By James Howard Kunstler - July 18, 2022

It’s like our country is trapped on one of those swirling carnival rides beloved of the county fairs… only, the felonious mutt who runs the ride has nodded off in a fentanyl delirium with the motor running at maximum speed… and the children-of-all-ages locked in the pods of this infernal machine shriek and vomit with each sickening rotation… as the half-century-old swing arms groan and wobble from metal fatigue on their squealing pivots… and suddenly comes a deafening crunch of gnashed gears, the smell of burning oil, and the pathetic whimpering of nearly dead.

That’s us. Some terrible midsummer accident-of-state has befallen the USA Carnival, and most are too dazed to know it. Whose idea was it to send the wind-up doll president called “Joe Biden” to Saudi Arabia? I can just imagine what went on in the chamber in private with “JB” and MBS (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman), virtual autocrat of the oil-soaked desert land. The American visitor muttered something about wanting an ice-cream cone before dropping into a catatonic thousand-yard stare.

“How does this thing work?” MBS asks his chief vizier, the foreign minister (in Arabic, of course), gesticulating disdainfully at the ghostly figure sunk in the plush camel-hair armchair yards away. “Joe Biden” sits motionless. Someone has forgotten to rewind him, some “aide” who carries the president’s Adderall. Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud tells the boss, “We’ll make up some camel-dung for release to CNN and friends. They’ll fall for anything.”

It’s like a crime scene where the forensic experts have entered. The Saudi leader and his entourage only hang around the room for three minutes until the US State Department shoots enough photos to prove that “JB” was there and not stuffed in the basement of his Delaware beach house for the weekend, as usual. The American news media gets briefed: Saudi Arabia graciously agrees to bump up its oil production somewhere in the 2025-2027 time-frame — a triumph for US diplomacy, the networks are informed. Air Force One wings home through clouds of despair. The White House team members spend the flight updating their resumés.

I think we have witnessed “Joe Biden’s” final appearance at any world-stage event. He can do no more for the Party of Chaos. It has done what it can to wreck the joint with him as the pretend head-of-state. The Ukraine gambit is a bust, a foolish miscalculation that was obvious from the start. All it accomplished was to reveal the pitiful dependence of our European allies on Russian oil and gas, leaving their economies good and truly scuppered without it. The Russians end up with control of the Black Sea and probably the Ukraine bread-basket as well. So, now, Europe will starve and freeze.

Did they really want to commit suicide like that? Do the populations of Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the rest just aim to roll into oblivion? Probably not. Rather, we are entering the season of upended governments. The Schwabenklausian stooges implanted everywhere will be overthrown, NATO and the Euro Union will dissolve in impotent ignominy, and the various countries involved will have to renegotiate their destinies, forgoing US advice and coercion. They might even become adversaries of the USA, not allies. Did you forget we fought two wars against Germany not so long ago? And all those countries have been fighting each other since the Bronze Age, too.

History never stops reminding us what a prankster it is. A strange and terrible inversion has occurred in this Fourth Turning. Somehow, Mr. Putin’s Russia is left to represent what remains of international rule-of-law while the western democracies sink deeper into a morass of deranged despotism. Anyway, they are too busy conducting war against their own people to even pretend to assist their Ukrainian proxies. “Joe Biden” crammed nearly $60-billion into the Ukraine money laundering machine since February, which will just spew hallucinated capital back out into increasingly disordered financial markets. Look: the indexes are up world-wide this morning. Why? Because global business is so good? I don’t think so.

Moving toward autumn, what we have to look forward to is . . .

[SNIP]