{"id":615184,"date":"2026-06-08T20:20:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T20:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=615184"},"modified":"2026-06-08T20:20:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T20:20:00","slug":"from-the-city-of-angels-to-the-city-of-zombies-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=615184","title":{"rendered":"From The City Of Angels To The City Of Zombies…"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The City Of Angels To The City Of Zombies…<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Jungle Drums Speak!<\/h2>\n
\n

“Love that the crack heads on Skid Row are up on the issues, know the candidates, and are able to Make Their Voices Heard in between hits of meth.” <\/em><\/p>\n

– Peachy Keenan on X<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Whaddaya know? Looks like the charismatic Nithya Raman has overtaken maverick candidate Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral \u201cjungle\u201d primary because. . . jungle reasons. That is, the denizens of LA\u2019s vast homeless encampments \u2014 once known as \u201chobo jungles\u201d \u2014 apparently voted overwhelmingly by mail for the Harvard-credentialed champion of street-junkies<\/strong> in the Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater, and Hollywood neighborhoods (SELAH) she represents on the LA City Council.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

LA Mayoral Candidate, Nithya Ramen, Champion of the Down-and-Out<\/em><\/p>\n

So, it will be a November runoff between the super-duper \u201cprogressive\u201d incumbent Karen Bass, and merely super-progressive Ms. Ramen. Better reserve your U-Haul trailer ASAP, as the City of Angels completes its transformation to the City of Zombies<\/strong>. And no complaining, please. This is what you voted for.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By the way, what does \u201cprogressive\u201d actually mean these days? <\/strong>Progress towards. . . what? The culminating disintegration of a civil polity? The concerted failure to govern a large, urban organism? Unconditional surrender to the forces of entropy? One might suspect a soup\u00e7on of racial animus in the mix, too, something of a middle-finger to this thing called\u00a0white supremacy\u00a0<\/em>we hear so much about. It must be rooted out at all costs, including the cost of a place that a productive population once loved \u2014 the very people renting all those U-Hauls, dispersing out into the USA gloaming.<\/p>\n

Of course, this \u201cprogressive\u201d Democratic Party has transformed itself in a decade or so into an out-and-out racketeering operation,<\/strong> that is, to a criminal enterprise dedicated to the misappropriation of taxpayer money among its rank and file, many of whom are not citizens. The model is not unlike more primitive early versions, such as Boss Tweed\u2019s ring in 19th\u00a0century New York, or the gang under mayor James Curley, the \u201cRascal King\u201d of Boston. The system was known as \u201cpatronage.\u201d Voters were the party\u2019s patrons, and the patrons were on the payroll. Some had actual party jobs. Some just got free stuff in exchange for their votes. They called it a \u201cmachine\u201d because its operations became automatic, self-fulfilling.<\/p>\n

There was one big difference, though: these earlier Democratic Party grifters, for all their moneygrubbing shenanigans, were American patriots. <\/strong>They celebrated a country so ostentatiously \u201cfree,\u201d so fervently dedicated to upward mobility, that it made room for their garish political corruption. The Democratic machine of Los Angeles today is quite the opposite: It\u2019s a faction that loathes and detests the American system and seeks sedulously to destroy it, even while grabbing as much loot as it can in the process.<\/p>\n

Mayor Karen Bass was trained for that mission in Cuba. Beginning at age 19, in 1973, Ms. Bass made eight trips there with the Venceremos Brigade (founded in 1969 by the Lefty-left SDS) to \u201cshow solidarity with the Cuban revolution,\u201d which, you might remember, was a straight-up communist revolution. One might infer, then, that Mayor Bass is a straight-up communist, with ambitions to destroy the\u00a0capitalist<\/em>\u00a0city of Los Angeles, so as to replace it with a communist utopia \u2014 where all production (if there is any) is owned and controlled by the government, which then dispenses the fruits-of-production to the people, according to their needs, as officers of the government see fit.<\/p>\n

In such a system, history shows, the people enjoy no ability to make decisions for themselves about what sort of work to pursue for their own improvement and well-being \u2014 what we call economic liberty.<\/strong> That\u2019s all left to the political office-holders, the\u00a0kommisars<\/em>, the decision-makers, who tell everybody else what to do (because, you see, they know better). It has not worked too well in practice, as the collapse of Soviet Russia demonstrated, and the imminent collapse now of Cuba, will validate.<\/p>\n

This is also exactly what you see in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires of 2025. There was the fiasco of the fire itself in which everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, in the way of prevention and mitigation. The incompetence of Los Angeles city officials was so total<\/strong> \u2014 from the mayor\u2019s absence in Africa, the fire chief\u2019s cluelessness, the empty reservoirs, the broken fire hydrants, etc. \u2014 that Pacific Palisades and Altadena across town got completely destroyed. In the eighteen months since, the city\u2019s bureaucracy (with \u201chelp\u201d from the state) has made sure that next-to-nothing can be rebuilt. Since a large number of people employed in the movie industry lived in these places, and were left financially ruined, Karen Bass\u2019s government has also neatly helped destroy the city\u2019s signature business. . . a home run for communists!<\/p>\n

Marxian economic theory is appealing to those who hate and oppose the natural fact that not all outcomes in human life are equal, who resent with red-hot passion the human tendency to social hierarchy, and work fanatically to defeat it. <\/strong>They never do, of course. In communist revolutions hierarchy always reorganizes itself \u2014 only within the party structure itself, while all extra-party human effort is outlawed. In California, as in the other \u201cblue\u201d states and cities, Democratic Party leaders perch in the upper branches of the social hierarchy while they cream-off all available revenue streams.<\/p>\n

If you suspect there\u2019s something shady about the California election system, you might be onto to something.<\/strong> President Trump thinks this is the case, and said so pretty forcefully on Sunday in his confab with the argumentative Kirsten Welker of NBC\u2019s\u00a0Meet the Press<\/em>\u00a0show. \u201cThere\u2019s no evidence!\u201d Ms. Welker repeated strenuously, of voting irregularity, either in this month\u2019s California jungle primary, or in the 2020 national election. You think? I guess we\u2019ll see about that.<\/p>\n

Remember: former president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro of Venezuela \u2014 home of the Smartmatic vote tabulation system \u2014 has been in US custody for months.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you suppose he might be trying to cut a deal for himself to avoid a very long prison sentence by disclosing what he knows about Smartmatic? <\/em><\/p>\n

Do you suppose that Mr. Trump might know something about these ongoing negotiations? <\/em><\/p>\n

Do you wonder if any of that has occurred to Kirsten Welker of\u00a0Meet the Press?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nMon, 06\/08\/2026 – 16:20<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The City Of Angels To The City Of Zombies… Authored by James Howard Kunstler, The Jungle Drums Speak! “Love that the crack heads on Skid Row are up on the issues, know the candidates, and are able to Make Their Voices Heard in between hits of meth.” – Peachy Keenan on X Whaddaya know?… Continue reading From The City Of Angels To The City Of Zombies…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":615177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[20,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-615184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economic-empowerment","category-national-security","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=615184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=615184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=615184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=615184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}