The Suicide of the American Left
If the best you can offer the voters is a choice between what they have now and something worse, and what they have now is already pretty wretched, you’re not likely to get much traction.
decline of industrial civilization
An Affirming Flame
According to an assortment of recent news stories, this Thursday, June 18, is the make-or-break date by which a compromise has to be reached between Greece and the EU if a Greek default, with the ensuing risk of a potential Greek exit from the Eurozone, is to be avoided
The Era of Dissolution
I suppose you could call the era of dissolution the Rodney Dangerfield of collapse, though it’s not so much that it gets no respect; it generally doesn’t even get discussed.
The Era of Response
The third stage of the process of collapse, following what I’ve called the eras of pretense and impact, is the era of response
The Era of Impact
The era of impact is the point at which it becomes clear to most people that something has gone wrong with the most basic narratives of a society…
The Whisper of the Shutoff Valve
Meanwhile,in Detroit and Baltimore, tens of thousands of residents are in the process of losing their access to water and electricity.
The Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem
There was, as it happened, a small problem with the 2707, a problem it shared with all the other SST projects; it made no economic sense at all.
Dark Age America: The Fragmentation of Technology
It was probably inevitable that last week’s discussion of the way that contemporary science is offering itself up as a sacrifice on the altar of corporate greed and institutional arrogance would field me a flurry of responses that insisted that I must hate science.
A Pink Slip for the Progress Fairy
…I’m going to spend this week’s post summarizing the the decline and fall of industrial civilization.
Dark Age America: The Hour of the Knife
The disintegration of social hierarchies, the senility of ruling elites, and the fossilization of institutions all lead to the hour of the knife…
Review: A History of the Future by James Kunstler
In the category of thrilling fiction about our post-industrial future, James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand novels have no equal.
Bright Were The Halls Then
Arnold Toynbee, whose magisterial writings on history have been a recurring source of inspiration for this blog, has pointed out an intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way they fall.