From James Howard Kunstler

 The Gyre Widens

James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler,

18 December, 2020

The mind-numbing weirdness of Joe Biden’s insertion into the election of 2020 — like the furtive groping of an intern in a cloakroom — only signals the Democratic Party’s reckless drive to self-destruction, dragging the republic over the edge of an abyss with it. How did this hollowed-out figure of a grifting old pol find himself pretending to national leadership, and in an historic moment of crisis that goes far beyond the mere wrecking of an election? Who wanted him there so badly, and why?

My guess would be Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and John Brennan anxious to stay out of prison, heading a long list of officials present and former who committed crimes trying desperately to protect them, with accessories aplenty across the aisle. That’s what this four-year coup has been about, snowballing criminality, culminating in an orgy of blatant ballot fraud. At this fraught stage of the drama, they’re hiding behind the pretense that all the old rituals of torch-passing must be observed for the sake of decorum, and they’re mistaken.

The Biden family’s moneygrubbing exploits in foreign lands had already been revealed in the previous act of sedition, the ridiculous impeachment attempt. In that episode, it was well-established in the public record that Hunter Biden grifted more than a million dollars out of the Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, and that his father had stupidly bragged on tape about covering for him. Yet William Barr’s DOJ was already in the possession of Hunter’s laptop, chock full of evidence that Hunter was raking in way more millions from other countries, and that the loot was being distributed to his relatives. Why did they keep that from the president’s lawyers with Mr. Trump in jeopardy of being railroaded for asking Ukraine’s president to have a look at it? Would Mr. Barr say they were protecting an ongoing investigation by keeping it all secret? What a lame excuse, under the circumstances.

Just as impeachment concluded in failure, Mr. Biden got smoked in the early primaries, only to triumph mysteriously in the March Super Tuesday voting. After all, a primary is the party’s own election, and they can engineer it however they want. So, they contrived to elevate someone already criminally culpable in the mind of any citizen paying attention and capable of adding two-and-two to get four. Weird, a little bit?

But then Super Tuesday segued right into the Covid-19 virus crisis, with all the destruction to livelihoods and interruptions of normal life that ensued, and the lingering odor of the Hunter Biden story wafted away in the bleak spring zephyrs. Only to return in the fall, because the fellow who ran the computer shop where Hunter B foolishly abandoned his laptop — one John Paul Mac Isaac — became annoyed that the FBI seemed to be ignoring it, and gave a copy of the hard-drive to Rudy Giuliani, who examined its contents closely and went public with it — quite a trove of evidence, with an added frosting of selfie porn photographs showing Hunter enjoying sex and drugs. You know the rest, with the news and social media striving to bury all of it for two weeks before the election.

So, the Biden family must be strongly motivated to finish the burial by getting into the White House, installing an attorney general who will lower that casket of turpitude into a grave, and whistle the back-hoes to fill it in. And while they’re at it, dig a few more holes in the ground to bury the treasonous activities of the Clintons and Barack Obama in matters that might be labeled “Uranium One,” “Skolkovo,” “Hillary’s Emails,” “the Iran Deal,” “Fusion GPS,” “John Brennan’s 2017 IC Report,” “the Mueller Investigation,” and more. Donald Trump had to be prevented from winning a second term at all costs, lest that burden of rot get spewed into any actual courtrooms like so much spoiled lunchmeat.

The trouble is, Mr. Trump actually does have the evidence, and he intends to use it after four years of being remorselessly fucked around by his antagonists. So, the nation is at the point in this long, winding drama that has become a fight to the death and there will be no rituals of torch-passing just to keep up appearances that everything is functioning normally. Mr. Trump has the evidence of widespread, yes widespread, ballot fraud. He is the president, after all, and he has all the information. As he’s said more than once, he’s caught them all. And they know it.

Of course, the CIA and the FBI, those pillars of the Intel Community, are still trying to withhold what they can, but the president is not having it. He’s taking away the CIA’s most precious asset: its resources for making mischief on-the-ground — its airplane fleet and its armaments, handing them over to the Pentagon — reducing the CIA to the simple task of analyzing signals from the world scene. And so, the CIA has been refusing to cooperate with the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, as a last gasp to preserve its long-running illicit prerogatives. That will eventually trigger the president’s invocation of the 2018 Executive order 13848, allowing, at long last, the arrest and prosecution of many desperate characters who tried to run away with the US Government.

But probably not before the last legal avenues have been traveled: Sidney Powell’s case against the Dominion vote system in the Supreme Court, a long-shot like all the other cases that the court is loath to touch; and the business of the alternate electoral college slates to be hashed out in the House on January 6, Vice-President Mike Pence, presiding. Democrats and their coastal elite supporters are not going to like it. If they call out their Antifa troops, those feckless weenies with their hoisted cell phones and stupid umbrellas are going to be crushed this time, not indulged like three-year-olds.

The wild-card all of a sudden is what the nation will also do about the foreign actors reportedly messing around with the government’s most critical computer systems. China? Iran? Russia? They’re a match for America’s own domestic enemies, who must be neutralized first before we’re capable of dealing with outsiders. The gyre widens.

Kunstler's column

Fore !

James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler.com

9 November, 2020

Sure enough, President Donald Trump likes to get out on the golf links, which is where he was on Saturday, a most spectacularly lovely Indian Summer day following a harsh election week. Of course, his outing provoked much mirth from a gloating national news media — and, by national, I mean united in purpose — as in: look at the big fat sad golfing loser-clown we of the anointed Woke class just beat like a drum on our noble march back to power!

In their righteous raptures of perceived victory, they missed Mr. Trump’s message, which was: This is how worried I am about the final outcome of this election. He’s a daisy, our president.

The news media’s strategy here, you understand, is to overcome reality by main force — reality being that the election Joe Biden rode in on was a garbage barge of ballot fraud that is on its way to being called out. So, the newspapers and cable stations rushed to declare Mr. Biden “the winner,” with several swing states’ votes not yet completely counted, and Mr. Biden self-ratified the call, while the Woke Resistance spent the weekend partying in Covid-19 super-spreader crowds they had deplored only days earlier.

Today’s (Monday’s) New York Times is an especially rich billow of gaslight wafting over the nation, as denoted in these headlines:

The Election Is Over. The Nation’s Rifts Remain. 

President Trump Lost the Race, but Republicans Know It’s Still His Party

Biden to Restore a White House Tradition of Presidential Pets

It’s self-evident, you see. The charismatic Joe Biden is moving into the White House, pets and all (plus Hunter in the Lincoln bedroom). Done and done, signed, sealed, delivered according to us, the august Newspaper of Record! Don’t even bother complaining, ye pathetic hordes of racist, red-hatted whiners…. And, by the way, we’ll be coming after all y’all not so fine people — as signaled by Washington Post op-edster Jennifer Rubin:

That was all the news that America got this weekend while the Golden Golem of Greatness, he laid low on the golf links, his own omission to concede the election pulsating only dimly through all that gaslight, the message drowned out by the popping champagne corks and whooping in Washington’s Black Lives Matter Square, across the street from the soon-to-be fumigated White House.

Not a few reality-based observers in the alt.media pointed out that it’s not the MSM’s official duty to pick winners. That’s up to elected state legislators certifying the vote. So, what’s really going on?

The Democrats… the Resistance… “progressives,” the Left — whatever you want to call them — are much less afraid of being caught for committing election fraud than for getting nailed on a long list of previous and quite serious crimes dating back a decade, including SpyGate, MuellerGate (Russian Collusion), Ukraine-WhistleblowerGate, Uranium One, the Skolkovo technology transfer, the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play doings, and the recently disclosed influence-peddling and money-laundering schemes of the Biden Family. A little election fraud ain’t nuthin to that massive, reeking landfill of perfidy and sedition, and folks apparently forget that the election happened just on the eve of whatever investigative results John Durham & Company may be ready to drop on the nation — including the afore-alluded-to Biden Family hijinks, of which there is a live case at the DOJ. Boy are they afraid of all that. Just sayin… in case you put it out of mind in all the excitement. So, now we will discover whether they committed targeted election fraud, and then, perhaps, we’ll find out how those other matters turn.

As for the election fraud itself, you can be sure that a holy host of computer nerd statisticians on Mr. Trump’s end have been working backstage, out of the limelight, to sift those kwazy numbers coming out of places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada where the race was pretty darn tight. From a strictly procedural point-of-view, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes look like an open-and-shut case of official misfeasance — insofar as that state’s Supreme Court exceeded its authority in changing the election law to allow ballots received after 8p.m. election day to be counted for days afterward (election law being the sole prerogative of the state legislature). And that’s a lot of ballots. That will likely be adjudicated in the US supreme court, and pretty pronto, given the exigent circumstances.

Then there are the janky numbers in all those other states where the Dominion vote tabulation software was used: 130,000 here… 27,000 there… et cetera. By the way, the company that puts out this Dominion product is partly owned by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard C. Blum; one of its top executives is Nancy Pelosi’s former chief-of-staff; and the software’s development was funded by the Clinton Global Initiative in 2014. I guess they know a good thing when it jumps up and bites them on the lips.

I suppose you’ve also seen rumors about the Intelligence Community’s election-meddling software programs, HAMR (“Hammer”) and Scorecard allegedly being employed in last week’s election, but that is only a rumor so far. Sidney Powell, lawyer to General Michael Flynn, dropped it on the airwaves, and recall that General Flynn was the Director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), so there’s a chance that he knows about these programs in excruciating detail. There’s also reason to believe that General Flynn retains connections to many loyal intel techies who worked under him, and are capable of sussing out the situation. Also, by the way: do you suppose that any of this election-meddling software was used to ensure Joe Biden’s mysterious out-of-nowhere victory in the Super-Tuesday primary? Hmmm….?

So, is this over? Is the election a done deal? Perhaps not. A fun weekend was had by all on the Biden side. Stand by in the days ahead. You may see a lot of heads explode as their narrative goes south. If it turns out I’m wrong about all this, I will be the first one to say so around here. 

James Howard Kunstler's latest

 Going Full Orwell

James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler.com,

Oscar Wilde observed that “life imitates art,” and there they were: the three grand poohbahs of social media, stone-facing the Senate Homeland Security Committee on their zoom screens like a trio of James Bond villains — Jack “Twitter” Dorsey, complete with sinister nose-ring and necromancer’s beard, Mark “Facebook” Zuckerberg, pasty and blank as a knish, and Sundar “Google” Pichai the Merciless. Only missing were the Persian cats in their laps.

They were on-board to answer how come their monstrous information engines were censoring the news so as to possibly influence a national election, and they offered the confabulated fantasy that their cancellation of the Biden Family influence-peddling story in The New York Post, and disabling the accounts of sundry un-Woketarian journalists, was actually a policy of “transparency.” With the election only days away, the subtext of their demeanor was a clear “Fuck you, you can’t do anything about it” to the American people.

Apparently so, but their insolence may be answered by the antitrust case lately teed up against them by the Department of Justice, especially if said election doesn’t go exactly the way they’ve attempted to engineer it. The rest of the Woke news media followed suit with the trio, of course, in an extraordinary affront to the public interest. The New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the gang completed their metamorphosis from a free press to Orwell’s memory hole, where reality goes to die.

But the Biden family grifting story has a life of its own, and the story is that the Democratic Party’s candidate for president would not survive a month in office before being dragged through some dreadful legal proceeding as a threat to national security, having sold himself to the rulers of several foreign countries, all too neatly documented to ignore.

For now, with the news media covering for him, Mr. Biden has managed to duck the story without refuting the authenticity of the evidence, namely, troves of genuine emails and texts between the principals of the various companies set up (in Delaware!) by his son, Hunter Biden, naming the former vice-president as an informed accomplice in schemes to sell his “services” to all comers. And he came pretty cheap, too, considering that the tens of millions proffered was mere walking-around-money to the CCP-connected Chinese billionaires, and others, who sought the deals. They even sent Hunter a hundred-large just “to buy a car.” (Did he get a Chevy Spark and blow the change up his nose, as was his wont, I wonder?)

The now infamous “Laptop from Hell” left behind brainlessly by Hunter in a Delaware repair shop apparently contains a parallel trove of photos and videos self-chronicling the scion’s sordid private life — sex, drugs, etc. — suggesting that he has set himself up as the perfect target for blackmailing operations. And goodness knows what Chinese intel on its own initiative recorded him doing in the hotels there (with amenities supplied) on his many visits to their land. Said laptop was also, it turns out, in the possession of the FBI as far back as the impeachment preliminaries in Adam Schiff’s House Intel Committee, fall of 2019. Since it was full of material counter-evidence about the issue at hand — the president’s phone call to Ukraine’s President Zelensky vis-a-vis the Biden family’s shady doings in that country — the question arises of how deep was the FBI’s complicity in the impeachment ruse?

Could FBI Director Christopher Wray not have known of the laptop’s existence when it came into the agency? I doubt it. Could Mr. Wray have concealed the information from Attorney General Barr? Yes, quite possibly. In the meantime, Mr. Barr has not said a word about the entire Biden pay-for-play / laptop extravaganza. I imagine he’s chewing the office furniture at Main Justice in a fury over it with the election pending, and his duty to avoid influencing the outcome. Mr. Trump has felt a little freer to share the wicked business with the public in his campaign appearances, setting the table for a banquet of consequences when the election is over.

If it can be gotten over, since the Democrats have made no secret of their elaborate plan to confound the results with post November 3 ballot harvesting and Lawfare shenanigans in the swing states — to be accompanied by riots staged by their Antifa and BLM shock troops. I think the idea is to provoke Mr. Trump to call out US troops to quell the riots, thereby opening him up to accusations of being a tyrant. I suspect the Dems will overplay their hand on that trick, since a sizable portion of the public that has not collectively lost its mind is good and goddam sick of riots, arson, destruction of property, and the looting capers that go with them. Mr. Trump has overcome every adversity thrown in his path for four years, and I believe he will get through this final tribulation, beep-beep. And then the games can begin in earnest.

Mr. Biden apparently changed his mind about “putting a lid” on the last week of his campaign and strayed out of his basement in what looks like a desperate effort to dispel the odium hanging over him. He might as well just paint a big “L” on his forehead. Thursday evening, he was onstage in Tampa, angry and fulminating to his usual sparse audience, when the skies opened. The audience peeled away in the pouring rain and so did Joe Biden after only nineteen minutes of bitter vituperation, the perfect picture of loserdom… Captain Queeg meets Willie Loman… without the charm.

The latest from Kunstler

Last Round-up at the 

Wokester Corral

James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler.com,

October, 2020

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.

Are you against the principle of free speech? The Democratic Party is. They used to be champions of the First Amendment; now they want to make it conditional on ideas and sentiments they support. Contrary ideas are to be labeled “hate speech,” and suppressed, along with anything that might hurt somebody’s feelings. How did you come to such a complete misunderstanding of what free speech means? Namely, that a free society is obliged to tolerate the expression of disagreeable ideas up to the limit, as the Supreme Court put it, of “crying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”

I will answer my own question partially by saying: you have been programmed against free speech by what used to be the very vehicles of it, the newspapers and TV News channels, which have, amazingly, come out against freedom of the press and turned into propaganda outlets for Woke Progressivism and its illiberal agenda — thereby inadvertently committing suicide of the entire profession. We’ve seen this acted-out most vividly just the past week in the social media companies’ efforts to suppress all news of the Biden family’s global business operations, along with The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and other leading news organizations that Americans used to depend on to know what was happening in the nation. This is especially unforgivable during a national election.

Did you support the movement on campus in recent years to shut down events featuring speakers such as Charles Murray (The Bell Curve), Heather Mac Donald of City Journal, Dinesh D’Souza, and many others who represented not-so-Woke ideas that “offended” you? Since when are your feelings so special that they negate the open exchange of ideas in the places that used to be dedicated to it, the universities? Should higher education only entertain ideas that you and your cohorts approve of? What if, in some future, a different cohort gains control of higher education and seeks to exclude your ideas on the grounds that they’re “offensive” (i.e. they just don’t like them)?

Are you in favor of a politicized Department of Justice and CIA? That is what the Democratic Party’s Resistance League deliberately brought about during the 2016 election, and they continue to promote it. Is it okay for bureaucrats to break the law to disable their political adversaries? That was the essence of the RussiaGate ruse. Former employees of those agencies, such as ex-CIA chief John Brennan and Andrew Weissmann, who ran the Mueller investigation, to this day still hype “Russian collusion” falsehoods to deflect attention from their own misdeeds. You let them get away with that.

Is it okay for these government agencies to spy on US citizens without any legal predicate, except their being political adversaries? Would it be okay if that were used against you in some future disposition of things? Is it okay for the FBI to withhold exculpatory evidence in federal court proceedings, thereby obstructing justice? Is it okay for the FBI and CIA to “leak” falsehoods to news reporters for political advantage? Do you not understand how by failing to oppose these actions you undermine the basis of political rectitude in a republic — bearing in mind the literal meaning of the word republic, from the Latin, res publica, the public thing, where civilization lives?

Are you against reason itself? For all your talk about the primacy of science, your agenda militates furiously against it: Math is “racist,” there’s no biological basis for understanding sex, all science is a “white colonial way-of-knowing,” masculinity is “toxic,” women can have penises and men can menstruate. Do you really believe these absurd fantasies manufactured in the graduate schools in the service of academic careerism at all costs — or do you just go along with them for the sake of protecting your own careers and perquisites?

Are you in favor of Antifa riots and the BLM hustle? They are staunchly supported by elected Democratic mayors and governors. These organizations looted and burned down shopping districts in many cities, and Democratic leaders did nothing to stop them. In Portland, Oregon, the nightly riots have continued for over 120 days under Mayor Ted Wheeler and Governor Kate Brown. The nightly riots have ceased to have any genuine political purpose or meaning; rather they’ve degenerated into a party space for energetic young people who can’t otherwise go to clubs, parties, concerts, cafes, or raves during the Covid-19 shut-down. So, rather, they’re enjoying a long-running game of “Cops-and-Robbers” out in the streets, busting things up, setting fires, getting chased around, and waking people up in their homes late at night with bullhorns and heavy metal music. They’re obviously having fun. The police have been forbidden to effectively disperse them, and the Multnomah County DA refuses to prosecute any of them — all of which just inspires the Antifas and BLMs to keep the game going. They have no real stake in the public interest. The net effect is terrible destruction of the city as a functioning civic organism. The Democratic Party has made it all possible. Wait until it comes to your town or city.

Are you in favor of cancel culture? The Democratic Party is addicted to it. Should livelihoods and reputations be destroyed for expressing an opinion, or telling a joke? Is asking someone for a date in the office a firing offense? Were Christine Blasey Ford and Michael Avenatti unimpeachable witnesses during the Brett Kavanaugh SCOTUS hearings? Or was that just an instance of anything goes and nothing matters? How much sadistic pleasure do you suppose has been involved in the professional ruination of men in the media, the arts, and politics? How much of cancel culture and the Me-Too movement have been based on simple coercion, the wish to push other people around, and on vengeance for personal losses and slights?

By the way, did you notice that Jeffrey Toobin has not been fired from his positions at The New Yorker magazine and CNN for jerking-off on-screen during a Zoom meeting of his professional colleagues last week? None of them have even publicly criticized him. Why do you suppose that is? I suppose it’s because he is a favored member of the Woke Journalists club and enjoys special protection from professional ruin — though the truth is he’s thrown away his credibility as a legal commentator, whether the Wokerati like it or not, especially on matters of public conduct. But that’s just one example of the hypocrisy that Wokesterism is full of, and reveals its chronic disingenuous insincerity.

The Democratic Party supports all this pernicious mendacity and bad faith, and more. Joe Biden is the current figurehead of the Party. Mr. Biden pretty clearly has insurmountable defects of his own, first as an international grifter while holding national office, as well as the misfortune of his cognitive decline, which is not his fault, but disqualifies him for high office. As for everybody else in the party, I don’t want such a reliably dishonest gang to be in charge of running the American government. So, I’m voting for Mr. Trump. He’s far from my idea of an ideal candidate, but despite his defects, he’s managed to hold the country together during the greatest disruption of normal life since World War Two. I’ve also come to admire his resilience and, yes, his bravery, in the face of an opposition that has spared no effort of foul play to destroy him.

I’m under no illusions that Donald Trump will Make America Great Again in the way that many of his supporters understand that slogan. The USA is headed into a terrible ordeal of economic disorder that I call the long emergency. Mr. Trump won’t stop it, and it may yet make a fool out of him. But the Democratic Party’s agenda would add an extra layer of tyrannical and sadistic insanity to the process that will only bring more suffering to more people, and I don’t want that to happen. I believe that Mr. Trump will probably win the election, but we’ll have to see what kind of nefarious dodges his opponents will employ to prevent any resolution of that outcome.

Kunstler: the Democrat Party is the enemy of the people

 Bleeding Out

James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler.com

23 October, 2020

“The difference between you and me,” Mr. Trump said to the ever more ghostly Joe Biden, fading mentally late in the action on the debate stage, “is that I’m not a politician and you are, and you’re a crooked politician.” Millions watching this spectacle might not have noticed, due to the media’s near-complete blackout of news detailing the Biden family’s adventures in systematic global moneygrubbing, but the Democratic candidate for president has political Ebola, a hemorrhagic fever of credibility, now gushing out of every pore and orifice.

Twitter and Facebook may try to squelch the story, but the evidence is all over the Internet now, like blood on a crime scene, in verifiable emails, texts, Snapchats, memoranda, and bank records that Ol’ White Joe Biden is at the center of a decades-long influence-peddling spree, selling his personal services to China, Russia, Ukraine, and any other country seeking favors in US government policy, and that this slime-trail of grift disqualifies him from holding high office as much as the irreversible rot of his cognitive abilities.

The “Laptop from Hell” affair has twelve more days to play out before the November 3 vote and the Democratic Party is in a terrible jam. Do they ask Mr. Biden to step aside, or do they keep running with him while the barrage of allegations and hard evidence pours down on them like so many mortar rounds on a besieged bunker? It’s obvious now that one way or another, voters are actually being asked to elect Kamala Harris president — but who asked for her? Only the disgraced and disabled head of the ticket, Joe Biden, desperate for a non-white running mate. Elsewise, she was so disliked by voters that she skulked out of the Iowa caucuses, ending her own run. Is Hillary ironing her purple pantsuit up in Chappaqua, awaiting the emergency call from her DNC?

The early 2020 impeachment gambit has finally blown up in the Democrats’ faces, too, as it’s now obvious the phony furor over Mr. Trump’s phone call to Ukraine President Zelensky was ginned up to smother any inquiry into Hunter Biden’s $83,000-a-month services to the Burisma gas company and its crooked chief, Mykola Zlochevsky, with help from then US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and several of her staff, as well as then Secretary of State John Kerry.

Interestingly, figures associated with Mr. Kerry (the 2004 Democratic party nominee), Devon Archer and Christopher Heinz (Mr. Kerry’s stepson) also happened to be business associates of Hunter Biden’s, and therefore the Biden family syndicate. Mr. Archer is currently under conviction, awaiting sentencing, on a federal securities fraud rap. If US attorneys out of the DOJ have any interest in talking to him, they have a lever to incentivize his testimony about many of the transactions involving Burisma in Ukraine and the Chinese companies that were funneling payments to the Bidens for “introductions” to US persons of influence.

The Democrats have a whole lot of bad behavior to defend, ranging far beyond the Bidens to the decades-long activities of the Clintons in their charity frauds, the related Uranium One matter — in which $150-million in Russian money found its way into the Clinton Foundation — and the deal that set up transfers of US secret computer tech to Russia’s Skolkovo project, which eventuated in Russia’s development of hypersonic weapons. Not to mention the RussiaGate coup operation to overthrow the president using false allegations supplied by Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and scores of high officials in a range of executive agencies.

Ironically many of those same schemers are at it again in the recent letter by a long list of former Intel spooks trying to discredit The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop as “having all the earmarks” of a Russian disinformation op. At the top of the list of that letter’s signers, you’ll find John Brennan, CIA chief under Obama, and James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence – both of them progenitors of the RussiaGate coup and liable to prosecution for seditious conspiracy. Can you smell their desperation?

Something else may be turning now, though, on this titanic hairball of corruption and deceit: mainstream media reporters starting to jump into lifeboats to save their reputations by actually reporting honestly on developments in this web of stories. The few early adapters to truth-telling may be the only survivors. The ones who stick with the ship of deception are going down into cold and darkness. And if President Trump wins reelection — a possibility despite polling that, in many cases, is just propaganda — the public will learn exactly how the Democratic Party became the enemy of the people.

Kunstler on the American Horror Show

 Jim Kunstler is actually a registered Democrat.

American Gothic Horror

James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler,com,

19 October, 2020

That something wicked we spoke of coming our way…?  Well, it came. Now we know why Nancy Pelosi has been running around in a fright mask with her hair on fire, and it’s not just a ghoulish anticipation of Halloween. Her Democratic Party is in extremis. It is shot through with the cancer of falsehood and the wormholes of crime, acquired through decades of playing fast and loose with the machinery of government. Nancy has been informed and she remains stuck in the rage stage of the grief cycle. Somebody sent her a copy of that hard-drive. The thing she feared would not end well is actually turning out worse than she thought.

I have a theory about Joe Biden: He didn’t want to run for president. Not one eensy-weensy bit. He wanted a nice, quiet retirement with his fat government pension plus sundry millions that had somehow found its way into his bank account over the years. He had a fabulous $16-million gentleman’s estate to gambol upon with his beloved grandchildren. The developing brain-fog was actually a comfort, allowing him to forget the rigors of public service and all the tedious gathering of… honoraria, shall we say. But then they came for him…!

The Party called. Rather specifically, his old Kemosabe, Barack Obama, called him in for that ominous sit-down and gave him the bad news: Joe, you’ve gotta run. Bernie, Liz, and the rest of those bozos, they won’t keep a lid on it. You’re in this thing as deep as we are and it’s getting a little hairy. You’ve got to do it for the sake of the party, and all our… friends….

And so, Joe Biden was shanghaied into running for president. He was given a bodyguard of news media, including those crucial new additions, the social media, Twitter and Facebook, where, increasingly, information was hubbed for transmission among the voters. They would protect him infallibly from any damaging narratives. In fact, they would generate powerful counter-narratives to keep their adversaries off-balance. If Joe could just roll with it until November 3rd, they could lay all their… problems… to rest, bury all that annoying insinuendo about the hobgoblin Deep State (ha!), and finally breathe easy.

And so, trailing rather pathetically in the primary elections after being dubbed an old racist by his opponents, and drubbed in Iowa and New Hampshire, Joe somehow managed to sweep the table on Super Tuesday — apparently due to the single, magical endorsement of one congressman James Clyburn (SC, 6th District), a narrative that was swallowed like a May River oyster by the credulous all over the land. And thus anointed, Joe retreated to his fabled basement for the whole election season, venturing intermittently into empty parking lots and airplane hangars to offer proof-of-life while a polling disinfo campaign by his media bodyguard vouchsafed his inevitable victory. Looked like a sure thing in September… pack up all my cares and woe… and so forth….

And then, something broke. Well, some news, actually, a wonder considering the Democratic tank that The New York Times, The WashPo, CNN, MSNBC, and all the rest had jumped in. Long about mid 2019, some jamoke in the jamoke state of Delaware got possession of some laptop computers brought in for servicing on account of water damage — like, what??? They fell into a hot tub??? Anyway, the customer, one R. Hunter Biden, never retrieved (or paid for) the computers which, under Delaware law and the service agreement of the computer repair shop, became the property of said repair shop and its jamoke proprietor, one John Paul Mac Issac. Mr. Mac Issac had a peek inside one of them that still worked — now legally his property — and, lo and behold, he noticed some familiar names among the emails along with an impressive video of the laptop’s owner using drugs while cavorting with a naked woman.

Mr. Mac Issac contacted the FBI. At first, they brushed him off, but then, weeks later, showed up with a subpoena for the computer and seized it. Impeachment season was upon us! CIA agent Eric Ciaramella, advised by fellow NSC member Col. Alexander Vindman, had cooked up a “whistleblower” complaint for crusading congressman and RussiaGate impresario Adam Schiff (D-CA), and the game was on! Mr. Mac Issac apparently followed the impeachment soap opera on the airwaves. The proceedings included no mention of the laptop and the information, or, shall we say, the evidence, it contained. He began to grok the significance of the material dumped in his lap by this wayward customer, R. Hunter Biden, and began to wonder how come the FBI was just sitting on all that. You’d think the FBI would have turned it over to the president’s lawyers since it amounted to what  might be construed as exculpatory evidence of a high order. Or that FBI Director Christopher Wray might have apprised Attorney General William Barr of the laptop’s existence. In any event, the President’s lawyers made their case against impeachment without  it. Weird, a little bit.

So, more time went by and Mr. Mac Issac grew a little suspicious, a little impatient. The FBI would not deign to return his phone calls. A fastidious fellow, he had made a copy of the laptop’s hard-drive. So, he up and handed another copy over to Rudy Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor of some renown, and one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers. Mr. Giuliani easily recognized what was in there: a detailed map of the Biden family’s world-wide grifting operations, plus graphic evidence of R. Hunter Biden’s moral depravity. Which brings us up to date… almost.

The bodyguard of news media protection was breaking under the weight of all that bad faith, perfidy, hypocrisy, lying, money-grubbing, and depravity. The story of the Biden family’s gothic doings was loose in the land despite every strenuous effort to suppress it, and now the suppressors were starting to look really bad… so bad that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was about to be hauled into the Senate Judiciary Committee for some ‘splainin’ — that is, a gentle reminder that he is not the Master of the Universe he bethinks himself to be, but rather a member of a society based on rules, traditions, and a consensual understanding of decent behavior.

That’s only the beginning of where all this goes. Other leaks are springing in the great Democratic dike, and they are short of Little Dutch boy volunteers who can plug the holes holding back a cold sea of infamy. There is, for instance, the fabled Anthony Weiner laptop, yes, the one that was seized in 2016 as part of the Hillary Clinton email probe. It somehow ended up in the possession of the New York City Police Department. Turns out it contains 340,000 emails between Hillary and her top aide of twenty years, Huma Abedin, wife of disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner. Trouble is, Mr. Weiner had no security clearance and it was, after all, his laptop. Rumor is that Ms. Abedin is now talking to prosecutors. Will that be consequential?

Also turns out one Bevan Cooney, a former business associate of R. Hunter Biden, who is cooling his heels in a federal slammer for a securities fraud conspiracy, was pissed-off enough at being left holding the bag that he gave his email account and password to investigative reporter Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash and Profiles in Corruption, who is now poring over the 26,000 emails exchanged between the various  business partners. Wait for it….

Also turns out that Devon Archer, another R. Hunter Biden partner, and fellow Burisma Board member, just had his conviction re-instated in the same securities fraud case that Mr. Cooney was convicted in, and Mr. Archer faces up to ten years’ time on his charges — an incentive, perhaps, to make a deal for information about his storied career with R. Hunter Biden in exchange for a reduced sentence.

The Biden campaign announced on Sunday that it was “putting a lid” on the candidate’s activities for the week so that he can study up for the final “debate” with President Trump. I suspect there’s a whole lot more than that going on in the basement, namely, discussions of how Mr. Biden might still gracefully withdraw from the race. Let’s face it, he’s barely been going through the motions for the past three months. Joe Biden is a dead man walking. If he stays in, the Democratic party is finished. Nancy Pelosi can stop worrying about getting her hair done. It will be burnt off entirely.

James Howard Kunstler: adapt to the "long emergency."

This interview with James Howard Kunstler returns to some perennial themes that just as relevant as when I first encountered them over 10 years ago. 

James Howard Kunstler: Adapting To The End Of The World As We Know It

Geopolitics & Empire

Author James Howard Kunstler discusses the end of the world as we know it and how the thinking class has gone nuts. 

He faults our unsustainable energy policies and how the "shale revolution" has only served to extend and pretend the collapse of the oil-based economy and the unviable nature of suburbia. 

Neither will the"alt-energy freak show" of renewables and EVs save us. He covers food production, the electric grid, and feels we are on the cusp of an economic dam ready to burst and that beyond the election anything is possible (e.g. impasse, civil war). 

He comments on the Jacobin "wokester" cancel culture and identity politics movement and looks at ways we can adapt to the "long emergency."

Kunstler on political shennanigans

 Out of the Woods?

James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler.com,

7 September, 2020

Hallelujahs echoed across the Blue Media late last week when the news broke that Donald Trump tested positive for coronavirus. For four years the president had foiled every ambuscade set along his path by a morally-inflamed, predatory Resistance, and each time he beep-beeped his way around the trap. But, now, with a little help from a pitiless universe, they had him! A gazillion tiny, viral assassins were stealing through his bloodstream like so many microscopic jihadis, primping him for an agonizing death: his alveoli withering, red corpuscles robbed of their vital O2, pink foam issuing from his nostrils, toes and fingers turning blue-green — and most deliciously of all, he’d remain conscious of his imminent defeat, of the life (which he’d never deserved in the first place) draining by degrees from his wicked, orange, bloated, supine carcass…

Except… wait a minute… what the hell…? How could it be! Late Sunday he somehow arose from his bed-of-death, ordered pizza (with meat!) for a thousand imps and demons camped outside Walter Reed Hospital, and walked under his own power (!) into a limousine to take a ride around the block and wave at his unholy minions! The cheek of this man!

CNN had a whack attack. Brian Stelter was beside himself, hinting that sinister forces had punked the network, and all the other righteous Resistance cadres, and that Mr. Trump could be endangering every federal employee down to the enlisted men posted overseas by venturing from his sickroom. The New York Times went farther afield (of course), declaring that “the murky and shifting narrative of his illness was rewritten again with grim new details.” Nicely put by an outfit that has come to specialize in shifting narratives!

And indeed, the new Resistance narrative demands to know just exactly when did the president start to feel ill? Did he, perhaps on-purpose, haul his ailing, hulking, scheming Golem ass into the Cleveland debate venue with the hope of infecting his rival, delicate Ol’ White Joe Biden? Did he recklessly put at risk the White House staff, dignitaries and luminaries coming and going, their family members, associates, underlings, servants, children? Did he threaten the global order, world peace, the fate of humanity?

So now, a keening wail of lamentation rings out across the land at Mr. Trump’s possible, dastardly recovery. How dare he! — to paraphrase Saint Greta Thunberg. 209,000 other Americans died, and not him! What vile and unholy devices got him out of a sure death sentence? No doubt Democratic Party astrologasters and consulting augurers will be searching for clues among the orbiting planets and the spilled organs of sacrificed chickens in the days to come. Perhaps Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) can snare a few of the president’s attending physicians into his House Intel Committee and rev up another impeachment for going against doctors’ orders. Wouldn’t that be a delectable counter to the looming confirmation process for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement next door in the Senate this month?

Over his dead body, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is hinting — a tantalizing prospect, with Covid-19 on the loose. It was Chuck who memorably told Rachel Maddow of MSNBC in 2017 that the Deep State “has six ways from [sic] Sunday at getting back at you.” By my count, they’re well over their allotted six by now. Not only did they all fail, but the seditionists behind them are liable to wind up behind bars before this is all over, perhaps even a few of Senator Schumer’s colleagues.

Anyway, Majority Leader McConnell isn’t buying Mr. Schumer’s sob story. “The Senate’s floor schedule will not interrupt the thorough, fair and historically supported confirmation process,” McConnell said on Saturday. The hearings are pegged to begin on October 12. Prediction: they will run three days, tops, and the nominee will sail through. No doubt Senator Schumer and company will be combing the legislative rules thickets with their Lawfare bush-beaters in search of some recondite, magic by-law that might prevent the deal from going down. Or else Chuck will threaten to shoot a puppy on the floor of the Senate if the Amy Coney Barrett hearing proceeds.

The news has it this morning that the president might check out of Walter Reed later today. The event is loaded to the brim with portentous metaphor, mainly, that Mr. Trump has overcome yet another adversity, specifically one that the Resistance has been using to scare the public into compliance with economy-wrecking rules. As the president re-enters something like normal life in the days ahead, perhaps the rest of America will rethink the abnormalities of 2020. Perhaps they will notice the Democratic Party’s investment in the Covid-19 lockdown narrative, and what it has done to their livelihoods, their families, and their futures. Maybe watching Mr. Trump get through this, they will see a way out of the woods.

James Howard Kunstler on Black Lives Matter

History Lesson

James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler,

3 July, 2020

Now I am going to tell you why BLM is a hustle, and how it came to this. Here is an opening to that honest conversation about race everyone’s been pretending to ask for. That’s been a hustle too, so far, because when anybody actually ventures to launch it, the cries of “racist” shut it down.

The BLM hustle has turned into a violent insurrection supported by a body of bad ideas geared to driving the nation insane. The action on-the-ground is like the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution seasoned with the murderous derangement of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. As biologist Bret Weinstein said in his podcast last week with linguistics prof John McWhorter: “If you attempt a Maoist takeover of the US, you’ll get a civil war.”

What we’re seeing in the looting and burning, the “canceling” of careers and lives, the toppling of statues and the attempt to rewrite history, the pathetic obeisance of political leaders to raging mobs, and the lives lost in senseless acts of violence is the unfinished business of the civil rights movement. That business was the full participation of Black citizens in American life. The main grievance now is that Black Americans are still denied full participation due to “systemic racism.” That’s a dodge. What actually happened is that Black America opted out and lost itself in a quandary of its own making with the assistance of their white dis-enablers, the well-intentioned “progressives.”

Let me take you back to the mid-20th century. America had just fought and won a war against manifest evil. The nation styled itself as Leader of the Free World. 

That role could not be squared with the rules of Jim Crow apartheid, so something had to change. The civil rights campaign to undo racial segregation under law naturally began in the courts in cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954). So-called public accommodations — hotels, theaters, restaurants, buses, bathrooms, water fountains, etc. — remained segregated. By the early 1960s, the clamor to end all that took to the streets under the emerging moral leadership of Martin Luther King and his credo of non-violent civil disobedience.

Many acts of non-violent street protest were met by police using fire-hoses, vicious dogs, and batons to terrorize the marchers. This only shamed and horrified the rest of the nation watching on TV and actually quickened the formation of a political consensus to end American apartheid. That culminated in the passage of three major federal laws: the Public Accommodations Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Meanwhile, something else was going on among Black Americans: not everybody believed in Dr. King’s non-violence, and not everybody was so sure about full participation in American life. Altogether, Black America remained ambivalent and anxious about all that. That full participation implied a challenge to compete on common ground. What if it didn’t work out? An alternate view emerged, personified first by Malcolm X, who called MLK an “Uncle Tom,” and then by the younger generation, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers and others retailing various brands of Black Power, Black Nationalism, and Black Separatism. It amounted, for some, in declining that invitation to participate fully in American life. “No thanks. We’ll go our own way.” That sentiment has prevailed ever since.

So, the outcome to all that federal legislation of the 1960s turned out not to be the clear-cut victory (like World War Two) that liberals and progressives so breathlessly expected. The civil rights acts had some startling adverse consequences, too. They swept away much of the parallel service and professional economy that Blacks had constructed to get around all the old exclusions of everyday life. With that went a lot of the Black middle-class, the business owners especially. In its place, the liberal-and-progressive government provided “public assistance” — a self-reinforcing poverty generator that got ever worse, especially in big cities where de-industrialization started destroying the working-class job base beginning in the 1970s. The catch was that Black America did not ask for or demand an end to those poverty-generating “welfare” programs. Rather, they objected loudly to changing them. It was, of course and unfortunately, a form of addiction.

How did white liberals and progressives react to all that? Increasingly with shame, disappointment, consternation, and amazement that the civil rights campaign had worked out so imperfectly. Despite all their idealism, American life had not become a nirvana of equality, fraternity, and amity. In the most troubled places, the urban ghettos, the statistical markers of out-of-wedlock births, crime, drug use, failure in school were getting demonstrably worse year by year. It was embarrassing, confusing, galling to the sociology professors, the congressional staffers, the school boards, the media pundits, the arts community, the literati, the clergy… really everybody who had hoped to right all the wrongs of history in their lifetime.

The solution was multiculturalism and diversity. These credos declared that a society didn’t require a common culture, a consensus about behaviors, manners, and values. Multiculturalism and diversity (M & D) provided a rich repertory of rationales for moral grandstanding, not to mention countless well-paid jobs administering institutional policy, without requiring anything of anyone. But, contrary to good intentions once again, that didn’t work. It only increased friction between groups of people and induced more failure.

For example, the language problem. Black children in the centers of poverty were not learning how to speak English coherently. Their poor language skills were arguably a greater impediment to success in school, and in adult life later on, than the color of their skin. Yet the dogmas of M & D militated against fixing that. And, of course, it is still a deep taboo to broach the subject. Really, America, if you want to begin somewhere, require the teaching of language skills in the schools. If you continue to deny it, you are condemning people to failure.

Eventually, M & D evolved into the identity politics that turned the universities into lunatic asylums and finally infected the already badly fragmenting culture at large. The figments and phantoms that preoccupy “woke” revolutionaries are a product of that still-vibrant shame, disappointment, and hysteria that progressive America feels about the outcome of the long civil rights campaign. That is what all those Ivy League Maoists are acting out in the streets now, abetted by their elders in the Democratic Party establishment, the city halls, and the state houses.

The economic collapse underway is intensifying these quandaries, paradoxes, and predicaments because from now on life is going to get much more difficult for everybody in the USA. It will require everybody to get more serious about what actions they can take, what behaviors they can follow, in order to remain civilized. Do we really want it to become a fight over the table-scraps of history, or can we clear the phantoms out of our heads and play it straight for a change?