I like to set out on the campus lawn and watch the happy oblivious people walk by me. I wonder what they are thinking, and how they are going to deal with the coming collapse. I take the time to enjoy the serinity of now, the cool breeze and 75 degree day and know that this may be as good as it gets.
I know that I am probably no different than those walking by me, other than I know we are in trouble and I know the possible outcomes. I see the storm when all they can see are the clouds.
How this all pans out, will not be decided for sometime. As others have said though, the storm is coming, we just don't know if we are getting a thunderstorm or a tornado.

"The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country."

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?


Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/detoc/ch4_06.htm

This is exactly what American and the people that live here have become; "below the level of humanity". All your “well intentioned” relatives helped contribute too and if you can't wrap you mind around this fact, wake the fuck up.

==AC

This is, of course, the great debate that doomers have with one another. Thanking you for the explanation I would still push against the idea of a homogeneous American or that we will all suffer the same reversion to a state of nature. Of course it is possible (given that the future is open) that whether a place descends into chaos depends upon the response of a relatively few people.
One important question is whether or not people see another option to the strip mall manifestation of our culture. How much creativity it takes to see other options depends upon what you see around you. If other options seem possible there is reason for hope and hope keeps us from descending all the way into a state of nature.

There is a lot of housing around here that would need to be abandoned, but also much with adjacent "potential garden space." There are a lot of old woodstove chimneys in which the liner could be taken out and returned to use. There is marginal farm land that could be returned to oat propogation. There are hobbiest blacksmiths, bee keepers, seedsavers and the like who carry the remnants of the old culture. Like a bacteria it would not take long for that culture to spread once the conditions returned in which it flourished.
"Doom" means different things to different people. I see it as a great moment of testing. Will I (lets remember that the only people we can control is ourselves) help lead my friends and neighbors into the realities of the 21st century or will I hold up in my bunker. Some places may not have the resources to change (Phoenix, Las Vegas etc) but that does not mean that there are not hundreds of thousands of places that do. It will be the remnants of the old culture that will allow them to first survive and later flourish in a low power world.

As far as governments are concerned, America once was a Federalist state but circumstances (coal powered steam locomotion and the civil war) pushed us into operating more like a unitary state. The remnants of federalism remain and I see no reason why that political infrastructure could not be returned to use, with all of the benefits and losses that this would entail.

It's rather simple my friend. The time of plenty is over. Starvation and misery is going to be imposed by nature not averted by someone who hopes they can help lead their friends and neighbors into the realities of the 21st century. The reality of the 21st century is about waking up from the dream everyone has been lulled into only to awaken into a nightmare.
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored."
~ Richard Dawkins: River Out of Eden, page131-132.

What were the "circumstances" leading to the civil war?
==AC
[O]ur...Founding Fathers, knew the ideas, language, and reality of empire....It became...synonymous with the realization of their Dream....Under the leadership of Madison, the...convention of 1787...produced (behind locked doors) the Constitution. Both in the mind of Madison and in its nature, the Constitution was an instrument of imperial government at home and abroad.
- William Appleman Williams

Not saying there won't be suffering or even starvation. Is there anything on the other side of that?
I think it is... myopic or perhaps a lack of imagination to say "no." I say yes there is something on the other side.
If the confidence is born of denial than I am a delusional fool. If it is born of right founded confidence...
Confidence, in this case, comes from knowing the ways of our fathers and mothers and knowing that it served them well in an age of limited energy. I am not them. The road will be rough. But it doesn't mean that the task is impossible. But we've been hungry before. We've been oppressed before. We've migrated before. We've buried our own young children before. Yet we carry on.
This is the power of culture, not just practical know-how but a knowledge of the set backs and failures that we have managed before. We do not need all of the things around us. We can manage without them.
Culture leads to confidence and that to hope...
...hopelessness is the surest sign of a shallow culture.

A growing moral disagreement between two subcultures in regards to slavery and the power of the federal government to legislate on the issue of slavery. At some point the south made the decision that it was not willing to risk the growing political power of the North which was, slowly, growing in its animosity towards slavery.

Cultures evolve and change. Sometimes they abandon practices (like the burning of Anabaptists or the beheading of aristocrats) and adopt new ones. Sometimes they should (and do) repent. A culture stops having arguments when it becomes weak and stops growing.
What does that have to do with anything?
Thanks to folks like Patrick Henry we have the Bill of Rights. We still have resources for the protection of our liberties. Even if we loose them they cannot burn every copy of the constitution and they cannot control the hopes that we give our children.

If you think the civil war was about slavery you better hit the books my friend. I don’t want to be the one to tear down the sacred cow of Abraham Lincoln. As we all know hell on earth if we don’t protect our “heroes”.

No it was about states rights in regards to slavery and the fear of the south that TEOTWATKI was about to unfold as the north became the political and economic power it was. So they declared their independence Lincoln went to Washington to save the Union and he did.
Was that a bad thing? At the very least it was better than the alternatives or at least it seemed so at the time.
I still have no idea what this has to do with either "doom-o-meter" or whether or not Americans have a culture or whether or not that culture is a source of societal or individual hope.

So what date have you planned to walk into a McDonalds with an Uzi?

Relax one night and dig into "The Real Lincoln".
I guess "saving the union" wasn't so bad if you weren’t one of 600,000 plus dead rotting on the battlefields. Doesn’t seem so bad looking back close to a century and a half ago at and saying “was that a bad thing”. No not a bad thing at all. Look at what we have now.

<<Snip>>
“As DiLorenzo documents – contrary to conventional wisdom, books about Lincoln, and the lessons taught in schools and colleges – the War between the States was not fought to end slavery; Even if it were, a natural question arises: Why was a costly war fought to end it? African slavery existed in many parts of the Western world, but it did not take warfare to end it. Dozens of countries, including the territorial possessions of the British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, ended slavery peacefully during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Countries such as Venezuela and Colombia experienced conflict because slave emancipation was simply a ruse for revolutionaries who were seeking state power and were not motivated by emancipation per se.
Abraham Lincoln’s direct statements indicated his support for slavery; He defended slave owners’ right to own their property, saying that "when they remind us of their constitutional rights [to own slaves], I acknowledge them, not grudgingly but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the claiming of their fugitives" (in indicating support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850).
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a political gimmick, and he admitted so in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase: "The original proclamation has no...legal justification, except as a military measure." Secretary of State William Seward said, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free. " Seward was acknowledging the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in states in rebellion against the United States and not to slaves in states not in rebellion.
The true costs of the War between the States were not the 620,000 battlefield-related deaths, out of a national population of 30 million (were we to control for population growth, that would be equivalent to roughly 5 million battlefield deaths today). The true costs were a change in the character of our government into one feared by the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Calhoun – one where states lost most of their sovereignty to the central government. Thomas Jefferson saw as the most important safeguard of the liberties of the people "the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/w-williams1.html

Too dam messy I like the unabomber's style.
Na. I am grounded enough on my own center to have my own values. I have no intention to harm anyone that wasn't looking to harm me. The ignorance I view today makes me want to puke so I like to tell the truth as I see it. That's all....
==AC

1. I don't know what it is you think that I think about Lincoln but we would probably agree on a lot of things (Lincoln was out to save the union and only later decided to free the slaves). I did not need a book for it. This is the narrative that I learned at my momma's knee. I guess I am the beneficiary of culture.
Was it worth all of the death? I am a believer in atonement and whether you call it the judgment of an angry God or karma, you cannot ask that question without looking at the crime of human enslavement and the inability of the founding fathers to deal with the issue earlier.
If nothing else it is a good example of what can happen when you see a problem coming but decide that the ways to fix it are too costly so you leave it for another generation.
2. Even more so I do not know what this focus on Lincoln and the Civil War brings to the conversation. The works of Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry are still around and those voices, while a minority, are still engaged in the societal debate between a strong federal government and individual liberties.
3. There is a degree of freedom that comes from pronouncing that we are all enslaved by some elite cabal, it frees you from the need to be responsible and stand up. It frees you from the need to take action to free yourself from whatever circumstances make you feel trapped. It frees you from the dogged desire to drive forward that comes from hope. It is, however, a coward's freedom.

It brings nothing to the conversation. You mentioned earlier that America was once a Federalist state but the civil war altered that. I just wanted to flesh out more about what you were thinking. Simple?
There is no elite cabal running things people have enslaved themselves. As De Tocqueville said:
“There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint…. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune…. they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters.”
It's a simple as that. By their own greed and abandoning their abilities to stay self sufficient people turned their "freedom" over to a technocratic machine that they suckle from to stay alive. There is no one driving this machine except maybe a collective consciousness that is steering it right off a cliff. Maybe you will be one of the lucky ones to be able to grow your own food and become self sufficient after the collapse. Good for you.