Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
During the civil wars, two dictatorships arose, the first under Sgt
John Doe (later executed, after Prince Johnson ate his ears while
chugging a can of Bud in a popular VHS video) and the second under
Charles Taylor (now on trial in The Hague).  Both got some aid from the
USA, but it was not enough to bring order to the country. People
wanted more rice, and their old standard of living back, and had the
bullets to demand those things, but not the education or skills to
obtain a better life peacefully. (Most of all, they wanted the USA to
come back and save them.  It did not. Carter, Reagan, Bush41, Clinton,
and Bush43 all had oppotunities to intervene but left our former colony
adrift in anarchy, except for some aid Reagan sent to President John
Doe on the advice of State and CIA.)

The lessons I have taken from this is, a country can be destroyed in a
few years, but a generation is not enough to rebuild it.
  

    
The two obvious enemies of an advanced industrial nation are the
greedy and the crazy.  The greedy are those who would damage or
liquidate a country's assets for their own short-term financial gain. 
The crazy, in our case, include both those who are so blinded by rage
that they cheer the idea of someone without health insurance dying and
those who are motivated by groups like the New Apostolic Reformation,
associated with both Sarah Palin and Rick Perry.

One thing that makes me very pessimistic about the future of the U.S.
is that both parties are controlled by the greedy, and one by a
coalition of the greedy and the crazy.  Many people simply lack the
imagination to believe that this could be the case, and those who do
understand it have nowhere obvious to turn.

I don't foresee the U.S. (or any other major industrialized nation)
collapsing as precipitously as Liberia did.  It seems more likely that
we will experience a combination of "you're on your own" moments as
parts of the social order we could previously take for granted are
dismantled (think Katrina) and continued agitation from the greedy and
the crazy probably leading to the election of a truly radical national
government.

This could change if there is an outlet of some sort for the political
desires of the non-greedy and non-crazy, but it seems to me that the
high ground has already been seized.

One irony of our situation is that eloquent punditry can easily be
found explaining the crisis we are in and its roots.  But still we
drift towards the falls.
  

    
>The crazy, in our case, include both those who are so blinded by rage
>that they cheer the idea of someone without health insurance dying
and
>those who are motivated by groups like the New Apostolic Reformation,
>associated with both Sarah Palin and Rick Perry.

Crazy people everywhere will object to your confusing them with those
folks, who are malignant or antisocial or, I don't know, callous. If
only selfishness were truly a pathology, for then it would be (at least
potentially) curable.
  

    
Monrovia, Liberia (capital city), 2002.  Photo by Carol Cole, L.A.
Times.

<http://www.toptenz.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/carolyn-cole-war-underfoot.p
ng>
  

    
Jeez!

And yes, what Gary says is true.
  

    
I was happy to see an article this morning in the local news about a
couple that tore out their front yard and replaced it with native
wildflowers and plants.  We are very much stuck in the 1950s around
here in terms of zoning and gardening, doing something like tearing
out sod to plant native plants is a step short of, well, COMMUNISM.

We'll see if next week there's an article about the zoning board or a
HOA coming in and telling them to tear it out and go back to a yard
that requires watering and mowing.
  

    
Jack,  amazing recount on how Liberia devolved?  Were you there?  I'd
love to use your recount on my blog and perhaps in my new book if you
don't mind. 

I'm hoping Liberia doesn't happen in the US, although the level of
dependency on external benefactors is likely the same.  That being
said, the trends I'm following point to an economic depression and a
devolution of political order.  In other words, the equilibrium point
we've been gravitating around for the last century will cease to be a
source of stability.  The upshot is that we either find new ones in the
decades that follow or some very bad things will happen.  

As you all know I'm advocating networked resilient communities as a
starting point for a new source of stability.  The scale invariance,
extreme efficiency, strong bonds/cohesion at the small group level,
etc. would make it almost impossible to break once established. 
Additional points in its favor: 1) it is, as a byproduct of its design,
extremely friendly to the environment since it sheds little entropy,
and 2) has the potential to produce advancements in the quality of life
far in excess of what is even possible in the most utopian visions of
the current system.
  

    
>>> amazing recount on how Liberia devolved?  Were you there?

Uh, good gopod no. Liberia had been in the deep shit for at least 20
years.
  

    
Jack has spent a bit of time there consulting on their legal system, and 
has done his homework.
  

    
My students were former child soldiers.  Let me say that after the
schools had been out of business for more than 10 years, say starting
around 1990, the wars were more like Lord of the Flies with pickup
trucks, automatic rifles, light and heavy machineguns, and mortars.
Liberia is perhaps the only country on earth that can truly say, "Made
in the U.S.A." And we abandoned those folks.  I'm going back when the
bureaucracy at UNODC sorts things out and approves our next grant.

Illiterate 20-somethings leading uneducated armed bands of teens and
children across the countryside, enticed by rice and magic. And some
drugs, it's true, but chiefly rice and magic. These were hungry
children empowered by an AK-47 and some sadistic charismatic leaders.

Funny how quickly a new generation will believe in the power of magic
in as few as 10 or 12 years after the schools close.

John, I have a lot of sources and resources on Liberia I would share
offline rather than derail a constructive survival conversation here. 
Email gjk@well.com.
  

    
We see a *very* mild version of this in Pittsburgh (and the rest of
the rust belt), as drug addicts and criminals rip the wiring and
plumbing out of abandoned houses and sell them to local scrap dealers.
I sat next to a guy at the bar awhile back who had bought a place for
something like $50K with plans on rehabing it, got called out of town,
and came back six months later to something that was near worthless
and difficult to sell.  The old guy next door he was paying to watch
the place had died, his family kept cashing the checks, and nobody
watched his place.

There's also a news story every few months about someone getting
killed trying to steal metal from live transformers and junction
boxes.

I know nothing about the technology involved, but it seems like local
power generation, water purification, and sewage processing are
probably high on the problems we should be thinking about now.   My
digifab setup is useless without power and I'm not sure how many days
of a dry spell my rain barrels will water the garden and give us
something to wash with.
  

    
When thing fall apart, there is no municipal sewerage treatment or
potable water treatment.  Again, Monrovia, a city that used to house
about 400,000 and now has more than a million squatters on top of that
living in burned out high rises.  They will live in several rooms on a
floor, cooking with charcoal, and use one room as a latrine. When
conditions become too unbearable, they'll move up a few flights to the
next unoccupied floor.  "NO PEE PEE HERE" is the most common sign along
the streets.  "Drinking water" of unknown provenance is purchased in
heat-sealed bags ... in a city of 1.4 million men, women and children.
And you have to have money to buy water in a city where unemployment
still pushes 70 percent.

The future, in a worst case scenario, looks pretty ugly.  

Unless you're rich.  The Mamba Point hotel stayed open during all the
civil wars -- the arms dealers and the diamond dealers had to have some
place to meet.  Mostly Chinese stay there now, and it has good
Lebanese and Italian food, a casino, a sushi bar, and if you're really
rich, you can get generous shots of Johnny Walker Blue.  It's
surrounded by private security with AK-47s and you can't drive in
unless you're a guest or have a big UN painted on your hood, but you
can walk in.  US dollars only, as always.  If you see a Liberian
government official there, s/he's on the take.
  

    
I'm ignorant here -- how much of Liberia would have been a place
people could live, farm, raise animals, etc, back in the late 19th
century?  If it was, how much of those same conditions exist now?

Places like Phonenix, parts of SoCal, and I'm guessing much of the
eastern seaboard sprawl simply cannot support themselves with local
resources.  Semi-rural suburbia and real rural US might fare much
better -- that is assuming we don't get into a situation like Butler's
"Parable" series.  If all of Manhattan decided to fan out over the
course of a few months, the surrounding states would be in a world of
hurt.
  

    
Unlike the USA, the whole country of Liberia is arable.  It used to be
a great rice producer, having two rainy seasons a year, but the
droughts that started in the mid-1970s caused the rice riots of 1979. 
They grow a lot of corn now, but it doesn't feed as many people as rice
did.
 
  

    
One of the reasons I moved to Idaho is that it struck me as being a
more sustainable place than San Francisco. I have chickens and ducks, I
have had rabbits, I have fruit and nut trees and bushes, a garden, and
outbuildings. I have friends and neighbors who are farmers and
ranchers and dairymen. Also, there's a lot of LDS here, who have a
couple of years' worth of food on their own, though of course they'd
likely only help out each other, not everyone. 

I also have a whole bookshelf of things on how to garden, how to raise
and butcher animals, how to build solar systems and plumbing and so
on. People say, you can get all that information online. I say, what if
there's no online?

As far as making subdivisions more sustainable, our local chapter of
the US Green Building Council just got a grant to help develop more
sustainable CCRs, like eliminating restrictions on solar panels,
clotheslines, xeriscaping and so on 
  

    
As locally resilient communities develop how well will meshworks work?
I mean, how easy will it be to work around IP providers and form
actual networks and share info and data? Should we all be getting
Android's and learning how to tether and set up servers and our own
networks? Is that doable?
  

    
If they can figure it out in the hills of Afghanistan (and they have,
with a little help from MIT) we can surely figure it out in the US. 
  

    
and really, it doesn't take a global economic collapse.  It could be
as simple as another Carrington Event:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859>
  

    
It seems like step 1 of the Liberia "things fall apart" scenario is
that nobody in the community has any money coming in. If we're talking,
say, Florida, and you have, at a minimum, retirees getting social
security checks and spending them at WalMart, that's enough to keep
basic supplies coming in and limit vandalism to vacant housing. Of
course, they could be scared off.
  

    

So we have this scenario approaching where this next future cohort of boomer
retirees and those that follow them are going to have bupkes for retirement
income.

They may have Social Security but it's not going to be enough.

John, what is your thinking about this?
  

    
I think you need to understand that if things fall apart, there aren't
going to be any social security checks coming in. Seriously. Given the
level of complexity in the system, when things go, they are going to
go quickly. 
  

    

Ok, so that's part of the scenario.

I think a lot of us will be sleeping in the parks.
  

    
Maintained and open parks are one of the first things to fail, so
we'll have to be early adapter squatters to have a chance.  

Lack of electricity is another part of falling apart that would hit
people of all age groups hard, seems to me.  Got 24 hours of gas for
that earthquake-kit generator?  Enough for some fine good-bye posts and
emails.
  

    
But you wouldn't run it for 24 hours straight.  This is part of
learning to live of the grid and in a community, you'd get everyone
together who needed to charge a phone or use a tool or whatever and
they would bring the fuel they could scrounge or hand-crank a
generator.

We just picked up a hand-cranked/solar/radio/light that also has a USB
charging function.  We can leave it in the sun all day and charge a
small USB device at the same time, or spend a few hours cranking it.

In parts of Africa, the trade off is pedalling the generator to charge
phones.  Jan Chipchase gave a great presentation on mobile phone usage
in low-tech/off-the-grid countries, but I'm unable to find it online.
  

    
I've been going through trying to figure out what my priorities would
be for electrical devices in the event of powerloss. So far, it looks
like refrigerator, laptops, and cellphones. The fridge is the big one.
I don't have a genset that will run that for any length of time, never
mind one that has omnivorous fuel consumption. I could probably scrape
by on solar, wind, and handcranking for the other stuff if I planned it
right.

The other thing about electrical power requirements is that they all
require solutions at at least a tier 2 level of technology, so far as I
can tell.