[PhebaAndThePilgrim]

Good day to all:
Pilgrim and I do not post much any more.
We just don't have much free time. Running the farm on a shoestring budget.
Kunstler is a jacka**.
For a while a few years ago I wrote to him about Peak Oil and farming.
When our next door neighbor died in a tractor accident his remarks on neighbors were snide and hurtful.
I saw him in a video on You tube.
He was being interviewed outside, and he stopped to spray himself with mosquito spray.
Give me a break.
First, the guy knows nothing about the reality of small town living.
He lives in an elite daydream vision of small town neighbors helping neighbors.
He honks around with his bottled water and his mosquito spray, spewing hate, bile, sarcasm and every negative human emotion.
I have stopped reading his blog.
He doesn't have a clue about the years of neighbors being there for each other.
Second, this guy wouldn't survive two weeks in a true survival/ environment.

As far as the Israel/Palestine situation:, my take on the problem has nothing to do with religion, oil, or politics, and everything to do with demographics.
When you overcrowd rats in a lab experiment, they turn vicious, fight, and kill one another.
I have studied the demographics of what crops are raised in the area.
I have studied population demographics.
What a nightmare.

There are only 2400 square feet for every person in Israel. That space includes space used to grow their food.
Our house is 2400 square feet (it's too big for us)

There are too many people in a very tiny area, fighting over minimal natural resources.

If it were not for massive inputs from the U.S. that section of the middle east would be what it is supossed to be, a semi-arid wasteland fit for goats and olives, and little else.

Here is an interesting bit of info:

Total fertility rate (2008)

In Israel, the total fertility rate (TFR) is 2.9 children born per woman.

TFR was 2.8 for Jews (2.69 in 2005, 2.67 in 2000), 3.9 for Muslims (4.03 in 2005, 4.57 in 2000), 2.49 for Druze (2.59 in 2005, 2.87 in 2000), 2.14 for Christians (2.15 in 2005, 2.35 in 2000) and 1.55 for Others (1.49 in 2005, 1.55 in 2000).

TFR is very high among Haredi Jews. For Ashkenazi Haredim, the TFR rose to 8.51 in 1996 from 6.91 in 1980. The figure for 2008 is estimated to be even higher. TFR for Sephardi/Mizrachi Haredim rose from 4.57 in 1980 to 6.57 in 1996.[8]

Palestine is high also.

If we use 7%, (correct me if I am wrong) as our number for a doubling time of 10 years, doesn't that mean the Ashkenazi population will effectively double in less than ten years?
How does that work?

Columbia, Missouri had a population growth of 7.6 percent during the 1990s, and doubled in population in a decade.

Pheba.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PhebaAndThePilgrim', '
')If it were not for massive inputs from the U.S. that section of the middle east would be what it is supossed to be, a semi-arid wasteland fit for goats and olives, and little else. .

[Munqi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ayame', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', '
')So whats the solution to ME?

Fence them off and let them eat sand, to put it in plane English.
However there is no need to send our troops there.
Cordone sanitarie policy will do.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')
Various readers, fans, blog commenters, Facebook trolls, and auditors twanged on me all last week about my continuing interest in the RussiaRussiaRussia hysteria, though there is no particular consensus of complaint among them — except for a general “shut up, already” motif. For the record, I’m far more interested in the hysteria itself than the Russia-meddled-in the-election case, which I consider to be hardly any case at all beyond 13 Russian Facebook trolls. The hysteria, on the other hand, ought to be a matter of grave concern, because it appears more and more to have been engineered by America’s own intel community, its handmaidens in the Dept of Justice, and the twilight’s last gleamings of the Obama White House, and now it has shoved this country in the direction of war at a time when civilian authority over the US military

[asg70]

Kunstler is hopelessly irrelevant now as he never even bangs out the word "oil" in his rants anymore. I don't see the point of even bothering to bring his links over here. Only the comments section under his posts touch on peak oil and that's just a vestige of the past.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')
With spring, things come unstuck; an unspooling has begun. The turnaround at the FBI and Department of Justice has been so swift that even The New York Times has shut up about collusion with Russia — at the same time omitting to report what appears to have been a wholly politicized FBI upper echelon intruding on the 2016 election campaign, and then laboring stealthily to un-do the election result. The ominous silence enveloping the DOJ the week after Andrew McCabe’s firing — and before the release of the FBI Inspector General’s report — suggests to me that a grand jury is about to convene and indictments are in process, not necessarily from Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s office. The evidence already publicly-aired about FBI machinations and interventions on behalf of Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump looks bad from any angle, and

[asg70]

Over a years since I last posted in this thread and Kunstler remains...irrelevant. Nobody should bother reading his drivel.

[Plantagenet]

Kunstler's take on the Mueller report and the end of the Trump Russia collusion nonsense is interesting

blowback-is-a-harsh-mistress

Kunstler thinks there will be some kind of "blowback" on the Ds for wasting two years on this nonsense. I'm skeptical myself. Personally, I think the Ds and the MSM will just keep on with the conspiracy theory stuff all the way through the 2020 election.

Cheers!

[KaiserJeep]

In the midst of all this wide-ranging thrashing and conflict on a variety of topics, a basic fact has been overlooked.

I have not read most of what Kunstler has written. In fact I read the first volume of his World Made By Hand fiction, which I found is unoriginal and derivative. However, I carry around the electronic verion of his most famous work, which is the book The Long Emergency. In case it escaped your notice, we are living this scenario today. Parts of the World are in collapse, refugees abound, China and India are ascendant, and Climate Change is rampant and unchecked.

He nailed it, in 2005, fourteen years ago.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'I')n the midst of all this wide-ranging thrashing and conflict on a variety of topics, a basic fact has been overlooked.

I have not read most of what Kunstler has written. In fact I read the first volume of his World Made By Hand fiction, which I found is unoriginal and derivative. However, I carry around the electronic verion of his most famous work, which is the book The Long Emergency. In case it escaped your notice, we are living this scenario today. Parts of the World are in collapse, refugees abound, China and India are ascendant, and Climate Change is rampant and unchecked.

He nailed it, in 2005, fourteen years ago.

[asg70]

Kunstler who is a cynic who is only interested in things to criticize. He simply criticizes for the sake of being anti-establishment. He has nothing constructive to say.

"Kunstler thinks there will be some kind of "blowback" on the Ds"

He also thought the world would end from Y2K. So why should I give a damn what he thinks?

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('asg70', 'K')unstler who is a cynic who is only interested in things to criticize... He also thought the world would end from Y2K. So why should I give a damn what he thinks?

[theluckycountry]

Chaos Creeps in on Little Cat's Feet

"Great cities fall to the sound of cheering crowds." Ami Kozak on "X"
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he Democratic Party put another bullet in its head this week with the election of the charming, affable jihadi communist Zohran Mamdani. Is “communist” too harsh a label? (He styles himself, softly, a “socialist.”) Yet his campaign platform looks like a template from the venerable Soviet Council of Ministers circa 1957: Free Everything: housing, buses and subways, college, child-care, government food stores. . . with a cherry-on-top of replacing police with social workers in high crime areas — because rapists and car-jackers would quit their rowdy ways if only they could talk about their feelings.

That chatter is not idle, especially among the class that owns major real estate, of which New York City has a frightening and increasingly obsolete inventory — hundreds of office skyscrapers running at fifty percent (or less) occupancy, which cannot cover their mortgages, maintenance, or taxes. What will become of them? I’ll tell you: some will be foreclosed-on, sold for dimes on the dollar (and fail again under new ownership,) and quite few will stand empty waiting for acanthus tree seeds to sprout on their empty windowsills.

...Or, they will turn into “squats,” like the towers in the abandoned city center of Johannesburg that I saw visiting there ten years ago. Those giant office buildings were not converted into “residential,” you understand; folks were simply camping-out there, even with the electricity and water turned off. This is exactly what happens when you run the prosperous people, whom you hate, out of town, which is what happened in that sad-sack nation. How many demonstration projects like that are needed to prove that communism with a racist frosting on top is a mug’s game....

[theluckycountry]

You think I'm an american basher, I have nothing on JHK. I'm surprised he isn't up for national slander or something. He spends his days now grinding out political dribble and painting childlike scenes of decaying america. Which are for sale of course

Here's a good podcast: Yakking with John Michael Greer about the Spiritual Condition of our Floundering Country https://www.kunstler.com/p/kunstlercast ... h-john-2c8

Here's his early work, a great book too, and free online if you sniff around.
https://www.kunstler.com/p/living-in-th ... ncy-global

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Liamj', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('emersonbiggins', '.').Maybe some of you knew this, maybe all, I don't know. It's just...interesting...

[AgentR11]

I recall fixing stuff for Y2K issues, also had a little stash of cash in case the terminals all didn't work right. But everything turned out fine. Y2K was a real issue, its just that we worked really hard to fix it before it became a problem. There's actually another one coming up... Year 2038 has some interesting surprises in store I bet; won't end civilization, but I bet more than a couple hickups will get noticed. Not my problem though.

[theluckycountry]

Y2K was a scam at the end of the IT bubble. There was never any danger, the only danger was that warehouses full of old generation laptops and desktops around the world wouldn't be cleared. So they invented that story and everyone ran out and dutifully bought up all the old stock at $3000 a system and $4000 a laptop. Six months later the price of computers collapsed to less than half and everyone who'd been sucked in felt like an idiot, which they were.

Most of us weren't even online back then. I simply reset my clock back a couple of years and waited to see what happened. Nothing happened.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', 'I') recall fixing stuff for Y2K issues, also had a little stash of cash in case the terminals all didn't work right. But everything turned out fine.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('theluckycountry', 'Y')2K was a scam at the end of the IT bubble.

[AgentR11]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AdamB', '
')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', 'Y')ear 2038 has some interesting surprises in store I bet; won't end civilization, but I bet more than a couple hickups will get noticed. Not my problem though.