Jim Kunstler’s Predictions For 2024
Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024.
Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?
Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries.
They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.
The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard.
Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.
You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men. . . strong men bring good times. . . good times make weak men. . . .
Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out. . . topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.
My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the fuckery has been — much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op. . . the global mass vaxx campaign. . . the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans. . . the broad-based censorship operations. . . the capture of the news media. . . and the war-mongering.
So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.
The Great Race
Uh, no, I am not referring to Blacks, Browns, Ochres, and Whites of the Homo sapiens persuasion but to an epic contest between forces already in motion and how that competition is going.
Three big tendencies propel us into the uncharted territory of the near future.
1) technological advance, especially artificial intelligence,
2) Collapse of complex systems needed to run a technologically advanced civilization, and
3) geopolitical disorder (including domestically in the USA).
Some combo of these three will determine the direction history goes in the year directly ahead. Will it be techno tyranny of the elite oppressing bug-eating serfs a la the WEF’s proclaimed goals?
A Google-ist robotic nirvana of intergalactic leisure and incessant orgasm in the Ray Kurzweil vein? Some brand of SHTF like Mad Max or a World Made by Hand? A war of all against all (or maybe just some against some)?
Or only more of the same tiresome, inconclusive, morbid and grotesque, Woked-up, post-modern Jacobinism?
Mystery Mutts on the Loose
The USA under “Joe Biden” has lost its military credibility, its economic power, and its moral authority. We must wonder if we are susceptible to being overrun, and possibly even occupied by our adversaries. Of course, the first duty of any government is to defend the country’s sovereign territory.
“Joe Biden’s” Homeland Security Chief Mayorkas is allowing more than 10,000 illegal aliens across the Mexican border each and every day. Most of these characters are military-age men, 90-percent of them lately from places other than Latin America, quite a few from China and hostile Muslim lands.
We don’t bother vetting them anymore. We just give them cell phones, debit cards loaded with $5,000 of walking-around money, and plane tickets to. . . wherever they like. They’re not here to make Moo Goo Gai Pan or trim privet hedge.
What do you think might happen in a set-up like that?
Prediction: in 2024, things are going to blow up around the USA. Infrastructure. Power plants, transport hubs, public places, bridges, monuments, you name it.
If you can sneak people and fentanyl across the border, you can sneak Semtex and C-4 plastic explosives over and the electronics are easy to get in-country. I wouldn’t rule out fissionable materials either, or stuff than can be used as a “dirty bomb” — a conventional explosive that disperses dangerous radioactive material when it blows.
I’d also expect groups of trained “migrant” men with rifles, grenades, and so on, to be shooting up places where people gather. We under-appreciate the amount of mayhem you can kick off with small arms.
If the “Joe Biden” regime just stands by on that and does nothing, will you be surprised to hear that American citizens begin forming militias to shoot back, maybe even start to hunt down and round up illegal immigrants?
The table is set for exactly this kind of low-grade war right here in our country.
The Energy Picture
Oil still matters a lot. 90-percent of the new oil in America after 2008 came from fracking. It was a mighty operation and we are at a new all-time production peak in the USA of just over 13-million barrels a day.
That’s a lot of oil, quite an achievement, but it’s sending a false signal. (Also note, we still consume about 20-million barrels a day.) Of the several fabled shale oil basins in America, only the Permian Basin in Texas is not in decline, and the situation there belies what the big numbers imply.
Individual well production is going down at an alarming rate (says oil analyst Art Berman) even while production is massive for now. We’re draining the remaining “sweet spots” as fast as we can — drinking the milkshake through more straws — driving the shale industry closer to depletion.
We are going to fall away from peak production much more rapidly than the fifteen years it took to get there. All that prior shale oil production was done using money borrowed at much lower interest rates.
America has entered a debt crisis. One way or another, the easy investment money for fracking is gone at the same time the shale plays are getting drained. There are no other significant shale plays left to discover in the USA outside of the already declining Bakken, Eagle Ford, and the still-booming Permian.
The marine-type shale formations that made fracking feasible in the USA are much harder to find elsewhere in the world, and the capital to explore for them is diverted all over Europe into cockamamie “green energy” schemes that have already failed.
Germany had to revive coal production for electricity after the USA blew up the Nord Stream pipelines “to weaken Russia,” at the same time Germany’s big wind-and-solar initiative crapped out.
Meanwhile the geopolitical realignment of the now enlarged BRICs coalition has set in motion many significant changes in economic relations between countries that will affect global oil distribution.
Saudi Arabia is dissociating from its cozy former hookup with the USA, including its embrace of the US dollar for oil sales — the “petrodollar” — which had until very lately helped stabilize
1) global distribution of oil
2) the US dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency and
3) relative peace in the pivotal geography of the Middle East, including the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, etc.
We’re seeing the first stage of that instability right now as the lowly Yemeni Houthi rebels threaten Western shipping coming out of the Red Sea and out past the Horn of Africa.
Also, obviously, the absurd Ukraine War we provoked has shifted Russia’s oil-and-gas export flow from the Western Civ nations to the other BRICs.
In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024.
Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war.
And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.
Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating.
Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke.
We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.
2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity — not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.
It’s not all going to fall apart at once — though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it — and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma.
But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.
Many of these disturbances will be caused, one way or another, by problems with oil supplies and prices. Some of that will be the sheer effects of a sun-setting industry, but a lot will depend on the ability to freely transport oil along its accustomed routes.
Economy and Money
One must imagine that strange currents of capital flows in the ocean of world money are what’s propping up the equity markets and even bonds are retracing their price-lines after a year on the destructive path that tracks monetary inflation.
Is this money dribbling in each day from China, Japan, and the vassal states of the EU trying to avoid the collapsing global Ponzi? The 2023 Santa Claus rally may be that fabled final peak before the long-anticipated blowoff. Who knows anymore?
The macro boyz must be tearing their hair out. Finance seems to have successfully de-linked from the on-the-ground activities of daily life ruled by “Bidenomics” — which is not even coherent enough to add up to a joke.
It’s just as empty a word as “Joe Biden” is an empty suit, trotted out for empty ceremonies.
Most everybody also awaits some kind of grand flimflam that jams us all into that rumored central bank digital currency rolling out, supposedly, to replace the hopelessly over-leveraged US dollar and the Euro.
Good way to start a monumental social uprising, I’d say, with government office buildings torched from Berlin to Tokyo. But they might try it anyway, because there is otherwise no fallback but a terrifying period of financial anarchy, where nothing works anymore.
In the meantime, pretending that the old “toolkit” still avails, Jerome Powell has suggested that he intends to “ease” Fed rates into the election year to goose lending back up, which is what Fed chairpersons generally do for the politicians they serve — and of the worst sort of lending, too: the leveraged trade in securities (financial figments) —which supposedly also stimulates hiring, “consumer” spending, and business formation.
I don’t see that working at all. The current unemployment rate (US BLS) is 3.7 percent, which is close to rock bottom. “Hiring Now!” signs are visible at every business left standing after the Covid shutdowns.
Why is nobody answering the call? My guess is that Covid vaccine injuries and disabilities are above what is mis-reported even reluctantly by the CDC and the news media. America is too sick to work and our business models are too broken to keep commerce and manufacturing alive.
On-the-ground, everything is breaking or already broken from trucking to packaging to building to growing to selling. Most of the damage has been done by government over many decades, but the DEI crusades of recent years really screwed the pooch, imposing an overlay of incompetence on routines and relations already under severe strain.
At the crudest level, activities like flash-mob looting undermine the entire retail shopping model. Must we go back to little stores where all the merchandise is behind a counter manned by clerks who have to be paid a living wage?
We just might have to — though you could just as easily imagine a period of time when our society is too chaotic to make any transition.
You probably haven’t failed to notice that Gold recently made the journey well above $2000-an-ounce. The DXY dollar index has been tanking steadily for weeks, too. Something’s up.
Silver is lagging — coiling, coiling around $24 for many months — but you can expect to see it slingshot up when the “moneyness” of everything else dribbles away. Will the government try to take the gold away, as it did in 1933?
Consider: America in 1933 was a very different, highly-regimented society of people trained to show up on time and do what they were told. This is not that America. This is a country of tattooed savages with an axe to grind against authorities they have come to loathe. Which brings us to the next topic:
Civil Strife and the Election
Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump.
In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law.
I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules — he was not confirmed by the Senate. . . whoopsie).
WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short.
Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.
You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election.
Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.
But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down.
This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated.
There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.
This is taken from a long document, read the rest here substack.com
Header image: The Telegraph
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