Kunstler: The Three Rivers of Angst
h/t basserdan
By James Howard Kunstler
May 31, 2021
Does Memorial Day 2021 seem an unusually grim lull between spring and summer this year? Here in the northeast, rain pounded the lakes, ballfields, and barbeque circles all weekend with the additional insult of a steady fifty-degree chill that hardly changed from noon to midnight all weekend. Anyway, the holiday is always freighted with that hush of battlefields strewn with the dead — no smiling Santa Claus, no pastel Easter eggs, and the skeletons aren’t in the mood for dancing.
Even the military looked tarnished this year with a battle royale raging over the new imposed strictures of Critical Race Theory poisoning the ranks, and the fishy spectacle of Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, an exemplary officer, getting drummed out of his post as Commander of the new Space Force for publishing a book about all that. His firing provoked the consciences of retired generals and admirals who denounced the Pentagon’s new tilt into Marxist political activism as an existential threat to the nation — and that didn’t seem like such an exaggeration, either, considering how an America led by transsexual gunnery sergeants might meet its future foes on the fields of war.
Memorial Day also marks one year since the sacred transfiguration of George Floyd from repeat felon to patron saint of social justice, but the remembrance of all that seemed a bit wan now that officer Derek Chauvin stands convicted of murder and the Floyd family has been elevated into the financial one-percent with a $27-million settlement for the loss of George’s earnest existence. Meanwhile, America could not fail to note the 36-percent increase in the national homicide rate since that mournful afternoon in Minneapolis.
Three rivers of angst flow out of Memorial Day 2021, and it is possible to imagine how they will meet later this year and join in a mighty flood of woe over the country. The first is the toxic stream of Wokery saturating just about every institution in the USA from the armed services, to the DOJ, to education both public and private, to organized sports, to the corporate C suites and, of course, to the transmission of current events in news and social media.
Despite the torrents of mendacious narratives and fogs of gaslight deployed in this campaign, a substantial chunk of the public resists suffocation and has finally begun to fight back, especially at the grass roots local level against the dogma-driven school boards out to cancel Western Civ. Expect this to ramp up as the spring semester closes out and the schools must set the terms for resuming classes in the fall. The kids themselves are bucking the mask mandates while the parents tangle with the more vexing problems of Woke racist curricula and insane sexual propaganda. It’s going to get ugly.
Another stream of angst is the River of Covid-19. The tide has just turned on the question of where it came from, namely, the Wuhan Lab, but it’s hard to game-out both what we might do about that concerning the CCP’s role in it — plus, the roles of Dr. Fauci and our own National Institutes of Health — and whether the depraved administration of China Joe Biden can even acknowledge the facts. That is to say: the whole sorry episode looks like an act-of-war but carried out with America’s foolish willing collaboration.
But then a whole raft of really deadly additional questions overrides even the quandary of who’s responsible, and I refer to the future course of the disease itself, whether another wave comes back, what new variants might emerge, and the extremely spooky issue of what the long-term effects of the experimental vaccines might be. Since the news media is so untrustworthy, and these are such troubling threats, it will be very hard to locate the truth about the medical concerns.
There’s a ton of rogue commentary on the Internet about all this, and a lot of it comes from legitimate and credible doctors. But the highest official US medical authorities are crippled for now and the public is left to sort out what’s real and what’s not on our own. An aggravating factor is that so many people have been roped into taking the vaxes that they might not want to even hear about any serious problems discovered with them. One extremely worrying narrative lately surfaced is the idea that Covid-19 itself wasn’t the prime bio-weapon deployed against the world, but rather the vaccines will deliver more death than the disease. Not saying I subscribe to that theory, but it’s out there to chew on.
The third stream of angst is the big muddy river of economy-and-finance. For the moment, it’s the one drawing the least attention because the equity markets continue levering up-up-up reassuringly on ZIRP and the gold market goes mostly sideways, and Bitcoin dances up and down like the jester it is. The unemployment numbers are still grim, along with the perverse effect of jobs going unfilled due to federal relief packages. A lot of businesses wiped out by the lockdowns just aren’t coming back, and despite all the “liquidity” sloshing around stocks and bonds, there isn’t much capital really available for people who went bankrupt and need it to start up anything again. Lurking in the background to all this is the surreal government spending of “money” created from up the Federal Reserve’s wazoo, a Ponzi scheme for the ages that shows signs of ending as all Ponzis due: in ruin. Only in this case for an entire nation. We’ll end up either with no money or plenty of worthless money. Take your pick.
For the moment one can only observe that that the fiscal management of the Biden admin looks like just about the most reckless and clueless of any regime in US history. All of a sudden, a $10-trillion annual budget, including all the special “rescue” plans? Come on, man…. The deluge from this river of angst might easily overtake the rising waters of the other two as we stand watching on the levee of summertime. Just offstage of all this is the quirky playing-out of 2020 election audits. Gawd knows what the nation will do when faced with genuine proof that Mr. Biden is in office less than legitimately. That’ll bring on the equivalent of a five-hundred-year flood, fer sure, when angst turns to real misery.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-t...-of-angst/
h/t basserdan
By James Howard Kunstler
May 31, 2021
Does Memorial Day 2021 seem an unusually grim lull between spring and summer this year? Here in the northeast, rain pounded the lakes, ballfields, and barbeque circles all weekend with the additional insult of a steady fifty-degree chill that hardly changed from noon to midnight all weekend. Anyway, the holiday is always freighted with that hush of battlefields strewn with the dead — no smiling Santa Claus, no pastel Easter eggs, and the skeletons aren’t in the mood for dancing.
Even the military looked tarnished this year with a battle royale raging over the new imposed strictures of Critical Race Theory poisoning the ranks, and the fishy spectacle of Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, an exemplary officer, getting drummed out of his post as Commander of the new Space Force for publishing a book about all that. His firing provoked the consciences of retired generals and admirals who denounced the Pentagon’s new tilt into Marxist political activism as an existential threat to the nation — and that didn’t seem like such an exaggeration, either, considering how an America led by transsexual gunnery sergeants might meet its future foes on the fields of war.
Memorial Day also marks one year since the sacred transfiguration of George Floyd from repeat felon to patron saint of social justice, but the remembrance of all that seemed a bit wan now that officer Derek Chauvin stands convicted of murder and the Floyd family has been elevated into the financial one-percent with a $27-million settlement for the loss of George’s earnest existence. Meanwhile, America could not fail to note the 36-percent increase in the national homicide rate since that mournful afternoon in Minneapolis.
Three rivers of angst flow out of Memorial Day 2021, and it is possible to imagine how they will meet later this year and join in a mighty flood of woe over the country. The first is the toxic stream of Wokery saturating just about every institution in the USA from the armed services, to the DOJ, to education both public and private, to organized sports, to the corporate C suites and, of course, to the transmission of current events in news and social media.
Despite the torrents of mendacious narratives and fogs of gaslight deployed in this campaign, a substantial chunk of the public resists suffocation and has finally begun to fight back, especially at the grass roots local level against the dogma-driven school boards out to cancel Western Civ. Expect this to ramp up as the spring semester closes out and the schools must set the terms for resuming classes in the fall. The kids themselves are bucking the mask mandates while the parents tangle with the more vexing problems of Woke racist curricula and insane sexual propaganda. It’s going to get ugly.
Another stream of angst is the River of Covid-19. The tide has just turned on the question of where it came from, namely, the Wuhan Lab, but it’s hard to game-out both what we might do about that concerning the CCP’s role in it — plus, the roles of Dr. Fauci and our own National Institutes of Health — and whether the depraved administration of China Joe Biden can even acknowledge the facts. That is to say: the whole sorry episode looks like an act-of-war but carried out with America’s foolish willing collaboration.
But then a whole raft of really deadly additional questions overrides even the quandary of who’s responsible, and I refer to the future course of the disease itself, whether another wave comes back, what new variants might emerge, and the extremely spooky issue of what the long-term effects of the experimental vaccines might be. Since the news media is so untrustworthy, and these are such troubling threats, it will be very hard to locate the truth about the medical concerns.
There’s a ton of rogue commentary on the Internet about all this, and a lot of it comes from legitimate and credible doctors. But the highest official US medical authorities are crippled for now and the public is left to sort out what’s real and what’s not on our own. An aggravating factor is that so many people have been roped into taking the vaxes that they might not want to even hear about any serious problems discovered with them. One extremely worrying narrative lately surfaced is the idea that Covid-19 itself wasn’t the prime bio-weapon deployed against the world, but rather the vaccines will deliver more death than the disease. Not saying I subscribe to that theory, but it’s out there to chew on.
The third stream of angst is the big muddy river of economy-and-finance. For the moment, it’s the one drawing the least attention because the equity markets continue levering up-up-up reassuringly on ZIRP and the gold market goes mostly sideways, and Bitcoin dances up and down like the jester it is. The unemployment numbers are still grim, along with the perverse effect of jobs going unfilled due to federal relief packages. A lot of businesses wiped out by the lockdowns just aren’t coming back, and despite all the “liquidity” sloshing around stocks and bonds, there isn’t much capital really available for people who went bankrupt and need it to start up anything again. Lurking in the background to all this is the surreal government spending of “money” created from up the Federal Reserve’s wazoo, a Ponzi scheme for the ages that shows signs of ending as all Ponzis due: in ruin. Only in this case for an entire nation. We’ll end up either with no money or plenty of worthless money. Take your pick.
For the moment one can only observe that that the fiscal management of the Biden admin looks like just about the most reckless and clueless of any regime in US history. All of a sudden, a $10-trillion annual budget, including all the special “rescue” plans? Come on, man…. The deluge from this river of angst might easily overtake the rising waters of the other two as we stand watching on the levee of summertime. Just offstage of all this is the quirky playing-out of 2020 election audits. Gawd knows what the nation will do when faced with genuine proof that Mr. Biden is in office less than legitimately. That’ll bring on the equivalent of a five-hundred-year flood, fer sure, when angst turns to real misery.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-t...-of-angst/
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