Our Year for Living Dangerously: 2024 Predictions and Premonitions from Flyover Country

 In late December or early January, pundits and commentators make predictions for the new year. This year, I’m going to join in that tradition from my home on Lake Mary in Southern Mississippi.

I’m making three predictions for 2024. I’m also sharing three premonitions about the coming year. I feel certain that my 2024 predictions will come true. I hope my premonitions will not come true, but I fear they will.

 

Prediction number one: Joe Biden won’t be the Democratic nominee for President in 2024.

 

I agree with James Howard Kunstler that Joe Biden will not be on the ballot for the presidential election in November. Biden will participate in most primaries, and he will easily collect enough delegates to capture the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nomination, but someonne else will be the Democratic Party's nominee.

As Kunstler has suggested, I think Biden will disclose that he has a serious medical condition sometime next summer. For the good of the country, he will say, he is stepping down from the presidential race and releasing his delegates to someone else.

Who will that person be? I don’t know and you don’t know, but someone living on Martha’s Vineyard knows. The Democratic nominee won’t be a person who participated in the Democratic primaries. After Biden steps aside, the Democratic Party’s Super Delegates will nominate someone who skipped the primaries. Credible speculation says it will be Michelle Obama.

 

The mainstream media pretends that Biden is a serious candidate for another term as President, but no one believes that. His declining health is evident to everyone. Biden has some sort of cognitive disability, which is steadily getting worse. 

Moreover, the Republicans are finding evidence that the Biden family took bribes from foreign countries and stashed the money in offshore bank accounts. If substantiated, those charges could led to an  impeahment trial during Biden's second term. 

 

I think Biden will pardon himself and his entire family (including his grandchildren) before leaving office. He will then shuffle off the world stage and live the remainder of his days in an opulent and secure memory care facility. 

 

Prediction number two: Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for President in November. 

 

Within weeks, the Supreme Court will overrule decisions by various state officials to keep Trump off the presidential ballot for allegedly participating in an insurrection. You can take that to the bank.

 

Trump is also facing criminal charges in various jurisdictions. I think he will beat those charges. Alternatively, any convictions against him will be overturned by the appellate courts.

 

Thus, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president, and he will face an opponent chosen by the Democratic Party’s Super Delegates.

 

Prediction number three: Americans will regret our involvement in the Ukraine war.

 

Ukraine is losing its war with Russia. It will never regain the Donbas or reoccupy Crimea. Meanwhile, the NATO countries are more and more ambivalent about their support for Ukraine. Russia has the stamina for siege warfare and prolonged fighting. The western nations do not.

 

Eventually, Ukraine and Russia must reach a settlement, and that settlement will require Ukraine to give up some territory. The longer the West waits before coming to that conclusion, the more people will die in this foolish and unnecessary war.

 

Now here are my premonitions for 2024—premonitions I hope will not come to pass.

 

Premonition number one: Urban violence. I fear an outbreak of violence in our cities during the summer of 2024, which will peak during the Republican and Democratic Party conventions. I also fear anti-Israel protests will become larger and more disruptive and will invite more violence.

 

Premonition number two. Rampant inflation. In spite of our government’s effort to deceive the American people, inflation in this country is out of control and is getting worse. In particular, the rising cost of food and housing will cause millions of Americans to suffer before the year is out. 

 

Premonition number three: Terrorists will cross our southern border and kill hundreds of Americans.

 

Illegal immigrants are entering the United States at the rate of 10,000 people a day, and they are not all coming from Latin America. A significant number of border crossers come from the Middle East and some are on the government’s Terrorist Watch List. No nation can absorb those numbers indefinitely without endangering its sovereignty.

2024 may be the year in which PresidentJoe Biden's insane boder policy enables terrorists to cross our southern border and commit a wanton and spectacular act of murder.  I hope not.

Conclusion

 

I hope 2024 will be the year when Americans take prudent steps to protect our security, our culture, and our way of life. I hope this is the year Americans will stop electing crooks and madmen to public office and quit sending their children to universities that promote racism.

 

I fear, however, that America will continue along its downward path toward financial and social collapse. If Americans don’t do something this year to remove the crooks from public office, reform our education system, and get our financial house in order, the days of American greatness will be over.

 

 

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows: Preventing the wrong people from running for President

Be Awake, College Students! Massive Economic Turmoil is Coming

A friend sent me a copy of the Magnificat journal's Advent Companion, a selection of daily reflections for the Advent season. Advent begins on November 27, and I read the first entry, which reflects on Matthew 24 and Christ's warning to be watchful.

During the time of Noah, Jesus instructed, people ate, drank, and married until the day the flood came and carried them all away.

"Therefore, stay awake!" Christ cautioned, and be prepared for the hour you don't expect.

As I read the Advocate Companion, I thought this passage would make an excellent advertisement for My Patriot Supply, an outfit that sells emergency food kits with a shelf life of 25 years. 

This is not a religious message. Instead, I warn that our national economy, built on financial speculation and easy money, will ultimately collapse. Perhaps it will be brought on by the cryptocurrency meltdown. If you aren't convinced, read James Howard Kunstler's recent blog essays posted on Clusterfuck Nation.

If you are a college student, this is no time to take out extravagant student loans. Higher education is under extreme duress: Since 2004, 861 colleges have closed their doors, and more than 9,000 campuses have shut down.

Stay awake, and don't take out loans to attend an obscure small college with a tuition rate of $25,000 a semester. Don't enroll in an online degree program unless you are pretty damned sure that an online college degree will lead to a good job.

Just importantly, don't be deceived by all the talk of student-loan forgiveness or by the Department of Education's pause on student-loan repayment--which will last more than three years.

A few people will get their loans forgiven under DOE's borrower defense program based on findings of fraud, and President Biden's loan forgiveness initiative may ultimately be approved by the courts. Still, the President's plan to forgive $10,000 of student debt, if it comes to fruition, will be a drop in the bucket for students paying $50,000 a year in college tuition. 

If you are pretty sure a college degree will lead to a job, by all means, go for it. People with degrees in the medical services field will probably find jobs.

But you are insane if you plan to take out $50,000 or more in student loans to get a humanities degree, a liberal arts degree, or a degree in gender studies.

You are insane if your college degree requires your parents to take out Parent Plus loans that they can't discharge in bankruptcy.

You are insane to take out a Grad PLUS loan to get a graduate degree in business, journalism, or the liberal arts.

Sometimes the Bible has some good advice. Indeed, now is an excellent time to head the biblical admonition to "Stay Awake!" and be prepared for global economic turmoil--which is coming.

 

Robert Crimo III Killed Six People and Escaped in a 2010 Honda Fit: Are We Teaching Our Children Well?

 We all know the drill. An alienated young white guy commits mass murder with a semiautomatic rifle. Almost instantly, the shooter is captured or gunned down or commits suicide.

Political leaders, flanked by their lackeys, hold a press conference where they heap lavish praise on the police even if the police did a lousy job (like at Columbine and Uvalde). The liberal media cries out for gun control. Pundits describe the shooter as a cowardly scumbag.

Our political, media and cultural elites never blame themselves for these mass shootings. No one blames the public schools, where all these young shooters spent their childhood and youth. No one laments our waning religious beliefs or the disintegration of our nation's civic life.

No one ponders why so many of these shooters were addicted to video games. No one asks why these shooters express their anguish in graphic detail on social media--anguish that is wholly ignored.

Crimo shot up a Fourth of July parade and escaped in a 2010 Honda Fit. Perhaps he knew that this pathetic little car symbolized his pathetic little life.

Crimo probably sensed that taking out student loans for college would not help him build a decent future for himself. He probably didn't have a girlfriend or any vocational goals. He was perhaps searching for meaning without having been issued a moral compass.

Whose fault is that?

James Howard Kunstler recently observed that "[t]he chief duty of men and women in [the] future will be doing everything possible to ensure that their children do not become hot messes." 

Who disagrees? 

But Americans are not striving to prevent their children from becoming hot messes. They're not doing everything they can to nurture and encourage young people to become functioning, self-reliant, and moral adults. 

Instead, our government shovels money into our corrupt universities to pay professorial nihilists to teach that America's heritage is nothing more than the story of white oppression. 

Our mainstream media has nothing good to say about patriotism or traditional civic values. Instead, op-ed writers label religious, patriotic Americans as "Christian nationalists," which is a racist code phrase.

No wonder guys like Robert Crimo III are becoming increasingly common. Indeed, the United States can hardly go a week without a mass shooting.

Ironically, the elites trying to destroy American civilization are never the victims of these young men's rage. They live in gated communities or highrise condos, surrounded by bodyguards and safely protected behind bullet-proof glass.

No, the people killed or maimed by the Robert Crimos of the world are school children, mall shoppers, and folks who only want to enjoy a Fourth of July parade.

Making his getaway in a 2010 Honda Fit

Summer Reading Suggestions: Dip Into Apocalyptic Literature

 Summer is here, and everyone is looking for an enticing novel to read while on vacation. Most of us want a page-turner--something vacuous but exciting, a book we can read on the beach while sipping a tropical cocktail.

The summer of 2022 is different from the summers of the recent past. Inflation is rising, and most of us feel that we are only beginning to see substantial price increases in food and staples. Gas prices are at historic highs. It seems like everyone is unhappy, anxious, and fretful. What lies ahead?

So--why not read some apocalyptic literature to help us focus on what may well be America's future? Here are my suggestions:

First, I urge everyone to read James Howard Kunstler's World Made By Hand novels. Kunstler's books are set in upstate New York during the post-petroleum age. He describes a nation that has dropped back into the nineteenth century with people riding horses instead of driving cars and lighting their homes with candles rather than lightbulbs.

Before diving into Kunstler's novels, I suggest you read The Long Emergency, his best-known nonfiction work. In this book, Kunstler argues that the petroleum-based economy is ending and that so-called renewable energy (wind turbines, solar panels, and such) will not allow us to maintain our lavishly materialistic lifestyle.

The Long Emergency is very persuasive. Kunstler convinced me that our gasoline-driven world is not sustainable. I fear our future will be bleaker than progressive voices predict. We are more likely to be raising chickens than driving electric cars.

I also recommend reading some of John Wesley Rawls' apocalyptic novels.  Rawls' books imagine life in a world after the global economy collapses. Violence breaks out all across the United States, and an international, fascist military force stamps out democracy and individual freedoms.

What I like best about Rawls' books are the technical details. For example, he provides a recipe for making napalm out of styrofoam and describes how to harden a suburban home against a terrorist attack. His books even have glossaries.

Rawls is a prolific writer, and I recommend you begin by reading these four novels: Patriots,  Survivors, Expatriots, and Liberators. If you read all four of these books, I predict you will buy 2,000 rounds of .22 ammunition and a 10/22 Ruger rifle with a camouflage finish.

William Forstchen is another master of the apocalyptic genre. One Second After describes life in Black Mountain, North Carolina, after one of America's enemies set off nuclear bombs in the earth's upper atmosphere. These explosions trigger an electromagnetic pulse that shuts down all electronic devices--including vehicles and electrically powered machinery.

As food runs short, Forstchen's town officials begin rationing, and looters and arsonists are summarily shot. Large terroristic gangs sustain themselves by cannibalism, and the town organizes a militia made up primarily of college students that fights the terrorists in a bitter battle to the death.  

Finally, I recommend people to read Cormac McCarthy's dark and harrowing book, The Road.  McCarthy's apocalyptic environment is not drawn as sharply as those sketched out by Kunstler, Rawls, and Forstchen. Still, he describes a grey, ashen world in which the sun no longer shines and crops cannot grow--a perpetual nuclear winter. It is a harrowing book that ends with a bare flicker of hope.

Americans should read all four of these authors because they sketch out for us--to one degree or another--America's future. We should pay heed and prepare for it.

I, for one, went to the grocery store and bought four cans of Spam.

Did colleges engage in a bait-and-switch scam to maximize revenues during the coronavirus pandemic?

According to a recent article in the Washington Examiner, American universities lured students back to campus this fall by deceptively promising to offer at least some in-person instruction. Then--after the students showed up and paid their tuition and fees--the colleges changed their policies and offered most or all of their classes in an online format.

In the Examiner's view:

[C]ollege administrators pulled a classic con artist's bait and switch. They asked college students to return to campus and bilked parents out of full-freight fees with the promise that at least some instruction would be in-person rather than online. Shortly before school opened, with the money safely in the bank, they shifted exclusively or at least nearly exclusively to online instruction, but asked student to come back to campus anyway.

Is this a fair indictment? I think it is.  Schools all over the United States shifted to online teaching for the fall semester, which almost everyone agrees is inferior to face-to-face instruction. Nevertheless, the schools did not discount their tuition, and they did not close their dormitories.

How can a college tell students that in-person classes are dangerous while continuing to stuff the kids into residence halls and frat houses, where the risk of contracting the coronavirus is unreasonably high?

In my view, American colleges responded to the COVID-19 crisis to maximize revenue at the expense of their students' health. It was nuts for universities to pack young adults into dorms at a time when the coronavirus pandemic is still not under control.

But the colleges were forced to adopt this reckless policy because they need the cash flow.  Many universities financed their dorm-building sprees by floating bonds or entering into partnerships with private corporations that funded the construction projects in return for getting a percentage of the room-and-board fees. These schools have got to keep their dorms full to meet their financial obligations.

Unfortunately for American higher education, the coronavirus disrupted its business model.  Parents are not going to pay fifty grand a year for their children to take online classes, and they are not going to pay room-and-board fees so their kids can live in crowded dormitories where they face an elevated risk of contracting COVID-19.

This cash-before-kids policy is not going to work for a lot of colleges. Many will close in the coming year.  And the upcoming shut-down of American schools is not just due to the coronavirus pandemic. A lot of families have figured out that that the universities are charging way too much for mediocre academic programs that don't lead to good jobs.

As James Howard Kunstler put it in a recent blog essay:

[T]he colleges and universities are [not] going down hard . . . just because Covid-19 has interrupted their business plan. Rather, because of the stupendous and gross dishonesty that higher ed has fallen into. The racketeering around college loans was bad enough but the intellectual racketeering around fake fields of study, thought-crime persecutions, and an epic sexual hysteria has disgraced the very mission of higher ed, turned it into something no better than a sick cult . . . .

I could not have said it better myself. Americans are awaking to the fact that much of our nation's higher education system is a big scam, and they are increasingly unwilling to subject their children to an education system that looks more and more like the Spanish Inquisition.

The penalty for saying "All Lives Matter" on a university campus

Living in the Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler: A book review

James Howard Kunstler, prolific blogger, novelist, and social commentator, has written a new book titled Living in the Long Emergency. You should read it. America's economy and social order are careening toward the abyss, and Kunstler explains why.

Living in the Long Emergency is an update of The Long Emergency, which Kunstler published in 2005. In his earlier book, Kunstler predicted the collapse of America's industrial economy due to the world's rapidly depleting supply of recoverable petroleum. 

In Living in the Long Emergency, Kunstler reiterates his earlier thesis and explains why the so-called fracking miracle for extracting shale oil has not altered his predictions. Fracking is far more expensive than traditional methods of extracting oil, Kunstler writes, and is only viable when it can be financed through low-interest rates and high oil prices.  Moreover, it is a short-term phenomenon that does not alter the fundamental reality of dwindling petroleum reserves.  

As Kunstler summarized the matter:

The shale oil "miracle," therefore, was a very impressive financial and technological stunt. In practical terms, it provided a means to pull forward from the future the last dregs of recoverable oil, so the US could live large for a few years longer. As [an] independent oil analyst . . . put it: Shale is a retirement party for the oil industry."

Kunstler's new book also includes a brutal analysis of contemporary American culture, which our oil-dependent economy helped foster. His assessment of American life is unrelievedly bleak. A casual survey of American culture, Kunstler writes, "reveals shocking degrees of neuroticism, delusion, dishonesty, and functional failure in culture."

Suburbia, made possible by cheap gasoline, has "produced yawning ugliness on the landscape, an epidemic of loneliness, family dysfunction, and a dismal cavalcade of mass shootings in public schools." In America's heartland, what we now call flyover country, Kunstler sees traditional American values eroded by opiate addiction, suicide, obesity, and unemployment.

Kunstler is particularly hard on American higher education. "The thinking class," he writes, squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy every remnant of American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization . . . ."

I've spent a good deal of my life shuffling around in American universities, including a three-year stretch in Harvard's re-education camp (cleverly disguised as Harvard's Graduate School of Education). Kunstler's summation of American higher education is spot on. 

Rather than try to summarize Kunstler's cogent analysis, I'll simply quote him:

It case you haven't been paying attention to the hijinks on campus—the attacks on reason, fairness, and common decency, the kangaroo courts, diversity tribunals, assaults on public speech and speakers themselves, the denunciation of science—here is the key takeaway: It is not about ideas or ideologies anymore. Instead, it's purely about the pleasure of coercion, of pushing other people around, of telling them what to think and how to act.

Kunstler's book includes a lot more provocative ideas and social analysis than I have touched on here. My brief review doesn't do it justice. But I fully endorse his fundamental conclusion, which I think is this: America has crapped in its own mess kit and doesn't have the money or the moral energy to repair the damage it has inflicted on itself.

A hundred years from now, I believe people will still be reading James Howard Kunstler's work to understand how America went so wrong. In my mind, he is one of the very few people who comprehend what has happened to us.

"If I were a carpenter": Manual skills will be more valuable than a liberal arts degree in the post-coronavirus economy

If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady

Would you marry me anyway?

Would you have my baby?

Tim Hardin

Sung best by Johnny Cash and June Carter

James Howard Kunstler wrote somewhere that in the coming age, carpenters will be more valued than people who design video games (or words to that effect). Kunstler's observation worried me because I have no mechanical skills at all, although I am a pretty good gardener.

Kunstler is right, and the coming age is now. Coronavirus is transforming the American economy. Millions of jobs have been lost that won't come back. All of a sudden, it matters if a person has real skills. A carpenter is going to be more valued in the years ahead than a sociology professor.

Americans have indulged themselves in the acquisition of meaningless university degrees--hundreds of thousands of degrees, and they will soon learn that all the millions of hours spent in university classrooms won't help them feed themselves.

I should know. I have been a university professor for 25 years, and I sat on dozens of dissertation committees. I would be embarrassed to list the titles of some of the dissertations I approved.  I remember one doctoral student at the University of Houston who wrote his thesis on what it felt like to be a graduate student.  I feel sure he is a tenured professor at some obscure regional university.

During my years in the Alice and Wonderland world of higher education, I stumbled across several instances of plagiarism. No plagiarist I discovered was ever kicked out of graduate school.  We treated plagiarism like a punctuation error--easily corrected.

All this foolishness was financed by the federal student-loan program, the Pell Grant program, and various forms of state and federal government support. And most of the people who acquired frothy university degrees got jobs--often soft-skill jobs in the public sector.  But few people who collected these degrees learned how to make anything useful.

Of course, not all higher education is vacuous. Programs in engineering, the medical profession, law, and accounting all teach useful skills. And several of my colleagues in my own field, which is education, are excellent scholars and dedicated teachers. I cast no aspersions on their work. But in general, the fields of education, liberal arts, and social studies offer degrees that lack real substance.

As I write this, nearly 17 million Americans are out of work, and this is just the first wave of job losses. Before the end of this year, people in government and education are going to feel the cold breath of a new Depression.  Experts reasonably predict that the unemployment rate in this country will reach 30 percent.

The world of higher education is in for a rude shock. Slovenly professors, who did very little work and made rare appearances on campus dressed in gym clothes, are going to lose their cushy sinecures.  If they are smart, they will acquire a craft skill and retool themselves as carpenters, plumbers, electricians, or technical workers.

As the job market for college professors collapses--and it will collapse, few laid-off professors are going to find new positions in academia. So If they don't retool, they will be forced on the dole, subsisting on food stamps and living with someone who has a real job.  

As for the people who took out student loans to get frivolous degrees, they are going to find it damned difficult to get a decent job and even more challenging to pay off their student debt. They, too, will need to master a useful skill if they aspire to own a home, get married, or have children.

James Howard Kunstler says plant a garden: That's good advice

Blow up your t.v.

throw away your paper

Go to the country, 

build you a home

Plant a little garden

eat a lot of peaches

Try and find Jesus on your own

Spanish Pipedream

John Prine

If you would like to get a provocative and unconventional take on the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying financial crisis, you should read James Howard Kunstler's refreshing blog, clusterfuck nation. Mr. Kunstler has been predicting an economic meltdown for a long time. And now, by God, his prediction has finally come true.

What we are experiencing is not just a health emergency, and it's not a recession. We are at the beginning of the 21st century's Great Depression, and it is going to last a long time. A lot of industries, a lot of organizations, and a lot of jobs are going to disappear, and many of them are not coming back.

So what should we do? Kunstler recommends planting a spring garden:

If you’re prudent, you can begin at once to organize serious gardening efforts, if you live in a part of the country where that is possible. I’d go heavy on the potatoes, cabbages, winter squashes, and beans, because they’re all keepers over winter. Baby chicks sell at the local ag stores for a few bucks each now and you’ll be very grateful for the eggs. Get a rooster — even though they can be a pain-in-the-ass — and you won’t have to buy any more chicks.

I think Kunstler is right. I'm not saying we are in danger of starving to death in the coming months. I feel sure that our supply chains and grocery stores will continue to provide us with food. We may not be able to get Mexican blueberries in February, but we will always be able to get canned beans and Kraft macaroni and cheese--or so I believe. And, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, we'll always have baloney.

But planting a garden is a good thing to do. I have maintained a vegetable garden for the last eight years, and it gives me great satisfaction to harvest and eat food I grew myself. As everyone knows, homegrown tomatoes are better than the store-bought varieties. And homegrown broccoli, harvested and cooked on the same day, is a totally different experience from eating frozen broccoli from the grocery store.

Furthermore, by planting a garden, we begin to retrieve essential skills that our grandparents knew. My elders knew when to plant various crops and when to harvest. They knew how to preserve fruit and vegetables through the winter. They knew how to butcher a hog and turn it into smoked hams, bacon, sausages, and lard.  

I can't feed my family on what I grow in five raised garden beds.  In fact, if I gathered all the food my garden grows over the course of a year, my wife and I would survive for about a week. But I am learning a few things about raising food crops.

For example, I planted a fall garden this year and learned that broccoli can survive a light freeze.  I also learned that collard greens are ridiculously easy to grow and taste delicious if seasoned with bacon and a little garlic. 

I plant okra in my spring garden.  I've learned that okra likes hot weather and grows so fast once it starts producing that I have to pick okra every other day. But I also learned that I don't like okra very much.

In World War II, Americans ripped out their front lawns and planted victory gardens. I am told that at one time, people's individual victory gardens produced more food than all commercial farming combined.  

That's comforting to contemplate because things are changing in America, and they are changing fast. We are going to have to be more resilient, more frugal, and more self-reliant.  Planting a garden will help us obtain these virtues. 

After all, a tomato bush growing behind the garage is a reminder that we are capable of taking care of ourselves. 

It's a comfort to have a shotgun in the closet: The guv'ment ain't never gonna round up all them guns!

My father came back from World War II with a pocket full of money. He'd been a prisoner of the Japanese for most of the war, and he received three years in back pay when he got back to the States.

One of the first things my father did when he returned to Oklahoma was to buy a Browning automatic shotgun, a beautiful gun with a dark walnut stock and the famous Browning humpback design. He promptly took up quail hunting and it became his only recreation.

Quail were in abundance in northwestern Oklahoma during the 1940s. The quail hunters had all gone off to war, and the countryside had been depopulated during the Great Depression when a lot of my father's relatives became Okies and went to California down old Route 66. There were literally millions of bobwhite quail in the brushy country on the Kansas border, and you could kick up a hundred or more just by wading into a random plum thicket.

My father was a minimalist when it came to upland game hunting. No fancy Gortex rain gear, no Orvis sportswear, no pricey equipment from Cabella's. When my dad went quail hunting, he took his shotgun and a cardboard box, which contained a cheap, faded hunting vest and two or three boxes of shotgun shells.

When I was about twelve I began to go quail hunting with my father, and I saved up my paper-route money and bought my own shotgun--a used Remington Model 11, another beautiful firearm made in the pattern of my father's Browning. I kept my shotgun in the closet with my Dad's.

For my dad and me, shotguns were not weapons; they were sporting goods--something like a fishing rod or golf clubs. Many of my teenage friends had shotguns, and it never occurred to any of them to take a gun into a school and start shooting people.

But times have changed, and now people can buy assault rifles with extra-large magazines. And these guns are fairly cheap. You can purchase a new assault rifle for anywhere between $500 to $1500. And the sporting goods stores sell assault-rifle ammunition in plastic tubs that hold a couple hundred rounds.

Now the politicians are talking about a nationwide gun buyback program designed to get firearms out of private hands--assault rifles mostly. Senator Joe Biden and some other presidential contenders endorse this idea.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, Senator Biden, but the guvment ain't never going to get all them guns out of people's closets. We now have more guns in the United States than we have people. There's a gun for everybody, even the little babies and toddlers.  And people are not going to give those guns to the federal government.

Senator Joe, Beto O'Rourke and Senator Warren might get people to sell their dusty old shotguns rusting away in the attic: their bolt-action .410s, their single-shot, 16 gauge Savages. But if they bought an assault rifle or a 9 mm pistol, they are going to keep it.

And any politician who does not understand that is not smart enough to be President.

The Browning automatic shotgun: A beautiful thing to behold

Note: The title of this essay was partly inspired by a passage from a book by James Howard Kunstler.

We are all peasants now: The student-loan crisis is destroying the middle class

As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we'd thought were obsolete.  . . . A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody called them peasants, but in effect that's what they'd become.

World Made By Hand

James Howard Kunstler 

American higher education is the emperor who wears no clothes. College leaders boast that our nation's universities are the envy of the world while they rake in so-called federal "student-aid" and parade about in medieval regalia peddling worthless degrees.

And America's young people are the losers. They've been gulled into thinking they can gain a middle-class lifestyle by getting a college degree and maybe a graduate degree as well. But millions are finding that their college degrees gained them little more than massive debt. And those online MBAs and doctorates they purchased with borrowed money--just junk.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank, outstanding student-loan debt reached $1.56 trillion last January. Around 45 million Americans have student-loan obligations and 7.4 million are enrolled in long-term repayment plans that stretch out for as long as a quarter of a century.  As Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos admitted with shocking candor last November, only one out of four student borrowers are paying off the principal and interest on their loans.

It is now well documented that student-loan debt is contributing to the nation's declining birth rates--now near a record low. People can't afford children because they're paying off student loans.

Young people can't afford to buy homes, they can't save for retirement, they can't pay off their debts.  Their liberal arts degrees, their shoddy law degrees, their fluffy MBAs and doctoral degrees qualify them to become baristas and clerical workers.

We are now in the early stages of the 2020 presidential election season, and what do our politicians talk about? Russia, border walls, free health care, and the Green New Deal.  We should be discussing the New Raw Deal--the deal our government and our universities have imposed on guileless young people.

For too long, Americans have bought the line that our colleges and universities operate for the public good and that the people who run them are wise and kindly. We particularly revere the ivy league colleges where we get nearly all our prune-faced Supreme Court justices and most of our presidents.

But if the folks who run Harvard are so goddamned wise, how could they have fallen for Elizabeth Warren's scam that she's a Cherokee? And if our elite college leaders are sensitive and kindly, how did little boys wind up getting raped in a Penn State shower room? And how could dozens of female athletes get groped by Larry Nasser while he was on Michigan State's payroll?

No, let's face the truth. Many American colleges and universities are not run by wise and kindly people; most are run by administrators who are primarily concerned with the bottom line. And far too often, higher education is not preparing young Americans to enter the middle class. On the contrary, by forcing people to take on oppressive levels of debt to get a college degree, colleges are setting up millions of Americans for a lifetime of peasantry.

James Howard Kunstler's negative assessment of American higher education is spot on

James Howard Kunstler posted an essay a few days ago containing his predictions for American higher education in the coming year. He predicts big trouble.

As Kunstler correctly observed, "college has become, most of all, a money-grubbing racket tuned to the flow of exorbitant student loans for exorbitant college costs."  In other words, as he has said before, higher education in the United States basically operates from a "criminal ethic" where costs have "developed an inverse relationship to the value of a college education."

Kunstler's essay also includes a withering assessment of college leadership: "The presidents, deans, and faculty of colleges around the country have turned into the most obdurate enemies of free thought since the Spanish Inquisition, a gang of cowards and villains who disgrace the meaning and purpose of higher ed[ucation]."

In fact, Kunstler's indictment of the people who run American colleges is too gentle. If these clowns lived in another age, they would be the people who staffed the French Vichy regime during Word War II--the bureaucrats who dutifully rounded up French Jews for the Nazis and shipped them from Paris to the German death camps. No courage, no intellect, no sense of decency whatsoever. They babble ceaselessly about trigger words, safe spaces and "white male heterosexual privilege" while they pick their students' pockets.

The federal student loan program is quietly and inexorably destroying the lives of millions of Americans; has anyone in higher education spoken up? Have the presidents of Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago, Brown, Johns Hopkins, or the University of Michigan uttered a single word of criticism about it? Has any university leader endorsed bankruptcy relief for overburdened student debtors?  Has any college president or dean criticized the government policy of garnishing Social Security checks of elderly student-loan defaulters? Has any higher-education leader of national standing called for the closure of the for-profit college industry?

No, our elite colleges and universities are almost as addicted to federal student-aid money as the sleaziest for-profit schools. In terms of dependency on federal money, there is not a dime's worth of difference between Harvard and Bob's Beauty Academy.

Kunstler predicts that "a shocking number of small four-year colleges will go out of business this year," and I share his view. Harvard professor Clayton Christensen said recently that half of American colleges will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years.

In fact, the small liberal arts college is dead, although the leaders of some small colleges stubbornly keep their institutions on life support. Parents need to warn their children to stay away from these decaying institutions. It would be a grave mistake to borrow $100,000 to get a degree from a college that will close before its graduates pay off their student loans.

French officials registering French Jews.

References

Abigail Hess. Harvard Business School professor: Half of American colleges will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years. CNBC.com, November 15, 2017.

James Howard Kunstler. Forecast 2018--What Could Go Wrong? Clusterfuck Nation, January 1, 2018.

James Howard Kunstler. Made for Each Other. Clusterfuck Nation, February 13, 2017.

Law schools give most financial aid to students who need it least: Legal education is "rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell"

To borrow a phrase from James Howard Kunstler, American law schools are going through their own private version of "The Long Emergency." Law school applications are down, enrollments are down, and the job market for attorneys continues to be terrible.

Meanwhile, tuition prices at American law schools keep going up, which means most law-school graduates begin their careers with mountains of debt. A 2015 report  by the American Bar Association found that average debt for people attending private law schools was $127,000. But average debt loads at for-profit schools is often higher than that. The average debt load for students who attended the now defunct Charleston School of Law was reportedly $200,000.

With fewer people attending law school and fewer people actually enrolling, law schools have done two things to keep their enrollments up:

First, the second- and third-tier law schools began lowering admission standards, which means more and more of their graduates are failing the bar exams.

According to Law School Transparency, some schools have admission requirements so low that half their students are at "extreme risk" of failing the bar.

Second, law schools have been investing more and more money on financial aid, hoping to lure students through their doors.

Unfortunately, most of this financial aid is going to students who have relatively high LSAT scores and who are most likely to have successful careers. Law schools are increasingly happy to admit students with low LSAT scores, but the schools are not supporting these students with adequate financial aid..

"The net effect," writes retired law professor William C Whitford, "is that lower-LSAT students are subsidizing the legal education of higher-LSAT students, when the latter are more likely to have the postgraduate income that will allow them to repay substantial student indebtedness without undue hardship."

Moreover, the law students with low LSAT scores and overall poorer credentials are likely to be less affluent than law-school applicants with high LSAT scores. As Brian Tamanaha put it in a recent book on law school admission practices, "Law schools have in effect constructed a reverse Robin Hood arrangement, redistributing resources between students making the (likely) poorer future graduates help pick up the tab for the (likely) wealthier future graduates" (as quoted by Whitford).

In short, the middle-tier and bottom-tier law schools have concocted a witches' brew of declining admission standards, inequitable financial aid policies, and high tuition costs, which is forcing the least qualified law students to take out loans that they can never pay back.

Paul Campos summarized this state of affairs in his 2012 book Don't Go To Law School (Unless). Job prospects are so poor for graduates of bottom-rung law schools, Campos warned, that some students would be better off financially if they dropped out after the first year rather than continue with their studies.

All of this is eroding the quality of American lawyers. As bar pass rates go down, the pressure is on state bar associations to lower the pass rate on state bar exams. So far, California has resisted this trend in spite of low pass rates on the California bar exam. At least two states, however--Oregon and Nevada--have caved in to pressure and lowered the pass rate on their state bar exams.

The American Bar Association bears most of the blame for this slow rolling catastrophe. It needs to close the bottom-tier law schools--both public and private. In my view, at least 20 law schools should be shut down.

Apparently the ABA doesn't have the courage to do what needs to be done to preserve the integrity of the legal profession, which, in the words of the immortal Merle Haggard, is "rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell."  As a result, the long-term health of our democracy is being threatened by a chain of forces driven primarily be greed and cowardice.

Merle Haggard:  "Are we rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell?"

References

Natalie Bruzda. Nevada lowers the bar for state legal exam as passage rate skids. Las Vegas Review Journal, August 2017.

Paul Campos. Don't Go to Law School (Unless) (2013).

Cathryn Rubino. Oregon Finds Out Easiest Way To Improve Bar Exam Passage Rate is To Lower Its Cut Score. Above the Law (blog), October 5, 2017.

Brian Tamanaha. Failing Law Schools (2012).

Task Force of Financing Legal Education. American Bar Association Report (2015).

William C.Whitford. Law School-Administered Financial Aid: The Good News and the Bad News. Journal of Legal Education, 67(1) (Autumn 2017).

Why won't Congress do a few things to ease the student debt crisis like stop the government from garnishing Social Security checks of elderly student-loan defaulters?

James Howard Kunstler posted a blog last week in which he challenged Congressional Democrats to introduce legislation to counteract the effect of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010). In that case, you may recall, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can give as much money as they like to political campaigns. 

All sensible people agree that Citizens United triggered a new level of corruption in national politics as corporations pump millions of dollars into Congressional campaign coffers in order to protect their venal interests.

President Obama complained publicly about Citizens United while he was in office.  But he didn't do anything about it, even though he could have ameliorated its effect through legislation when the Democrats controlled the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Democrats can still put a Citizens United override on their legislative agenda as Kunstler challenged them to do:

That’s your assignment Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership. Get serious. Show a little initiative. Do something useful. Draw up some legislation. Get behind something real that might make a difference in this decrepitating country. Or get out of the way and let a new party do the job.

And of course there are plenty of other things the Democrats can do to promote fairness and justice in our society. As Gretchen Morgenson pointed out in a New York Times article last year, hedge fund managers get a special tax break allowing them to pay lower taxes on their income than most Americans.  That's right: a hedge fund manager is taxed at a lower rate than a New York school teacher.  President Obama could have closed that loophole in the tax law by executive action, but he didn't.

And then there's corporal punishment in the schools. Researchers are unanimous that beating children with boards is not good for them, and the United Nations has identified corporal punishment as a human rights abuse.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, Secretary of Education John King, Jr. condemned corporal punishment in an open letter to the nation's school leaders. But why didn't King speak up sooner? Corporal punishment in schools is a wrong that Obama's Department of Education could have stopped with an administrative regulation. Why didn't it? 

And then there's the student-loan program, which has brought suffering to millions.  According to the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Education garnished the Social Security checks of 173,000  student-loan defaulters in 2015, a practice that Senator Elizabeth Warren bitterly condemned. The amount the government collects each year is a pittance--about one eighth the amount Hillary Clinton spent during the 2016 election season. And most of the money the Feds collect goes to paying interest and penalties without reducing the debtors' loan balances at all.

Senator Warren and Claire McCaskill filed a bill to stop the garnishment of student debtors' Social Security checks, but the measure never made it out of committee. Why won't Senator Schumer and Representative Pelosi get behind that bill? Who could decently oppose it?

In fact, there are numerous noncontroversial things our Congressional representatives could do to ease widespread suffering among the nation's poorest Americans. But  our Congressional representatives are not doing these things. 

Why? Two reasons.

 First, they don't want to do noncontroversial good things because that would mean sharing the credit with their political enemies.

And second, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Mitch McConnell and all our other bozo representatives don't work for us. They work for the lobbyists, their campaign contributors, and the global financial institutions; and that keeps them pretty busy.

References

Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr. Letter to Governors and State School Officers, November 22, 2016.

James Howard Kunstler. Homework Assignment. Clusterfuck Nation, September 29, 2017.

Gretchen Morgenson. Ending Tax Break for Ultrawealthy May Not Take Act of Congress. New York Times, May 6, 2016.

Senator Elizabeth Warren Press Release, December 20, 2016. McCaskill-Warren GAO Report Shows Shocking Increase in Student Loan Debt Among Seniors. 

United States Government Accountability Office. Social Security Offsets: Improvement to Program Design Could Better Assist Older Student Borrowers with Obtaining Permitted Relief. Washington DC: Author, December 2016).