Saturday, July 26, 2008

Ideas Worth Spreading


Have you ever been on a successful diet but the people who see you every day can barely tell you've trimmed down? Then you run into someone who hasn't seen you in months.

"Oh my God!," they shriek. "Look at you! You must have lost 20 or 30 pounds!"


You grin with pleasure, then wish those to closer to you would have this excitement over the day-to-day tiny changes of your body instead of waiting until your clothes are hanging off.

Such has been the changes in the body of our society this past year. We are mutating into something entirely different than anything any of us have grown up with.

America has lost weight, and many more pounds will drop off by next year this time. We are simply unable to continue doing business the same way we always have.

Yesterday, two more large banks were closed - The First National Bank of Nevada and The First Heritage Bank. As with IndyMac Bank, the FDIC came to the rescue of account holders.

Each rescue eats up around 10% of all the FDIC's money. With these additional two banks being closed, we can assume another 20% is gone. In a nutshell, the FDIC is losing weight too. Since 90 banks are in trouble, it will only take several more to fail before not a single person's or business bank account is protected.

Entropy is a bitch. What's that, you ask? Entropy is social decline and degeneration. That's why everything is falling apart - wars, banks, housing market, airlines, health insurance, gas and food prices, increased crime in response to all this, and our economy being thin and getting thinner by the day.

I've covered all this in recent articles, so no need to dwell further on our immediate doom and gloom future.

Today, I'll take you into a forward-looking view of surviving a post-entropy world.

This video will give you an idea of what it will take to salvage what's left and collectively rebuild a new way of life after gas and food is barely affordable, and we live with the actual cash we have rather than on credit. It describes the kind of place that's worth living in, and chances are, it won't be a sprawling metropolitan area or suburb where you can't afford to drive to work and back.

Be warned - it's about 18 minutes, but James Kunstler was at his best and very entertaining. Give him a couple minutes to warm up before you give up if you aren't used to these kinds of presentations, and when he starts joking about the curvature of the earth, it rolls from there.

While it ain't comedy, he will make you laugh. Jim's track record for predicting the mess this country is impeccable, and I trust his ideas about solutions are worth spreading. So now, here's something entirely new and different:






7 comments:

  1. it's almost like we know what's coming but deny it in our brains -- doublethink or something like that.

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  2. Doublethink is the perfect word, Jay. I fight against it myself.

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  3. never been on a diet
    they say im pimp size lol

    yep banks folding like a poker hand

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  4. Thanks again, Kit, Kunstler is even more entertaining in person than in his writing--that was funny as hell (nature band-aids"!). But full of great thoughts and insights too. It strikes me as a bit more optimistic than things I've read by him. He's so good at opening my eyes about the constructed environments we live in.

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  5. Torrance, LOL, "banks folding like a poker hand."

    Macon, Yeah, I figured some of you would enjoy this funny, cooler, optimistic side of Jim Kunstler. Glad you enjoyed it.

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  6. Great piece. I stumbled onto Kunstler a while ago when I rented the End Of Suburbia and have been hooked ever since. Thanks for sharing this.

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  7. Kunstler's 8/18 and 8/11 essays are very interesting. Hope you can check it out.

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Hi, this is Kit.

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