Status Updates From Reinventing Collapse: The S...

Clueless busybodies who feel that they must Do Something and can be spun around by any half-wit demagogue are bad enough, but the most dangerous group, and one to watch out for and run from, is a group of political activists resolved to organize and promote some program or other.

One major difference is that the Soviet Union was entirely selfsufficient when it came to skilled labor. Both before and after the collapse, skilled labor was one of its main exports, along with oil, weapons and industrial machinery. Not so with the United States, where not only is most of the manufacturing being carried out abroad, but a lot of service back home is being provided by immigrants.

The population of the United States is almost entirely cardependent, and relies on markets that control oil import, refining and distribution, as well as on continuous public investment in road construction and repair. The cars themselves require a steady stream of imported parts and are not designed to last very long.

Even the most commonsense and humble adaptations will present public officials in the US with a terrible choice: enforce property laws or let people die. The US and the Soviet Union were at two extremes of a continuum between the public and the private.

this agricultural system depends on the availability of fossil fuel-based energy, mainly in the form of diesel for agricultural machinery and transportation and natural gas for fertilizer and other chemical manufacturing. In effect, the industrialized agricultural system transforms fossil fuels into food calories with the help of soil (which it gradually destroys in the process) and sunlight.

The Soviet Union failed to remain technologically competitive in three important technological categories: food production, consumer goods and information technology. None of these factors was lethal on its own, but the combination was quite damaging, to the prestige as well as the pocketbook.

The universal right to drive a car is the linchpin of the American communal myth. Once a significant portion of the population finds that cars have become inaccessible to them, the effect on the national psyche may be so profound as to make the country ungovernable.

The least common denominator is that you have to drive a motor vehicle, otherwise you can no longer perform this charade. This is why there is so much denial about it being necessary to give up the car and all the current talk about resorting to bio-fuels to continue feeding the car addiction.

The wonderful thing about the American middle class concept is its malleability, because it is almost entirely symbolic. You could be middle class, own an ancestral mansion in an old brick and fieldstone suburb, drive a Mercedes and send your children to an Ivy League school. Or you could be middle class, live in a dolled-up trailer home, drive a souped-up pickup truck, and send your children to a community college