KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century
James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made By Hand, takes on the converging catastrophes of the 21st century. Features a new guest each episode. (Note: Episodes 1 - 214 featured conversations between Duncan Crary and JHK during the years 2008 through 2012 and focused on the topics of suburban sprawl, disposable architecture and the end of the cheap oil era.)

     Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticizing neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. His books include Developing an Economics for the Post-crisis World (2015) and Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? (2017). He lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The new theme music for the podcast is the Two Rivers Waltz by Larry Unger.

Direct download: KunstlerCast_323.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 11:38am EST

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 morality tales, to cheer the good people and boo the bad. We flee from talk about responsibility and work like vampires from daylight. None of the risking 'our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor' for us. We see ourselves as customers in a restaurant, whining that the menu isn't good enough for people so awesome.”

 

Direct download: KunstlerCast_322.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 4:30pm EST

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. They are the least popular posts. We want simple morality tales, to cheer the good people and boo the bad. We flee from talk about responsibility and work like vampires from daylight. None of the risking "our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" for us. We see ourselves as customers in a restaurant, whining that the menu isn't good enough for people so awesome.”

Direct download: KunstlerCast_322_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:01pm EST

#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.

Direct download: KunstlerCast321.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 3:14pm EST

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

Direct download: KunstlerCast_320.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 10:41am EST

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.

Direct download: KunstlerCast_319.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:03pm EST

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.

Direct download: KunstlerCast_318.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 8:22am EST

#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”.

Direct download: KunstlerCast_317.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 12:06pm EST

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 Oregon State University. He lives with his family outside of Corvallis on an organic farm. 

Direct download: KunstlerCast_316..mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 4:39pm EST

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.

Direct download: KunstlerCast_315.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 5:04pm EST

#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

Direct download: KunstlerCast_314.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 11:59am EST

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.

Direct download: KunstlerCast_313.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 9:56am EST

#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.

Direct download: KunstlerCast_312.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 11:37am EST