This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Lifting The Fog Of Pretense
Submitted by James H Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
There are times when events are in charge, not personalities. The unseen forces that hold the affairs of nations and economies in equilibrium dissolve, particles fly out of the many centers, and things heat up toward criticality.
Glance in the rear-view mirror and say goodbye to the Era of Wishful Thinking. This was the time when the USA was inspired by its Master Wish: to be able to keep driving to Wal-Mart forever. Looked at closely, the contemporary idea of Utopia was always a shabby package. On one side, all the pointless driving. For most Americans it was nothing like the TV advertising fantasy of a lone luxury car plying a coastal highway in low, golden light. More like being stuck near the junction of I-55 and I-90 in Chicago at rush hour in July in an overheating Dodge Grand Caravan with three screaming ADD kids whose smart phone batteries just died — plus your fiercely over-filled bladder and no empty Snapple bottle to resort to.
On the other side, there’s the Wal-Mart part: the unbelievable cornucopia of insanely cheap plastic goodies, like, somewhere in the 1990s America became one giant loading dock for nearly free stuff. Wasn’t that fun? Now, everybody has got the full rig, from the flatscreen to the salad shooter, but we’re tired of seeing Kim Kardashian’s booty, and nobody really liked salad, even when you could shoot the stuff into a bowl. The thrill is gone, and so is the paycheck that was your ticket to the orgy. It’s especially gloomy over in the food department, where the boxes of Lucky Charms are suddenly half the weight and twice the price. And that was going to be the family dinner! Must be Nature’s way of telling you it’s time for a new tattoo.
In this weird liminal time since the so-called Crash of 2008 leadership has depended on lies and subterfuges to prop up the illusion of resilience. One biggie is the shale oil revolution, kind of a national parlor trick to wow the multitudes for a long enough moment to convince them that their troubles with the national energy supply are over. Even people paid to think were hosed on this one. Wait until they discover that the shale oil producers have never made a buck producing shale oil, only on the sale of leases and real estate to “greater fools” and creaming off the froth of the complex junk financing deals behind their exertions. Expect that mirage to dissipate in the next 24 months, perhaps sooner if the price of oil keeps sinking toward the sub $90-a-barrel level, where there’s no economically rational reason to bother drilling and fracking.
The lies, frauds, and cons run between the axis of Wall Street and Washington had two fatal consequences with still-lagging effects. 1) They destroyed the capacity for markets to establish the real price of anything - rendering markets useless. 2). They disabled capital formation to the degree that we might not have the money to rebuild an economy to replace the “financialized” matrix of rackets that currently pretends to function. A lot of observers like myself have been waiting for the moment when the fog of pretense lifts and exposes all the broken machinery within. We may be so close now that you can smell it.
Change is in the air, literally, as we wake this still-summer morning with the thermometer so low you wish the furnace was prepped and ready to run. Much is in the air, too, where the news of events near and far provoke swirls of transformation in the disposition of people, nations, and affairs. Who would have guessed a few years ago how nervous Scotland would make the whole Western world? The sharpies at the Pentagon, and the White House, and the CIA may be waiting with indigestion and palpitations for the next ISIS decapitation video, but maybe you have to wonder instead which of five thousand shopping malls across this land will be visited by black-flagged desperados armed with automatic rifles and RPG’s.
Finally, there are the people themselves of this sclerotic polity: too dumb and distracted to help themselves, full of inchoate grievance and resentment, tending ever deeper into darkness. Welcome to the season of the witch in the Era of Bad Feeling. Somewhere “out there” there is a light of virtue waiting for us, but we are a long way from finding our way to it.
- 11873 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -


Light of virtue?
Yeah, that light near the end of the tunnel is a freight train coming at us
Or moar like the blinding flash of a nuke
Yup, its the blinding flash of a nuke
Just did a podcast with Jim 20 minutes ago. He is a sharp mother f***er. (Don't make me explain the asterisks you d**b sh**.)
** **** ******** ** *******
SPY DOWN 0.1%
Move on nothing to see here
.
Agreed.
Will the podcast appear on his site or somewhere else?
BEHOLD...PEAK IDIOCY IS UPON US!
LOL, who needs TV when you got entertainment like this, this is why i love ZH.
No doubt, you can smell the collapse getting closer.....
your statement rings true. I used to watch tv and surf, including zero. Along the way I just started turning off, then leaving off, the tv. Here I sit today reading zero and the tv is a black ignorant statue on a podium, across the room. It sits silent as I forget it's presence.
Interestingly, even my wife is leaving the tv off these days. That is a profound development.
"...and no empty Snapple bottle to resort to."
Never had to do that, but it made a great car spittoon when I dipped Skoal.
It must be a short trip from WalMart to the dumpster in my apartment complex from what I see in it.
Somewhere “out there” there is a light of virtue waiting for us, but we are a long way from finding our way to it.
The light was last seen on Q99X2
It will find its way to us soon.
If "they" attacked a mall, there would be few casualties.
pods
Damn you pods, you made me spew my coffee.
;-D
Time for a new tattoo of a salad shooter shooting Lucky Charms at Kim Kardashian's ass on a flatscreen in a minivan.
BTFD - same as last month; last year.
the fog of financial war...and of MIC wars...now intermix.
One curtain will replace the other and vice-versa.
Like in the 1930s.
Only difference : Oppenheimer's toy is a bitch to play with and Einstein's remark : same policies produce same results, a recurrent reminder that if you scratch where you itch the rash progresses...
Meet the new boss...same as the old boss
Article is spot on! Pretense, lies and manipulation of markets and data, created the entire upside move from the bottom of 2008/09. The good news is: ITS OVER! I love watching the CNBC / Bloomberg talking heads talking their book and their furious buying of dips. God, it will be so good to hear their shrieks when this spiral picks up momentum...And it will.
Only radical conspiracy theorists think that the future will be different from the present.
The present is an anomaly. It is the past we draw analog to. They who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
One of those comments that sounds thought-provoking, right up until you actually begin to think about it.
It must be tough to be Kunstler - how do you handle being so superior to everybody James?
He proudly revealed that he voted for Obama TWICE. He's not bad with fear porn but I don't trust him at all.
"Conditions are deteriorating, and the solutions proposed to date have only made things worse. Although the solution is readily available to us, powerful forces whose interests are served by continuation of the present system cling tenaciously to a monetary system that no longer has any foundation. The time at which there will be no other choice but to reject the current system entirely is fast approaching. Although that moment is unknown to us, the course that we continue to pursue will undoubtedly hurtle us into a monetary abyss that will mandate a major reform."
-Ron Paul "A Case for Gold" 1982
This could go on much longer. The wheels will certinaly come off, but it has been "imminent" my whole life. Just saying. Junk me if you must; I love Ron Paul and real money.
Real Paul, ron money.
By 'real money' do you mean Honest Money?
http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.html
Is this guy on sErious anti-depressants, or what?
this ponzi can last longer than you can stay solvent betting against it. this system will likely last as it has through several "revolutions", unveilings of the man behind the curtain. yea, the dollar will be replaced and all those who invest their dollars in real assets will do well financially while the poor get poorer. that is the way of the world so sayeth the god of economics.
The sheeple's virtue of trust was their addictive mind numbing drug.
I just shot my salad...
terrorist
It's cool. Nobody really liked it anyway.
WB, Is that something like losing your cookies?
Voldemort? wha back again???
Somebody better talk me out of buying that Farm I've had my eye on, or I'm just going to do it.
Hmmmm. Increasingly senseless fiat, or God's green Earth?
PW, I've always regretted not buying that farm. Do it now and skip the regrets 3 years from now. A watched precipice never falls but it will get you by and by.
Do it.
Then go live on it.
Even if the world doesn't fall apart soon, you will not regret the choice.
I'm out 43 years on my homestead, and it is still the best place on earth.
PW,
God's green earth has a thrill hard to describe. Bought mine 25 years ago, TV has been off since the switch from analog to digital, never missed it. 60 chickens, twelve goats, and three steer; along with both spring and fall garden ensure that there is plenty to do. Family is involved as labor is shared, and no one has a problem sleeping at night.
Won't work for someone who believes life revolves getting one of Apple's latest thingees, or Wal-Mart's junk in the trunk. But peace certainly can be found in the flight of a bird, the loping run of a red fox, or the feeding of fish in a lake. Exciting also, when you find a snake in your henhouse (golf balls work wonders on killing egg stealing snakes, they can't digest or regurgitate). The birth of a baby goat, sunset after a day of hard work, swimming in a spring; life for me could not be more glorious. I wish you well and good fortune, and the view from the precipice beats watching it.
Thanks for the brilliant replies, fellas. I won't be able to live full-time on the property, at least for a while, but just knowing it is there, and mine, will suffice for now.
I appreciate your informed comments, as I am a city slicker......more accurately a suburban slicker.
Thank you.
"Change is in the air"
Really? More hope and change?
More like 'change your underwear' when you start to see price tags after hyperinflation hits.
Thank Al, I thought I was the only one who thinks this guy is full of himself.
The light of virtue is at the end of that 1000 years of darkness Ronald Reagan spoke about. Just what ARE Amercans going to do when they get home from work, and all the box stores they used to drive to are padlocked? Maybe block parties, where we get to know our neighbors again instead of pimped up TV personalities?
If the stores ever did close, it would be a block barbeque, and guess what's for dinner?
Bankers & Politicians?
IF an agenda including truth-telling were getting planned, the powers-that-be might NOT DARE to do it soon AFTER a national election.
2). They disabled capital formation to the degree that we might not have the money to rebuild an economy to replace the “financialized” matrix of rackets that currently pretends to function.
Money has nothing to do with capital formation. Money is created by traders making trading promises and getting them certified.
These certificates (and accounting entries) are money. They are exchanged as the most desirable of items of barter. This is because they are easily carried, universally accepted, and in a properly managed Medium of Exchange, they never lose (nor gain) in value.
As the trader delivers on his promise, he returns the certificates and they are destroyed. If he DEFAULTs, certificates which remain in circulation are reclaimed by INTEREST collections of like amount. This guarantees zero INFLATION, all the time ... everywhere. The operative relation is INFLATION = DEFAULT - INTEREST.
Capitalism is a con. It forces traders to have their trading promised blessed by those holding capital (synonymous with TPTB "The Powers That Be"), before they can deliver on them. Capitalism is no different than demanding "tribute" in the olden days. And more importantly, this allows TPTB to control trade ... to their advantage. It's called the business cycle.
yeah, really not following him here
plenty of "money", but the suits get more bang for the buck (compensation based on stock appreciation ... ain't it sweet) with stock buyback/dividend than capital expenditure.
CapEx is counterproductive for MASSIVELY overbuilt and oversized firms in a world which entered degrowth a decade ago - they know everyone is dead-ass broke and will never not be dead-ass broke again. The rational move is to extract as much wealth as possible from a firm before it dies then run, not walk, away. The only excuse for CapEx would be a delusional belief that your firm will escape the biggest baddest secular economic decline ever. Well, maybe that's not so delusional for a handful of niches - firearms come to mind.
I don't eat salad all the time......but when I do, it's always from a salad gun.
subprime auto lending beginning to blow up
that will leave a pile "they" won't be able to sweep under the rug.
People are finding life a little tougher James,
They cant understand how what they have, never equals to what they need, no money, no hope, constant lies from the bosses, constant deciept from the same. They switch on the web and still see Jon Corzine roaming free while liquidating all others, obscene bail outs for abject failure, struggling to make sense of the indefensible. Money men criminals with complete imuinity, congress men bought and paid for, utter corruption totally unpunished.
Like here, where those of the highest realms of life abuse the public trust, abuse the children of those they lead, cover it up with a bought and paid for press, and as bent a law system that has ever been seen in modern times, all the while the 'Public' broadcaster knew, and even they covered it up, just the same. Bent from top to bottom eh?
Wars without end, debt doubling in just five years laid on the backs of those can afford it least, expecting us the 'People' to pay for something they didnt cause, and still it goes on James, day after day, week after week James.
And now the people know, they know it all James, thanks to the digital age, the lid can never be put back on can it?
People James, are very rightly fucked off, just look at the rising sentiment here in Europe, where is it? Its not with the establishment is it? It probably never was though in hindsight.
Our bent, corrupt, and bought out power structures caused this, not us.
The fog is, as you say lifting.
Dog fucking help them.
"They cant understand how what they have, never equals to what they need"
Then they're fucking dumbasses and even Chirst can't help them.
"Our bent, corrupt, and bought out power structures caused this, not us."
Ain't being a permanent victim grand?
Okey doke Toten,
Leave the monetary side aside,
Do you understand what these people are going to do in your name to keep this fucking facade up?
Do you understand they are going to use you and your family, including kids to keep this facade going? And you are going to war mate, they've said so.
And we give this credence do we?
Permanent victim? You are one wether you like it or not. Ask your bosses, they love it like that.
The French behaved much the same in the 1790s...revolution, hyperinflation, guillotines...same basic mind(less) thoughts....blame someone....fast.
Bah - who cares about the future? The locall Wal-Mart has ammunition back in stock. Going there to get some 9mm and a new salad shooter now!
I heard there was a background check and 15 day waiting period for salad shooters.
I do love this line...
It’s especially gloomy over in the food department, where the boxes of Lucky Charms are suddenly half the weight and twice the price. And that was going to be the family dinner! Must be Nature’s way of telling you it’s time for a new tattoo.
LMFAO
Higgs Boson
"Finally, there are the people themselves of this sclerotic polity: too dumb and distracted to help themselves, full of inchoate grievance and resentment, tending ever deeper into darkness. Welcome to the season of the witch in the Era of Bad Feeling. Somewhere “out there” there is a light of virtue waiting for us, but we are a long way from finding our way to it."...
Where oh where can we find 300 million of these talking to the old guy in diapers with the puss filled jowls minus (-) Washington D.C. which includes the 535 that don't do any of the peoples business in that inverted toilet bowl + the White House + the DoJ + the DoS and all it's associated covert agencies including the U.S. military that spy, torture and kill for it and last but not least the cesspool of lobbyist bandits that wear the knee pads and grab ankles for it?!!!
Worst part of all... As we watch Scotland vote their independence along with Catalon Spain and not far behind Northern Italy we will still be "the boil with the whitehead on top of the blackhead (Israel and U.K.) with the splinter running through all three" for the rest of the planet!
Kunstler out of the ballpark on this one!
The line between needs and wants has been erased. Everybody nowadays thinks that food comes from the supermarket and gas comes from the pumps at the convenience store. Nobody knows how the machine works they just expect it to keep spewing goodies. If something can't go on, it won't and the correction will be of biblical proportions.
Everybody nowadays thinks that food comes from the supermarket and gas comes from the pumps at the convenience store. Nobody knows how the machine works they just expect it to keep spewing goodies. If something can't go on, it won't and the correction will be of biblical proportions.
Well said KD
http://theinternetpost.net/2014/09/13/decapitation-american-style/
But but but, I want gas and I want it now, give me gas! What do you mean that machine won't pump it?! It has to!
We are going to learn the folly of having our actual necessities on a just-in-time delivery system. I have an idea of what it takes to produce and preserve food. Making clothing from scratch the old way? I've got the concept down, but that shit looks mind bogglingy tedious, even if you have a kickass spinning wheel and a really nice loom, and I've never actually done it. How about things like soap? Simple medicines such as asprin? Toilet paper?
JIT cannot go on forever, and when it stops, a lot of people are going to get hit right between the eyes with the fact that they don't know how to survive without it and they will be fucked. Any congress critter that has passed a bill that furthers globalism, and thus makes us more dependant on JIT, will deserve to have his or her heads taken when it all stops. What's good for business today is bad for tomorrow.
I sure hope things don't devolve to the extent you suggest, which is basically a pre-industrial existence. My view is that is an extremely low order of probability. More likely is a much more decentralized society yet still one with electricity, tech, etc. We will have to become more self-reliant or locally-reliant. Nope, we won't have grapes, cherries and watermelons from Chile in January, and that's a good thing in my opinion.
Still, an extended time of shortages as JIT breaks down means building a year or two stockpile of as many items as practical sure seems prudent. Whatever is stocked can be used whether the crisis occurs or not. Since you brought up soap, I've figured out how much I go through in a month and really it's not difficult or even that expensive to build a 2 year stash of soap, shampoo, toothpaste, tooth brushes, razor blades (double plus good) -- basically toiletries and hygiene products. Don't even need a lot of space to create that. Prescription drugs....if using those, getting caught with your pants down can be a real problem, especially as many medicines are manufacturfed ONLY in China or abroad. I've resorted to "losing" bottles to grab extra refills from my medical providers as when I told them I wanted extra in case of supply disruption they refused my requests.
You are so correct about what it takes to produce and preserve food. It's a huge effort. That's why I don't focus on utter self-reliance but assume and depend on functional communities and divisions of labor, even if on a much smaller and localized basis. The rise of entrepreneurship from the ashes of "oligarchial capitalism".
So Versailles wasn't "blurring the line" at a time when the majority of French people were stunted, diseased, malnourished, dirt poor, and living in hovels?
Brazilian slavemasters weren't "blurring the line" when they preferred to be carried in litters by their slaves than ride in horse-drawn carriages?
Romans weren't "blurring the line" when they routinely ate so much that induced emesis was necessary?
There is no line, there's just what you've been lucky enough to be able to afford during your lifetime.
"They destroyed the capacity for markets to establish the real price of anything - rendering markets useless. 2). They disabled capital formation to the degree that we might not have the money to rebuild an economy to replace the “financialized” matrix of rackets that currently pretends to function."
Out of the above post, this is by far the most important points made! Markets do not exist in a real sense, without markets there is no price discovery, so what real capital there is flows into useless directions. And with endless ZIRP, there is no reason for saving, or as it is called "Real Capital Formation". Spend less than you earn and bank the rest for future needs. That is how real capitalism works, the kind that built America from nothing to what it was a few decades ago.
All this fucking over of freedom, capitalism and free markets has been carried out by just the people who claim to be free enterpise champions!!! Can you believe it, all they do is talk freedom, free markets, growth, capitalism, and THEY have flushed that whole system down the toilet. Replaced with Goldman Sachs style skimming machines. 80% of all trades on wall-street are computer programs, robot traders. Capital formation? Doesn't happen. Debt creation is now the engine to drive this fake economy. When debt creation replaces Capital formation, then you know our leaders are fucking liars and died in teh wool communists, But clever communists, they support corporations they don't attack them. By this, they turn corporate America into the new communist elites. A backdoor way to create a socialism for the rich and dog eat fucking dog free for fight for a crust of bread capitalism for the workers.
Welcome to the United States of Communist Liars America.
See other article on propaganda. (I know you already did)
Fuck you James. I happen to *like* salad.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
As one of my chief finanacial advisors, Tom Petty, says...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMyCa35_mOg
is the hardest part...
The study of economics is often baffling and confusing. Many economic theories exist but many are full of holes and conundrums. Much of how people react to a policy may have to do with timing and perception instead of reality. Economics is full of loops that feed back upon themselves and unexpected pitfalls based on expectations.
All this can become quite abstract. Economist predict events that never tend to unfold as expected or planned. Many of the "modern monetary theories" in use today have not been proven over time, but reflect an attitude that we can control economic cycles better than in the past. More on how few people really understand this very important part of our lives in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2014/03/few-people-really-understand-econ...
"the next ISIS decapitation video"
that was a fraud. sotloff was a mossad hack. isis and isil are run by mossad, so sotloff is still alive. rita katz, the mossad slut who produced all of the rotflmao videos of osama bin laden who died 12/15/2001, probably produced the sotloff video. pure fantasy by the people who bring you genocide