"This Is the Way the World Ends"
Feel like we’re on the ragged edge of something
new and awful? You are not alone…
by Jim Kunstler
"That “singularity” so many blab about is not what they think it is: the merging of human intelligence with Bill Gates’s Office products, leading to an orgasmic nirvana of infinite memoranda from your HR department concerning new diversity, inclusion, and equity policy. Rather, I speak of the magic moment when the necromancers of finance discover that the proverbial can they’ve been kicking is filled with Schroedinger’s cat food… and the road they’ve been kicking it down actually comes to a dead end up their own highly-credentialed wazoos. Economics will never be the same hereafter.
The bond market has gone south, and that spells The End for the great game of financialization. The bond market is Moby Dick compared to the little blowfish that is the stock market. The global money system is based on bonds, which are… what? That’s right: loans… promises to pay you X at some future moment. So, what happens when a daisy-chain of promises-to-pay gets broken? Or, perhaps more precisely, when all those promises lose their last shred of plausible reality? Why, the money that these broken promises are denominated in loses its essential cred. Trick question: how much is worthless money worth? (Answer: not enough to pay for a can of Scroedinger’s cat food.)
Which is where all this folderol leaves a lot of ordinary people all over Western Civ (and beyond!) trying to scratch up enough increasingly worthless money to feed the family and pay the landlord. Many will never understand what happened. But they will not be any less pissed off at the result.
This is the way the world ends for the hapless phantom known as “Joe Biden” the child-sniffing ectoplasm that haunts the White House these days of late empire. Somehow, the bamboozled nation has so far passively accepted the pranks and punishments laid on them by the backstage managers behind the Figment-in-Chief. Eight-plus percent inflation? No problemo, right? Eighty-seven thousand new IRS agents on-board to drive you batshit while destroying your household and your posterity (ha!)? Half the population of South America flooding across the border? (The vibrancy! You no like?) A hundred dollar fill-up at the gas pump, and no heat for you this winter? (But… Netflix!) Drag queens to amuse and edify your children about the delirious realm of sexual pathology. All that…and how about a Russian hypersonic nuclear missile up your ass if the preceding somehow failed to move you? (Because: Russia, Russia, Russia…!)
Meanwhile, a trend is manifesting in other lands. The people of, first, Sweden and now Italy are voting in “right wing” nationalist governments - the horror - sending their equivalent of our Party of Chaos to the showers. This has irked the President of the European Union, one Ursula von der Leyen, no end. She has threatened to send Italy to its room without supper for the effrontery Of course, Madame von der Leyen’s fellow Germans have already been sent to their room without so much as a kartoffelklop, plus no heat or hot showers for you, Hansel and Gretel. Embrace the suck.
You may be sure that we’re in for the business here in America, too. The thermometers are trending down and Halloween won’t be so much fun when the little goblins come home to a house that’s the same temperature inside as the night air outside. Little Skippy’s face is turning blue, and not because he went trick-or-treating as Robert the Bruce.
The aforementioned Party of Chaos, the gang that queered the last big election, is surely gearing up to run a whole lot of work-arounds for massaging the November 8 midterm vote in their direction. Nothing is beyond them. One of their avatars, the podcaster Sam Harris, said it out loud a month ago: that lying and cheating is perfectly ethical in service to the Left’s being able to continue imposing its will upon all of us. Whoops! He let Schroedinger’s cat out of its hypothetical sack. The punishments must continue until morale improves! (Hope you enjoyed your career, Sam.)
And so it begins… as they intone in the horror movies when the contents of the family’s raised ranch, chattels, children, mom, dad, the golden retriever all get sucked out of the universe via some quantum portal in the television. Today the markets, tomorrow our beloved country will be overrun by what’ll look like an alien invasion of re-po men. This is the way the world ends… not with a bang… but with a physics lesson: the lonesome sound of Schroedinger’s cat’s meow."
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"The Hollow Men"
I
"We are the hollow men,
We are the stuffed men,
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass,
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men,
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams,
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column.
There, is a tree swinging,
And voices are
In the wind's singing,
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom.
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land,
This is cactus land.
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom,
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness,
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here,
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars,
In this hollow valley,
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech,
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear,
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom,
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear,
Prickly pear, prickly pear,
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality,
Between the motion
And the act,
Falls the Shadow.
For Thine is the Kingdom...
Between the conception
And the creation,
Between the emotion
And the response,
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long...
Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow.
For Thine is the Kingdom...
For Thine is,
Life is,
For Thine is the,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper."
- T.S. Eliot
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