A Whimper

Getting back to the theme of TEOTWAWKI. What I see coming up is a drop off in several stages. There will be three stages and we are around halfway through phase one.

Phase One

This is when we shift over from abundance and having an excess of everything to a system where there is enough but it will have to be controlled and well-distributed to make sure that everyone gets their share. The big box stores will try to control this distribution network and centralize the profits, but the truth of the matter seems to be that with fuel costs at a high and likely to stay high, the "warehouse on wheels" is due for a fall. We will struggle mightily to re-develop a system of local distribution and merchandising, but there will be some pretty wide holes and there will be serious inflation and occasional shortages. Figure this phase to last for two or three more years.

Phase Two

This is where the fun will really start. I am assuming here that Peak Oil is a reality. It is about here that we will start back the other side of the oil supply curve. Couple this with the rest of the world demanding their share of the pie and the cost and availability of fuel and heat will start becoming seriously constrained. America will begin having shortages in a fairly serious manner and the Lumpen will start getting frisky. I see the beginning of societal unrest here as the Haves of the baby boom start retiring and sucking money out of the system and the rest of the country begrudge them the right to take more than their fair share.

The local governments will start stepping up here. They will start demanding that Washington do something, but by this time Washington is broke so the local governments will start implementing local solutions. Some of these solutions will not be thought well of by the Kumbaya crowd.

Taxes will start going through the roof as you gotta start paying off the bills. Folks are going to be pissed and they will start pushing back against taxes in a big way. I figure Washington will cave and then start running the printing presses. It ain't gonna be Weimar, but it ain't gonna be pretty.

I figure this phase will be from around 2010 to around 2016. You gotta give me a little slack on either side, this ain't an exact science you know.

Phase Three

This is the stage where there isn't enough to go around. Folks will have their saving evaporate and the investments collapse. Getting around is going to become and issue and getting manufactured stuff and food is going to become problematic. Some hunger and some serious social unrest here my friends. This is when bullets start flying. Keep you head down and stay safe. Have some getaway money put aside, and have a way to put some miles between you and the crazies.

Required Viewing

Local Government

I think that when things start getting shaky, it will be interesting to watch the actions of local governments in the US. For the most part, these are pretty good folks, they are worried about the things that really matter like police and fire, water and sewer, and sweeping the streets.

The fall will be hard on them, but I think that this is where you will see both the best and the worst of America. Some of these folks have no tools to do the job and will be miserable failures. These will be the folks that ensconced themselves in order to help their development companies grow the useless subdivisions and strip mall that ate their farmlands.

Some will grow into the job, and "get 'er done". They will have a rough row to hoe and will probably have a pretty good reason to be proud of themselves.

Some will shine.

But at the change, these are the folks who will husband us through the change. The state capitals will be worse than useless. I predict that most of their time will be spent trying to reclaim their perquisites and serving the corporations who have no intention letting off the butt-fucking of the American people.

Grey Men

The group of folks that will have the most problem in the world to be will be the grey men that inhabit corporate America. Good little boy who have spent the last 25 years of their lives toiling for their corporate master and waiting expectantly for their "Golden Years" reward of golf and loafing.

Bummer for them dude. They will be finding out soon just how much store the big corporations put into the promises of a happy retirement that they handed out so freely. What we will have is a group of sad, pathetic losers who donated the best years of their lives on an IOU that no one has any intention of honoring. They will be sixty year old men with few prospects, a social security card, a bunch of shattered illusions, and not really that much they can do about it.

You gotta remember that revolution is a young mans game. The youngsters will be sharpening their knives when they found out how bad they have been screwed, they are going to have a completely different set of goals than protecting the grey men's constitutional right to 18 holes a day.

Good luck man, you and all of your excess baggage are going to have a hell of a time of it.

The Old Blog

I can't for the life of me remember why is is I have two blogs (actually three, but that is beside the point).

Here is the address for the old one.

http://timurlane.blogspot.com/

What to do with the Boomers

The six-hundred pound gorilla in the room is the 7o million or so boomers that are infesting the culture. Probably more than any cohort in the history of the country, this self-absorbed and demanding group will do everything that they can to suck the remaining marrow out of the American economy in order to provide for the overstuffed retirements that they feel are their right.

It will never occur to them that theirs is the generation that engineered Enron, the dot-com crash, and the housing boom. They are the generation that presided over the gutting and outsourcing of America and the systematic underfunding of everything you can think of for the rights to lower taxes and marble countertops.

A great first step to the healing of America would be to let this mass of narcissistic vomit sway in the breeze. They have done nothing exceptionally telling in their lives, let them continue to work until they get it right. Let them work until the social security fund is paid off and fixed. Raise their taxes until the national debt is paid down. They ran the society in a manner that they took the good shit and stiffed the kids with the bill and now they are bankrupt. They need to keep working to help us get out of this mess.

Excellent

Raising sons is a treat. Yes, they are ungodly noisy, have the attention span of a gnat, and leave a mess everywhere, but the truth of the matter is, the joy of raising them far exceeds the irritation that they cause. I wouldn't have it any other way.

They Hate Our Way of Life

The politicians are forever beating on the Muslim world for hating our way of life. We my friends, I will take a wild guess here but I think that us folks here in the US are starting to take a serious look at our "Way of Life" and are getting more and more disillusioned about it.

To be honest, it appears to me that the US is not so much a country as a peculiar economic agreement where everyone tries to take as much as they can and give back as little as possible.

Who do we think we are

We have a problem defining who we are here in America.  We tend to idealize our past and ourselves. We think we descended from the folks coming over on the Mayflower, when there is a better chance we descended from an indentured servant transported for theft.   We claimed manifest destiny to civilize the continent but slaughted anything between us and what we wanted.  We won WWII through the valiant efforts of Patton, McArthur, and Eisenhower, but the main thing we did is made sure the Russians had plenty of bullets to kill Germans.

Look at us now. We are shocked and aghast when Belichik cheats at a stupid game, but Mozillo and his ilk steal 100 million or so and they are captains of industry.

We gotta get our shit together. 

Gotterdammerung?

Ragnarok, Armageddon, Kalki, Tonatium

Why is it we are so intent on a the end of days. TEOTWAWKI is a great step down from these. I think that mankind will do out with a whimper, not a bang.

As your half-insane local survivalist guru, I am here to tell you that you don't really need to be out hell and gone away from the cities, or have a bunker to hunker down into. What you need is a healthy dose of common sense, a couple months of food, a way to purify water, and a multi-purpose gun or two.

If it is the end of days, fuck it, lets party. No amount of planning will make the post holocaust world worth living in. Survival for survival sakes is the mark of an animal willing to gnaw his own leg off in a trap.

What I propose that we survive is a transition from the high-test, uber-concentrated world of today. Peak oil is a very likely subject and the ability to forge a life using much less energy than now will be a major portion of the test for survival.

Up here in the NW we have the Columbia River for water and power, we probably aren't going to be in too bad of shape for daily bread. So we will have to figure out how to do without Chevy's (Both types), learn to garden and preserve food, cook at home, and walk to work.

I sincerely doubt that the general populace of the United States will turn into the reavers of the "Firefly" series. Oh, cops will be overworked, rich fucks are gonna be taxed heavily, and everyone will eat lower on the food chain, there might even be nights when children will go to bed hungry, but no huge problems, just living like the rest of the world.

Whither Survivalists?

“Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.”

—George Carlin

In a way, the title survivalist is kinda silly.  It is as though the folks who pour the name on themselves are the only people who want to live, the rest of society is unwilling to do so and only want to be around if there is someone to support them.

But the actions taken by the survival types show that the  folks that they consider untermenschen non-survival types are a source of real concern.  Loading up in the bunkers with as many automatic weaponsas they can lay hold of, they await the ravaging hordes with a fatalism worthy of a biblical prophet.  

But when you think about it, the ravaging hordes are what will keep everyone alive.  yes, right now they are busily esconsced in their McMansions, overweight and in debt, but all of those problems have easy solutions.  How we will survive as a society is leading the society into a new system with less material input and greater personal responsibility input.  

What we need to be discussing is not which automatic weapon will put a bigger hole in a looter, but how do we shift a society from one built of consumers to one built of citizens.

But, to be honest, there are gonna be some scary times getting from here to there, and a couple months of food and the ability to raise a garden might come in handy.......maybe some weapons too.  :)

Der Alte

Lets see what this looks like...this is only a test....had this been an actual emergency, well you know the rest

An Urban Survivalist

This will probaby be shouted down by the "way-out" survivalists, but I think that one has to take a chance in a small city.  My reasons are quite simple, I cannot say that life would be worth living out on a piece of very marginal land, living in fear of every passerby that shows up on the horizon.

I tend to think of humankind as sociology, not psychology.  Anything that exists today that is worth keeping (and for that matter worth throwing away) is a product of a group effort.  The myth of the lone individual working in isolation creating something of value is so rare as to be considered either extinct or an observation that was just based on wishful thinking in the first place.

That being said, I truly think that living through the storm times that are facing us will be a chancy thing.  I feel however, that the probability of success is greater with a group in an urban setting than as a solo in a rural setting.  If it is a full blown storm, the casualties in either setting will be staggering.  

The requirements are the same in either setting; savings, storage, security, and availability of energy sources.

I think that cities will allow for improved access to all of these requirements.  There will be serious issues with maintaining them, but the same can be said of the rural setting as defined by the wayouts.

One of the key things to remember is, that if the world goes mad max on us, a lot will lose even if they did everything right.  You just have to figure out how to do it with a little style.