Our Cray III supercomputer finally issued a set of results for the economic analysis we requested yesterday and our heart is still pounding. We were observing the progress of a black cherry souffle through the glass panel in the oven door when the emergency klaxon began its horrendous clatter. Miranda, our downstairs maid, became terribly upset, she startles easily, poor thing. The sirens here in the POWcityblog bunker are East German naval surplus and enough to make anyone afraid they are about to die under a sky-blackening rain of Scud-B missiles. Though saddened by the deflation of our souffle we picked up our Stirling SMG from the counter and raced to the Cray III's output screen. Immediately we could see that things are very much worse than expected: the Cray III had discovered a mainstream media article using the term "the recession" uploaded TWO DAYS AGO!
This use of present tense is deeply troubling. No longer is recession pending, some future byproduct of the American housing bomb, but an identifiable reality. Better get ready, and we mean ready.
The Cray III foresees no way around Peak Oil. Sure, there will be some use of hydrogen and solar and so forth here and there but the days of SUVs and endless iterations of suburban sprawl are over. We spent hours and hours patiently entering data on Mexican and Saudi well depletion, skyrocketing demand in India and China and the average length of commutes in North America (including the amount of extra liquid hydrocarbons required to move vehicles owned by the morbidly obese) and guess what neighbours? It's all over. The dispassionate electronic neurons of the Cray III have confirmed what our guts have been saying for three decades: kiss it goodbye.
Epochal change is at hand for North Americans and none of you will be spared. The degree of suffering may vary form individual to individual. What that means is the rich will laugh at the rest, especially those who didn't divert funds to shotgun ownership while they still could. A great watershed in history came along and spent fifty years building suburbia and now another great watershed is coming along which will reveal it as a disaster and 'the greatest misallocation of resources in human history,' as James Howard Kunstler says.
Everything from the postwar building boom is subsidized by cheap fossil fuels which are now running out. This not a recession. This is epochal change for which nobody is ready. This is the Long Emergency. No more Chilean apples in February. No more mindlessly trashing farmland for tracts of styrofoam mansions. Cray III is a cold-hearted machine and we don't expect sentiment at the best of times but as we read the outputs a chill gripped our colon.
'We must warn others,' our idealistic half insisted. 'We must be ruthless,' our pragmatic half countered. But how to reach the doomed, maxed out, soon-to-be-impoverished masses about to be trapped miles from places of employment or community meaning by the lack of affordable fuels? Smaller communities and larger cities will survive the relocalization but the mind reels in horror thinking about the sprawl zone. I'm not ashamed to admit I joined Miranda in shedding tears.
Few have the resources POWcityblog has been amassing since 1986, the year of Chernobyl and the first space shuttle crash. That simultaneous failure of technology representing the best of the eastern and western blocs prompted us to begin our museum-quality gun collection and prepare for the worst. We'll have a ringsde seat...but for what fresh hell?
editor's note: it may be wise right now to just return to your homes and families and be together. you can watch JHK on YouTube and discuss among yourselves what you know about knitting & container gardening
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