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APOCALYPSE REPO MAN

A loyal minion e-mailed me with a great idea which became this article. At times I do tend to forget that a lot of people have not been reading my drivel for almost four years ( or even several years prior to this blog with my e-mail newsletter ). And, shockingly, they refuse to slog through all my back issues. This allows me to keep talking about the same old crap while pretending to only have the best interests of my readers in mind. Suckers. Remember, if you have a valid question, don’t hesitate to ask me. You might get a reply, or I might use it for an article. I might also ignore it, but that might just mean that I have no answer or I can’t stretch it out into a full length piece. For instance, one minion asked me about wheat stored out in a shed. Was the freezing weather going to be detrimental? For me, I don’t care about storing it outside under a tarp. For others, I can’t say for sure if it is bad, nutrition wise. Would the sprout ( Sprout ) test mean something, or does the kernel still retain enough nutrients for human health but just not enough to replant? I have no answers and I don’t have the time for research, so there is a subject I won’t write about. It was a good question, but not one I can address. Anyway, I might have answered a question previously but the current crop of readers needs an update. Or, I might have new information. There are no bad questions, and I appreciate article ideas. I can come up with brilliant articles about a quarter of the time. About half is just treading water, filling up those thousand words for the day. The other quarter are thanks to minion questions.

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Why should I worry about a house payment, as there will be no one to collect after the collapse? I think I’ve been giving the impression of a complete overnight collapse being feasible and imminent. As in, asteroid hitting the planet, Yellowstone blowing ( Super Volcano: The Ticking Time Bomb Beneath Yellowstone National Park ), a large nuclear exchange or a massive solar flare scorching us kind of sudden collapse. Most survival “experts”, and here I include Peak Oil writers, Gaia huggers, anyone that thinks our current high living oil dependent First World lifestyle is going to end badly, want you to believe that the collapse is many generations long. As long as the three hundred year Roman or Mayan collapse. They remind me of wife #4 who, bless her pea picking heart, thinking I’m full of crap since Y2K ( The Real History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Predictions from Revelation and Nostradamus to Y2K and 2012 ) never happened. So, since a superpower nuclear exchange never happened, it never will. Since the American collapse has not killed us in 38 years ( I count from the first oil shock and de-link of gold, but your count might differ slightly ), we are all safe and snug. As they say, history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. You can’t be too literal with history. It is a guide, not a blueprint. Just because we’ve gotten lucky before doesn’t mean we will stay that way. History teaches that all empires fail, and that all agricultural areas eventually are depleted of nutrients. Our empire is already there, but it is waiting for a strong enough contender to knock it off its pedestal. And the majority of our farmland has been a barren poisoned soil for awhile. It is just kept alive by petroleum. History isn’t wrong, we’re just on borrowed time.

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When I talk about a quick collapse, I don’t mean literally overnight. I mean far less than the generations that others talk about. The waterfall analogy is what I use. Slowly downward on a very slight decline, until the Black Swan ( The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: “On Robustness and Fragility” ) event plunges us over the lip. But the plunge can take months. Your crops can fail and you still have a little bit of time with the food already in the system. We don’t know when the plunge will happen, or how. It could have already started, and be of several years duration. No one knows. And, yes, we could still have an overnight collapse event like the nuclear war ( The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War ). It is just that the likelihood is low. Never impossible, but perhaps improbable. Improbable enough that you don’t bet your home on it. You have to bet on that collapse being several months to several years long. You insure your life by being ready for the sudden collapse, but finances are best bet on a quick collapse. Sudden is immediate, quick is a much more compressed time frame than the traditional experts allow for. We have been in an economic collapse for two years or so. Five years ago the global oil production numbers evened out, with no new growth. The growth was unconventional fuels ( tar sands, ethanol ) taking over. Three years ago the oil imported into this country started to decline. Two years ago the economic depression started. There is no growth except the financial shenanigans of derivatives and inflation. Even if there is enough oil to keep the lights on or keep the heat on in the winter, there isn’t enough to keep our economy growing. And if it isn’t growing the interest payments on all our levels of debt can’t be paid. For some time, the federal government and federal reserve bank has been buying its own debt since China no longer is. How long do you think that can last?

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Things promise to get so much uglier in the very near future. I don’t know how the banks will screw us next, but I know it is going to happen. The central bank is our Mafia ( Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires ) and the federal government is the enforcer of their will. You can bet that the current reluctance of the banks to kick you out for non-payment will not last. The banks are desperate for money, and that is just from a limited derivatives meltdown years ago. They don’t want to claim the house as a liability rather than an asset. How can this change? Most likely through the government. I don’t know details, but I can guess. How about if you are underwater in your mortgage, and Uncle Obammy allows you a hardship emergency loan. It buys the house, or rather guarantees the note just as it was doing through the VA program. No one can qualify to buy the home, so it is rented out. He rent goes to the bank as the government guarantees the bank won’t be stuck with the liability. Or, large numbers of houses are condemned both because no one can live in them for upkeep ( crackheads [ Crackhead (v. 1) ] are a fire danger! Or some other nonsense ) and because the local cops can’t patrol that area due to budget cuts. The houses are destroyed to cut the number of homes being a drag on the market due to an over-inventory. Or, suburbia is destroyed to herd us into concentrated urban area. The excuse might be dwindling fuel supplies that lead to food that must be used to ship by rail rather than truck. In reality, you are in a non-barbed wire concentration camp, held by Food Stamps and unemployment.

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My point here is that things will last long enough for a mortgage to be a millstone, and you can’t predict how things will come apart so you need flexibility. A mortgage is not flexible, nor is any debt. I can’t make up your mind, nor can I give you legal advice since there are fifty versions of bankruptcy out there. All I can do is point out the fallacy of business as usual since we never went through Oil Down ( Oil Rig Down – Lulu.com ) before. We went through a mild period of switching from domestic dependence to foreign dependence, but look how traumatic that was.
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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