Bob Dylan - Desolation Row (Official Audio)
Posted on 04/13/2024 4:25:47 AM PDT by MtnClimber
“They have tried to solve a wide range of insoluble problems, from the weather to poverty to viruses, and now they will attempt to solve us.” —Eugyppius.
This is that part of the movie where the hero — you — tumbles off the cliff on Kong Island in a lightning storm with a canyon full of tarantulas down below where you’ll soon be landing. I know, not a pretty picture. The cliff is our country’s financial quandary; the lightning is us getting sucked directly into war; and the tarantula pit below is the emerging peril of Covid vaccine injury and death coming on hard, like your landing.
Gold and silver are vaulting up suddenly like nobody’s business (literally). This may be fun to see if you are sitting on a pile, even a small pile of the stuff. But to everybody else it’s a signal that something is messed up in the complex engine of the economy. You know, of course, that our money is debt. So, debt is the fuel that drives that engine. Debt is a promise to pay back money with interest to take advantage of the time-value of money. The time-value of money means it’s better to have the money now (to keep the engine running) than to wait until your work produces money (if it even can).
The trouble is, debt loses its credibility if there is no plausible way of paying it back, or even just to keep paying the interest. That’s exactly what is happening now. Everybody can see that the US government can’t pay the interest on its debt, which is Treasury bonds, notes, and bills (from long duration to short). That debt is running at well over $1-trillion a year. That’s a thousand billion, which is a thousand million, altogether a million million. See, it’s impossible to grok how more than a trillion dollars gets produced in an economy based on selling fried chicken nuggets and streamed movies to people with no jobs.
When the Treasury holds an auction on a new issue of bonds (needed to pay off the interest on old bonds) and nobody shows up to buy because they doubt its ability to pay interest on the new paper, our country’s debt becomes worthless. As a last resort, the Federal Reserve swoops in and buys that worthless paper by creating “money” on its computer. That “money” goes out into the economy. The Fed pretends to get paid interest. It’s all fakery, a swindle. It’s like putting water in the gas tank of your engine. You know that the engine is going to throw a rod. When it does, it’ll be such a shock that the vehicle it’s running in is liable to hit a bridge abutment or something else hard. That’s what tumbling off the cliff is like.
The dopes running US foreign policy are so foolishly obsessed with taunting Russia (“poking the bear”), that they can’t give up their sponsorship of the war in Ukraine, which Ukraine is losing because they never had the mojo for the fight. That should have been obvious, but for some reason our “best-and-brightest” overlooked that. No amount of free weaponry and ammo can make up for the fact that Ukraine has run out of young men to pointlessly get shredded by Russian artillery. Russia is unwilling to get rolled by NATO and the US in a part of the world Russia has controlled for centuries. Yet, “Joe Biden” keeps hinting about sending America’s tranny army there, and even gearing up the military draft for the nose-ring and blue hair generation. Good luck with that.
Nor does “JB” exercise any control over what Israel does over in the Bible Lands. Bibi gonna do what Bibi gonna do. Israel can’t be persuaded that the current war is not a struggle for its existence. As Scott Adams points out, Israel has decided to pawn off its Holocaust cred in order to treat its enemies as harshly as possible, so as not to get wiped off the map. Israel has treated the Palestinians very harshly. (The October 7 Hamas raid was pretty darn harsh, too.) In any case, world opinion went all rancid on Israel. That hasn’t stopped them. Now Israel faces its ultimate foe, Persia, a.k.a. Iran, these days. Persia has a big army and a lot of weapons, and all sorts of wing-men in the neighborhood. . . as a practical matter, most of Islam right now. This week, Persia made noises about an imminent attack on Israel. Didn’t happen so far.
Let’s get real on Islam. Its core principle is to exterminate the humans on this planet who are not of Islam. Islam has been pissed-off at Western Civ since the Crusades, its animus renewed in 1683, when Islam’s advance into Europe was halted at the gates of Vienna, and then again in modern times when Islam got pushed around because Western Civ wanted its oil. Islam is overrunning Europe again and penetrating the USA through our southern border. Islam means business. It wants to wreck us, kill us, and take our stuff. And it dearly, sorely, wants to deep-six Israel, which Islam contemptuously refer to as “the Zionist entity,” as if it were some crypto-insectile space alien.
America (and Europe, too) wants to play this both ways: to grudgingly help Israel survive while at the same time pretending not to notice Islam’s true aims....
A bad time to have big problems when we pay so much just to keep up with interest on the debt.
James Howard Kunstler doing his best “Kurt Schlicter” thing. Love the way this guy word-smiths.
Too bad it’s the truth.
NOt to worry. We still have our bibles and guns.
Let them come.
Now that is funny. This guy Kunstler can definitely turn a phrase.
Thanks for posting Kunstler’s ‘Clusterf*ck Nation’ blog every Monday and Friday...this and Karl Denninger’s ‘Market Ticker’ ALWAYS worth a read.
There will be even greater collision going on between the dims and China and Iran.
...All your seasick sailors, they’re all rowing home
Your empty-handed army is all going home...
I’ve been reading his SubStack column for over a year; always a good read.
“...how more than a trillion dollars gets produced in an economy based on selling fried chicken nuggets and streamed movies to people with no jobs.”
LOL...
Bob Dylan - Desolation Row (Official Audio)
Thanks for the origin of the title.
I thought it was Tom Waits.
May’ve been, I don’t know.
Marking.
No, you are correct. I just think Tom Waits covered Bob’s song or I just hear his voice in my mind...
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