Living the Long Emergency

Book Info
James Howard Kunstler: Living in the Long Emergency - Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward

A book that includes 3 sections, how our world is facing the long emergency issue, stories of individual opting their ways to survive amid the long emergency, our future.

Quite an interesting book with a number of nice quotes and insights.

p56 Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World - a book that eventually become a sort of bible for the 1960s back-to-land movement.

Homestead Act in Alaska was expiring, someone grabbed the last chance to claim a piece of land and live there for a few years. Eventually, he moved back to the mainland.

• Maybe Alaska is too harsh for homestead and survival? A good climate / location is needed.

Education on promoting craftmanship

p83 A common assumption in the media has us moving into a dazzling robatic nanotech future powered by human “innovation” - plus some mystery “renewable” energy source as yet undiscoverd. But what if that is not so? What if we are moving into a period of energy and resource scarcity, capital scarcity, population contraction, and relative hardship - the conditions that I described in my World Made By Hand series of novels? Wouldn’t it make to teach young people manual skills, to train them as artisans? And by that I don’t mean artisans in the fey sense of boutique consumerism; I mean preparation for a world where it is crucial to know how to make things after mass production fails, a world without social safety nets.

• It is a good reminder and observation, based on the prerequisite of this book that cheap oil era is ending soon. The US is using the last bit of energy - shale oil to sustain the development.
• Renewable energy in this book can never replace the role of fossil fuels. The production amount / equipment is made with fossil fuels.

Political View, on the role of black officials

p92 Lots of people are fooled by the ‘black faces in high places’ syndrome, but I’m not one of them. It’s simply easier for white people to manage black people through a buffer class of ‘black officials’, while at the same time it insulates white poeple from responsibility for the very pathologies you describe. When a problem is important and white people really want to solve it, they don’t bother talking to black people first. Lincoln didn’t bother talking to black people before he freed the slaves.

• It resonances with the colonial era Hong Kong, or other places, using the locals, raise them as if they are British, but with local faces. To rule China with Chinese, to rule India with Indian.

p93 I predict mass communication technology and theory will be further weaponized to the point where increasing numbers of people suffer from a Matrix-like existence; “fake news” leading the way, long on emotion, short on facts.
People will be further “freed” to become prisoners of their own passions, no matter how ridiculous. Video games, porn, recreational marijuana, “sex robots,” social media of all kinds… “Distraction” will become the formal currency that drives the economy because in a nation where people (especially young men) can no longer count on full-time employment, the state will have every incentive to support and defend every hedonistic, narcissistic, distractive behavior in order to keep attention off themselves and their failed policies.
If and when the economy begins to clatter and wheeze like an engine starved of lubrication, the increasing chatter of pale-faced technophiles will ramp up to convince people the “next big thing” is right around the corner to save us.

• Keep people busy on subtle things, to hide the incompetence of the governance.
• Or to maximize profits of oligarchs, switching the focus of the society from more important yet difficult things to trivial nonsense.

On the whites

p126 I noted that Americans were anti-intellectual dilettantes. You know, it’s hard to find a good violin lesson around here. I’s hard to find someone who’s interesting to talk to It’s hard to find anybody who reads books. The people who do those Chinese men I told you about before they made fun of Americans for being so dumb. Those guys know math. Everybody in the physics department is Chinese or Russian or Indian. And I took that to heart. I came to the conclusion that to be a white nationalist, the best thing you can do is study math and physics and maybe foreign languages, and be a homeschooling parent, and raise children from a young age who are really good at math. And the way to get them in that is: you want to train a child in the psychological ‘flow’ state where they are totally calm, get them to actually concentrate on something-building a model airplane, or coloring a coloring book, or playing a piano. But you want to get that flow state, and you want to get them to be able to teach themselves and sit quietly at a table and work out math problems or read a book for hours. Anyway, that’s the best thing we can do for the cause.”

• An attempt to get back the ability to stay focused.
• A reform on the failed US education is needed.

Paycheck Liberals

p128 There was such a bubbling up of prosperity, money, you know, that it made the culture kind of crazy. I think that the ideology is enforced by what I call paycheck liberals. In your day, people were shoemakers, maybe owned a hat company, maybe owned a store. They had to have trade secrets, they had to be clever. Right? Now the last middle-class job in America is a paycheck liberal like, you know, a social worker.
For example, in Boston the alt-right orgranized some kind of silly civic nationlists demonstration. And five thousand paycheck liberals showed up to protest them. If you look at these people, they all have jobs either as schoolteachers or bureaucrats of some kind. All the Left that comes out to oppose us - they all get paid to be liberals, and they’re not very bright because their job doesn’t require them to do anything except agree with liberalism. But the one thing they know how to do is bully the conservatives, and the paycheck liberals bullied the alt-right into exisitence.

• A novel concept called Paycheck liberals. They are government paid people.

Car Reliance Rural Living

p170 “The thing about rural life is, yeah, we don’t have public transportation so we’re kind of forced to drive. I have this conversation with Clara, my young employee, all the time. She gets really frustrated when people talk about not owning your individual car. She’s like, ‘How could I work? You know, how could I possibly work? I have to work?’ And yet you look at us, we’re driving around all over. I mean we joke about just driving downtown with a horse, you know.”

Only a Partial Recovery

p186 As I look back on it now, I think it really started to unravel during the 1970s and continued to unravel through the 80s and the 90s with distractions like the bubble around tech stocks, and then the housing bubble. I had this narrative of a succession of bubbles. Each one appeared to be the beginning of a new era of prosperity. But each one was a scam, essentially a Ponzi scheme that left a few people richer and the vast majority of people ultimately poorer. And that with each recovery, fewer people would recover. And that narrative seems to be holding.”
I asked him: “Have you continued to be worried about the trajectory that we are on?"
"I’m not worried,” he replied. “I say I’m pessimistic, okay, maybe fata-istic. I think it was in 2008 when I first talked to John Michael Greer and understood his story of catabolic collapse where we have a partial collapse, and then a partial recovery, and a partial collapse, and a partial recovery” That makes sense to me. And I think that there will continue to be period that look kind of bright and which will be spun as the beginning of the neve age of prosperity for the United States, But none of them will work out.”

• Only a few can benefit from the so call recovery, the majority will not.
• Seems that we own a lot of items, material wealth, but at the cost of mental health, self-reliace and self-sufficiency.
• We are all included in the captial market, we are the resources that is being consumed by big companies. They extract profit from us - we work for them, we buy their product, we sign contracts with them.

Can Tech Job Prosper Forever?

p189 Like he’s really good at math and science and computer programming, and he has a bright future, if current trends hold. But with the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, I think a lot of people now, a lot of young kids who think that they have a bright future in the tech industry, don’t.
”Are you surprised at the delusional quality of our national life?” I asked.
”I understand,” he said, “if you’re doing well in a system which is col-lapsing, it’s in the interest of your own psychological comfort to imagine that the collapse is a fairy tale, that it’s really just lazy people who should get to work and stop complaining. I think our civilization climbed a lot faster than any previous one and it can go down a lot faster. I’ve been living through the collapse most of my life. And I think my kids will live through it for most of their lives.”

Entropic consequences

p197 Living organisms can’t reproduce indefinitely without producing entropic consequences and degrading their habitat. The cliché is true: don’t expect infinite growth on a finite planet. Have we reached that tipping point? Prob-ably. Our waste products are self-evident. The amount of carbon dioxide (CO,) in the atmosphere exceeded 400 ppm (parts per million) in an entire month for the first time as of March 2018. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a gigantic region of circulating plastic trash from just the past half century of manufacturing all that crap, and it is having a devastating effect on ocean wildlife. Plastic microparticles show up in the tissues of many organisms, and the larger stuff gets eaten and destroys animals’ digestive systems, while grocery bags, discarded fishing nets, and beer halters strangle them to death.
Microparticles are also showing up in American drinking water. Meanwhile, the new excess of CO, in the atmosphere is acidifying the oceans, harming and killing species, and upsetting deep relationships between them. All that is on top of the damage from sheer overfishing.

• We fucked up our world. And more people will only end up more entropic consequences.
• Overfishing, plastic problem, CO2 concentration

Planning where to live

p204 Plan carefully where you will want to live in the years ahead. Some places in the USA just won’t be habitable anymore. The giant metroplex cities certainly won’t continue to function at their current colossal scale. The Southwest is likely to be toast. Dixieland is hard to take without air-conditioning for everybody. In the American future as I conceive it, everyday life will revolve around food production and the trades that support it.

• The story is also true for many tropical or even temperate countries.

No commercial flight in 2040?

p210 Likewise, the Drawdown Project’s riff on airplanes of the future:
Today, some 20,000 airplanes are in service around the world, producing at minimum 2.5 percent of annual emissions. With upwards of 50,000 planes expected to take to the skies by 2040.
Say what? I’m much more inclined to think that there will be little left of commercial aviation in 2040, not that it will be two and a half times bigger than it is now. Their argument assumes that aviation fuel— basically unleaded kerosene—will continue to be available in the same (or greater!) volumes than today. It assumes a lot more, too, such as the continuation of tourism at present rates, of business travel connected with global corporate activity, the sustainability of mega-cities and metroplexes, with their expensive airport infrastructures, and of geopolitical stability in a world of failing states.

Inclusiveness and diversity

p244 By the logic of the day, “inclusion” and “diversity” are achieved by forbidding the transmission of ideas, shutting down debate, and creating new racially segregated college dorms. The universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called “intellectuals yet idiots,“3 hierophants trafficking in fads and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-Gnostic crusade bent on transforming human nature to fit the wished-for template of a world where anything goes.
p245 A peculiar feature of the social justice agenda is the wish to erect strict boundaries around racial identities while erasing behavioral, sexual, and ethical boundaries.