Posts
Israel’s Netanyahu starves 1 in 5 Gaza Children
2 hours ago
Showing posts with label Clusterfuck Nation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clusterfuck Nation. Show all posts
Friday, February 8, 2019
American Psychosis: Flag Worship
"haha north koreans are so crazy oh hold on a second i gotta sing the america song and salute my television"
Monday, December 21, 2009
Have A Clusterfuck (Nation) Christmas - Blue Christmas, James Howard Kunstler
Blue Christmas
By James Howard Kunstler
December 21, 2009As the end-credits rolled for James Cameron's new movie, Avatar, the audience burst into rowdy applause. It seemed to me that they were applauding the sheer computerized dazzlement of the show -- but in the story itself they had just watched the US suffer a humiliating defeat on a distant planet. In the final frames, American soldiers and the corporate executives they had failed to protect were shown lined up as prisoners-of-war about to embark on a death march.
More to the point, the depiction of our national character through the whole course of the film was of a thuggish, cruel, cynical, stupid, detestable, and totally corrupt people bent on the complete destruction of nature. Nice.
And the final irony was that Cameron had used theatrical technology of the latest and greatest kind to depict America's broader techno-grandiosity -- as the army's brute robotic warriors fell to the spears and arrows of the simple blue space aliens.
Altogether, it was a weird moment in entertainment history, and perhaps in the American experience per se. No doubt audiences overseas will go wild with delight, too, but perhaps with a clearer notion of what they are clapping for than the enthralled masses of zombie Americans.
The infatuation with technology, and the disgusting cockiness that goes with it (so well-captured in Avatar), is but one facet of the psychosis gripping the nation -- and by that I mean the profound detachment from reality.
We have no idea what is happening to us and, naturally, no idea of what we are going to do.
I sat in a bar Friday evening with a financial reporter from a national newspaper, trying to explain the peak oil situation and what it implied for our economy.
He had never heard it before. The relationship between energy resources and massive debt was new to him. (It also came up in conversation that he could not tell me what the Monroe Doctrine was about, despite a history degree from Yale.)
There you have a nice snapshot of the mainstream media in this land...
.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Thought for the day: "Who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending?"
{Click the thumbnails for full size images):
The American victory over manifest evil in World War Two was so total that there was no one else left on earth to compete with in making and selling useful articles...
...at least for a while. And it produced a middle class so well-paid that it could express itself in a vast spewage of plastic and leisure across the land.The human race will look back on this society with wonder and nausea for whatever remains of its time on Earth. For at least twenty years, though, this way of life has been running on fumes, inertia, and promissory notes.
The amazing thing is that these life-extension strategies worked, especially the past ten years when there was really nothing left besides a Ponzi structure of interlocked swindles and rackets.
When the time comes when we do look back to understand what went wrong, I think we'll see that the Woodstock generation went off the rails in 1980, with the election of the actor, Ronald Reagan, who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending...
[In Full at Clusterfuck Nation]
Thursday, June 11, 2009
A Not-So-Nostalgic Farewell To The Days Of Happy Motoring
Showing it's age... 1960's Esso sign, behind a former Esso station in Victoria Rd, Thornbury. (A suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Au.)
James H. Kunstler:
"Americans will never again buy as many new cars as they were able to do before 2008 on the terms that were normal until then: installment loans. Our credit system is completely broken. It choked to death on securitized debt engineered by computer magic and business school hubris. That complex of frauds and swindles coincided with the background force of peak oil, which meant, among other things, that economic growth based on ever-increasing energy resources was over, and along with it ever-increasing credit. What it boils down to now is that we can't service our debt at any level, personal, corporate, or government - and that translates into comprehensive societal bankruptcy.
The efforts of our federal government to work around this now, to cover up the "non-performing" debt and to generate the new lending necessary to keep the old system going, is a tragic exercise in futility.I'm not saying this to be a "pessimistic" grandstanding doomer pain-in-the-ass, but because I would like to see my country make more intelligent choices that would permit us to continue being civilized, to move into the next phase of our history without a horrible self-destructive convulsion.
Another consequence of the debt problem is that we won't be able to maintain the network of gold-plated highways and lesser roads that was as necessary as the cars themselves to make the motoring system work.The trouble is you have to keep gold-plating it, year after year. Traffic engineers refer to this as "level-of-service". They've learned that if the level-of-service is less than immaculate, the highways quickly enter a spiral of disintegration. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported several years ago that the condition of many highway bridges and tunnels was at the "D-minus" level, so we had already fallen far behind on a highway system that had simply grown too large to fix even when we thought we were wealthy enough to keep up. Right now, we're pretending that the "stimulus" program will carry us over long enough to resume the old method of state-and-federal spending based largely on bonding (that is, debt).
The political dimension of the collapse of motoring is the least discussed part of problem: as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves able to buy and run cars, they will feel increasingly aggrieved at the system set up to make motoring virtually mandatory for all the chores of everyday life, and their resentments will rise against the elite that can still manage to enjoy it.
Because our car-dependency is so extreme, the reaction of the dis-entitled classes is liable to be extreme and probably delusional to an extreme, too."
In Full, Lagging Recognition, James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation, (June 08 2009)
Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (2005)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
