[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')
It must be hard on The New York Times editors to set their hair on fire day after day in their effort to start World War Three. Today’s lead story, Russian Threat on Two Fronts Meets Strategic Void in the U.S., aims to keep ramping up twin hysterias over a new missile gap and fear of Russian “meddling” in the 2018 midterm elections. The Times’s world-view begins to look like the script of a Batman sequel with Vlad Putin cast in The Joker role of the cackling psychopath who must be stopped at all costs! America’s generals have switched on the Batman signal beacon, but Donald Trump in the role of the Caped Crusader, merely dithers and broods in the splendid isolation of his 1600 Penn Avenue Bat Cave, suffering yet another of his endless bipolar identity crises. For God’s sake,

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')
Sunday night was Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s turn through the CBS 60-Minutes wringer of censure with a visibly frustrated inquisitor Lesley Stahl trying to hector her into self-incrimination. The sad truth about American schools is that they’re a mirror for the painful collapse of the society they supposedly serve — a process ongoing for decades before Ms. DeVos came on the scene. The expectation that some uber-regent can or ought to fix public education is bound to disappoint a news media searching for saviors. The further we leave the 20th century behind, the more anomalous its organizing principles look, especially the idea of preparing masses of young people for mass, regimented work at the giant corporate scale. There’s a big divergence underway between the promises of schooling and the kind of future that the 21st century is actually presenting — of

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')
It hasn’t been a great month for America’s electric car fantasy. Elon Musk’s Tesla company — the symbolic beating heart of the fantasy — is whirling around the drain with its share price plummeting 22 percent, its bonds downgraded by Moody’s to junk status, a failure to produce its “affordable” ($36,000 — Ha!) Model 3 at commercial scale, a massive recall of earlier S Model sedans for a steering defect, and the spectacular fiery crash in Silicon Valley last week of an X model that may have been operating in automatic mode (the authorities can’t determine that based on what’s left), and which killed the driver. Oh, and an experimental self-driving Uber car (Volvo brand) ran over and killed a lady crossing the street with her bicycle in Tempe, Arizona, two weeks ago. Don’t blame Elon for that. There’s a lot to

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AdamB', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')
... the spectacular fiery crash in Silicon Valley last week of an X model that may have been operating in automatic mode (the authorities can’t determine that based on what’s left), and which killed the driver. Oh, and an experimental self-driving Uber car (Volvo brand) ran over and killed a lady crossing the street with her bicycle in Tempe, Arizona, two weeks ago. Don’t blame Elon for that.

[KaiserJeep]

I must protest. Whatever your opinion, the Tesla Autopilot software is a driver assist feature. This is an entirely different objective than Uber's attempt to build an autonomous unmanned vehicle.

Did you watch the video of the Uber accident in real time and on fullscreen? The driver saw the bicyclist but could not overide the vehicle and stop due to lack of time. By traveling at that speed under those conditions, he committed driver error. But the real cause of the accident was the bicyclist who stepped in front of an oncoming car. Suicide is a possibility.

I would submit that the latest Tesla crash was another example of driver error, whether it was travelling in manual driving mode or with Autopilot engaged.

[asg70]

Wrong. With the Model 3 at least, Tesla is taking money for full level 5 self-driving. It's essentially a presale and a promise that current sensors will be capable of full autonomy within a reasonable timescale.

This is a class-action suit in the making if Tesla can't deliver full autonomy, assuming it survives long enough for Model 3 owners to lose their patience.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kunstler', 'W')hy not war with Canada? That pissant “nation” is cluttering up the northern half of OUR Continent, which we struggled mightily to free from wicked Old Europe. What doesn’t Justin Trudeau get about that? And when we’re done with him, how about a few rounds with Frau Merkel and the wee frog, Monsieur Macron? I’d like to see the Golden Golem of Greatness in a leotard and one of those Mexican wrestling masks, tossing these peevish international dwarves out of the ring like so many sacks of potting soil.

And now it’s off to Singapore for a championship bout with the opponent known as “Little Rocket Man.” There’s an odd expectation that these two avatars of unreality will settle the hash that has been simmering for sixty years between the divided Korea and the USA. Mr. Trump will make a deal to turn North Korea into a golfer’s paradise and Mr. Kim will promise to beat his nuclear arsenal into nine irons and putters. And then they’ll celebrate on Air Force One with bags of Big Macs and Buckets o’Chicken. (Let the aides and advisors fight over the Singapore Noodles and squid beaks in garlic sauce.)

The New York Times lost its shit Monday morning with a lead editorial that hauled onstage the stock villain from The Times’ repertory of international bogeymen: Russia.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('NYT', '[')i]If a president of the United States were to sketch out a secret, detailed plan to break up the Atlantic alliance, that plan would bear a striking resemblance to Trump’s behavior. It would involve outward hostility to the leaders of Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Japan. Specifically, it would involve picking fights over artificial issues — not to win big concessions for the United States, but to create conflict for the sake of it. A secret plan to break up the West would also have the United States looking for new allies to replace the discarded ones. The most obvious would be Russia, the biggest rival within Europe to Germany, France and Britain. And just as Russia does, a United States intent on wrecking the Atlantic alliance would meddle in the domestic politics of other countries to install new governments that also rejected the old alliance.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')size=200]The Three Headed Monster[/size]

The faction that used to be the Democratic party can be described with some precision these days as a three-headed monster driving the nation toward danger, darkness, and incoherence. Anyone interested in defending what remains of the sane center of American politics take heed:

The first head is the one infected with the toxic shock of losing the 2016 election. The illness took hold during the campaign that year when the bureaucracy under President Obama sent its lymphocytes and microphages in the “intel community” — especially the leadership of the FBI — to attack the perceived disease that the election of Donald Trump represented. The “doctors” of this Deep State diagnosed the condition as “Russian collusion.” An overdue second opinion by doctors outside the Deep State adduced later that the malady was actually an auto-immune disease.

The agents actually threatening the health of the state came from the intel community itself: Mr. Brennan, Mr. Clapper, Mr. Comey, Mr. Strzok, Mr. McCabe, Mr. Ohr, Ms. Yates. Ms. Page, et. al. who colluded with pathogens in the DNC, the Hillary campaign, and the British intel service to chew up and spit out Mr. Trump as expeditiously as possible. With the disease now revealed by hard evidence, the chief surgeon called into the case, Robert Mueller, is left looking ridiculous — and perhaps subject to malpractice charges — for trying to remove an appendix-like organ called the Manifort from the body politic instead of attending to the cancerous mess all around him. Meanwhile, the Deep State can’t stop running its mouth — The New York Times, CNN, WashPo, et al — in an evermore hysterical reaction to the truth of the matter: the Deep State itself colluded with Russia (and perhaps hates itself for it, a sure recipe for mental illness).

The second head of this monster is a matrix of sinister interests seeking to incite conflict with Russia in order to support arms manufacturers, black box “security” companies, congressmen-on-the-take, and an army of obscenely-rewarded Washington lobbyists in concert with the military and a rabid neocon intellectual think-tank camp wishing to replay the cold war and perhaps even turn up the temperature with some nuclear fire. They are apparently in deep confab with the first head and its Russia collusion storyline. Note all the current talk about Russia already meddling in the 2018 midterm election, a full-fledged pathogenic hallucination.

This second head functions by way of a displacement-projection dynamic. We hold war games on the Russian border and accuse them of “aggression.” We engineer and pay for a coup against the elected government of Ukraine, and accuse Russia of aggression. We bust up one nation after another in Middle East and complain indignantly when Russia acts to keep Syria from becoming the latest failed state. We disrupt the Russian economy with sanctions, and the Russian banking system with a cut-off of SWIFT international currency clearing privileges, and accuse them of aggression. This mode of behavior used to be known as “poking the bear,” a foolish and hazardous endeavor. The sane center never would have stood for this arrant recklessness. The world community is not fooled, though. More and more, they recognize the USA as a national borderline personality, capable of any monstrous act.

The third head of this monster is the one aflame with identity politics. It arises from a crypto-gnostic wish to change human nature to escape the woes and sorrows of the human condition — for example, the terrible tensions of sexuality. Hence, the multiplication of new sexual categories as a work-around for the fundamental terrors of human reproduction as represented by the differences between men and women. Those differences must be abolished, and replaced with chimeras that enable a childish game of pretend, men pretending to be women and vice-versa in one way or another: LBGTQetc. Anything BUT the dreaded “cis-hetero” purgatory of men and women acting like men and women. The horror….

Its companion is the race hustle and its multicultural operating system. The objective has become transparent over the past year, with rising calls to punish white people for the supposed “privilege” of being Caucasian and pay “reparations” in one way or another to underprivileged “people of color.” This comes partly from the infantile refusal to understand that life is difficult for everybody, and that the woes and sorrows of being in this world require fortitude and intelligence to get through — with the final reward being absolutely the same for everybody.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he loyal opposition is the party out-of-power in a polity that stands divided into two factions — assuming the polity can still function as such, which, apparently, it no longer can. Historically in the USA, this used to allow for the tempered regulation of changing conditions during two hundred years of a rapidly evolving techno-industrial economy that pumps out more goodies year after year while the population grows and grows.

Much of America, political leaders especially, assume that this arc of growing goodies and more people will just keep trending up forever. They are just plain mistaken about that. Rather, the whole industrialized, wired-up world is rolling over into the greatest contraction ever witnessed. The only thing that’s postponed the recognition of this reality is the profligate borrowing of money, or shall we say “money” — data entries that pretend to represent secure wealth. This amounts to borrowing from the future to pay for how you live today. Of course, the act of borrowing is based on the supposition that there will enough future productive activity to allow you to pay back your borrowings with interest. This is obviously not the case now, in the face of epochal contraction, especially of affordable energy to keep things running hot.

Thus, the US has decided to get through the approaching winter by setting its house on fire. The two political parties alternately in charge of things are driving around the burning house, stopping at intervals to run Chinese Fire Drills. We call these “elections.” Both parties pretend that the burning house is not a problem. Mr. Trump, aka the Golden Golem of Greatness, has taken “ownership” of the rising temperature in the burning house. “Hey, at least you’re not freezing now.” He and his party have been piling all the furniture inside the house on the fire, to keep the heat up, rather heedless that flames are starting to shoot out of the attic.

The other party has no quibble with burning down house. In fact, this has been the Democratic Party’s sovereign remedy for problems since the War in Vietnam, when it was explicit policy to burn down villages in order to save them. Seemed to work, until it didn’t — and then we just tried to forget about the whole sorry exercise. It still haunts them, though. So these days they’ve decided to destroy the culture that abided inside the burning house. They’re taking down the draperies and collecting all the clothing and Tchotchkes and framed photographs of loved ones, and piling them on top of the burning furniture, doing their bit to keep the heat up.

You might infer from all this that no matter whatever else the Republican and Democratic parties might do now is not going to prevent the house from burning down. In a month, or six months, or eighteen months, they will be left standing stunned in the ashes. How’d this happen!?! Even the clown cars they were riding around in will be smoldering wrecks. And then the rest of the people of this land can sift through ruins, seeking a few trinkets or useful tools with some remaining value. These people will be entitled to call themselves “survivors.” And they will act like survivors should act: by earnestly assessing how the house happened to burn down, and using what few assets and resources they still have at hand to shelter-in-place, while they draw up plans for a more sensible house.

If there was a true loyal opposition in this land, they would have called the fire department long ago. But they were too busy texting out their contrived grievances and sending cute Instagrams of each other in pussy hats to friends and allies while the flames of the burning house reflected off the screens of their iPhones. The vaunted technology did not save the day. It only stole their attention.

If it happens that the Democrats lose the midterm elections a few weeks ahead, they will jump up and down and holler that the elections were stolen from them, that somebody meddled and colluded to deprive them of victory, and that will amount to throwing just enough gasoline on the still-burning house for one final glorious burst of heat and flame before the rafters crash through the floor. Welcome to the Long Emergency.

[Revi]

He's a bit of a fuddy duddy. So what that people nowadays are LGBTQ. Haven't they always been that and afraid to say it? I agree with him on the house afire analogy, but that's the way it goes in failing empires. It's going to be an interesting and scary next few years. I don't particularly like the bozos who are driving this bus, but I don't think I can do much except vote in some new ones and hope they can restrain the crazy driver a bit. Otherwise enjoy the ride, because it may end soon...

[asg70]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '
')Kunstler is angry, brilliant, erudite and usually correct. If not a bit wordy lol Nothing to add. No analysis will perfect or fix kunstler, you me us or the world. It is what it is and kunstler is soooo entertaining describing us. He is also a bit overblown etc. fun

[Revi]

I like Kunstler as a dark, comic observer of modern culture. He's at his best being sarcastic and witty, but falls down when he is being preachy, as he is with the LGBTQ issues. He should stick with suburbia since it deserves all the crap he gives it. He begins to sound like just another right wing crank when he gets on his soapbox instead of the inspired writer who brought us all those great books. I suppose he feels that since the Peak Oil ship has sailed he is stuck being one of the carnival barkers for one of the two sides that have taken over the US ship of state. We get that crap every day.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')ostmortem
Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And so, with the midterm election in the rearview mirror, behold the rush into the next phase of Civil War 2. The Golden Golem of Greatness (aka, President Trump) finally requested the resignation of the feckless Attorney General, Mr. Sessions — a fine point as we shall see. The New York Times, of course, played it as an opportunity to litigate the constitution in their headline the day after:

Jeff Sessions Is Forced Out as Attorney
General as Trump Installs Loyalist

WASHINGTON — President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday, replacing him with a loyalist who has echoed the president’s complaints about the special counsel investigation into Russia’s election interference and will now take charge of the inquiry.

Notice that in the headline and the lede The Times is trying to establish the legalistic meme that Sessions was fired rather than resigned, hoping to trigger an obscure DOJ rule that a fired AG cannot be replaced by a temporary appointment. (Well, Mr. Sessions did sign a letter of resignation stating that…uh… he resigned.) At the same time, The Times tries to establish that the incoming Acting AG, Matthew G. Whitaker, is too biased to serve, setting the table for a constitutional food fight.

Of course The New York Times is no longer a newspaper in the traditional sense, but an advocacy and propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. They’re pushing this desperate gambit because it’s clear that Mr. Trump is taking the gloves off now in this long-running battle. What’s at stake is whether the DOJ will prosecute the actual and obvious collusion that occurred during and after the 2016 election — namely, the misconduct of the highest DOJ and FBI officials in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign to cook up the bogus Russia-gate case, and the subsequent scramble to cover up their activities when Mrs. Clinton lost the election and they realized the evidence trail of this felonious activity would not be shoved down the memory hole by Clinton appointees.

The result has been two years with no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion and two years of DOJ / FBI stonewalling over the release of pertinent documents in the matter. There is already an established and certified evidence trail indicating that James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Lisa Page, and others (including former CIA Director John Brennan and former DNI James Clapper) acted illegally in politicizing their offices. Some of these figures have been subject to criminal referrals by the DOJ Inspector General, Mr. Horowitz. Some of them are liable to further criminal investigation Many of them have been singing to grand juries out of the news spotlight.

Whether Mr. Whitaker remains in his new role, or is replaced soon by a permanent AG confirmed by the Senate, the momentum has clearly shifted. The Democrats, and especially the forces still aligned with Hillary, are running scared all of a sudden. Thus, all the bluster coming from party hacks such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY 10th Dist), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Mr. Nadler takes the gavel of the House Judiciary Committee in January and is promising a three-ring circus of investigations when he does. If the House moves to a quixotic impeachment effort, they will find that to be a dangerous two-way street, since Mr. Trump’s legal team can also introduce testimony in his defense that will embarrass and incriminate the Democrats. Anyway, the Senate is extremely unlikely to convict Mr. Trump in a trial.

Mr. Mueller is said to be writing his final report on Russia-gate. One might adduce that he did not turn up anything significant, since, if he had discovered treasonous collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it would have merited public action by now. You can’t uncover something like that and not act on it for more than a year. More mysterious, though, is whether Mr. Mueller even bothered to look into the well-documented misdeeds of the officials citied above. How could he not? If he failed to do so, would he not appear to be himself involved in the cover-up of their activities? The Inspector General‘s report would be sufficient to alert him.

There is a lot to get to the bottom of in all this: the mis-use of FISA court warrants, the outsourcing of US intel activities to Britain’s MI6 intel agency to spy on US citizens, the role of Hillary Clinton and her campaign with FBI and DOJ officials in providing so-called opposition research used to provoke spying operations on Mr. Trump and his associates, and to confound the performance of his duties in office. And much more.

Readers seem perplexed as to why I keep writing about Russia-gate. It should be self-evident that an attempt by the party then in power to use federal agencies to interfere in a presidential election is serious business in the highest degree. It is corrosive of the rule-of-law and the fate of the nation, and attention must be paid.

[Revi]

It hurts seeing JHK turn into Alex Jones. I guess it's a niche that was available...

[The_Toecutter]

This article was pretty damned spot on:

https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/03/cities-towns-landscape-despair

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '.')..

But what is uniformly overlooked about the current scene is the physical arrangement of daily life on the American landscape, how it affects us in unreckoned ways, and what a tragic fiasco it has become.

I refer to the everyday human habitat known as suburbia, the matrix of single-family home subdivisions, arterial highways and freeways, chain stores, junk food dispensaries, and the ubiquitous wilderness of free parking — the last of these implying just one insidious side-effect of this template for living: mandatory motoring.

...

Interestingly, one of suburbia’s biggest defects is the impoverishment of public space, and with it the degradation of the very public arena where ideas are exchanged and vetted for value. Most public space in America is devoted simply to the movement and storage of cars. The highway is a hostile environment for humans and few people seek camaraderie or stimulation in the parking lots. The ambiguous leftover scraps of land, like the woodsy berm between the Walmart and the Best Buy, have no civic value. (That’s where kids go to drink malt-liquor.) Everything else is private space, including the shopping mall, by the way, where you can be arrested for making a speech, or just wearing a T-shirt with a provocative message. Public space per se has been relegated insidiously to TV and the Internet, and neither of these are an adequate replacement for real-live social relations with other human beings in a real place worth caring about.

...

The suburban environments of America are endless replications of low quality buildings, devoid of artistry, in poorly arranged relationships with each other on the landscape.

...

What you’re seeing out there in all those clownish burger sheds, unvarying Big Box Stores, office “parks,” and boring tract houses is not mere ugliness. It represents something much more profoundly malign. This immersive ugliness is entropy-made-visible. Entropy is the force in the physical universe that drives things toward stasis and death. Entropy is what you want to steer clear of as much as possible. Living in an entropy-saturated environment is not good for you. Your brain processes the message that it sends out — this way toward death! — if perhaps only subliminally… and the mind revolts.

...

Being immersed in suburbia, we barely register the pain it inflicts on us. It’s monotonous without being tranquil. The illegible cacophony of signage distresses your neurology. There is no reward in being there. The entire ensemble functions as a kind of uninvited punishment.

...

Who even ventures out for a pleasure drive among the strip malls? The normal impulse is to buy whatever you came there for and get out as quickly as possible. But have you ever been tempted to walk down such a highway? To go for an evening stroll among the muffler shops, the Fry-o-later exhaust units, and the roaring traffic? Most highway strips don’t even have sidewalks. There’s no expectation that any normal person would choose to walk in these environments — though the desperately poor and the brain damaged sometimes do. This is how we live.

...

There are well-established methods for the design and assembly of human habitats that are worth living in, but you get very little of that in the USA. Even our “best” cities have become demolition derbies. What is especially absent, as I have averred to earlier, is artistry consciously applied to our surroundings. You can lay some of the blame for that on the dogmas of modernism, since the schools of architecture are marinated in it, especially the hatred of ornament, which means we’re forbidden a visual language to communicate our connection to nature (that is, everything in the universe). In fact, modernism has amounted to a campaign to explicitly denature the human project.

...

Another big chunk of blame can be assigned to officialdom and its zoning and building codes, which in most jurisdictions tends to absolutely mandate a suburban outcome (e.g. if you want to build a store, the law says you’d better supply twenty parking spaces). From this, an ethos emerges of the human habitat as an administrative abstraction. You end up living in a mere diagram of a place, not a place.


...

[Ibon]

Everything Kunstler says is true, but imagine for a moment that your existence was focusing and writing blogs about this as he does for decades! It's basically hashed over whining that doesn't really provide represent any alternative.

I understood all of this 40 years ago and left it behind, not only physically but also I no longer pay it any mind.....

As long as you are engaged in the outrage of this suburban ugliness you are still in relationship to it.

That is not good.

Create your own separate reality.

In fact, there is a weird truth as well. Be grateful in a strange way that so many have chosen imprisoned dead lifestyles.

It makes more room for the rest of us.

[ralfy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'E')verything Kunstler says is true, but imagine for a moment that your existence was focusing and writing blogs about this as he does for decades! It's basically hashed over whining that doesn't really provide represent any alternative.

I understood all of this 40 years ago and left it behind, not only physically but also I no longer pay it any mind.....

As long as you are engaged in the outrage of this suburban ugliness you are still in relationship to it.

That is not good.

Create your own separate reality.

In fact, there is a weird truth as well. Be grateful in a strange way that so many have chosen imprisoned dead lifestyles.

It makes more room for the rest of us.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ralfy', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'E')verything Kunstler says is true, but imagine for a moment that your existence was focusing and writing blogs about this as he does for decades! It's basically hashed over whining that doesn't really provide represent any alternative.

I understood all of this 40 years ago and left it behind, not only physically but also I no longer pay it any mind.....

As long as you are engaged in the outrage of this suburban ugliness you are still in relationship to it.

That is not good.

Create your own separate reality.

In fact, there is a weird truth as well. Be grateful in a strange way that so many have chosen imprisoned dead lifestyles.

It makes more room for the rest of us.

[Newfie]

I sometimes think more folks are sufficiently aware of the problems.

However there is no alternative solution that is either better or that does not violate their innate sense of morality, fairness.

So they are stuck, the present is good enough and they have no idea of a better future. So here we are, dead culture walking.

2¢