“You didn’t find me, you collapsed a building on me.” – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
How do you get a philosophy student off the front porch? Tip him for the pizza.
Finished my taxes. All went well – I’m actually getting some of my money back. In truth, I was pretty close to posting some memes. This weekend at the Wilder house was just one filled with, “meh, let’s order pizza and relax because we don’t feel like doing much” across the board. So, we relaxed, at least until it was time to do my annual tango with TurboTax®.
I almost decided to post some of the more amusing memes I’d found across the Internet, but had so far not found a time or place to use. But, just as the clock headed reached 10 ‘til midnight, the muse struck me like a bag of wet sushi fish in a net stocking owned by a stripper named Destiny who is missing two fingers on her left hand.
How does civilization end?
Lots of people talk about an eternal decline. That’s a wishful thought, I guess. It’s the Bladerunner dystopia where everything is cheaper and coarser, ever more crowded, and ever less human. I guess the bright side of the Bladerunner fate is an endless supply of robot clones of Sean Young back before she went crazy and decided to live on a diet of Twinkies® and gin.
Be glad I didn’t make you look at Old Cat Lady Sean Young.
To be clear, that’s mainly what we’re seeing.
- Gangs of “youths” in Chicago rioted this weekend because it’s Chicago, they outnumber the police, and they can do anything and their chances of getting arrested are about the same as Kamala Harris having an idea that didn’t die of loneliness.
- Power grids that went from reliable to “maybe” because people decided investing in infrastructure was homophobic or something.
- A shrinking middle class, and less clear ways for most people to join it, especially the kids. My generation, Gen X, has a significantly smaller share of the national wealth than the Boomers did at my age. And the Zoomers and Millennials?
- Economic disruption – inflation and shortages jumped up when the papering-over of the economic problems of a made-up currency that was spent as fast as possible by both Left and Right could no longer be papered over. Even today, there is no thought to try to fix things, because that would stop the party and we know politicians love to party.
- Moral decay and the loss of civic virtues that would make Caligula look like a prude. When late-stage Rome would have said, “Whoa, dude, you’re going too far,” it’s time to think about where we are.
There are more things, but making longer lists makes me better at making longer lists but doesn’t really tell the story, and you have a search engine. The idea is that all of these things that are happening right now are going to lead us down a trail where each day, things get a bit duller, a bit uglier, and bit more unreliable, and a bit shabbier. The United States (and other Western countries) exhibit a long, slow decline into the eventual status where everything is not only expensive, but it also sucks.
I congratulated someone for a great exit sign once. “Nice going!”
Again, that’s an optimistic case. It assumes that we’re making progress, and we’ll keep making progress, but a that progress will be spread over more and more people, like trying to make 300,000,000 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of a single jar of jelly. That is the way that most civilizations have ended, with a whimper and not a crash.
But 2023 is a different story, and faces different problems. The first, and biggest is energy and “peak” minerals. I’ve written about this dozens of times, but our current civilization is one of the first built entirely around single-use materials, the most important of which is energy. Each barrel of oil pumped and used cannot be reused later – it’s gone. And, I assure everyone reading this, that biotic or abiotic, there is a finite amount of oil that can be extracted that makes economic and thermodynamic (provides more energy than it takes to extract).
I did sit on a block of ice too long once, got polaroids.
We go after the easy resources first, oil that seeps up under its own pressure – drill down 20 feet and Jed’s a millionaire. In 2023 we’re using high tech and energy intensive methods to frack oil and drilling miles down in miles of water.
There are other materials that this applies to, as well. The Romans could build wooden warships, and the trees could grow back. Sure, we can reuse the steel from our ships, and do. But when it comes to minerals like phosphorus, lithium, copper, and PEZ™, there are absolute limits to the quality deposits required. And with something like phosphorous, there is no replacement, since it is an element vital to life and we can’t replace it with soybeans or turkey bacon. Once these inputs stop, like my first marriage, it’s over.
The second idea is that our current civilization isn’t regional like Rome or China or Dave’s Tribe of Wandering Dudes. The civilization of the world today is just that. Outside of parts of Africa, South America, and Detroit, what we have is truly a single world civilization. It’s all interconnected. Russia declares war on the Ukraine? Wheat prices go up. If there’s an attack on Taiwan? Large swaths of semiconductors are off the menu.
I hear that’s a robot’s favorite dish – silicon carne.
When Rome collapsed, only Rome collapsed, and people in China or South America didn’t have a clue. If any part of the world collapses today? The rest of the world will be degraded as well – perhaps enough to take everything down with it, since we work in a world without substitutes.
The final idea (for now) is that nobody really agrees with anybody. This is not a new development. But in 1940, the war in Europe really didn’t hurt the United States – we could make almost everything we needed (except pesky things like rubber and bananas) and were doing fine. The world is at war? No one cares.
Now, the economy is tightly coupled – one nation to another, these wars matter. Since 1945, the (general) peace has been kept, and what conflicts were allowed were just large enough to make profits for Boeing® or General Dynamics™ but not large enough to mess with anything that mattered. But if China takes Taiwan? A huge number of semiconductors are no longer available on the international market, and those are used in everything from washing machines to cars to tanks to watches to . . . you get the picture. And the reason you get the picture is because of thousands of semiconductors transporting the data directly to you.
A cop pulled Chuck Norris over once. The cop got away with a warning.
One break? Poof.
I think it’s much more likely that, instead of a gradual slide down into poverty, that one morning we wake up and find a huge chunk of the economy doesn’t work at all anymore, because the inputs are gone. COVID was a stress test for this, and we failed. Our just-in-time economy may bump profits, but it removes the idea of a resilient economy.
Oops!
The good news, though, is if the world experiences a prolonged and significant collapse? No more taxes! Well, at least no more taxes until Warlord Lance the First, of Modern Mayberry, wants his share.
…Eureka!
Prolly multiple locations, no time/inclination ta look. Maybe Ricky?
Up to and including 600 rounds sticks in my noggin.
“Serve & Protect”, (Whom?) eminently ‘Qualify’ with their Weapons. Typically? The Lone ‘criminal’ is the one outnumbered.
The Epiphany? The Standard silhouette shows the Bad Guy FACING the Suspect. Maybe having the suspect’s BACK as the target would help improve accuracy, and reduce environmental Lead pollution?
i know, i know. Budgets are stretched ta the max!
FMJ’s, in a (Yet Another) chicago live action ‘simulation’. SHOULD help kill multiple birds per stone?
Think of the poor tax donkey’s!
Domino’s? Is that not the poor chap DRIVEN from the company He Started?
Musta lost the controlling interest in the Stock? Hostile, In Deed. Indeed.
Chicago temps are up, and so is activity. With Elon unleashing Twitter, it can’t be hidden.
Like a drunk staggering on a long stairway with many landings to break up the staircase down. Rarely a step upward towards improvement, often a multi-step stumble downward as gravity and chaos rules.
You talk about micro-chips, I talk about SHTF when EMS, Firemen and Power Line guys stop going out to save and repair stuff. We might both be right as micro-chips have a lot to do about communications, credit cards working and the grid power control nodes.
A long enough banking holiday with a credit card freeze (as the vast % of credit cards are Bank run) the truckers stop driving as no trucker can reach in his pocket for cash to feed that 4-5 mpg Semi. When I was doing the cross-country trucking bit a failed company credit card that wasn’t corrected ASAP by phone calls was a drop the load and bob tail home event.
Just think, all those PEZ just lost on the side of the road.
And given those “Youths” acting out in Shitcago, HAVE electricity, plenty of food and such.
Just think about several cities of such craziness because their EBT cards DON’T feed them today.
Lots of fragile links that could make SHTF just a little closer than we think.
John, take a look at my hermit reply last posting.
Michael, your examples make the hair on my arms raise up. I’m investing in food, tools, and other supplies. But you bring up examples I hadn’t even considered.
You know when it’s really gonna become crunch time? When the local governments decide to tell their people “Stop sending money to Washington, send it to us, and we’ll eliminate the middlemen”. If the state follows through with supplying the basics (keeping the power on, providing emergency services, making sure that the truly disabled and elderly have food and shelter), Washington is screwed. That kinda rebellion can spread.
While the concept of states encouraging sending THEM the money that would have gone to the FEDS is an interesting concept – and I do agree that if enough did it, Washington could be screwed, there is a problem with the execution of this. In short – this idea could work for all the ‘self employed’ folk who do their own withholdings/estimated tax payments. For everyone else – the processor of the payroll usually handles it, and I’m pretty sure that the local IRS office would take exception to this, and since for most any business bigger than ‘mom and pop’ stores – payrolls are done by outside services, it’d be hard to convince those services to divert the FED $ to the State. Why? Fewer pressure points for the FEDS to have to hit (the payroll processors). As for how much pressure such ‘diversion’ tactic would apply on Washington: I fear that since the practice of spending far more than is collected in taxes has become ‘standard practice’, I suspect they’d just do as they’ve always done: ‘Fire up the printing presses’ and just print more $ to make up the ‘loss’, while they (Treasury/IRS) strong-arm the payroll processors to cough up the bucks that they believe are rightfully ‘theirs’. This *might* not work – as they’re supposed to sell bonds to cover ‘new’ money, but with the $ falling out of favor as an international investment instrument (let alone world reserve currency), they might just have to do excessive ‘quantitative easing’ (i.e. – devalue our currency) – which will just speed the arrival of the storm that will knock our fiscal house of cards down…
It’s an interesting thought experiment though, just the same. 😉
Hermit reply was excellent.
I have a scale of collapse, so it varies. Lowest level is, “mail didn’t come today” and highest is “solar flare scorched the entire Earth”. It’s all a matter of degree. We lose electricity? We probably lose 40% of the people in the United States, if we’re lucky. It’ll probably be closer to 90%.
Phosphorous can be reclaimed by boiling human urine, that is how it was discovered.
America could not produce enough boots or PEZ for a drafted military. Guess who makes them.
Unicoin will solve all of their satanic majesties problems.
There will be blood.
You don’t need to boil urine to reclaim the phosphorus. Just let it soak into your compost pile, then spread it on the garden. And don’t flush it out of your garden with excessive irrigation.
It can be, but it’s hard. We have these wonderful concentrated deposits. Getting little bits? Ouch. No way to have commercial farms, carrying capacity . . . collapses.
The big danger of tangling with China is that they would shut off all the pharmaceuticals we get from them. Imagine tens of millions of people suddenly going cold turkey off their cocktail of antidepressant meds. They would go off the rails. Not to mention the millions of people who couldn’t get life sustaining meds. If the ChiComs attack Tawian, they are going to be on their own.
Why we need to stockpile any essential meds.
Which the DEA and FDA have made darned near impossible to do.
We were able to talk our family doc into an extra prescription of my wife’s synthroid that she needs to survive so we ordered a significant back-up supply but that isn’t all that easy to do.
Just takes money. There are lists online (sea captain’s medical guide http://irp.fas.org/doddir/milmed/ships.pdf ) that provide extensive info. There are dosing guides. Searching for ‘fish meds’ should get sources to purchase from…
Most doctors that specialize in ‘travel medicine’ will write you scrips for common antibiotics if you tell them you are traveling overseas. There are other Drs online that will prescribe and sell you a whole kit of ABX and commonly required meds. You will have to pay for them yourself.
Many people report getting scrips from their Dr for chronic conditions for an extra 30-90 days supply but again, you will have to pay, insurance won’t cover it most of the time. Explain your concerns about supply chain disruptions or not being able to get to the store. As long as your scrip is not for something abusable, they should be willing.
And everyone can leverage early refills to build up a stash. Just refill at the earliest point you can before you actually run out. Move any that you have left when your new month is filled to your stockpile (or move the same number of doses of the newer meds).
This is a topic that has received man-decades of discussion in the prepper community. Shouldn’t be hard to find lots of suggestions with a bit of searching.
n
Holy cow! As a guy who doesn’t take anything more than some vitamins, didn’t think of that.
There are already shortages.
https://www.drugs.com/drug-shortages/
The .gov maintains various stockpiles and some pre-positioned supplies that are essentially giant crash carts of meds you might need a lot of in a big hurry, like atropine, and cipro…
It has been an ongoing issue since before wuflu, and at least back to ebola when I first looked at it.
n
In keeping with the TSE subtext, two epiparagraphics:
Uncah Sam — he dead.
A penny for the Big Guy.
Well done. Do you think the Big Guy will notice?
Just across the river from St. Louis, the “most dangerous city in America” :
https://www.salon.com/2022/08/16/we-wont-be-the-first-civilization-to-collapse–but-we-may-well-be-the-last/
“…Monks Mound – these earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people…violence dramatically increased. Surrounding towns were burned to the ground. Groups, numbering in the hundreds, were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. At the end, “the enemy killed all people indiscriminately. The intent was not merely prestige, but an early form of ethnic cleansing,” writes anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat in “Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians.” He notes that, in one 15th-century cemetery in central Illinois, one-third of all adults had been killed by blows to the head, arrow wounds or scalping. Many showed evidence of fractures on their arms from vain attempts to fight off their attackers.”
My advice: go outside today and enjoy a nice Springtime day. What will be will be, as it all has been before.
Not going to happen that way, because the rurals have guns. Between WW 1 and 2 the balance of power changed. Guns gave the average working man the ability to fight soldiers to a draw or better, without having to train full-time as a soldier.
The Chinese, Russian, and German genocides happened because the victims chose to permit it, not because they couldn’t defend themselves if they wanted.
Well, that makes me want to break out the Irish Whiskey . . . oh, wait, too late.
Consider, for just a moment, what life might be like if one was not ‘connected’ to real-time updates on these unfolding disasters. I live in a quiet suburb of a big city in the southwest. The stores are always crowded and the shelves completely recovered from the depths of recent shortages. No hint of any impending retail apocalypse. Yesterday evening it was warm and beautiful, and the neighborhood was alive with a dozen well-behaved kids out playing in the street – riding bikes and skateboards, bouncing balls, shrieking with laughter. We sat out on the porch toward sunset and I remarked to my wife that if I did not know better, I would swear that it was 1975 all over again.
You know what’s coming. I know what’s coming. But it’s been over a decade since Trayvon Martin earned his final degree. And 30 long years since Reginald Denny was sacrificed in effigy as the face of White Supremacy. Even George Floyd is fading from America’s collective short memory. What’s deeply unnerving is that the inevitable societal collapse is taking so damned long to get here. Every time it seems that the fuse has been lit, it sputters out and we are left once more in a state of perpetual anxiety, wondering when, when, when?
Maybe this is why so many people are snapping, individually. The suspense is literally killing us.
Every month, we get fewer and older. Every month, our enemies grow more numerous and younger.
The majority of children in the USA today aren’t American by any meaningful definition.
What’s the point of remembering George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, or (especially) any more recent victim of government exercise of power now? “Biden got elected. At ease, troops.” If you review the history of Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia, you’ll see a strong correlation with electoral politics. (Don’t take my word for it.)
I have considered that, at length. I think there’s a fair chance that we do lose that communication, and all we are left with is wars and rumors of wars. The collapse will not be televised?
This is the most important thing you’ll read all day: https://eatonrapidsjoe.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-does-30kacre-corn-ground-mean-to.html
Real inflation last year ran 25-30%.
$100 compounded quarterly at 20% interest for 5 years is: $265.33
$100 compounded quarterly at 25% interest for 5 years is: $336.19
$100 compounded quarterly at 30% interest for 5 years is: $424.79
Yup. Tough times ahead. We avoided a lot of the inflation, but it won’t stay away forever.
This will be a world wide phenomenon. Both Russia and China are almost in as bad of a shape. They are run by autocrats who are answerable to no one, not the best setup for a secure future. They will undermine and crush the US, though given our “leaders”, I don’t know why they would bother doing something we are already accomplishing ourselves They will wreck the rest of the world doing so and all will live in ruin.
Maybe? They may be riding a pretty wild horse, themselves. But the next time coming up will be harder.
Bix Weir claims that an additional benefit of the impending bank collapse will be forgiveness of debt, at least in terms of mortgages. On the other hand, what if China traded all it’s worthless T-bills bonds etc. for those mortgages and farms? That would buy time for other countries to do the same or similar without causing a mass collapse of the dollar. Then China could send millions of Chinese over to occupy those homes and farms. The bankers would be happy, the Chinese would be happy, and we’d be starved slaves on the neo-plantation. “What’s not to like?”
Ugly thought, that. But I think, if that started, the US would default on the t-bills.
Uglier thought, with the certainty of gravity:
The inevitable ethnic cleansing of the new arrivals in response would throw a kink in those plans right quick.
Read Crichton’s Rising Sun (and skip the dreadful movie version) for a closer look at how that worked out at a fraction of the scale you suggest.
The war drums were beating right up until Japan Inc. financially collapsed.
The Chinese would fare about as well as white farmers are doing in SAfrica right now.
Bad Day At Black Rock times 100,000, and no Spencer Tracy coming to the rescue.
We’ve done it before, and would again.
John, I wonder if it is a combination of the two: in point of fact things have been slowly collapsing over the past years in a way that would make the collapse truly catastrophic.
Energy and rare metals (especially) are good examples of ways large chunks of the economy end suddenly. And once such industries stop, it is very hard to get them back up and running.
They have been, and there’s another factor: people. We’ve outrun our ability to create people capable of doing many jobs.
It’s a long way down.
Sean Young, ooof. I remember her from “No Way Out”. A good movie. Read later she was a total wacko on sets and no one would hire her.
Yup, heard she had a thing for superglue. But that’s another story.
John did you see this?
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/dominos-falling-brookfield-defaults-161-debt-dc-office-buildings
Brookfield isn’t a minor player in real estate, DC has always been a safe bet for steady rent increases and full utilization of the rentals. Not like DC ever “suffers” from a bad economy, eh?
I smell a Banking Holiday nearby. That is likely to stop the credit card system and thus the trucking of America. I was a trucker for a year (hospital burnout) and I can tell you once the company credit card fails, it s a phone call to fix OR a drop the trailer and Bobtail Home. Nobody carries the cash needed for a 4-5 MPG semi.
If you think the “Natives” are restless now, wait until they cannot use their EBT cards for food because the trucks failed to show up.
Holy crap! High interest rates while doing QE? I hadn’t seen that. D.C. is the model for the “it’s always good because Congress is here” economy.