Texas Lessons For Preparing For The Ongoing Collapse

In other news, the Biden Administration will use FEMA to fight domestic terrorism.

I kid you not.

Former USSR also had no debt peonage, no mortgage, and reasonably effective/cheap healthcare/education system. A lot of the more privileged urbanites also had dachas where they can grow some food. I bet even at its most dire, very few people in the former eastern block was 1-2 paydays from homelessness, which is what USians are already facing in ever increasing numbers.

For water purification, I would recommend a solar distiller over something that requires a heat source. But if you’re seriously concerned about polluted local water sources, a roof water collection system might be the way to go.

There is a different and more hopeful scenario. That you recognize infrastructure is crumbling means you have to recognize that infrastructure was built in the first place. There is no reason we cannot rebuild it and improve upon it. Sometimes it seems like you have lost all hope for humanity. I have not and I don’t think you should either.

If anyone should have lost hope it was the people who lived through the Great Depression and then had to endure World War 2. My generation (which I think you are part of) has valid complaints and concerns but what- we should give up and consign ourselves to a future that is worse?

Screw that. We can do better.

“In such a situation you need to be able to handle bumps…These solutions don’t have to be individual or family based, they can be communal outside the State…”

In regards to Texas, my understanding (which is very limited) is that there is a robust ‘evangelical big-church’ community, as well as a sizeable Catholic church. Have their been examples in the news about these communities acting significantly as “solutions” for their members in this time of crisis.

I would like to think there are many.

Goodbye America. It was nice knowin’ ya. Or, on second thought, maybe not. Either way, adios.

https://furry.substack.com/p/america-is-back

Excellent article!

Ian, any chance of Stirling penning a guest post here? I for one would like to hear his thoughts on recent events, and would love to get an update on his tri-polar American politics idea. That might be the best political post I’ve ever read.

Calls to ‘stock up’ never seem to account for the very first development in all declining/failing states, which is that previously criminal organizations take over “distribution and recovery”. And while they don’t have fraternal orders and review boards, like the cops, they are much freer to enter your ‘stocked up’ house and take all that stuff you’ve so kindly put all in one place for them.

And that is as true in Missoula as it is in Boston, Houston or Tampa.

Even a good system can have a disaster from time to time. It says a lot that we all know that’s not what happened here. Texas, the CDC, Trump, the 2008 meltdown, the F-35, climate change, make your own list, it will be long. There are so many cases where we can see that something is a really bad idea, that it won’t work, but we are told the problem is really with us. If we had the proper ideology, faith, we would see that 2 + 2 = 17 and days of reckoning never come, or come to people we don’t care about. The rich don’t care because they get as rich or richer from disaster. And the powerful don’t care because they will just blame it on someone else or say, in chorus, hoocoodanode. We live in the Age of Stupid, where reality doesn’t exist until it does, and where the only lessons learned from mistakes are how to dodge responsibility for them, lay blame, especially on those who got it right, and do it all over again.

One of the keys to doing OK in future crisis situations will be local energy generation and storage. A disaster just waiting to happen is a grid failure in the sun belt states during the summer. 95 F and 95% humidity without air conditioning for a week or so will cause thousands of deaths. Cities like Houston are in a sense “artificial cities” in that their natural pre-air conditioning population should be a fraction of what it is today. Same for Phoenix and Tucson where, although the heat is dry, they have 100+ straight days of 100 F. All this has evolved in my lifetime and, sadly, will devolve in a more chaotic manner.

Third paragraph, second sentence: ” You can count on infrastructure or the state when things go bad.”

From the context, I’m guessing Ian meant to write, “You *can’t* count on ….”?

@coloradoblue: thanks for the data point. The arcaneness of Western US water rights is arcane. You might want to rig something’s up that’s confirming to the 110 gallon standard, then have a couple other barrels or a couple IBCs in reserve, ready to be hooked in when there’s need and authority breaks down or changes it’s mind. Can you have an underground cistern to store your well water? Or just a couple barrels in your garage or basement? I have a 55 gallon barrel in my utility room for peace of mind.

There’s a multi-hundred acre solar electricity installation a couple of miles from our place. All of the electricity generated there is sent forty-fifty miles away, not to our local electric utility which generates none of its own power but buys power from outside sources — some as far away as Arizona. There are also wind-farms not far away, but all their electricity is sold outside the region, some as far away as Texas (not all of Texas is on their own grid).

It seems to me that should push come to shove during the ongoing collapse, it would be relatively simple to switch the solar generation to serve our local utility, same with the wind generation. The problem is that our local utility has never been particularly reliable — outages of an hour or more are routine, day-long or longer outages are not infrequent. Not many around here have their own generators (access to fuel is the limiting issue as well as initial cost) and roof-top solar is very rare (again, a matter of initial cost more than anything).

Water is from wells (there’s not enough rainfall even in good years to collect enough for household use) and around here, some wells have run dry and have to be dug ever deeper. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, there were no Native settlements or pueblos in the immediate area, and more distant pueblos were abandoned during the long drought of the 1670s. Most were never reoccupied.

We experience a few episodes of near-and-below zero temperatures every winter, but they usually don’t last more than a couple of days. One time (2011?), though, it was close to or below zero for a week and many places suffered burst pipes (now replaced with pvc). Otherwise, we’re mostly able to cope with the cold. We don’t heat our whole house in winter, and some people we know only heat one or two rooms when it’s really cold. Lots of folks have wood stoves, but make no mistake, they aren’t cheap to keep stoked in cold weather.

A lot of the food sold locally is trucked in from Texas. We don’t know what will happen thanks to the Texas deep-freeze. We’re hearing stories of lots of ruined farms with major loss of crops and animals. But no one really seems to know the Big Picture.

The odd thing is that folks are still moving out here from the city.

So it goes.

anon wrote: ‘It would not surprise me to see another pandemic in my lifetime (I’m still young).’

Count on it. The interactions between nature and an increasingly ubiquitous humanity that produced COV19 will continue to create threats.

Furthermore, everybody who knew anything about the possibilities pathogen-wise expected a global pandemic and will tell you that global humanity got off very lightly with COV19, which has a very high reproductive rate but low lethality. In a way, we’ve been lucky: we’ve got our training wheels via this coronavirus and have applied the new biotech to roll out vaccines in record time.

That in its way will also present a threat. The mRNA vaccines are only the tip of the iceberg as regards what the new synthetic bio-based biotechnology is capable of — most normies have no idea.

They’re going to find out, though. Much as computer and networking technology has dominated and transformed human societies over the last half-century, the new biotechnology will dominate the coming decades. It will dominate and transform human affairs far more profoundly, however, because it has the power to reframe the terms of life itself.

And much as computer networks became integrated into military affairs, the new biotechnology will follow the same arc. It already has been: Biopreparat, the old USSR’s bioweapons program, achieved certain things biotech-wise twenty years ahead of everywhere else.

In terms of merely killing people, bombs and so forth will remain the primary threat. But the real objective of military action is to change the enemy’s behavior, and pathogens — as COV19 has already demonstrated by globally changing humanity’s behavior– have an unparalleled capability to do that. Anything that can be done with a drug or chemical to change an individual’s mental state, reproductive status, etc. can be done with a pathogen in principle.

Stockpiling stuff would make sense for a situation of short-term interruptions in things, in the context of the larger society remaining intact over the longer term.

In a terminal breakdown situation stockpiling would have to be approached differently and done differently . . . perhaps making most sense if a whole community in a place is stockpiling and stockpiling alike, and is prepared to handle the violent looter gangs one way or another.

It depends on what you are stockpiling. Ideally, a lot of it would be tools and seeds that are useful but can’t be immediately translated into cash/gold. If you have tools and skills to fix other people’s stuff, they will want to help you stick around. Don’t be known as the person with money or gold or weapons. Even if you are useful to others, that’s painting a bull’s eye on your back.

Ideally, you want to be located where there is more incentive to keep order, though late capitalism is so predatory that you can’t count on traditional power figures to keep order and keep their flock for future shearing. How well local communities do will likely be largely be luck. just make sure you appear to be helpful, cooperative, and useful to local power figures. But if situations look long term bad, it’s better to figure out an exit strategy while you still can.

The last season of Brockmire has a hilarious vision of the 2030s. I actually hope we get that dystopia and not something worse.

Orlov’s solution based on his experience of the Soviet Union’s collapse is one of practicality. What works, what can people adapt to, how profound will the collapse be, what will be the most successful means of self-and-group preservation?

His basic insight is that things don’t collapse all of a sudden for the most part, some necessary services keep going for a long time and many make it through to the other side of the collapse relatively intact. People don’t move to the country; they stay in the cities, households doubling or tripling up in many cases. Maintaining services in a city is relatively easier than providing services in a small town or rural area. For the most part, the rabble are not adaptable to hardscrabble rural life in any case (YouTubbers notwithstanding). In fact there may be a net return to the cities from the suburbs and rural areas.

Family and community are critically important for survival, and yet the truth is that a lot of people will die; life expectancy will plummet and for many survival won’t be possible. Disease, murder, suicide, conflict, homelessness, abandonment, etc. will all play a role (as they are doing). The pandemic has reduced US life expectancy by a year so far, but we know that life expectancy itself is deeply class based, and the life expectancy for the Lower Orders is many years fewer than that of their betters.

Stockpiling is fine but if you’re part of a community, individuals and households generally don’t need to have a lot of supplies on hand. They need enough to tide them over and to share. If they’re in a city, deliveries will continue though more and more sporadically. If they’re in the country, deliveries may be irregular and sparse.

If the basics continue with few disruptions or alterations, the Collapse might be more of an inconvenience than a catastrophe. But we see in Texas that so many people have been so negatively affected at once, and so many cannot recover any time soon — something like the post-Katrina situation on the Gulf Coast — that substantial social change is certain. For one thing, many Texans will have to leave (many already have) and there may be nothing to go back to as houses and buildings are written off, businesses shutter for good, and whole sectors of the economy disappear.

We’ll see soon enough, won’t we?

Here is a random bit of advice I stumbled upon on the reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/lq1jn7/lpt_texans_you_are_about_to_experience_the_worst/