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rdy2rte and drewkitty are reporting more positive things (drew, I'm amazed at your bravery) but generally I feel totally overwhelmed by the level of chaos we're seeing on the BBC news - and that's from the areas they've got reports from. It's like will without oil is saying: Whilst Brown's new government here quickly made some hard decisions to keep us afloat, the US government still seems to be suffering from the same problems it was before any of this began; corruption, indecision and lobbyist-induced bending of the facts...It reminds me of this DailyKos post before the crisis, talking about the horrible problems with American democracy in the 00s. The quote that stood out was:
'Seven years ago a Turkish friend of mine said that America would have a civil war within 20 years. I was shocked that she would say this. I tried to convince her that the checks and balances built into our system would prevent that from happening.I could not have been more wrong. Now, it scares me to think how close we came or are to that. Even though it feels like the tide is changing, we're not out of the woods yet.We are in Constitutional Crisis now; the Constitutional Confrontation is yet to come.'
it seems the writer's Turkish friend may have been right - talks of civil war aren't as crazy now, nearly 5 months on from the first oil price increases. With people talking about the alberta oil field conflict and even talks of a potential new COUNTRY called Cascadia, things are getting really weird. It's all muddled what we receive over here but in class a lot of people were talking.
"Have you heard about Cascadia?" one of my new classmates in biology said, "I hear they're trying to break away from the US or something?"
"Don't be silly," another one replied " the government's just going to do what they did in LA and drop another bomb on anyone that gets out of line..."
The conspiracy theories are endless. I was just happy to be back at college (I chose to do Biology, chemistry and *shudder* maths - me and greg sat down and worked out which would be the best for any kind of career. Of course, now I'm back in school looking to learn after all this news and all anyone can talk about is the crisis...
things here are much likeEnglish village has been talking about - lots and lots of police, some dodgy people lurking. Some people are very unhappy - One of the tescos near us has been bought out by its local managers and is now a 'Bristol groceries' Shop. Other big companies like Mcdonalds and HMV are floundering - McDonalds closed weeks ago with various notices about lack of ingredients, whereas most of the music shops are slowly disappearing with the new music downloading system. A lot of people are saying that Movies and Tv might head the same way but it hasn't happened in a big way yet, not like with mp3s. David's beaming all the time because he can download games for much cheaper than they used to be - although I'll bet it's mostly old or simple games they're releasing, I can't see many massive budgets around at the moment.
Greg is also a happy man. Since we moved in with him his alternative power gadget company has been raking in cash - some people are profiting from the crisis. He's actually got a big raise - practically unheard of in this day and age! The company's trying to setup more local co-opted manufacturers as mass producing in china doesn't look so hot anymore. Greg's been assigned a task to find a few handymen in the South West that can build some of these gadgets to distribute locally. He celebrated by spending a fortune on a side of beef - using up most of our restricted item rations in the process. It tasted gorgeous after so many days without meat.
[author note - week 18. That DailyKos post is actually from today. It's worth looking at. There are some very troubling matters in US politics at the moment that might not even need an oil crisis to start a major breakdown.]
- Location:Bristol
- Mood:
scared - Music:Pearl Jam - Big Wave
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My e-mail box this morning had a message from some friends in Seattle: they're still safe, but they're all starting to seriously think about getting out. Dana is a Canadian citizen, and Douglas is English; both have been married to their spouses long enough to fast-track visas, although Dana says that if it gets bad enough they're going to load the truck, head for one of the smaller border stations outside of Vancouver and take their chances. She made sure that their daughter received her Canadian passport as well as the US, and hopefully "We're here to visit family" will get Ed through.
(OOG: It wasn't until I started playing that I really let myself think about the impact an oil crisis would have on my friends who are in marriages/partnerships with non-citizens: granted, it's not a typical situation for the vast majority of Americans, but how do you decide which family -- which nation -- to give up?
(Also? How the hell did I wind up with 90% of my friends not US citizens?)
-Mia
(OOG: I think we're all learning/thinking a lot about consequences of this crisis we wouldn't have realised before.)
Health care workers, especially those in shortage occupations, are covered. I've been offered a place in four practices pending successful completion of the orientation program: there's apparently such a shortage of midwives in South Bucks that women aren't able to get midwife-led antinatal care! The maternity ward at Wycombe General was due to be shut down, but with the petrol rationing the Health Ministry has decided to leave it open -- but primarily to high-risk clients. 80% of women are going to be on the Dutch model of midwife-led care and home birth, and with two trained midwives required to be in attendance, I am quite in demand.
What does worry me is what I'm hearing about immigrants in academic programs: I know those aren't jobs that pay well, and unless they're in a science or engineering field I'm afraid that most of them are going to be forced to leave -- not by the government, but by their bank balances.
I think a lot of what we're seeing in-game in the US is reflecting our actual fears based off of things that are already starting to happen. We saw the government fail to provide for people in Katrina (which is part of how WWO came about!) and we're actually seeing some of the economic effects begin to take place IRL because of the meltdown of the housing bubble - mismanaged by lenders to the point of it becoming an actual ponzi scheme.
Meanwhile, we watch gasoline supplies become more and more strained because refineries are having trouble processing lower quality oil. The US demand is now driving up gasoline prices in Europe as voracious imports are the only thing preventing wide-scale, real-world shortages. Inventories went up last week here and the traders now know that's just a red herring and drove up the price of gas for June delivery by several cents today.
So when presented with a scenerio such as WWO those fears kick the writers in us into overdrive... and things get fugly. (I don't think something like the LA bombing will actually happen, though!)
The real trick now is to keep what's going on in-game ringing true and begin to pull us out of this mess - while knowing that around December something will happen that will keep us from updating again, at least formally...
The LA bomb was silly. It's the one thing that's made me go 'nah, that doesn't sound right'. (10,000 deaths from one bombing run? did they have nukes or something?) But apart from that wwo is compelling and compulsive reading because even when it's dark and depressing it's still mostly plausible.
As a writer I'm torn because although I love what people like
It's tough to keep the balance right. It would not be difficult to make local events crazy: the Wasatch Fault has been itching to give us a Richter 7 earthquake for years now, and there's always fire season. Concealed weapons permits are more common in the general population than you'd think.
But it doesn't feel true, you know? While the majority of city residents aren't Mormon anymore, there's enough cultural interaction that most people do keep supplies on hand, do know their neighbors and would, for the most part, just pull up their socks and get on with it. There would be callbacks to the "spirit of the pioneers" (with accompanying eyerolling by the Goshute, Paiute and Dine First People and a fair few of the Hispanic organizations), the cannery at Welfare Square would go into overdrive providing supplies for the local food banks, and the stupid restrictions keeping people from tearing up their lawns and xeriscaping the whole thing would go by the wayside.
It wouldn't be perfect. There would doubtless be a jump in meth labs for as long as the supplies held out. Parts of the West Side would be Red Zones. Summer brown-outs and black-outs would be much more frequent.
But it wouldn't be the end of everything. Not even close.
What was remarkable in the destruction of New Orleans, as in other natural disasters in the USA, was that despite lurid press stories about orgies of rape and murder at the Superdome - which didn't in fact happen - the social structure of common people didn't collapse. They worked together without regard to race or creed to help each-other out.
But the authorities collapsed. One-quarter of the New Orleans police quite simply deserted their posts. When a group of refugees crossed a bridge into the next county, they were fired upon by the town sheriffs and deputies and driven back. Soldiers looted. People were forced to stay at the sports stadium because they couldn't afford the bus fare out - yes, during a natural disaster while evacuating a city, they still charged a fare to drive out. When one teenaged boy collected a hundred people from the stadium and piled them on a bus and drove it out of the city, the National Guardsmen stopped the bus on the edge of the city, drove the people off it and back into the city, and arrested the boy for vehicle theft.
For all their hysteria, for all their prudishness mixed with pornography, for all their religious ranting and "I know my rights!" when it comes down to it, the American people deal quite well with severe crises, and work together to fix things up. But their systems of government fail them, and quite simply collapse into anarchy.
So if there were a "civil war" in the USA, I think it would look more like, say, Iraq six months after the invasion - no effective national or state government, lots of looting by soldiers, and small groups arising to fight each-other and the occupier. I don't think we'd get another Confederacy vs the Union sort of thing.
the interesting point is if this Cascadia thing happens. If the north east breaks off from the south, or california does, or washington and oregon join with BC and Alaska, we could see a lot of aggression from the poorer states left behind. If the central government falls apart, I wouldn't be surprised to see more than one country at the end of things.
For the sorts of conflict which I think are more plausible, see global guerilla. Guerilla activities carried out not by people who actually want to take over government, but by people who just want chaos - so they can have the benefits of being in charge without the responsibilities of it. These attacks are likely to be on the arteries of infrastructure... but more in that guy's blog.
But we should take this chat to email, kyle3054(at)iprimus.com.au