Kunstlercast - Suburban Sprawl: A Tragic Comedy

Larry Kummer is The editor of the Fabius Maximus website. FabiusMaximus.com He has 37 years experience in the finance industry in a variety of roles, retiring as a VP and Senior Portfolio Manager at a global investment bank. He was a Boy Scout volunteer leader for 15 years, running a Troop for 7 years and retiring as Director and VP-Finance of the Mt Diablo-Silverado Council. For 20 years he was an active Republican, working on many campaigns — until the party abandoned its traditional principles. He began writing about geopolitics in 2003 A sampling of important posts from Fabius Maximus: America isn’t falling like the Roman Empire. We're falling like the Roman Republic. Welcome to ClownWorld, the final meme for America- It is the next phase of the "crazy years", long ago predicted by Robert Heinlein. A new, dark picture of America’s future- our institutions are falling like a line of dominoes. Larry says, “I’ve written 140 posts about ways to reform America. They are the least popular posts. We want simple

Larry Kummer. Are these the Crazy Years in America? Larry is The editor of the Fabius Maximus website. FabiusMaximus.com He has 37 years experience in the finance industry in a variety of roles, retiring as a VP and Senior Portfolio Manager at a global investment bank. He was a Boy Scout volunteer leader for 15 years, running a Troop for 7 years and retiring as Director and VP-Finance of the Mt Diablo-Silverado Council. For 20 years he was an active Republican, working on many campaigns — until the party abandoned its traditional principles. He began writing about geopolitics in 2003 A sampling of important posts from Fabius Maximus:  America isn’t falling like the Roman Empire. We're falling like the Roman Republic. Welcome to ClownWorld, the final meme for America - It is the next phase of the "crazy years", long ago predicted by Robert Heinlein. A new, dark picture of America’s future - our institutions are falling like a line of dominoes. Larry says, “I’ve written 140 posts about ways to reform America.

#321 — Charles Hugh Smith writes the popular Of Two Minds blog (at https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html) and is the author of many books, most recently Will You Be Richer or Poorer; Profit, Power, and A.I. in a Traumatized World.) He lives in the world capital of Wokesterdom: Berkeley, California.

David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, an intellectual utility infielder of internet commentary. He covers all the bases: culture, politics, finance, and technology, with often surprising views on the the predicaments of our time. He tweets at @DavidBCollum

Richard Vague, from Texas originally, is a Philadelphia-based managing partner of the venture capital firm, Gabriel Investments. He’s the author of A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises and The Next Economic Disaster: Why It's Coming and How to Avoid It. He’s been in and around the policy world for years and is considering a run for president as a Democrat. He intends to make his decision about that sometime this fall.

Doug Hill is a journalist and independent scholar who has studied the history and philosophy of technology for more than twenty-five years. His work has appeared in numerous national publications, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, Salon and Esquire. He is coauthor of the bestseller Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live and lives in Pasadena, California.

#317 Rob Gourdie is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. He is also Director of the Center for Heart and Reparative Medicine Research at the same university. He writes under the pen name of Tom Therramus. In his “day job,” he works on the repeating waves of electrical signals that drive the heart beat. Over the last decade he has developed an interest in another repeating pattern - waves of price volatility in oil - that he speculates are a Peak Oil-related phenomenon. His writings as Tom Therramus on oil market instability, and its impacts on economics, politics and climate change, have been posted at OilPrice.net, Greentechmedia.com, Resilience.com, RealClearEnergy.org, Nouriel Roubini's Economonitor.com, and EuanMearns.com Energy Matters. His LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-therramus-602b3721/)  lists his SKILLS as including “Asperger's", "Mild Numeracy", "Vague Literacy” and "Being Kiwi”.

Jason Bradford has been affiliated with Post Carbon Institute since 2004, first as a Fellow and then as a Board Member. After earning his doctorate at Washington University in St Lous, he worked for the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden, was a Visiting Scholar at U.C. Davis, and co-founded the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG). He bailed out of academia to learn and practice sustainable agriculture, trained at the Ecology Action (aka GrowBiointensive) in Willits, California, and then founded Brookside School Farm. For four years he hosted The Reality Report radio show on KZYX in Mendocino County. In 2009 he moved to Corvallis, Oregon, as one of the founders of Farmland LP, a farmland management fund implementing organic and mixed crop and livestock systems, where he worked until early 2018. He sits on the Economic Development Advisory Board for Corvallis and Benton County, and serves as an advisor for the OregonFlora Project based at Ore

Blake Pagenkopf is the author of The Great Conflation; Why Left Versus Right Isn’t Right Versus Wrong, which asserts that a simple spatial model can be used to explain the political misunderstanding that now rages across America. (See the chart below  in these show notes.) He is also an architect and construction manager currently renovating mixed-use buildings on small town Main Streets in the Midwest. He lives in the Kansas City metro area.

#314 David Stockman is the Author of the new book, Peak Trump: the Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of Mega. David representing Michigan’s Fourth Congressional District for three terms and served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan — the youngest cabinet member in history. He was previously the author of The Great Deformation,a comprehensive history of crony capitalism. His excellent daily blog appears at www.davidstockmanscontracorner.com

Brent Bednarik is a former Army Officer with two deployments in Afghanistan. After that he worked at one of the Big Four accounting firms in Manhattan, and is currently an entrepreneur in the tech start up space. Brent and I have been corresponding about what I like to call the new religion of Wokesterism, which has emanated from the university campuses and is finding a beach-head in corporate life. Brent is interested in what he considers a consciousness shift happening in western societies, and speaks to business owners and c-suite executives about these impending changes and the challenges they’ll face.

#312 John Michael Greer, an old friend of the podcast, blogs at his Ecosophia Website, and is the author of a score of books ranging from the social and political commentary of The Wealth of Nature and Not the Future We Ordered, to a large body of science fiction and fantasy.

Bill Holter writes and is partnered with Jim Sinclair at the newly formed Holter/Sinclair collaboration. Prior, he wrote for Miles Franklin from 2012-15. Bill worked as a retail stockbroker for 23 years, including 12 as a branch manager at A.G. Edwards. He left Wall Street in late 2006 to avoid potential liabilities related to management of paper assets as he foresaw the Great Financial crisis coming. In retirement he and his family moved to Costa Rica where he lived until 2011 when he moved back to the United States. He was a well-known contributor to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) commentaries from 2007-present.     Bill has retained a working relationship with Miles Franklin and can help with any of your precious metals needs including transacting, shipping, storage and even safe deposit boxes in non bank vault facilities.  Feel free to contact him with any of your questions or needs.     He can be reached via email at bholter@hotmail.com

Shaun Chamberlin is an author, activist and the editor of both Lean Logic and the paperback Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy.  He has been involved with the Transition Network since its inception, cofounding Transition Town Kingston [UK] and authoring the movement’s second book, The Transition Timeline.  He worked closely with David Fleming until his death. His website is: www.darkoptimism.org  On Twitter, he is @DarkOptimism Dr. David Fleming (1940 – 2010) was a visionary thinker and writer who played significant roles in the genesis of the UK Green Party, the Transition Towns movement, and the New Economics Foundation, as well as chairing the Soil Association. He was also one of the early whistle-blowers on oil depletion and designer of the influential TEQs carbon/energy rationing system. He read Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford, and later earned an MBA and then an MSc and PhD in economics (in 1988). These enabled him to better engage with a

Raul Meijer runs The Automatic Earth Website. He puts out the Debt Rattle news aggregator there every day, and posts his own frequent commentaries on a broad range of current events, especially on subjects of finance and economy. He’s based in Europe,  dividing his time between Athens and the Netherlands. He lived in Canada for many years.

Jasun Horsley is an English cultural critic, metapsychologist, conspiracy researcher, and podcaster, and the author of several books, including Seen and Not Seen, Prisoner of Infinity, and the upcoming The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse. To earn a living, he currently runs a thrift store in Canada with his wife. This is the link to Jasun’s excellent podcast, The Liminalist. Here is the link to his Auticulture Blog.  And here is a link to Jasun’s fascinating essay series on the sexual confusions and hysterias of our time: The Age of Advanced Incoherence: Identity Politics & Identity Crisis, which is at the center of today’s conversion.

Doug Henwood is an American journalist, economic analyst, and financial trader who writes frequently about economic affairs. He publishes a newsletter, Left Business Observer, that analyzes economics and politics from a left-wing perspective. His own excellent podcast, Behind the News is available at iTunes. He is a contributing editor at The Nation Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn.

Independent researcher Steve St. Angelo started to invest in precious metals in 2002.  Later on in 2008, he began researching areas of the gold and silver market that, curiously, the majority of the precious metal analyst community have left unexplored. These areas include how energy and the falling EROI – Energy Returned On Invested – stand to impact the mining industry, precious metals, paper assets, and the overall economy. His website with frequent postings is: https://srsroccoreport.com.

    Informal Q and A session with questions from listeners with Jim Kunstler, host of The Kunstlercast. I've enjoyed other people's AMA shows around the web so here we go. This is an experiment, of course,  and I understand now why I haven’t done it before. It’s not easy spouting off into a microphone by yourself and remaining coherent. I hope it works for all y’all. I’ll be back in the usual format with a guest interview in a couple of weeks. Hope you’re having a great summer.

DOUGLAS FARR (FAIA, F-CNU, LEED-AP) is an architect, urbanist, author, and passionate advocate for sustainable design thinking. Doug is the founding principal and president of Farr Associates, a Chicago-based firm that plans and designs lovable, aspirational buildings and places. Doug co-chaired the development of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) and has served on the boards of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Bioregional, EcoDistricts, and Elevate Energy. A native Detroiter, he is an architecture graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University. Doug wrote Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature (November 2007, Wiley) and Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future (April 2018, Wiley).In 2017, Planetizen readers named him one of "the 100 most influential urbanists of all time.”