Category Archives: Apocalypse When?

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Pandemic — the board game. The perfect gift for the sick, the quarantined, the home-schoolers and the unemployed.

So is this it? Is this the beginning of the long-expected crash of the industrial world? Don’t think for one minute that I am cheering it on, I fear it as much as anyone. But what we are seeing today (Monday, March 16) is far more than a perfect storm.

• The coronavirus threat is grinding the economic life of the country to a halt. At a time when nearly half the population is living paycheck-to-paycheck, the places where they get their paychecks are closing until further notice. The half of the population that depends on schools to feed and house their children so they can work have just been told the schools are closed until further notice. As have the parents of many — the number increases daily — of the 30 million children who rely on the schools for two meals a day.

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I don’t care how tough things are, do not eat that.

There are so many powerful forces arrayed against the survival of industrial economies that people often find it comforting to focus on only one — global climate change, for example — brandish a sword at it and vow to fight to the death. But to act as if there were only one existential threat to our current way of life is as uninformed and irresponsible as pretending there are no threats at all. 

Consider just some of the accumulating catastrophes of the modern world in addition to global warming:

• The end of cheap energy. It has become almost impossible to extract fossil fuels profitably. The amount of energy gained for the energy invested in drilling and mining has declined steadily, and for some operations — fracking and tar sands, for example —  is approaching parity. When it gets there, the Industrial Age is over. 

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People who are ignorant of history and of the dynamics of human life, have been casually tossing around threats of violence, even civil war in America if they don’t get their political druthers. Some of them who are members of Congress actually launched a mob action inside the Capitol that lacked only torches and pitchforks — and a cause — to be a replica of an uprising.

They know not what they do. Those who refer to our own Civil War mostly talk gibberish — they have no idea about its roots, reality or meaning. Those who toss out these matches of hatred and potential violence for the minor that causes various kinds of accidents like the traffic accidents, the momentary political advantage will smile and tell you that a match cannot destroy a country, and that’s true unless it lands on a mountain of dry tinder. And these people don’t even know what human tinder is, let alone how close it is to igniting. Continue reading →

The little known Old River Control Structure (bottom center) is a frail line of defense between the raging Mississippi River (top) and a total dislocation of the US economy, by way of the Atchafalaya River (bottom).

[Reposted from June because it’s happening again in July]

The United States economy right now, this week, faces a risk of catastrophic disruption that has been approached only four times in the last century. And CNN isn’t covering it.

The Mississippi River has for nearly a hundred years been trying to change course at the northern border of Louisiana, with catastrophic consequences for the economy of the United States. The river wants to switch to the course of the Atchafalaya River, and enter the Gulf at Morgan City, 65 miles west of New Orleans. This would cut off deep-water access for the Port of New Orleans and every industry located on the lower Mississippi River: taken together, the busiest port system in the world. Continue reading →

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“Storm over Glebe” by kateausburn is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Catastrophic floods of Biblical proportions have deluged the American heartland, from North Dakota east to Ohio and south to Louisiana. It’s been the wettest 12 months since they started keeping weather records in 1895. Planting of corn and soybean crops has been delayed or canceled over enormous swaths of the nation’s breadbasket, with as yet uncalculated consequences for America’s farmers — and food supply. Climate scientists say these conditions are going to get much worse in the coming years.

But, hey, President Trumpet was consorting with Sumo wrestlers in Japan last weekend, and tweeting his little heart out about Biden having a low IQ, and Mueller finding no collusion, and something something Hillary and something something Obama. For his traveling comfort, he was supplied with Fox News and Big Macs at all times, and a large tarp was draped over the name on the navy destroyer USS John McCain, which was also visiting Japan, so that the name of the national hero would not offend the president’s eye. We’re in good hands. Continue reading →

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More and more people — and they seem to be young people — are taking to social media and various doomer sites (Reddit/Collapse is one of them) to moan that they are so bummed by the prospect of civilizational collapse that they are considering suicide. Now, suicide, like sex, is talked about far more than it is actually done — but this drivel should be dealt with before it becomes a fad.

Did you not get the memo, young tragedians, that you (and I, and everyone we know) are going to die? I can understand the error, because our culture is about being special, and forever young, and being anything you want to be, and never, ever talking about death. Continue reading →

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America is in the depths of the greatest depression in its history. You might assume I’m speaking of economics but I’m not — I am speaking of the mental health of our people and our society. We like to think and talk about ourselves as the richest country in the world — we are not — the smartest people in the room — we’re demonstrably not — with the best health care system in the world — far from it — and the highest standard of living ever — wrong again. Objectively, the word that best describes the condition that most of us are in most of the time is despair.

If you doubt that statement, consider the mounting evidence: Continue reading →

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The bridges of Coral Gables, Florida, have become harbingers of the havoc to be wrought by climate change.

The mayor of Coral Gables, Florida believes the world will end not with a bang, but a tink — the sound of an aluminum mast striking a steel girder. That sound, he explained to Bloomberg News the other day, will be the manifestation of climate change that crashes the Florida real estate market and brings on the Apocalypse. Okay, he didn’t say anything about Apocalypse. But his explanation, and the fact that Bloomberg gave it a lot of attention, is striking evidence of the growing awareness of the inevitability and imminence of the ultimate disaster that is climate change. Continue reading →

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The reason there aren’t many people on the beach on Margarita Island is that it’s hard to enjoy the beach when you have no food or water. But welcome to Venezuela. (Wikipedia Photo)

Every New Year’s Eve, there are people who travel to the easternmost promontory of whatever rock they live on, in order to be the first of their flock to experience the arrival of the New Year. I suspect a serious party deficiency in the upbringing of these people, but in every unmet need there is an opportunity for obscene profit. Thus: Now you can be among the first to experience  Armageddon, aka the collapse of the industrial age, up close and personal, from the vantage point of a five star resort hotel. Hurry, this opportunity is available for a limited time only — until the mobs burn down the hotels.

The place is Margarita Island — I swear I am not making this up — a sub-Caribbean island perch for jet-setters just off the northern coast of South America. It has a population of 600,000 people who have learned to take great care of a few thousand visiting, sun-bathing, hard-drinking  millionaires at a time. Its great misfortune is to be a part of Venezuela.

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You don’t have to worry about gravity or reality or any of that stuff if you just don’t look down….

What will be the trigger that detonates the final implosion of the industrial age? The betting is always changing, and a new and unexpected candidate has just presented itself as a possibility. The traditional destructors — scarce and/or expensive fuel, shortages of food and/or water, rising sea levels, spreading drought, violent weather and the like — are lined up like dominoes and will eventually fall onto each other in a final wave goodbye. But who will go first? With such musings do we beguile the time as we wait. This is how to get Dallas, and New Orleans, and Nice off our minds, we’ll think about Rio de Janeiro and the Olympics.  Continue reading →