kunstler has his finger on the pulse of the empire and reports that it ain't doing well, and probably is on the way towards total collapse;

Feel like we’re on the ragged edge of something new and awful? You are not alone….

 That “singularity” so many blab about is not what they think it is: the merging of human intelligence with Bill Gates’s Office products, leading to an orgasmic nirvana of infinite memoranda from your HR department concerning new diversity, inclusion, and equity policy. Rather, I speak of the magic moment when the necromancers of finance discover that the proverbial can they’ve been kicking is filled with Schroedinger’s cat food… and the road they’ve been kicking it down actually comes to a dead end up their own highly-credentialed wazoos. Economics will never be the same hereafter.

The bond market has gone south, and that spells The End for the great game of financialization. The bond market is Moby Dick compared to the little blowfish that is the stock market. The global money system is based on bonds, which are… what? That’s right: loans… promises to pay you X at some future moment. So, what happens when a daisy-chain of promises-to-pay gets broken? Or, perhaps more precisely, when all those promises lose their last shred of plausible reality? Why, the money that these broken promises are denominated in loses its essential cred. Trick question: how much is worthless money worth? (Answer: not enough to pay for a can of Scroedinger’s cat food.)

Which is where all this folderol leaves a lot of ordinary people all over Western Civ (and beyond!) trying to scratch up enough increasingly worthless money to feed the family and pay the landlord. Many will never understand what happened. But they will not be any less pissed off at the result.

This is the way the world ends for the hapless phantom known as “Joe Biden” the child-sniffing ectoplasm that haunts the White House these days of late empire. Somehow, the bamboozled nation has so far passively accepted the pranks and punishments laid on them by the backstage managers behind the Figment-in-Chief. Eight-plus percent inflation? No problemo, right? Eighty-five thousand new IRS agents on-board to drive you batshit while destroying your household and your posterity (ha!)? Half the population of South America flooding across  the border? (The vibrancy! You no like?) A hundred dollar fill-up at the gas pump, and no heat for you this winter? (But… Netflix!) Drag queens to amuse and edify your children about the delirious realm of sexual pathology. All that…and how about a Russian hypersonic nuclear missile up your ass if the preceding somehow failed to move you? (Because: Russia, Russia, Russia…!).....more.........