Media starts to pick up the troubling story

I have been watching the media cover “preparedness” for quite some time. Sure, I come from breakdown-prepared stock (my family had cases of freeze-dried survival rations in the 70s), so I’ve always been more in tune with the topic, but never before have I seen the mainstream media start to treat the subject with anything but scorn.

With regard to the unraveling, that is changing. The media seems to be waking up.

From the New York Times: Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism – A non-judgemental (unless the fops at the Times are keeping their tongues firmly in their cheeks on this one. If so, it was lost on me.

The UK’s Telegraph: RBS issues global stock and credit crash alert This is the Royal Bank of Scotland saying this, by the way:

“A very nasty period is soon to be upon us – be prepared,” said Bob Janjuah, the bank’s credit strategist.

And finally, from the Wall Street Journal: Peak Oil: IEA inches toward the Pessimists’ camp.>

The word is getting out and hitting the mainstream, or more accurately, the non-salacious mainstream. The Telegraph? The Journal? The NYT? To be real, these outlets aren’t reporting the whole story, nor are they reporting it with the alarm that’s due, but it is showing up on their radar, which I find at once, both interesting and very troubling. I’m starting to thing our problems are bearing down on us much faster than we thought.

Be prepared.

Cycles

What humans tend to understand very little about, is the cyclical nature of civilization, and more specifically, society. Apparently, evolution of our species has built into it the assumption that things will either a)stay the same pretty much forever, or failing that, b) improve a little or a lot (depending on just how grand your sense of optimism is).

But that’s sadly, a misreading of how it all works. Everything in our world and universe, for that matter, works through the machine of cycles. It’s built into the source code of our existence, and to deny it, is just self-delusion. We see it and teach it in our educational institutions, study it in our labs and think-tanks and even applaud it in our entertainment (Think The Lion King’s ‘Circle of Life’. But when it comes to life in the U.S. and the Western World, we think it can only get better, bigger and faster, forever and forever.

We are wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

The Story of Stuff

One of the things that always surprises me when we travel to the UK to visit family, is how we use so much more stuff in the U.S. than everywhere else. I first realized this years ago, when I first travelled there. A large portion of my family lives in the U.K. and when we go there, we live, not in hotels, but in our family home. Which means, for the most part, that we live like natives. In the particular town (a village on the West Coast of Scotland, actually) that means we transport our trash and garbage to the dump ourselves. At first, I was amazed at how little of that we generated while living natively.

There are a couple reasons for this. Read the rest of this entry »

California Wildfires – A Personal Experience

The past week has been a difficult one for the MacLeods, but not as tough as it was for some.

My family was affected by the California Wildfires, my parents losing their home early Monday morning. The first reverse-911 call came in at about midnight, suggesting they prepare to evacuate. Two hours later, the call came – evacuate immediately. They did. Probably in the next couple hours, the home my father designed and built on a scenic hillside outside San Diego in a small gated community was consumed by fire so quickly nothing identifiable remained. Everything burned, melted and congealed into a pile of rubble. It was truly amazing.

But all are okay, the house and contents insured and life goes on. For them, at least. For those not insured or prepared (and there are many, as we will hear about in the coming weeks) life is difficult right now. Some overly optimistic watchers are actually excited, saying the disaster will create a huge demand for new housing, with new jobs, materials purchased and will result in a new California real estate boom. Their theory is that the excess supply of California housing just got burned down.

Sadly, that’s not true. The real estate inventory problem in California isn’t one of structures, it’s one of credit. The subprime meltdown is shutting off the financing for overpriced-underafforded housing. There aren’t too many houses on the market, there’s a shortage of buyers who though unable to truly afford them, were previously able to finance them. Big difference. I think a lot of burned down houses will stay down for the count. All won’t be rebuilt right away.

Rather than saving the California economy, I fear these wildfires will deal it a harsh blow.

Technorati : California, Wildfires

Kunstler – No Confidence?

Kunstler with the theory that the 2008 election cycle has started so early because we’re so lacking in confidence that our current leadership can do anything about the horrible situation we’re in. I think he’s absolutely right. He’s also spot-on when he opines that the current crop of candidates on both side may “exhaust, bankrupt, and even disgrace their campaigns as they desperately pirouette around these painful truths, and that none of them will survive the process with their political legitimacy intact.”

I believe that in that lies the reason Al Gore is being coy about entering the fray. He’ll let the others screw themselves and each others, as political candidates almost always do, then jump in at a more economical time. He’s no dummy, and probably the only person who can lead us out of this morass with some union and economy intact.

No Confidence? by Jim Kunstler