[Ayoob]

What's the point in "whining" then? It's to make more aware so that they can prep.

Listen Ralfy,

I am not interested in the vast majority of humanity being aware of the fate that awaits them.

You shouldn't either.

The competition will be worse and your odds go way down if you bring awareness to the vast majority of humanity.

Let them stay exactly where they are.

Now that's not very nice but it is very honest.

Another way to look at it is to adopt a Jewish view of charity. When I read a description of Tzedakah if I'm spelling that right I thought well there you have it.

The first thing you take care of is make sure you're not a charity case yourself. Be productive and support yourself. Then, your wife and children. Any man who doesn't feed and clothe his children is an asshole, you have to do this. Pay your child support. Then your wife. Then your mother and father, then your brothers and sisters, and then family outside of that ring for one hop.

Then your next door neighbors on either side, other side of the block, and across the street. The way I understand it, it's sort of a shame if you don't know and look in on them from time to time. Then any organizations you may belong to, social relationships, then into the wider community that you live in.

When everybody from all of those groups is fed and clothed and housed, and everybody has a book to read and a box of band aids, and everybody has a job if they want/need one, which will NEVER FUCKING HAPPEN because the poor will always be among you, THEN you look past ALL THOSE PEOPLE and find SOMEBODY ELSE to help.

[ralfy]

When more are prepared, incidences of conflict may decrease.

[Plantagenet]

Its such a pleasure to find myself agreeing with every line of Kunstler's latest screed.

is-thinking-cancelled

I especially liked it when he called General Flynn "American's Dreyfus."

The railroading of Dreyfus by the French establishment and the French newspapers is a good analogy to the railroading of General Flynn by the American liberal establishment in DC and the American liberal mass media.

The US has gone Orwellian.....thinking is now cancelled right along with everything else the leftwing "cancel culture" is cancelling.

All we can do is wait for Joe Biden.......senile decrepit old Joe Biden.......to come along and fix things.

Except we all know that Joe ain't going to fix nothing. He's just a placeholder for the leftwing woke VP he selects, and Joe will be swept away as soon as it can be decently by done after the Ds take total control of DC , and the total victory of the leftwing Ds and the woke cancel culture will then be complete.

Cheers!

[Tanada]

Debate Extra — A Ghastly Spectacle

Ol’ White Joe Biden showed up last night after all, along with an executive officer of government known here as the Golden Golem of Greatness, a.k.a. President Donald Trump. Mr. Trump demonstrated that he is not a politician while Mr. Biden proved that a politician is exactly what he is… or was.

Mr. Trump went mad dog from the start, suggesting that either he was poorly prepared by his staff, or he was so pissed off after four years of unsporting (and likely illegal) harassment from the press, the elected opposition, and the permanent bureaucracy that he could not control his temper. It came off as un-presidential. That might turn out to be not the detriment it seemed — with conventional politics in such disfavor — but the spectacle was pretty hard to watch. Mr. Biden gave a fairly standard performance of a presidential candidate in a debate, but that’s all it was since he managed to contradict or renounce most of his party’s platform as well as his own previous policy utterances, such as whether or not he backed the “Green New Deal.”

And then there was “moderator” Mike Wallace who frequently flew to Mr. Biden’s rescue when the Democrat got into a jam. For instance, after introducing the issue of The New York Times’s sketchy reporting of the president’s taxes, Mr. Wallace halted any discussion of the Biden family’s awesome income stream from Ukraine, China, and Russia, amounting to many millions of dollars, during his terms as vice-president. Or when Mr. Biden denied that his son, Hunter, had been dishonorably discharged from the Navy for drug use.

If Mr. Biden was stoked on amphetamines, someone should have slipped half a milligram of Xanax into the president’s pre-debate diet Coke. Had Mr. Trump remained calm and self-possessed, there would have been a high probability of Mr. Biden simply talking himself into a muddle of verbal applesauce by the halfway mark. Instead, it was the president who was so keyed-up, he could barely articulate even easy debating points — the long-proven lie about his “fine people” remark around the Charlottesville Riot… the gross dereliction of Democratic Party mayors and governors who support and abet riot, looting, arson, and murder… Mr. Biden’s own confused pronouncements about further Covid-19 lock-downs and calling Mr. Trump’s February halt of Chinese air traffic “racist”… the president’s shut-down last week of the insane “critical race theory” trainings in government agencies and companies doing business with them… the arrant attempt to sow fraud and disorder with mail-in voting… and the practically breaking news of the Obama Team colluding with Hillary Clinton’s RussiaGate set-up from the start….The president blew those opportunities to be clear when Mr. Wallace was not stepping on him.

Few failed to notice that the tenor of the debate matched exactly the distempered public mood of the day. Mr. Trump’s wild swerves of choler are a match for actions like Senate Minority Leader’s peevish refusal to even meet with SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett or Woke Boston Univeristy Prof. Ibram X. Kendi’s psychotic lessons on How to Be an Antiracist (by persecuting white people) or the loosing of joint Antifa / BLM mobs on small businesses and private homes across America. These are considered normal and okay in these opening innings of the long emergency. Mr. Trump’s own bitter exasperation is of a piece with all that.

I have no idea how it will play with the voters. My own position remains as prior the debate: that the Democratic Party is an even greater threat to the country than a fiercely pissed off Donald Trump. It remains to be seen how many voters are equally pissed off at the Democratic Party as represented by its untoward candidate for president, Mr. Biden, the ghost of the Obama administration.

Kunstler

[jedrider]

Mr. Trump went mad dog from the start, suggesting that either he was poorly prepared by his staff, or he was so pissed off after four years of unsporting (and likely illegal) harassment from the press, the elected opposition, and the permanent bureaucracy that he could not control his temper.

Playing the victim card again, when it is time he should be playing the adult card.

Kunstler was once a prophet. Now is he merely a morally impoverished soul lashing out on the world, just like Trump is.

[REAL Green]

This article is too long to post and too good to dissect so read it if you are uncomfortable with what is happening now in the American body politic. Somehow a new liberalism must be reawakened. One based on coexistence not cancel. Academia, Science, and big business are pursuing woke for a power motive not for the truth. The masses are being fed ideological Kool-Aid as foot soldier for their power impulse. This corruption and destruction is far worse than Trump populism plus the woke are mislabeling Trumps populism as the evil of the day. It is an enemy being pumped up into something far worse than reality. The modern liberal is a dead man walking. He is killing himself with a suicide of his true self for motives that are contrary to true liberalism.

“Last Round-up at the Wokester Corral”
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation ... er-corral/

"I have some questions for former friends who have dumped me on account of my support for Mr. Trump’s re-election — which is mostly a vote to prevent the Democratic Party and its fellow travelers from running the government. On the whole, these former friends are college-educated, mature in experience, and cultured. Some of them are well-acquainted with history, which is to say, they ought to know better than to support the obviously illiberal motives of the political Left."

[Ibon]

"I have some questions for former friends who have dumped me on account of my support for Mr. Trump’s re-election — which is mostly a vote to prevent the Democratic Party and its fellow travelers from running the government. On the whole, these former friends are college-educated, mature in experience, and cultured. Some of them are well-acquainted with history, which is to say, they ought to know better than to support the obviously illiberal motives of the political Left."

Perhaps your former friends avoid you not because they don't agree but rather because your monotonous singular message sounds like a car alarm that is left to blast all night in a quiet neighborhood until some neighbor puts a brick through the window to shut it off.

[REAL Green]

Perhaps your former friends avoid you not because they don't agree but rather because your monotonous singular message sounds like a car alarm that is left to blast all night in a quiet neighborhood until some neighbor puts a brick through the window to shut it off.

Ah, Ibon that was Kunstler speaking not REAL Green. Quit being dishonest I would think somebody like you would be above that.

I generally don't talk politics in my local. I live REAL Green which means yielding to greater forces. If I talk politics it is with self-righteous woke extremist here on this obscure forum. It may be possible the brainwashing and indoctrination with our forum woke liberals might be improved on by honesty of science and reason. Most of the time it is not becuase these extremist are set in their ways and generally can't be reformed. Yea, I am pointing the finger at me-too. I am set in my ways but as a traditional green liberal that lives green and not an AdamEV type I am adapting as needed to the clear and present danger of extremist Marxism of the radical left. Bricks fly both ways. Maybe that is dangerous for people like you in glass houses.

[ralfy]

That's why it's called a "long emergency."

[AdamB]

That's why it's called a "long emergency."

Well, that is a Kunstler phrase. He imagined the world would end on Y2K and then there would be an emergency. No emergency showed up. There are reasons you don't pay attention to theater majors when it comes to technical topics, or religious nutcases looking for father figures in palm readers.

[Tanada]

November 2020



Architect Sir David Adjaye becomes the first back-to-back winner (Oct, Nov) at the Eyesore of the Month with this unfortunate and misconceived humdinger for lower Manhattan at 130 William Street. Unfortunate because this kind of residential mega-tower was the-thing-to-do just a year ago, before Covid-19 rang out around the world, and then, suddenly, well-off Manhattanites began bugging out of the city, and international travel dribbled away, and foreign capital stopped parking itself in luxury New York real estate, and the price of all that real estate started crashing, and, well, the business model for projects like this came screeching to an end. So, do you understand that this type of luxury skyscraper is now obsolete? Manhattan life won’t be roaring back to pre-Covid normality anytime soon, if ever. With the Everything Bubble ready to pop, international capital itself is about to do a colossal disappearing act. The restaurants are not just struggling, their owners are bankrupt. The hotel business is on-the-rocks. If Broadway recovers, it may be a shadow of what it used to be. Even the future of major league sports is dubious. The office towers are still mostly unoccupied. Countless citizens are still in forbearance for rents, mortgages, and other loans — meaning they will eventually have to pay back all those months they were excused from paying (ha!) — plus consider that if landlords, mortgage-holders, and other creditors don’t get paid back, insolvency thunders through the system… see where all this leads?

So, yes, unfortunate… bad timing… paradigm shifts are unforgiving.

Then there’s the baleful design of 130 William Street per se. Mr. Adjaye has uncannily come up with the instant Modernist Gothic ruin. The soot-colored, pock-marked cladding looks like the building has been exposed to acid rain for seven hundred years, and the quasi-Romanesque arched windows add to the gloomy effect. Only gargoyles are lacking. The rendering below seems incomplete without a melancholy hunchback perched at the windowsill contemplating the cruel rise-and-fall of empires and the tragic heedlessness of human beings. Wait for the building to be sold for dimes on the dollar sometime in 2022.

Shout-out to. Ray Sawhill for the nomination.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency and the four-book series of World Made By Hand novels, set in a post economic crash American future. His most recent book is Living in the Long Emergency; Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward. Jim lives on a homestead in Washington County, New. York, where he tends his garden and communes with his chickens.

Kunstler

[asg70]

The only good thing about following Kunstler these days is the schadenfreude of watching him writhe in pain over Biden winning.

Right now he's still in the denial stage.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation ... e-machine/

He'll eventually switch over to heckling every day of Biden's administration even if he tries to, ya know, actually get us off fossil fuels, unlike Trump, but Kunstler seemingly stopped caring about peak oil years ago. Now he's just another angry old white guy.