by James Howard Kunstler
Kunstler.com
It’s one thing to get sandbagged by a public health crisis – a plague being about the worst kind – and quite another for an advanced, complex economy to fall away under your feet like a freight elevator that snapped its cables. The two are now linked in the public imagination, which naturally churns out narratives to serve the collective human craving for pattern recognition.
“The news” is the net sum of all that, mixed with a lot of cognitive “noise.” Even highly intelligent people have a hard time sorting it out. The Internet is full of stories, often contradictory, charged with anger, horror, indignation, and agendas, mostly unhelpful and some quite dangerous – like the cry that China must pay for this! Uh, like how? Send them an invoice: Please remit $11.7 trillion to the address above…? Release the US Airborne over Beijing as if it were Belgium, 1944…? Drop the big one…? (They have big ones, too.)