Posted on 02/04/2017 7:01:22 AM PST by blam
Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com
The Purpose of Decadence and the Pleasures of Coercion
I guess you’ve noticed by now that the center didn’t hold. Instead of a secure platform for political premises like tradition, precedent, rationality, and cultural norms, you see a fiery maw of sheer emotion between the camps of the so-called Left and the so-called Right.
I say so-called because the campus Left and the Trump Right have escaped the categorical corrals they formerly occupied. And they may have left their customary official parties stranded and dying too. It may be fatuous to say whether that is a good or bad thing; it just is, for the moment. They are two halves of a polity so broken and so far apart that it is also hard to see how they might ever come back together into a consensus about how a society might operate successfully.
Not having a consensus — some substantial overlap between circles of perspective — it’s not surprising that America can’t construct a coherent view of what is happening, or make a plan for what to do about it. Mainly what’s happening is the running down of fossil fuel based techno-industrial economies, and the main symptom is falling standards of living, with fading prospects for future happiness and security.
As I’ve said before, our economic picture is basically untenable due to the falling energy-return-on-investment of the crucial oil supply (shout-out to Steve St. Angelo). At the high point of 1920s oil production the ratio was around 100-1. The shale oil “miracle” is good for about 5-1. The aggregate of all oil these days is under 30-1. Below that number, you’ve got to shed some activities in our complex economy (or they just get too expensive to support)
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
I’m sorry I read this thing by “Tyler Durden” and have been left with a feeling of “what the hell?”
I tried to see who this guy is but when I clicked on his icon in the article, the ensuing page said “you don’t have access to this information.” La-di-dah.
There were so many “ism” words in this tripe appended to a whole host of issues that somehow this person connects to “the economy.”
I’m just not buying this crap, frankly.
Kunstler is in his own world (i.e. head in posterior) as he tries to lump together the violent fascists of Berkeley with the ordinary attendees of Trump rallies while writing in figurative imagery as if straightening his bowtie as he smiles at his reader(s) in supercilious self-praise of his superior ‘center’ perspective.
Yes, Tyler needs to have better backup while he continues to work hard at researching his Grade-A reporting projects.
The author’s economic and technology assumptions are loony.
The divide is not economic anyway. Some of us simply will not compromise with the insane and the evil.
Just so you know, ‘Tyler Durden’ (name taken from the novel Fight Club) is the byline used by a group of guys who write at Zero Hedge. A collective pseudonym, if you will.
THE SECOND COMING
by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
***
The Second Coming was written in 1919 in the aftermath
of the first World War.
I did find that out after some searching. I think it’s a little juvenile myself, but if that’s how they roll, okay. I still don’t think it changes the article for me, however.
Babble, trying to sound SMART! Has Not a Clue, and gets paid for it..
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