I’ve said many times that we can expect delusional beliefs to rise in proportion to the economic hardships we experience. That is exactly what’s happ… - James Howard Kunstler

Natural gas… is not as versatile as gasoline, but it does a lot of tasks beautifully. Gas is the feedstock—the raw material—for a wide array of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and plastics. Ninety-five percent of the nitrogenous fertilizers used in America are made… of natural gas, and so it has become indispensable to U.S. agriculture.

The entropy produced in World War II was much more widespread and profound than that of World War I. In World War I the action had taken place… entirely on rural terrain, classic battlefields. In World War II, much of the warfare was urban. The long-range bomber had reached a high stage of refinement in the twenty-plus years between world wars. None of the major capitals had been damaged in World War I. In World War II, hundreds of towns and cities were destroyed in Europe and Asia. Berlin was reduced to gravel; London was badly mutilated; and, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became radioactive ashtrays. The casualties of World War I had been enormous, astonishing, [and] appalling beyond civilized peoples’ wildest dreams, but the victims had been overwhelmingly soldiers. The casualties in World War II were overwhelmingly civilians and in much greater aggregate numbers.

As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we'd thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved, and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody in town called them peasants, but in effect, that's what they'd become. That's just the way things were.