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Page added on March 16, 2015
Kunstler: truthinesslessness
Nothing is stable, nothing is straightforward, everything is fixed, and nothing is fixed. O nation of busboys and WalMart greeters, awake and sing!
Can an empire founder on sheer credulousness? After last Friday’s jobs report, I think so. For a culture that luxuriates in statistical analysis (and the false idea that if you measure enough things, you can control them), it is rather amazing that we absolutely don’t care whether the measurements are truthful or not. Hence, an economist (sic) such as Paul Krugman of The New York Times might ask himself how it is that Zero Interest Rate Policy only trickles down to places where hamburgers are sold. PK was at it again in his Monday column, yammering about “rapid job growth,” “partying like it was 1995.” Wise men like him are pounding this country down a rat hole faster than you can say Romulus Augustulus.
Apparently the US Bureau of Labor Statistics missed the job bloodbath in the oil industry, especially over in Frackville where the latest western phenomenon is the ghost man-camp (along with ghost pole dancing parlors). It’s a veritable hemorrhagic fever of job layoff announcements: 9,000 here, 7,000, there, thousands of thousands everywhere — Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes — like an Ebola ward in the oil services sector. Not to mention the cliff-drop of capital expenditure, meaning even steeper job losses ahead, Casey Jones. But nobody notices, I guess because they’re out at Ruby Tuesdays eating things bigger than their heads. Are the portions getting smaller, or are their heads shrinking?
Finance is complicated, but not as complex as the wizards employed in it would have you believe. They would have you think it is an order of magnitude more abstruse and recondite than particle physics, when, in fact, it is often not much more than a Three Card Monte switcheroo. The whole ZIRP and QE game, for instance, can be boiled down to a basic wish to get something for nothing, that is, prosperity where nothing of value is created. Now, that’s not so hard to understand, is it? Until the economics wardrobe team comes in and dresses it up in martingales and bumrolls of metaphysics and you end up in a contango of mystification.
More galling and worrisome, though, is the failure of anyone even remotely in authority to stand up and publically object to the tidal wave of lies washing over this dying polity, actually killing it softly with truthinesslessness. The code of anything goes and nothing matters is turning lethal and the more it is kept swaddled in lies, the more perverse, surprising, and destructive the damage will be. The more our leaders lie about misbehavior in banking — including especially the actions of the Federal Reserve — the worse will be the instability in currencies. The more central bankers intervene in price discovery mechanisms, the more unable to reflect reality all markets will become. The more that the US BLS lies about the employment picture in America, the worse will be the eventual wrath of citizens who can’t get paid enough to heat their houses and feed their children.
An economist (sic) named Richard Duncan last week proposed the interesting theory that Quantitative Easing can go on virtually forever in an endless chain of self-canceling debt. Government spends money it doesn’t have and cannot raise, issues bonds to “investors,” buys its own bonds and stashes them in a storage vault so deep that the sun will not shine on them until it becomes a blue dwarf — long after the cockroaches have taken charge of Earthly affairs. Duncan forgets one detail: consequences. The consequence of this behavior will not be eternal virtual prosperity, but rather a wrecked accounting system for the operations of civilized human life. We’ve stepped across the event horizon of that consequence, but we just don’t know it yet. My bet is that we start feeling the effects sooner rather than later and when it is finally felt, all the Kardashian videos in this universe and a trillion universes like it will not avail to distract us from the flow of our own blood.
8 Comments on "Kunstler: truthinesslessness"
forbin on Mon, 16th Mar 2015 9:47 am
” overnment spends money it doesn’t have and cannot raise, issues bonds to “investors,” buys its own bonds and stashes them in a storage vault so deep that the sun will not shine on them until it becomes a blue dwarf ”
Actually on a computer hard drive, so one EMP later………
or if lucky a “fat finger” glitch …..
hehe
Forbin
JuanP on Mon, 16th Mar 2015 12:05 pm
I have never watched a Kardashian video, but I know what they are. The flow of others blood on TV, Kardashian video, or wars for profit are all the same thing to me entertainment and manipulation for the masses.
Just behead couple of American retards that went to a place they shouldn’t have gone because everybody hates Americans over there, and, “POOF!”, just like that 200+ million American ignorant fools hate ISIS, and can be easily manipulated into going back to Iraq and attacking Syria. We deserve what’s coming.
When Uruguayan guerrillas kidnapped and assasinated US AID advisor to Uruguay, Dan Mitrione, in 1970 because he was directly involved in the selection of officers sent to the USA’s School of the Americas and the kidnapping, torturing, murder and disappearance of Uruguayan citizens, the USA responded with the most brutal criminal repressive Death Squads and dictatorship in my country’s history.
The same has happened to almost every other country in the world that dared to challenge the US government. The world will not forget or forgive, most people are just waiting for the right moment because it is very obvious to everyone in the world that the USA is destroying itself more efficiently than anyone else could. We just have to let you guys keep doing what you’ve been doing all along a little while longer while we sit back and watch the greatest show in human history live.
Davy on Mon, 16th Mar 2015 12:46 pm
Oh, Juan, the rest of the world is not going to sit back and watch they will have their tits in the ringer too. There is no decouple and no fairness in this coming awfulness.
Talking about history I remember the worst of the world in the 20th century was in communist Russia and Mao China. 30mil plus dead at Mao’s hands and probable similar number from the evil Soviets over their period.
The US is plenty bad no need to elaborate because this is an anti-American site that preaches continuously the American sins. I am not going to buy into the one sided Anti-American scene. It is cat piss and stinks.
You make a good point that currently the US is the most capable at the destruction. I agree but not the worst in degree of evil. Look to Putin’s buddy in North Korea or Syria for that In summation the rest of the world is in aggregate more destructive with 300mil in relation to 7BIL statistically attests to that.
I want to add your bitterness for what happened in your country seldom acknowledges your own people’s part in that dark period. This is typical of all those around the world that hate America. They chose to blame America (rightly) but fail to acknowledge the part they played in the mess. Your comment sounds like just more of the same complain and blame.
SugarSeam on Mon, 16th Mar 2015 2:37 pm
also, it’s “partying like it’s 1999.” Just to be clear. 😉
Plantagenet on Mon, 16th Mar 2015 4:05 pm
It is amazing that the obama administration BLS numbers completely omit the tens of thousands of job losses occurring in the oil patch due to the oil glut. According to the official administration data, the US is adding jobs at a rapid rate, and very few jobs are being lost in the layoffs by the oil biz.
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Mar 2015 8:56 pm
JuanP, you see the UFSA as I, and most of the outside world do. Even Europe is waking up to the fact that the UFSA is trying hard to get a shooting war going in Europe again, for the 3rd time in 100 years. Always “over there”, never on UFSA shores.
Well, this time, if they succeed in getting it going, it WILL come to America big time. Oceans no longer protect the North American Continent. In fact, it is the biggest underwater highway in the world. A few nuclear subs pop up offshore east and west, push the buttons and hundreds of missiles are minutes from major US cities.
But the insane psychopaths running the UFSA don’t give a damn. They think that they will be safe somewhere in a bunker while the rest of the world fries. Or they are so old they know they don’t have to care about their own lives.
Kissinger 93
Wolfowitz 71
Sorros 84
Etc.
Davy on Mon, 16th Mar 2015 9:19 pm
Geeze, Mak, Why the big thrill with NUK war? You are always preaching about the missiles flying. You are not even competent with submarine NUK delivery systems. You don’t need to pop up on the coast to get the job done. Of course you would not understand that with your sicko NUK war fantasies. Do you tell your kids and grandkids about your NUK fantasies that will surely be their end? What kind of dad would desert his kids and then preach their destruction? a sicko dad.
Makati1 on Tue, 17th Mar 2015 2:18 am
Davy, I grew up in the age of “Duck and Cover” and I survived. Truth does not kill you. It makes you stronger. Yes, my grand kids are aware of nukes and the fast heating cold war and it’s possibilities.
The closer to shore the sub is, the sooner the payload reaches target, before the US can react. And both China and Russia know that.
Do you really think that they will lob them over the North Pole like in the 60s so the Us has time to react? Nope! They are going to come from as close to shore as they can get their subs.
Ten or so subs on each shore are expendable. All they have to do is get their missiles in the air before they are discovered. Getting home after is not the goal, just a benefit if they can do it.
Sure there will be distractions, like Russian and Chinese bombers, also nuclear armed, and probably a few hundred missiles lobbed over the Pole for effect, but that would not be my strategy if I were they. I would expect overkill on the first round, with little expectation of a second volley.
I see few coastal cities surviving the first hour. The interior will be pounded if you are near any significant military asset or nuclear power source.
Underestimating your enemy is NOT a trait I see in China or Russia’s leadership. The Germans made that mistake in WW2. As did the Japanese. As did the Americans in Vietnam and Korea.
China and Russia are NOT 3rd world ME countries. They are nuclear armed superpowers and deserved to be treated as such.