We still have a few choices, and the first is that ugly, ugly word, “downsize.” We can choose what to learn to live without now not only so that we won’t miss it when it doesn’t exist, but in order to free up capital to preserve what matters to us most. Being as creature-loving as a Persian cat, my suggestion is to give up expensive trifles that don’t really add much to your life but subtract significantly from the bottom line. The President may think his Blackberry is to be saved in case of fire second only after the teleprompter, but it is lunacy to spend five hundred a month on cell ‘phone services so your thirteen-year-old daughter doesn’t feel deprived. (Actual conversation lately! Mom has a house note of $1800/mo, and I don’t think the pleasure of an electronic gizmo is worth over three mortgage payments a year!) Who needs movies, sixteen pay per view channels, and $75 haircuts? A lot of people seem to think they do. Bowling? No. Skeet-shooting… well, maybe!

What is really going to count if the very best happens and “all” we have to go through is The Great Depression, the Sequel, is the basics: food, shelter, books, fuel, trade goods, supplies and equipment to repair things, what it will take to get your family through in reasonable comfort and safety. We old-timers have a distinct advantage because we remember when Mama played the piano and everyone else gathered around to sing. We made our own entertainment. We had never heard of home air conditioning. We cooked from scratch and made many of our own clothes.

John Galt said they would know they had won when the lights went out in New York City.

We’ll know the others have won when the ‘net goes down and the only TV channel is broadcasting, “Stay in your homes. Remain calm. Civil disobedience will not be tolerated.” If that day comes it will be too late to stock up on jigsaw puzzles, the encyclopaedia on CD, catfood, and straight pins.

I noticed today that mason jars, which have held steady at a dismal dollar each have jumped suddenly to almost fourteen dollars a case. Makes you wonder what the Kerr and Ball people know that we don’t.

The winds of change are howling across the land, and most of us who gather here don’t like them. In time those they will hurt most will figure it out. Barkeep, how many cases of Tullamore Dew you got back there?

And the money and credit fiasco will be attended by the relentless decline of global oil production…

The very systems we take for granted are only possible for a society with wealth…and an industrial society like ours needs abundant (cheap) amounts of oil. Poor, oil-depleted societies don’t get to have sprawling automobile-dependent suburbs and functioning shiny skyscrapers. Societies that are formerly wealthy get to watch such accoutrement of wealth and energy abundance turn into relics.

Further, formerly wealthy societies will not as a whole be able to eat as well and by extension sustain as many people, especially non-productive people. A welfare class is in fact a luxury item only possible in the presence of surplus. Scarcity culls.

Dear friend of the Whiskey Bar James Howard Kunstler goes to great trouble to explain this clearly in The Long Emergency and to paint a fictive picture of what we can expect in our real lives in World Made By Hand. They’re both standard Whiskey reading.

If you’d like to take measures to get yourself financially prepared for economic meltdown and energy scarcity, you may want to take a look at the aptly named Energy and Scarcity Investor. We’re offering it for half price…but only until midnight April 2.

That’s it for now, Shooters. Talk to you on the morrow.

Regards,
Gary Gibson
Managing Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder