I was just re-reading your post and I wanted to respond to this line, because I don't think it's true. Montana has one of the 2 or 3 lowest median incomes in the US. I believe I am correct that people work more hours on average here than anywhere else in the country.

The problems you are relating are not poverty problems. They are problems of overpopulation and urban dependency. Those same guys that are robbing their neighbors in your neighborhood....here they're on the volunteer fire department. In your neighborhood the power goes out and everybody riots. In mine, people with less income will be out with chainsaws clearing out the downed trees and most of 'em will be breaking out their generators.

The problem is not one of not having enough stuff. It's one of A: having a mindset that you are helpless and dependent on everybody else to fix your problems...and B: living so tightly packed with other humans that it's darned near impossible to solve your own problems. Here people fend for themselves and fend for eachother, 'cause they realize that there ain't nobody else gonna do it for them. Katrina is a perfect example. People were in extremis from hunger and thirst within like 3 days. People here frequently have months of food stored and most of them have wells. In LA if you can't afford your utility bills, you're screwed. Here you'll probably find somebody that will barter with you for a couple of cords of firewood. Find a used wood stove in the Mountain Trader for $50 and you've got heat for the winter.

I am absolutely unconcerned about the LA diasapora moving to Montana. They will either learn to fend, or they won't last the first winter. I am much more worried about the California millionaires buying up all the land and building McMansions.

Death scares most people. For most of us, some sort of survival instinct seems to be hardwired into our brain (some more than others).




Disorder scares most people who like to live in civilization. The more I think about it, civilization=order. My neighborhood I chose is quite orderly most of the time. I would never live and raise a family in Echo Park, Los Angeles.



Very well. Personally, I am more worried about it contracting. More specifically, what humans are going to do to each other caught inside the contraction.

I don't mean to single you out SPG, but the majority of people I know would agree with Ayoob, myself included.

I don't think I ever claimed to represent the majority view point.

To quote Buffy Ste. Marie:

I don't necessarily disagree with your take on the problem, though I would simply say the problems Ayoob describes are the result of the pathological culture(s) of certain urban denizens in this country. Poverty plays a role, but not all their problems can be boiled down to being poor.

I'm not entirely sure I buy your picture of the rugged individualism of Montanans, however. Montana is in the top 10 of federal welfare states. For every federal dollar they shell out in federal taxes they get $1.58 back. Californians get 79 cents. Hmmmm, who's more dependent?

And I for one am concerned that the social pathologies described by Ayoob will spread like the cancer they are. Matter of fact, they already have. Oregon is undergoing an alarming degree of Californication as I type. I think we need two walls, one at the Mexican border and one around California.

Why does it need to be two walls? I say we just give California back to Mexico.

I think the only chance of that happening is if every locality thinks every other locality is just as bad off, or worse.

I think very few will go quietly into that dark night, most will resist in some way. And some of that resistance will involve migration.

I wouldn't predict exactly how many strangers would migrate into your area, Shannymara, during any collapse scenario. Except that it will be a positive number greater than or equal to 1, if your area has any resources worth accessing. If you are able to support yourself where you are, that's reason enough for someone to try supporting themselves there, too.

And so it begins. Guess who's moving? One year and five months from now I will be moving to the country. I have to finish school and then I'm in like flynn.

The first step in the Plan is to move to my new spot. One week from Sunday I'll plug in my computer in the new place, take a picture of the beautiful yellow Victorian replica house right across the street from my spot up there in heaven, and I am out of the hood for good. Never to return. And I agree with you about the endlessly expanding urban blight of America.

God gave me legs, and I am using them. Here are the locations up for consideration by me.

1. Corvallis, OR
2. Bellingham, WA
3. Kelso, WA
4. Vancouver, BC
5. Up your ass, MT

So I will be bringing the sprawl with me. There are ten million miserable Angelenos behind me, and if the projections are correct then I expect Mexico to puke another 60 million people up to El Norte, and you can wish upon a star that they won't figure out that Montana is a nice place to live. Good luck.

Hey, they're never going to make it to Montana 'cause nobody's as tough as you, right? So you got nothing to worry about. Captain America isn't going to try his hand at homesteading up in Montana 'cause it's just way too hard. Only real soldiers like you can make it in such rough and rugged terrain.

Me! Me! Actually, I already have, a year and 9 months ago, when I moved to the New American Mecca we call Atlanta.

Once, a long time ago, I visited a place filled with warm sunshine and swaying palms and where it was 80 degrees in January. I saw a place that had a vibrant economy and a reasonable cost of living and a future so bright, you really needed a pair of shades. So I went. Took a good job, bought my own quarter-acre slice of paradise.

Life was good. I watched with increasing awe and fascination as skyscrapers took root and clawed for the sky, great emerald towers that bespoke endless wealth and promise. Opportunity abounded, and a 1000 people a day joined me in paradise. Then the stock market crashed, and I felt a bit poorer. But never mind, this was the era of Real Estate, and who needed stocks when owning a home was like having your very own dollar-making machine. The economy got even better, and the roads, shops and beaches grew ever more crowded.

But alas, there was something gravely wrong with this picture. For some unfathonable reason, my home was broken into and robbed, once, twice, and eventually a half dozen times. I caught one of them, testified in court so he could be sent to the "big house." But the criminals kept coming. Helicopters circling my yard at 7 am, as the cops looked for a taxi-driver robber that crashed into the fence right behind my house :/ A dude getting arrested for grand theft auto in my driveway(!) And my next door neighbor getting robbed at knifepoint at 8:30pm on a weekday evening by three dudes on bikes. (He was a firm believer in gun control both before and after, before, he thought guns should be controlled; after, he believed in *real* gun control, i.e., learning how to hit your target.)

And if that wasn't enough, I got robbed at 8pm one evening, while I was inside the house. The cops could hardly believe it. (And the cop was a bit crazy too, with Soldier of Fortune mags in his patrol car and him giving me all kinds of free advice about the importance of handguns and the laying of booby traps in the yard. "It's a war out there," he said, "and it's time to fight back." This was from a sworn police officer, mind you.)

So it came to pass that I knew it was time to move. I called a Realtor and told him, "I don't care what this place sells for, I just want it sold." (He did just that in 11 days, and for more than I could have ever dreamed of getting.) At the end of January 2005, the For Sale sign was planted in the front yard and we loaded up the U-Haul truck and headed north, never looking back. I said to my dear friend as we left the warm sun behind us and into the rolling hills of Georgia, "You know, someday soon, there's going to be a great exodus of people doing just like we are - getting the f@ck out of that goddammed state."

Just last week, I read that the Broward County School District had a "mysterious decrease in enrollment of 8200 students from last year." It now cost 3x to rent a U-Haul out of Florida then to rent one in the opposite direction (2x what we paid). The housing market is in a state of total seizure as 1000's of houses flood the market as sales slow to a crawl. I don't know about you, but I think the Great American Exodus has begun.

Yes, Atlanta is a pretty dammed nice place to live, and a sensible one at that. No hurricanes, no earthquakes, far from a certain international border. And yes it's actually *safe* here. What a concept! But yes, I know the same thing could very well happen here as it did down in southern Florida. But I already have a place in mind for my next move (New York, New York, the green hills of the great upstate, I love you more than you'll ever know.....)

B

Right now, things aren't bad, and the only people who have an inkling as to what's coming down the pike are the extremely rare types. Like the types who frequent boards like this one.

It will be changing environmental factors that drive people to migrate. Unemployment. Loss of savings. Systemic breakdowns of basic services. Empty stores, empty gas stations.

But this isn't happening yet pervasively. Once these things start happening again, and again, and again, people will start to move.


How about a general one. Consider any mammalian species. When the species can no longer obtain necessary resources in its area, it will at least attempt to migrate to another area to obtain them. Are humans any different?

I went too far with "empty" gas stations. And maybe by the time gas gets that scarce, most of the migration will be complete.

And I'm still not saying that everyone's going to migrate, just that it's natural for at least some to make the attempt as local resources start to dwindle.

Uh, we are giving it back to them if you didn't notice.

Hence people like Ayoob who never had the intention of moving to Mexico, find themselves living there. Naturally Ayoob (x millons of others) are setting their sites on places like Oregon and Washington.

This process started like 15 - 20 years ago, now Oregon and Washington are becoming northern suburbs of Los Angeles. It seems each Californian comes without about five illegal aliens. One to mow the lawn, one to watch the kids, one to fix the deck, and several more to cut down the 500 year old growth forest in the backyard so they can have a better view.

Many of the people who have lived in western washington for most of their lives are in the same boat as Ayoob...wondering where to they go now?

Maybe you'd feel better if I held your hand and we both ran around screaming about how doomed we are.

Ready.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

OK. Enough of that now. Pull yourself together. You're going to be ok. Even if you aren't, getting all mopey about it isn't going to improve the sitauation.

While I am a doomer, I think it's the only logical position. I will be alive in 25 years, so it is worth forecasting 25 years into the future to me.

You know, if somebody was to tell me that if I continued smoking cigarettes I could possibly end up with lung cancer and spend the second half of my life very sick and unhappy... well, maybe I'd quit. If somebody was to tell me that my neighborhood would turn to shit with poverty and lack of sanitation and health care services and that our schools would fall apart... maybe I'd do something about it.

Maybe if somebody told me that I would not probably be driving a car to Ikea to buy a cheap sheepskin in twenty years, I'd set myself up in such a way that I could be OK regardless.

Why do you want to head off a productive discussion about current conditions that may not be right in your back yard but are definitely happening to millions of your countrymen?

This is something I don't understand. You don't want to talk about it because it's bad news?

I wonder if Ayoob ever moved out of Los Angeles to a rural area.





That's why I like those commercially minted gold bars. They are rectangular. If you have a dope scale and a caliper, it's easy to verify the gold content.