me over six miles of broken light bulbs. Hillary? Make that nine miles, and throw down some carpet tacks.

But wait a minute…! Here’s something to consider: a proposition put out by David McAlvany on his podcast last week: To Understand Election 2016 You Have to See 2020. (The new podcast is posted on Wednesdays, so to listen after Oct 5 you’ll have to click back a week.) The idea is that the winner of the presidential election is sure to be the biggest loser because the global economy is in the process of tanking, Long Emergency style, and the global finance system is going down with it. Whoever presides over this fiasco from the White House is going to be a bigger bag-holder than old Herbert Hoover in 1929.

The salutary part of the story is that such an epochal crack-up will sweep the establishment out of power. In the present case, this means discrediting the crony-capitalist, revolving-door grifters of the Wall Street / Washington axis, plus the neo-con military empire-builders bent on starting World War Three for profit, plus the economic central planners of the Federal Reserve whose desperate meddlings have nearly destroyed the necessary operations and meaning of money. And the cherries on top to get thrown out with the rest of this giant shit sundae would be the campus cultural Maoists. In short, vote for Hillary and let history flush them all out of the system.

A vote for Trump would let the aforesaid villains and bunglers off the hook because supposedly Trump represents free market business interests, and if he got elected they would be blamed for the economic and financial cataclysm which has been in motion for going on for two decades — and has accelerated mightily under the genial Obama. Whatever else you might say about free markets, had they been allowed to operate naturally, a lot of dead wood might have been cleared out of the financial forest by allowing failing institutions and companies to crash and burn. Instead, they were artificially propped up and hosed down with bailouts and other accounting frauds at all costs. The cost turns out to be the coherent workings of markets.

There can be little question that Hillary represents so much that has gone wrong in American public life under the Baby Boomer regime. The fact that she will be the oldest president ever at inauguration itself says a lot about the limitless cupidity of the Boomer political gen. They just don’t know when to stop. It’s history’s job to stop them now, nature’s way, by seating them at the banquet of consequences for all their poisonous cookery and quackery.

Watching these lamebrain debates, you get the impression that the folks running things, including media stars like the debate moderators, lack the slightest clue about the gathering economic storm. They are too busy reading the false weather reports posted by the Fed and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both Hillary and Trump seem to believe that we can winkle our way back to a 1962-style economy if we click our ruby slippers three times. That is not going to happen.

There are too many people on-board the planet and too few resources to keep them all going. It’s hard to say whether we might have managed the necessary contraction, say, starting back in the 1970s when the writing was on the wall and a truly honest president (one Jimmy Carter) spelled it out in plain English. We blew it, electing Ronald Reagan to enable the final feeding frenzy of the techno-industrial age.

Now it’s up to natural forces — and their galloping horsemen — to get the job done. So let us by all means throw out votes behind Hillary and let her rip so we can move on from there sooner rather than later and find new ways to remain civilized in the coming disposition of things.

And the worst thing about that memory—I cited Baudrillard. Needed it on the CV, tired of getting rejected. It felt like citing Nostradamus.. pic.twitter.com/m5EIjW0M5N

— The War Nerd (@TheWarNerd) September 29, 2016