Beginning Veteran’s Day Week With …

The week began with the usual stories about unemployment,  government mismanagement, and Afghanistan but then comes James Howard Kunstler’s weekly comment on current events (kunstler.com/blog): insightful and predictive in “Dreams Die Hard” (11/9/09).

Here’s just a bit of that post that’s well worth your time to read (as are all his weekly/Monday posts and his excellent book “The Long Emergency”):

• “Within the context of conventional party politics – the kind that has been baseline “normal” in the USA for a long time – we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of- touch  with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for ’hope” – if not hope itself – the President and his White advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They’re flat out lying about the employment figures issued in the government’s name. They’re willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against “the malefactors of great wealth.” They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return to the prior state of reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a. “consumerism”) that has made us so ridiculous and unhealthy.
• “The Republican right wing is, if anything, even more childishly delusional. For Glen Beck and Sarah Palin it comes down to “drill, baby, drill”.
• “In the meantime, American life will just wind down, no matter what we believe.”

Until a next time; keep your eyes on the horizon as the weathers changing fast.