The Southwest also faces increasing friction with adjoining Mexico. This is not a racist provocation but a description of reality. No other first-wor… - James Howard Kunstler

Many individual immune systems will be compromised by the hardships of the Long Emergency and disease will seize the opportunities presented, as it always has. AIDS ought to be especially worrisome, because even when people have lost everything, they still have sex. That may be all many people will have, and it will get them in a lot of trouble. Besides, as already suggested, the resourceful HIV bug may find an even more efficient means of transmission through countless random acts of mutation. Millions [and perhaps billions] of human beings are going to die. […] The attrition is apt to continue for much longer than the Black Death raged in the Europe of the fourteenth century,because under the regime of cheap [hydrocarbons like] oil the carrying capacity of our earthly habitats was exceeded by orders of magnitude, and we have farther to go to return to the solar carrying capacity-of our home places. Some home places, such as the deserts of Arabia and the American West, will support only minuscule numbers of people without the benefits of fossil fuels. Of course, there will be no compensations for the loss of those nonrenewable resources. Also, because of the… human contribution to global warming, this climate change might well be much more severe and longer-lasting than the blip of the early 1300s, or even the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, [...] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the… fossil fuel era. […] Factories could be started up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, where swollen populations furnished trainable workers willing to labor for much less than those back in the United States or Europe. Products then moved around the globe in a highly rationalized system, not unlike the oil allocation system, using immense vessels, automated port facilities, and truck-scaled shipping containers at a minuscule cost-per-unit of whatever was made and transported. Shirts or coffeemakers manufactured 12,000 miles away could be shipped to s all over America and sold cheaply. […] Meanwhile, among economists and government figures, globalism developed... [as] an intellectual fad. Globalism allowed them to believe that burgeoning wealth in the developed countries, and the spread of industrial activity to formerly primitive regions, was based on the potency of their own ideas and policies rather than on cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil. […] [An] overlooked [fact] is that [Margaret] Thatcher’s success in reviving England coincided with a fantastic new revenue stream from oil, as quaint old Britannia became energy self-sufficient and a net energy-exporting nation for the first time since the heyday of coal. Globalism then infected America when Ronald Reagan came on the scene in 1981. Reagan’s ‘supply-side” economic advisors retailed a set of fiscal ideas that neatly accessorized the new notions about free trade and deregulation, chiefly that massively reducing taxes would… result in greater revenues as the greater aggregate of business activity generated a greater aggregate of taxes even at lower rates. […] The rise of computers, in turn, promoted the fantasy that commerce in sheer information would be the long-sought replacement for all the played-out activities of the smokestack economy. A country like America, it was now thought, no longer needed steelmaking or tire factories or other harsh, dirty, troublesome enterprises. Let the poor masses of Asia and have them and lift themselves up from agricultural peonage. America would outsource all this old economy stuff and use computers to orchestrate the movement of parts and the assembly of products from distant quarters of the world, and then sell the stuff in our own s and s, which would become global juggernauts of retailing. […] It was also like a convoluted liquidation sale of the accrued wealth of two hundred years of industrial society for the benefit of a handful of financial buccaneers, with the great masses relegated to a race to the bottom as the economic assets are dismantled and sold off, and their livelihoods are closed […]. That this development was uniformly greeted as a public good by the vast majority of Americans, at the same time that their local economies were being destroyed—and with them, myriad social and civic benefits—is one of the greater enigmas of recent social history. In effect, Americans threw away their communities… to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.

We lived more by the sun than by the clock, but I did own a clock. It was an eight-day windup console clock which I kept on the mantel in the living room, and it was the only timepiece in the house that worked anymore.