Forecast 2023 - Get Out of the Way if You Can’t Lend a Hand

Article author: 
James Howard Kunstler
Article date: 
31 December 2022
Article category: 
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body: 

Here's an interesting and sobering read. Kunstler covers the economy, the deep state, Ukraine (particularly interesting), Asia, and diminishing energy. His prognosis is grim, consistent with his books The Long Emergency.and Living in the Long Emergency. The article is sobering yet worth reading. Here are a few excerpts:

... 2022 sure was a cold shower. The long emergency I talk so much about finally got up to cruising speed, with the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden” revving our country into economic, political, and cultural collapse — a hat-trick of calamity — and he did it more swiftly and directly than any emperor managed in late-day Rome, with policies and actions 180-degrees contra to America’s public interest...

Economy

All you can really say is that the folks running things have hijacked every module of our nation’s interests and tilted them down into decadence and ruin. They’ve tanked whatever’s left of the US economy with an array of surefire idiotic maneuvers. By spending trillions of dollars that don’t exist to buy votes, they’ve inflated away our money’s purchasing power — an Econ 101 level mistake. The “Green New Deal” is a swindle, an out-front, in-your-face nefarious operation to subvert Western Civ by the WEF...

There is no way we can run our society as currently outfitted on any combination of alt.energies. All the Greenies can really accomplish with this crusade is to destroy the complex systems we rely on faster than would happen in the normal course of things, foreclosing any chance of an orderly retreat to a plausibly downscaled arrangement for daily life. We are exiting the current system anyway, like it or not — the longstanding thesis of The Long Emergency....

By the way, the WEF’s core idea of central control by a coordinated world government is at odds with the core reality of the times ahead, which is that life is about to get much more local and downscaled — the exact opposite of centralized....

The Ukraine bread-basket is out of the picture in 2023, unless military action ends well before planting season. Thanks to “Joe B’s” stupid sanctions policy, a more vulnerable Europe can’t depend on Russia, another world-leading grain producer. By summer, the projected harvests all over Western Civ will be inadequate to feed the existing populations...

Europe has already blundered into buying its one-way ticket to Palookaville... The coup de grace was the US wrecking the Nord Stream pipelines....

Russia eventually began reaching out in the world and made trade agreements with other countries. It built those Nord Stream gas pipelines. It organized a regional “customs union” among its Eurasian neighbors intended to function rather like the Eurozone.

As that was all happening — pay attention — around 2010 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat on a State Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) that threatened to block the sale of a Canadian company, Uranium One, to Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, on the grounds that Uranium One’s assets included 20-percent of the USA’s uranium supply.... But then, suddenly, about $150-million poured into the Clinton Foundation...

From 2014-on, Ukraine, with America’s backing, did everything possible to antagonize Russia, especially showering the eastern provinces of Ukraine, called the Donbas, with artillery, rockets, and bombs to harass the Russia-leaning population there. After eight years of that, and continued American insults (the Steele Dossier, 2016 election interference), and renewed threats to drag Ukraine into NATO, Mr. Putin had enough and launched his “Special Military Operation” to discipline Ukraine....

Prediction: Europe’s industry will falter and close down by painful increments. The EU will not withstand the economic stress of de-industrialization. It will shatter and leave Europe once again a small continent of many small fractious nations with longstanding grudges....

Bottom line: Ukraine is and always was within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, and will remain so. The USA has no business there...

More likely, I think, we’ll forego the nuclear fire and simply go through a collapse of the socioeconomic organization that our governance rests on, and the Deep State illness with it. It’ll come with plenty of hardship, but it will purge the poisons that have disordered us, and when we get through it, we’ll make new arrangements for daily life....

Related

It's Not A Lie If You Believe It, Burning Platform, 29 December 2022:

I wish I could go through a day without having to reference Orwell and Huxley when observing how the ruling class is able to manipulate, subjugate, and propagandize the willfully ignorant masses through lies, deceptions, disinformation, and fear. But here we are, living through a dystopian nightmare blending the worst aspects of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World....

Orwell’s explanation of mass-media deception is a brilliant assessment of how the ruling class changes the narrative to suit their needs, and without blinking an eye are able to deny what they have said and done. Orwell saw this manipulation of the truth before TV, the internet, social media, or professionally created government propaganda existed....

The perfect example of Orwell’s mass media deception in practice has been this entire Covid hoax, which has been built on a foundation of lies from the very beginning. At the outset Fauci scoffed at the concept of masks providing any protection from a microscopic virus while being interviewed on 60 Minutes. He wasn’t lying....

They lied about social distancing, based on a 3rd grade girl’s school paper. They used a PCR test improperly to falsely produce “positive” cases in order to terrify the masses into a mass formation psychosis....

The cognitive dissonance of the vaxxed runs deep. They are too embarrassed and ashamed to admit they were duped and lied to. How many more young people need to “die suddenly”...

And still half the country refuses to accept the truth because they don’t want to question the narrative or abandon their fellow vaccine cultists....

The masses do not mind being lied to because they are entranced by narratives created to keep them under control and focused on whichever enemy they are propagandized to hate, whether it be Trump, lockdown and mask dissenters, anti-vaxxers, phantom white supremacists, J6 “insurrectionists”, the Russians, or “election deniers”....

If Government Officials Want To Prevent Rebellion They Should Stop Committing Treason, Alt Market 22 December 2022.