Good Afternoon JHK, Are you healing nicely? Got to move around or that scar tissue will tighten up and make your life a living hell! Keep moving! Your girlfriend must be a real comfort right now and it’s amazing how you’re able to find people like her…several times over your life span.I don’t have your talents more »
Forecast 2013: Contraction, Contagion, and Contradiction
The people who like to think they are managing the world’s affairs seem fiercely determined to ignore the world’s true condition — namely, the permanent contraction of industrial economies. They just can’t grok it. Two hundred years of cheap fossil fuel programmed mankind to expect limitless goodies forever on an upward-swinging arc more »
KunstlerCast #214: A Small American City
JHK helps Duncan launch a new podcast series Released: Dec. 28, 2012 James Howard Kunstler will be resuming the KunstlerCast, solo, in the near future. In the meantime, this is the “pilot” episode for “A Small American City,” a new podcast series by former KunstlerCast host Duncan Crary. Jim helped Duncan launch the new series more »
In the Shadow of Christmas
Do you know why scenes or even just shots of freeways so seldom appear in the movies we watch? Because they are so depressing that nobody can stand to see them. The jolts of terror that you get in a horror movie at least inform you that you’re alive, but more »
December 2012

Behold the landscape of Happy Motoring in its latest iteration in northern Virginia, that is, the Washington DC suburbs. It’s significant that the very seat of policy and governance in our country is the epicenter of cluelessness about the fate of our tragic car dependency. They just see endless new layers added onto the existing more »
America the Horror Show
Finally the USA has an act that perfectly expresses its true spirit as the horror show nation among nations: the random mass slaughter of little children by a maniac. Is it not so that the failure to protect little children from harm is the most shameful weakness an adult human can present? more »
Homeless
Even if the so-called economy were “recovering,” the people of the USA would be stuck in a physical setting for daily life that has no future – the nightmare infrastructure of subdivision houses, strip malls, and WalMarts, all rigged up for incessant motoring. Of course, the so-called economy is not recovering because there more »
Modernity Bites
There is surely a correspondence between an exhausted culture and a populace devolved so far into mental dullness that it can’t recognize its predicament. We don’t seem to get how much the industrial production spree of the past 200 years has just plumb worn us out, not to mention the ecosystem we were more »
November 2012

On view in Kingston, NY. This kind of says it all about the condition of America’s Main Street economy. Note, this is about both the programming and quality of the buildings. Thanks to Martine Hahn from Greenwich, NY, for sending it in. Closeup below:
A Look in the Mirror
The verdict is apparently in: if Fox News will replace its current heraldic theme music with a mariachi band, and Sean Hannity puts on a sombrero for his nightly broadcast prayer circle, then the Republican Party will once again rule the land… …Not – in the immortal word of Borat Sagdiyev. more »
The Tides of Event
Mitt Romney’s sickening insincerity was on full view Sunday night as CNN served up both candidates complete finish-line pitches to the Ohio crowds thought to hold the fate of the election in their fickle sway. Romney has consistently proved one thing over the whole, long, nauseating course of his campaign: that he will say anything more »
Apocalyptoween
With little to do while waiting for something possibly very bad to happen people tend to get jokey. That was how I felt about the election until Hurricane Sandy came along. For one thing, I happened to travel (by car – how else?) last week from Bennington through Brattleboro, Vermont, and down more »
Snake Garden
There’s a good reason why nobody is paying attention to the election this year except the people who, one way or another, get paid to be interested: because for all that’s at stake there is no coherent discussion about any of it. By ‘at stake’ I mean what we are going to do more »
October 2012

The architect of this addition to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Mels Crouwel, dubbed his creation “the Bathtub.” Actually, it looks more like what we in America would call a laundry sink.
Heretics Unite!
History is in a bad mood, as reflected in its acting troupe, the human race. What goes for the micro of an individual human personality also seems true for the group. We have our bright moments, or years, and our darker ones and cycles within cycles of these and even sometimes bright and more »
Interview With Jack Spirko Of The Survival Podcast
Interview With Jack Spirko Of The Survival Podcast
Empty Pageantry
The press wet its small-clothes over Mitt Romney’s ebullience in last Thursday’s so-called debate, as these joint interview contests are styled these days. What a jaunty fellow Mitt came off as, compared to poor Mr. Obama, cloaked in presidential gloom, the wearisome woes of high office and all that – or perhaps just more »
In Full Flight
Flying at higher platitudes in the thin upper air of his own mind last week, Republican candidate Mitt Romney remarked apropos of airplane travel: “[T]he windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous.” It turned out that Mitt more »
Duty
I drove the eight miles from Cambridge to Greenwich, New York, around eight o’clock and the night was bell-jar clear. A scrim of deepest blue sky backlit the landscape of tender hills and valleys while on the ground I wended the twisting two-lane state highway 372 with my brights amplifying the yellow road signs and more »
Interview With Minister John Shuck Of The Religion For Life Podcast
Interview With Minister John Shuck Of The Religion For Life Podcast
What Does It Mean?
In the word-cloud of current events, the phrase “parasitic financial system” billows up to a degree that suggests even so-called thinking persons begin to understand what’s happening: that banking shenanigans are sucking the life out of advanced societies. That’s why Matt Taibbi’s metaphor of Goldman Sachs as “a Vampire Squid jamming its more »
Zeitgeist Failure
In an age of gross zeitgeist dysfunction — when untruth, delusion, and deception rule – politics is mere advertising, which is to say surface shimmer playing on the public’s wish-fulfillment fantasies. The trouble at this moment in history is that the American public’s wishful fantasies are inconsistent with the circumstances that reality offers more »
Our Years Of Magical Thinking: Interview With James Kunstler
Our Years Of Magical Thinking: Interview With James Kunstler