“In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom.”

– Edward Gibbon, Author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Dear Reader,

“Are you freaking kidding me?” a polite reader begins, “Kunstler? Wow, you guys are further around the bend than I thought:

“For example, it is now clearly established that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines don’t work. We know that they don’t work. People who take them are now even more susceptible to COVID-19 than the people who didn’t take them. So we know they don’t work. Moreover, there’s a tremendous troubling record now of harms and injuries and disabilities and deaths that have been inflicted on people by these vaccines.

“Where’s the proof for any of this?” our reader continues, “I’ll be open minded waiting for it, but by all indications you people have fallen deep into the crazy right-wing-loon hysteria machine. I guess you’d rather bring any terrifying hellscape of demented minds to the forefront of your readership’s awareness than the debacle playing out in DC regarding Trump’s coup.

“Yeah, I know, you’re above all that, the 1/6 Hearings are just partisanship, nothing to see there, we’re independent, blah, blah, BS, BS, BS. Let’s ask Judge Luttig.”

Who?

“Hey Kunstler: Where’s Durham? Fucking idiot.”

What?!?

We do feel obliged to share reader mails. But we would also ask, what proof does our dear reader have that none of this didn’t take place either?

Oy.

The Fed rate hike Wednesday did little to restore civility to our conversations.

The markets went up. Then back down. And down again.

“All these things are in flux, Addison,” Mr. Kunstler said.

Jim continues:

The whole capital structure and currency issue are in flux. I mean, we have reason to believe that a lot of the stuff that’s out there that we call capital is not really there. They’re simply debts and obligations that parties owe to one another, and if they don’t get paid, then the wealth or the money or the capital will not be there. And of course, that will affect currencies. So that whole thing’s unsettled.

Now these debts and obligations are going to increase by 75 basis points. If you didn’t lock in your mortgage with a historically low fixed rate you could be in for some hurt. College loans? New car payments? Retirement funds getting taken to the woodshed.

Jim continues:

We don’t know yet whether the public of Western civilization will accept digital currencies and all the losses of freedom that that implies. The geopolitical chess game out there of who exerts the most influence in the world is completely up in the air at this moment. 

What we’re seeing is kind of a rapid decline of American influence, partly due to our bungling. And the rise of China and, to some degree, Russia, the country that we’re trying desperately to disable. Although I have my own ideas about China and their ability to continue doing what they’re doing. It’s my opinion that they’re in at least as much trouble as we are because of their relationship with the oil markets in the world.

The world is in a process of rearranging its ways of doing things, getting things, and being things. And it’s very distressing. It’s hard to see where things might go. We always have to understand that there are Mr. Rumsfeld’s old unknown-unknowns out there, or as Taleb calls them the Black Swans. And so life tends to be non-linear. The universe tends to produce nonlinear phenomena, and a lot of surprises happen. The final thing is that God is a prankster. He likes to mess with us.

To answer our reader’s concerns, one of my goals with the Wiggin Sessions is to talk to interesting people with diverse opinions. For the most part, I know the characters we’ve been talking to. Jim is one of them. One of my favorites, actually.

I’ll admit it’s strange to me… when I first met Kunstler I was convinced he was a socialist because of his views on climate change and the long emergency. Now our polite reader is accusing him of being part of the “crazy right-wing-loon hysteria machine”.

Go figure.

Who is Judge Luttig?

We remind you, you can get a full barrel of James Howard Kunstler, right here.

Follow your bliss,

Addison Wiggin
Founder, The Wiggin Sessions

P.S. “There’s no WeChat equivalent outside of China,” Elon Musk said at an all-hands meeting yesterday at Twitter, “You basically live on WeChat in China. If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success.”

We don’t know what that means, per se. But given Musk’s track record, he’s planning another Mars-shot.