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James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog is updated Mondays and Fridays. The KunstlerCast podcast and Eyesore of the Month are monthly features. Read & comment here.
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“Where Am I Here?”

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James Howard Kunstler
Mar 26, 2021

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      Biden’s style — specifically how he communicates with the American people — is also a page from the FDR playbook. Two months into his presidency, he has been surprisingly disciplined and economical with his words and appearances. The verbal gaffes that dogged him throughout his long career in Washington are nowhere to be seen.”
— Paul Brandus, Opinion columnist, USA Today

I don’t know about you, but I was thrilled to hear Joe Biden tell America — with a faraway gleam in those ol’ blue Konstantin Chernenko eyes — that he’s expecting to run for a second term. The prospect must engross him, so effervescent was his campaign of 2020! Like all presidents, he’s learning on-the-job, but he’s already lapping Franklin Roosevelt in the hundred-day dash of executive action, showing those wicked CCP envoys who’s boss (why, they are, of course), and turning the depraved white supremacist state of Texas into a vibrant Honduras del Norte. As Mr. Biden would say, anyway… I’ve gone on too long about that….

Meanwhile, from offstage you could hear the crunch of his handlers chewing their Xanax, knowing that the game was a brain-fart away from disaster. Well, he only wandered away from the podium one time, and he dutifully followed the script. In fact, the script was right there in his hand the entire white-knuckle hour of this debut press conference, and he often appeared to be reading straight off the page. I’m sure he was making a funny when he said he came to the Senate 120 years ago. (Remember the battle over Wm. H Taft’s nomination to be Territorial Governor of the Philippines?  And how, in the hearings, then-freshman Senator Ol’ Joe B produced three New Haven doxies who testified about Taft’s “abnormal appetites” during the nominee’s years at Yale?)

Traditionally, presidential press conferences are opportunities to inform the nation where things stand, and to send signals to the other nations (“friend and foe alike” as JFK used to say) about America’s intentions, especially in the nuclear age, with the world so nervously on edge. What did Americans learn from Mr. Biden’s debut? Mainly that an old dog can do some old tricks, follow a script, play the politician, fill a suit, run his mouth, and go through the motions — fulfilling people’s cynical expectation that some trip is being laid on them. Foreign observers will probably note that the executive branch is being run by a politburo more secretive even than the old gang who ran the USSR. No one in this country seems to notice.

Mr. Biden’s real job is as a walking MaxWriter© signature machine, ready to sit down and serve whenever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer send another 1000-plus-page bundle of legislation to the White House, designed to ratchet up the government’s despotic power over everyday life in order to “solve the problems” of free enterprise, free elections, and free speech with free money and hyper-complexity.

Coming up soon, for instance: HR1, the “For the People [ha!] Act,” designed to maximally enable election fraud by enrolling as many live bodies as possible to vote with no chance of verifying their identities, age, place of residence, or citizenship. The act would certainly introduce many new layers of chaos and delay in ascertaining election results. It would also take away the states’ constitutional duty to fashion their own election requirements and, in the process, further erode the legitimacy of the federal government and give many states more reason to oppose and nullify it, or even secede from it — meaning, another step toward that looming civil war 2.0.

One strange exchange in the press conference especially stood out [from the official White House transcript]:

Q: [Janet Rodriguez, Univision] Thank you, Mr. President. We, too, have been reporting at the border. And just like Cecilia, we ran into a pair of siblings who came in on Monday, who were detained by CBP — had the phone number for their mother who lives in the U.S.  We have contacted the mother. That’s the only way they know her kids are here because CBP, today, Thursday, has not contacted that mother. So, when can we expect your promise of things getting better with contacting and expediency and processing?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, they’re already getting better, but they’re going to get real — they’ll get a whole hell of lot better real quick, or we’re going to hear of some people leaving, okay?

Did you catch that? The siblings’ mother lives in the USA? How did she get here and when? Is she here legally? Why were these children living in another country, away from their mother, and for how long? Why did the mother abandon her children in the country she left? Did anybody notice that this story doesn’t add up?


This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:  Kunstler.com/vaulted


Your Spring Reading ! ! !

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A Too-Big-To-Fail Bankster
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Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962.
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New Paintings by JHK 2020


Other Books by JHK
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Book 1:

World Made by Hand

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The Witch of Hebron

Book 3:

A History of the Future


Book 4:

Harrows of Spring
Buy World Made By Hand Signed and local from Battenkill Books
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Buy World Made By Hand at Northshire Books
Buy The Witch of Hebron signed and local from Battenkill Books
Buy The Witch of Hebron on Amazon
Buy The Witch of Hebron at Northshire Books
Signed and local from Battenkill Books
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Signed and local from Battenkill Books
Available on Amazon
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Geography of Nowhere
The Long Emergency

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James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog is updated Mondays and Fridays. The KunstlerCast podcast and Eyesore of the Month are monthly features. Read & comment here.

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The Great 'Splainin' Cometh
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Kamala Unwinding
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