[asg70]

You're just giving him relevance by cross-posting his (or Greer's, in the other thread) work.

Just like Gail, Kunstler's "gotta eat". I use that term literally and/or figuratively but it means that these people carved out a modicum of fame back in the day, and where there's fame, there's the potential for income. As soon as they completely let go of the doomerism they let go of a part of their following. Both Kunstler and Greer now fashion themselves novelists. The doomerism is just used as a promotional vehicle for their novelist career, although maybe Kunstler still does paid lectures where he can do a standup routine bashing architecture he doesn't like.

[KaiserJeep]

AdamB, I believe that you fail to grasp the essential nature of The Long Emergency. An excellant case can be made that we are 4-5 decades into that scenario. It is not after all an event, but a long and gradual process.

I carry around a copy of Kunstler's book of that name and also M. King Hubbard's paper on Peak Oil on my E-readers. Both are coming true. Just don't make the mistake of believing that "something must happen". What is happening is that the world has been dying for several human lifetimes, including your entire life. The oil supply peaked a decade ago. The Long Emergency is here, and you will not ever perceive of a Doom event. Somewhere between two and twenty decades from now is when widespread human die-off begins, and the probability approaches unity that "the big power down" is within those bounds. On the order of 20-200 years. Notice I did not say "on the close order of", which means I do not expect the FF power down in less than 2 years or more than 2000.

You will not see it coming. You can only be certain it has happened afterwards, in measured retrospective. You will be as helpless as everybody else. That is the nature of resource shortages, they manifest themselves in exponential curves.

I know, that's a useless prediction. But the nature of any forecast where human psychology is a factor does not allow for more precision.

[KaiserJeep]

My measure of 200 years ago is based upon that being the date when human population exceeded that one billion human upper bound, and the ecosystem started to sicken and die because it could no longer absorb all the human damage. That was just a few years after the Reverend Malthus published his essay on human populations. He had figured out that populations increased geometrically, while resources increased linearly. Thus he knew about the coming exponential resource shortages in 1798.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')It’s interesting to see how, in a culture so pornified that any nine-year-old can watch sex acts on-screen all the live-long day, we discover that decorum is absent in American life. This, at the same time that the more Gnostic political Leftists want to transform human nature by erasing sexual categories in their quest to create a utopia of hermaphrodites. Sex is bothersome, you know. It comes between people literally and rather awkwardly, and it is fraught with tensions so primitive that it can frighten and shame us. Is it any wonder that these tensions will manifest in a workplace where men and women spend their waking hours? Are you really surprised that sexual attraction is a currency for advancement? That it tends toward the naked exchange of favors? I’d submit that the wreck of Harvey Weinstein is a dramatic representation of

[Ibon]

Male bonobo soliciting sex with sugar cane offering. Harvey Weinstein just following sexual politics hardwired since millennium.

[asg70]

I guess a slow day for doom...

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')size=150]Thar She Blows![/size]

I’m obliged to file this blog before Robert Mueller’s office releases the name of the first winner in the Russian Election Meddling tribunal indictment lottery. Most of the betting is on Paul Manafort, the Swamp-creature-fixer-lobbyist-grifter who spent his summer vacation of 2016 managing Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Before that unfortunate summer internship, Manafort was just a shadier-than-average influence-peddler. It happened that many of his clients were bigshots in foreign lands — Mobuto Sese Seko (Congo), Jonas Savimbi (Angola), and Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), as well as interests in Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ukraine, and other world beauty spots. Also, most notably, Russia where the wicked Mr. Putin dwells and incessantly plots evil against our shining city of a republic.

Over the years, Manafort took large sums of money to the DC laundry room and then distributed bales of it around town to other lobbyist subcontractors, but he left quite a trail. And he overlooked the requirement to register as an agent for foreign interests. So, indicting him looks like a no-brainer. An entry-level US Attorney could, figuratively speaking, hitch him up to the rear bumper of a Chevy Yukon and drag him over five miles of broken Coke bottles.

If I am right, his indictment will provoke a five-column headline in The New York Times, Don Lemon will have a multiple orgasm on CNN tonight, and by Halloween the whole Manafort matter will be as forgotten as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Las Vegas Country Music Massacre. That’s how we roll in Attention Deficit Nation. I suppose Mueller’s team next will want to charge fired National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn for failing to register as a foreign agent prior to a having conversation with the Russian ambassador — but mightn’t it be a little absurd to outlaw dialogue between incoming White House officials and foreign ambassadors who, after all, are here to have conversations with our people? That’ll be an interesting precedent. Why would other countries even bother to send an ambassador here if that’s our policy?

There’s an outside chance, of course — outside, say as far away as the planet Mars — that Mr. Mueller will just flop his whole hand on the table and indict President Trump. Wouldn’t that be a jolt? And it would instantly prompt a constitutional crisis, so my money says ain’t gonna happen.

It’s hard to see where it goes from there. The standard plot-line is to net these smaller fish and use them as bait to harpoon the Big White Whale. Give them immunity and let them sing their hearts out to avoid getting sent to ping-pong camp in the Poconos for a five-year stretch. Or else these two schnooks go bankrupt paying hotshot DC lawyers to get them off the hook. Does Mueller go after Donny Junior for having a conversation with a Russian lawyer? Or son-in-law Jared Kushner for flying to Russia and having meetings with Russians? Hey, does anyone remember that A) We’re not at war with Russia, and B) the soviet regime there folded up twenty-five years ago?

The casual observer can’t avoid dragging Hillary into this. It appears that, among other things, the Clinton Foundation received over a $100 million in “charitable donations” from various Russian companies and individuals over the years. Gosh, they’re a big-hearted people! Maybe it’s all the vodka they guzzle. No doubt, the newly-converted Russian capitalists were yearning to support “impact entrepreneurs” who are creating “new enterprises to generate both social impact and financial returns” by addressing market gaps in developing countries, or to “strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence” — as the Clinton Foundation described their activities.

More likely they wanted to grease their access to the sure-thing It’s-My-Turn Madam President. Except then she went and lost the election… all because of Russian meddling.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'A')damB, I believe that you fail to grasp the essential nature of The Long Emergency. An excellant case can be made that we are 4-5 decades into that scenario. It is not after all an event, but a long and gradual process.

[KaiserJeep]

The answer is, that modern engineering expertise can do just about anything in principle, as long as alternative materials are available along with cheap fossil fuel energy to transport and manufacture the alternative product formulation.

In the absence of cheap energy, with an existing infrastructure completely dependant upon it, you really cannot do anything. That is why it is so very important to use the last of the FF's to transform our current energy hog infrastructure into a new and more efficient one that can utilize feeble, distributed renewable energy sources to provide a new more energy constrained lifestyle version that has some resemblance to what we have today with dirt cheap FF energy.

The most critical resources are clean water and local food. Expensive fuels mean that most of your diet must be locally sourced. Then there are new superinsulated residences that must not be dependant upon natural gas or grid electricity for basic HVAC and cooking. It goes on from there, and darned near everything is different from today.

[Subjectivist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'T')he answer is, that modern engineering expertise can do just about anything in principle, as long as alternative materials are available along with cheap fossil fuel energy to transport and manufacture the alternative product formulation.

In the absence of cheap energy, with an existing infrastructure completely dependant upon it, you really cannot do anything. That is why it is so very important to use the last of the FF's to transform our current energy hog infrastructure into a new and more efficient one that can utilize feeble, distributed renewable energy sources to provide a new more energy constrained lifestyle version that has some resemblance to what we have today with dirt cheap FF energy.

The most critical resources are clean water and local food. Expensive fuels mean that most of your diet must be locally sourced. Then there are new superinsulated residences that must not be dependant upon natural gas or grid electricity for basic HVAC and cooking. It goes on from there, and darned near everything is different from today.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')verybody and his uncle, and his uncle’s mother’s uncle, believes that the stock markets will be zooming to new record highs this week, and probably so, because it is the time of year to fatten up, just as the Thanksgiving turkeys are happily fattening up — prior to their mass slaughter.

President Trump’s new Federal Reserve chair, Jerome “Jay” Powell, “a low interest-rate kind of guy,” was obviously picked because he is Janet Yellen minus testicles, the grayest of gray go-along Fed go-fers, going about his life-long errand-boy duties in the thickets of financial lawyerdom like a bustling little rodent girdling the trunks of every living shrub on behalf of the asset-stripping business that is private equity (eight years with the Deep State-ish Carlyle Group) while subsisting on the rich insect life in the leaf litter below his busy little paws.

Powell’s contribution to the discourse of finance was his famous utterance that the lack of inflation is “kind of a mystery.” Oh, yes, indeed, a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery dropped in a doggie bag with half a pastrami sandwich. Unless you consider that all the “money” pumped out of the Fed and the world’s other central banks flows through a hose to only two destinations: the bond and stock markets, where this hot-air-like “money” inflates zeppelin-sized bubbles that have no relation to on-the-ground economies where real people have to make things and trade things.

Powell might have gone a bit further and declared contemporary finance itself “a mystery,” because it has been engineered deliberately so by the equivalent of stage magicians devising ever more astounding ruses, deceptions, and mis-directions as they enjoy sure-thing revenue streams their magic tricks generate. This is vulgarly known as “the rich getting richer.” The catch is, they’re getting richer on revenue streams of pure air, and there is a lot of perilous distance between the air they’re suspended in and the hard ground below.

Powell noted that the economy is growing robustly and unemployment is supernaturally low. Like his colleagues and auditors in the investment banking community, he’s just making this shit up. As the late Joseph Goebbels used to say describing his misinformation technique, if you’re going to lie, make sure it’s a whopper.

The economy isn’t growing and can’t grow. The economy is a revenant of something that used to exist, an industrial economy that has rolled over and died and come back as a moldy ghoul feeding on the ghostly memories of itself. Stocks go up because the unprecedented low interest rates established by the Fed allow company CEOs to “lever-up” issuing bonds (i.e. borrow “money” from, cough cough, “investors”) and then use the borrowed “money” to buy back their own stock to raise the share value, so they can justify their companies’ boards-of-directors jacking up their salaries and bonuses — based on the ghost of the idea that higher stock prices represent the creation of more actual things of value (front-end-loaders, pepperoni sticks, oil drilling rigs).

The economy is actually contracting because we can’t afford the energy it takes to run the things we do — mostly just driving around — and unemployment is not historically low, it’s simply mis-represented by not including the tens of millions of people who have dropped out of the work force. And an epic wickedness combined with cowardice drives the old legacy news business to look the other way and concoct its good times “narrative.” If any of the reporters at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal really understand the legerdemain at work in these “mysteries” of finance, they’re afraid to say. The companies they work for are dying, like so many other enterprises in the non-financial realm of the used-to-be economy, and they don’t want to be out of paycheck until the lights finally go out.

The “narrative” is firmest before it its falseness is proved by the turn of events, and there are an awful lot of events out there waiting to present, like debutantes dressing for a winter ball. The debt ceiling… North Korea… Mueller… Hillarygate….the state pension funds….That so many agree the USA has entered a permanent plateau of exquisite prosperity is a sure sign of its imminent implosion. What could go wrong?

[KaiserJeep]

Again, you are not thinking this one through. The main run up of the stock market is new technology investments, slowly but steadily increasing energy costs, and governments that print and spend money.

The price of a can of tomatoes may not have changed much in decades, but think about what has changed:

First the tomatoes. They were planted, fertilized, cultivated, harvested, and processed with human and animal labor decades ago. The tomatoes themselves were probably one variety planted in open fields, and capacity was constrained mainly by available labor at harvest time. Contrast that with an extended season using plastic film row houses and allowing for at least two harvests per year plus a Winter crop rotation. Electric powered irrigation to boost crop yields, along with chemical fertilizers. New tomato varieties designed and bred for mechanical harvesters and transortation in 36" deep plastic cargo tubs without damage.

Now think about the can. It was steel sheet metal with soldered seams, complete with traces of iron (good for you) and lead (not good for you). The processing and canning had to be within a few miles of the fields because the fruits were transported in wooden bushel baskets and loaded, unloaded, and processed by humans. Today flatbed trucks with huge tomato bins can transport the fruits dozens or hundreds of miles for automated processing. The cans are either steel with welded seams and plastic linings, or aluminum vacuum-formed with plastic linings, or even glass.

Canned tomatoes used to be the product of small to medium family farms. Today they are corporate products, mainly produced for the major grocery stores. The cost only remains approximately the same because the volume is way up. But YES they do cost about the same, even though they are not really comparable to the older product.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')
It must be exciting to wake up on a gilded bed somewhere in Riyadh and realize that you are Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, mover and shaker of Middle East order. Actually, exciting just to have woken up at all. Perhaps Prince MBS checks to make sure that there aren’t seventy-two virgins in the room before he rises to prayers, state business, and the prospect of World War Three. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has been a giant gasoline bomb waiting to explode for decades. It occupies one of the geographically least hospitable corners of the earth. Its existence as a modern (cough cough) state relies strictly on the reserves of oil discovered as recently as the late 1930s, that is, within the lifetime of people still reading this blog. The oil supply is in steep decline, and so,

[AdamB]

Indeed James. What now?

So James...you figure you a better prognosticator now, then then?

[Plantagenet]

the Kingdom is going mad. The current king, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, is the latest in a line of geriatric monarchs. His brother and predecessor, Abdullah, spent his last years in a limbo of medical life-support (virgins standing by), and Salman is reputed to be dotty. Crown Prince MBS has assumed more of the king’s duties by necessity, but the land is filled with thousands of other princes, many of them frustrated, angry, and jealous of the Crown Prince’s prerogatives.

One can only imagine the clouds of intrigue wafting through the ornate corridors of wealth and power. Crown Prince MBS is lately out to deprive his many royal rivals of those two critical assets, and a couple of said rival princes — Abdul Aziz bin Fahd and Mansour bin Muqrin — were offed altogether (gunfight, helicopter crash) two weeks back. A score of non-royal public officials and business poobahs have also been arrested, including top ministers (Finance, Economy & Planning), the former CEO of the national airline, and a brother of Osama bin Laden, whose family ran the country’s biggest construction company.

It really amounts to a nascent civil war

There are no signs of a civil war.

Yes, Crown Prince Muhammad is arresting other princes who might threaten his rise to power, but thats how monarchies work. Power in a monarchy isn't determined by who wins elections but by who controls the government and wield government power.

Crown Prince Muhammad either personally controls or has his family members now in control of the Saudi government, the Saudi military and the Saudi intelligence services. One of Prince Muhammad's family members is the new Saudi ambassador to the US.

Looks to me like Crown Prince Muhammad has planned this out pretty well and successfully arrested or intimidated all opposition to him and his family taking over the Kingdom. He is also apparently very popular with younger Saudis for his moves to liberalize society, such as allowing women to drive cars and go to sporting events.


Crown Prince Muhammad has moved quickly to arrest people who might oppose him becoming the next Saudi King

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')
“Contact with Russians.” Grown men and women, doubling and re-doubling down on a political fantasy, repeat this prayer hour after hour on the cable channels and Web waves as if trying to exorcise a nation possessed by the unholy hosts of Hell. But such vicars of the news as Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, and Dean Baquet (of The New York Times) only shove the country closer to a cliff of constitutional crisis. To a certain class of people — a class that includes a lot of Intellectuals-Yet-Idiots, as Nassim Taleb has dubbed them — President Donald Trump is a figure of supernatural malignity who must be ousted at all costs. I did not vote for Donald Trump and I do not admire him; but I rather resent the dishonesty that is being marshaled against him, especially the mis-use of