ArkBuilders

The grid-reliant lifestyles of about 300 million Americans is a wide path, indeed.

Americans are the most invested in the three most popular doomsday machines of our time: resource wars, on-grid homes and fiat currency collapse. All three systems are sure to lead us along the wide path of destruction, which may be described more accurately as a marginally harder and steeper Peak Oil cliff than would otherwise be the case if we had any sense.

Amazingly, the whole world is willingly following us on our doomed path towards ever more oil-reliant lifestyles, grid-reliant homes, petroleum-based mining and fabrication of automobiles and heavy capital equipment, plastics, and food... Oh the food. All of that food made by so few people using nothing but oil and gas to plant, fertilize, irrigate, harvest, store, process, package, retrieve and prepare... then haul away in the form of waste.


And Look at us all, humming and buzzing and droning out on the grid like electric zombie slaves, far removed from anything natural. Industrial agriculture has long ago pushed almost all 6.5 billion of us off the land and into our cubicle homes and cubicle working places.

And for what? For the most of us, our "work" is nothing more than a PC and a cubicle and the harnessing of petroleum energy slaves to do work more efficiently. From our cubicles we enter into electronic warfare on the grid and the one who wins the most credits on our plastic cards wins. We all want to be lords of petroleum and we are wiling slaves of the grid that petroleum feeds. Nobody wants to imagine a world without the power of grid-lordship because that means breaking a sweat, getting back to family, thinking in terms of seasons, etc...

You want an example of insanity? Check this out, from today's edition of the "Daily Mail": 19 minutes - how long working parents give their children.

Ha! 19 minutes... let's read the first two sentences of that story...

A typical working parent spends just 19 minutes a day looking after their children, official figures revealed yesterday.

The startling research shows the devastating impact that working full-time has on children who hardly see their parents.

...and we wonder about all of the psychological problems, like, where did that come from? Parents make their kids into zombies right from birth... and then they throw their parents into the nursing homes, the kids to daycare, the spouses to divorce court... and the rest of the free time is spent receiving signals from electronic gadgets to the suggestable alpha brainwaves. That's the life of the grid addict. "I didn't mean to do it, the grid life forced me. I'm a victim of the grid."

And the number of grid zombies only increase as time goes on and populations grow and as demand for more finite petroleum resources (grid enablers) grows even as supply flows now are finally threatening to shrink... and all we want is another quarter of profits. To hell with our own children, right? And forget about the increasing numbers of extinct species that we are slashing and burning and burping up from our Mac bellies. We are a patriotic people, waving plastic American flags made in China, saying "Support the troops and keep the oil flowing into our grid. Our grid-life is not negotiable".

It is like we are all competing in our own version of The Lemming Olympics, a race to the rocky bottom of the fjord with our doomed lifestyles and overextended crowds.


Why? I don't know. "That's just the way things have always been done around here", they say. Insanity. We are all relying upon industrial agriculture, which relies upon oil and gas, which are peaked in terms of supply flow even as demand rises.

If the path to destruction is wide, then truth is the path less traveled. If we live in truth we can avoid the life of a lemming. From that analysis, our job in life becomes very simple. All we have to do is seek and speak the truth at every possible corner to anyone who will listen.

I used to get frustrated when people wouldn't listen to me about fiat currency or peak oil. But that isn't so much the case anymore. Why should I take responsibility for their actions? It is difficult enough already to take responsibility for my own.

But you know? Something amazing happens when you just tell the truth: You learn more and you grow in wisdom and your skills of communication increase and you gain understanding of the human condition. When I empty out everything I know about Peak Oil and what I think people can do to prepare for the coming crash and post-oil age, I suddenly have a whole lot of room in my head to learn more. It is like I have just written one chapter and am ready to move on to the next.

On the other end of that experience, people stunt their growth if they withhold telling the truth.

I am not talking about telling the kind of truth like "Mom, I don’t like your necklace." I am talking about "Mom, your lifestyle is doomed! Sell your home and stocks. Buy silver. Run for the hills!"

Neither truth goes over well, but the first one is more easily forgiven... even if both are true, which surprises me still because the second one can save your life. Oh, but the worst kind of truth is the one that forces fundamental change and a total re-think of decade issues like "retirement" and "vacation home" and "financial planning"... all of it going to the post-oil dust bin.

I was just re-explaining to a relative recently (not my Mom, that was just an example) about the coming crash of the housing market and dollar and, well, industrial civilization eventually. The person in question wants to buy a house. Now you and I know, at least we should by now, that an on-grid house in the middle of mega-city sprawl is not the best way to prepare for the coming events that are currently underway even right now.

And this person already has known about peak oil for years. So none of this makes any sense. The disconnect happens like this: Person realizes Peak Oil. Person wants a house. Person willingly forgets about Peak Oil because person wants house. Person won’t talk about Peak Oil anymore because person wants house.

I just described “compartmentalization”, which is a human condition when people disassociate themselves from one kind of truth for a while, suspending belief in order to avoid living incongruently… or to put it another way, to avoid feeling or looking like a hypocrite. That word might be a bit strong but you get the idea.

It makes no sense to jump on the grid in the middle of mega-city sprawl right at the very peak oil energy output. It is like investing in the titanic AFTER it has hit the iceberg.

The big picture is crash in the grid-reliant US housing market for two reasons:

1. Housing valuation crash
2. Grid-reliant housing crash

It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a house in NY, Las Vegas, LA, Minneapolis, Austin, Dallas, Orlando, St. Louis… and smaller towns too. And I realize that in some localities, housing prices continue to go up even now. Neither you nor I need to be interested in which housing locality peaks last. The big picture is nationwide collapse.

Here is what we will see Nationwide...

First we will see bankruptcies and then we will see a glut of homes on sale and then we will see sale prices go down and then more bankruptcies and people get "upside down" against their mortgages. The term upside down happens when someone's house is worth less than the amount due from the mortgage.

So what, right? Bankruptcies don't hurt me.

Well, when a lot of people go bankrupt. housing values go down. That's what happens when more people want to sell and less can afford to buy.

But the price going down is just the small story. The bigger story is that all of this grid-reliant stuff is the wrong direction because, as you and I might already know, civilization is in the beginning stages of collapse due to a phenomenon called peak oil. That means, whatever kinds of housing and lifestyles and business require cheap and abundant oil in order to function are danger zones.

That means -

• cities and suburbs are danger zones.
• relying upon industrial agriculture is a danger zone.
• even holding dollars or dollar denominated paper (stocks, etc...)is a danger zone because the dollar is tied to no asset but is justa reflection of people's confidence in the US market health.

.... all about to change or in process of changing.

There is no other way for grid-reliant homes to go except down. Grid costs rise when energy costs rise. All this is due to less energy available related to demand. Saving on heating and cooling costs won’t help at all, it is all about the grocery store becoming empty and the car rusting in your riot-zone neighborhood. The whole way of grid reliant living is about to hit the panic button.

Even the mass media can’t hide what is happening economically to the US housing market.

Housing US -

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&q=housing+US&btnG=Search+News

So I can’t decide anyone’s strategy but I can speak truth.

Grid-reliant housing near big-city / big-sprawl is a danger zone right now. We need to be thinking in a totally different way. When we make a decision, whatever it is, then we automatically at that moment cut off a bunch of other possible decisions, like getting into a sustainable lifestyle and living arrangement that suits what will be in the future. So any big-city / big-sprawl housing purchase will, in the best case, delay other, more suitable efforts that greatly benefit you down the road 5, 10, 20 years and beyond.

I know that it isn't common opinion and I know some may think I have wacky ideas about what causes peak oil will bring. And that is OK. I just speak truth as I know it and let God show who in
foolish in His own way.

So far, I have been right about silver vs the dollar or stocks. And I believe that silver will continue to appreciate better than stocks or the dollar, both of which I believe are doomed to endure

Unprecedented crash before this is over. And even there, it is not about the money but it is about getting out of a doomed and stupid system that is bound to fail utterly and getting into something that makes more sense. Dollars benefit the printers and the printers steal from me if I hold dollars by the simple act of printing more dollars, which devalues my wealth. By me holding dollars, our government is empowered to hit foreign countries with depleted uranium munitions. It is a good thing when we decrease the power of corrupt governments by trading their fiat paper confetti for the world’s only 5,000 year storage of wealth, gold and silver.

Same idea with housing. It is a good thing to get out of a doomed grid-reliant style of life before being forced out.

The housing thing is just now starting to peak and will crash along with the general economy. Everything is tied together. This is a time to think differently.

Be ready, my friends and fellow ArkBuilders... some people are thinking that the US economy will hit a brick wall at about 5 dollars a gallon. That might have been Kunstler but I don’t remember. I don't know when the point is, but I know that we can't have gas push us forever in our current direction.

OK, I just found this from peakoil.com –

“I think Kunster is on to something regarding our suburbian society. In the reader's digest version of the reader's digest version of his book the Long Emergency, he states that our economy is now built on the continued expansion of the suburbs. When gas hits $5 a gallon, the suburbs will hit a break wall. Probably before that price, but $5 is a nice number, right? Once it costs $30 to feed your car to drive to your $120/day (gross) job, most people won't be able to afford it. Sure the middle managers can, but most of America makes far less than a middle manager.” http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic7929.html

Clearly, we don’t have decades. We may not even have years. What we do now will determine how we live in the post crash world.

Figure 4. The Olduvai Theory: 1930-2030

- Tate Ulsaker