Thread by @leashless

Overwhelmed.

I have very old friends who live in a "freeze to death in winter" climate, one of the coldest places in America.

"You should get a wood stove, and a couple of tons of wood. Just in case."

Odds they'll do it: 50%.

Since 2002, I've been conscious of the big risks.

The resiliencemaps.org system is intended to let you - yes you, dear citizen: plan to keep yourself alive, when the shit hits the fan.

I just don't think people understand what is happening yet, how high the stakes of this particular game are, and how uncertain the outcomes

Let me tell you what I think is happening.

Firstly, America is the long pole in the global tent: it's where The Future is designed, even if it's manufactured in China. It's the big market, home of infinite capital.

But it's been broken a while: 1990s peace dividend misallocated

The failure to build a permanent peacetime economy has drawn America into endless wars. The opportunity was to cut the DoD budget year-on-year through the 1990s, clip out the obsolete programs, double down on that 4% sustained economic growth.

America would have ruled the world.

Now, I cannot over-stress this too much: Iraq is where the error becomes _fatal_ for three reasons:

1) intelligence agencies become a war marketing department: culture of truth goes out the window

2) America goes bankrupt

3) America loses

Yes, 2008 is *America went bankrupt*.

As any good American would, when America went bankrupt, America started to live on its credit cards: they printed money.

The nondumb end of the elite has known America is bankrupt since 2008. They haven't really had options other than to keep pretending everything is fine.

Now this teeter totter keeps going through the Obama years, and they hold the ship steady: very little actually happens during the Obama years, for good or ill. Some wounds heal.

But the war grinds on, and the costs mount, and there's just no way to carry a war for two decades.

This is why covid matters. America was *already a failed state* in many ways post-2008, and those conditions have only worsened.

You all know this, if you live in America. You've watched the changes. Middle class is fine, everybody else is in hell, with rising filthy flood water

I cannot hammer this home too clearly: FAILED STATE.

It takes a couple of years for the destructive cultural change to hit, and then it's off like a nuclear rocket: in the flyover states, they're dropping like flies. Homelessness too.

Everyone is squeezed, these ones broke.

You just can't count on the system to hold together.

Western States Pact. Michigan Capitol cancelling sessions because of armed protesters. *MEN WITH GUNS ARE INTERFERING WITH THE FUNCTIONING OF DEMOCRACY* in Michigan.

*Michigan*.

Take the anti-vaxers. Millions of armed people that would rather die than be vaccinated. Fine, ish.

Problem is: millions of armed people that would rather *kill* than be vaccinated.

They're mapping anti-vaxers like a pandemic of stupidity but the problem is far worse than this

Nobody except America has millions of armed anti-vaccine fundamentalists.

It's *entirely unprecedented*.

They started by fighting evolution, now they fight germ theory.

That's modernity dying, right here, right now.

How are we to exit the covid era without masks and vaccines?

Add to this the "biblical" famines predicted by the UN, and the global food crisis WSJ is discussing.

Remember, the issue is not just the virus. The virus is what the virus is: super bad in some places, manageable in others, largely depended on the rationality of government.

The coronavirus problems are only just beginning, because they aren't coronavirus problems: cv has finally pulled the pin out of America, and those gun-wielding anti-vax maniacs are extremely numerous, and will mostly be fine. 20% of the old will die. 1% of the gunmen, maybe.

Herd immunity. They're just going to plough through, a ton of people are going to die, and that's how they're going to cross the river.

Maybe this is just human instinct, the triumph of will over reason. But to me, it looks like abandoning our position.

juliasundukova.com/en/video?type=…

Nobody really wants to hear all this.

I first worked on pandemics well over 10 years ago guptaoption.com/6.SPRS.php and, really, nobody gave a shit then either.

I never published my old piece on the break up of America either: drugs, guns, abortion, gay marriage: permanent wedges.

Anybody that reads this, and does not understand it, feel free to ask me for clarifications.

To the rest of you: get moving. If you are asleep at the wheel and this summer goes badly, when winter hits, America is going to turn into a genuinely awful place filed with suffering.

I have a serious set of eyes to see this shit and put the pieces together.

I've been on x-risk *forever*. Again, resiliencemaps.org it's the tool for becoming resilience in the face of all of this. It's been open source since like 2010.

You have to listen, and plan, now.

We are just no longer in the "business as usual" flight envelope. America's recovery from 2008 has now failed, it cannot be salvaged, and that means things like the death of the dollar or the Constitution, or a year without an election, or similar kinds of profound drama.

MOVE!

Oh and apparently this video about government's limitations and systemic crises is quite useful to people

it's about 10 years old, which gives you a sense of how inevitable this all was