Post Apocalyptic Feminism

I have read both of, and reviewed the second book, in James Howard Kunstler's World Made By Hand post-apocalyptic series.

 

Personally I thought they were more about middle age wish fulfillment than an accurate accounting of a possible future.

 

But apparently the author, who is touchy feely with the more leftward (sustainable) side of the survival spectrum, so there was fallout I didn't even consider.

Reality does not have an ideology: Class, Race, Hierarchy, and Social Relations in The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler, 30 July 2013

The characters in my novels lived very differently than people do in these late days of turbo-petro-industrialism. The economy of their town and the county surrounding it — the extent of normal travel in the new times — was centered on agriculture and the activities that supported it and derived from it. The division of labor had changed drastically in my fictional world, household management especially. Without microwave ovens, washing machines, heating furnaces, and other mechanical slaves that we take for granted, running a household required a lot more work. It was my heuristic judgment (i.e., guess) that such conditions would likely propel work assignments back to more traditional arrangements between men and women, especially because the care of very young children takes place in the home and, despite the wishful propaganda of our times, such care happens to fall mostly to mothers among the higher primates. (The vaunted role of “house-husband” might be improbable if it were not for the fact that so many “breadwinner” jobs today can be done by anybody, male, female, or someone in between.)

Anyway, the reaction to this fictional experiment was surprisingly pugnacious. High and low, far and wide, women denounced my book in formal reviews and casual emails. There was a unifying theme to them, though: a refusal to consider the possibility that social relations might change no matter what happened to the economy. That, and outrage that anyone might suggest a retrograde path for the recent achievements of feminism. It seemed self-evident to me that a lot of this achievement was provisional, depending on larger macro historical trends. That idea alone was greeted, in my replies to reader emails, by the sharpest opprobrium, since it was assumed that the political victories of recent decades have become permanent installations of the human condition. I recognize that, as a principle of politics, privileges and rights attained are rarely given up without a fight. But I wondered at the failure of imagination I was witnessing, especially among educated women readers.

I don't know.  In the near term, a soft collapse (which was the case of the distantly Upstate New York where the novel takes place, if not for the rest of the planet) into a lower level of technology probably isn't going to be particularly favorable to men or women.  It's not as if there is a huge amount of folks out there who have a whole lot of bankable survival skills.  He has the usual Navy SEAL types (backed up by a magical bee queen mama), but compared to the overall population total that makes for a very small number of people.  In some of the slash and burn cultures (the east agricultural type to get back up and running without fossil fuels) women were the main farmers.

 

So I think there is some fairness to some of the criticism. In the near term, the outcomes will be far more random than his novels indicates.  Historically, women were just as involved in the physical labor that went into feeding a family.  Not all cultures broke down the labor effort they way American frontier settlers did.

 

So while I think the feminists are likely being a bit clueless (he didn't link to specific complaints), that doesn't mean that Kunstler is isn't clueless as well.  If I had to take a guess, you will have near random small grouping of adults, with an equally random grouping of small children.  Given the stress, and likely starvation involved, there probably will be relatively few infants until there is a settling down.  Which is about where things are when his novels get started.

Verizon, copper, and the return of the Jutes

I had seen some rumblings of this somewhere, but it looks like it is not immediately going away.

 

I would guess, that one sign of overreach is the inability of an Empire to maintain its infrastructure.  A less extreme version of the Romans pulling out of Britain and leaving it to the Angles, and Saxons, and Jutes.

Verizon Ready to "Kill Copper" and Take Hostages
Rainbow Girl, Corrente, 26 July 2013 (hat tip: NC)

The main pilot program rolled out in Fire Island, NY, post-Sandy [shock doctrine opportunity.] Sandy damaged all the copper lines and Verizon has a monopoly for copper phone service in Fire Island. Instead of fixing the existing phone lines, Verizon -- eager to find opportunities to roll our "Voice Link" -- an ObamaCare like product that is expensive, does not work and causes life-threatening and working-people's-economy threatening things -- tells Fire Islanders take our "Voice Link" or get lost. And the NY Public Service Commission is "considering" Verizon's request to kill all copper and force its customers to buy this defective, overpriced product -- in all it's markets.

Hopefully, when the Jutes show up, the warning call from the Fire Islanders will get through.  After all, while Jutes (gave their name to Jutland) are a bit rare on the ground these days, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition either.

Empires like buffer states

I am only going to put in the title and subheading on this link.

Japan military 'needs marines and drones'
BBC News, 26 July 2013 (hat tip: NC)
Japan should bolster its marine force and introduce surveillance drones, a defence review paper says, highlighting concerns over China and North Korea.

Why would British and U.S. sources be so interested in the Japanese building up their military?  Didn't that kind of go wrong the last time?

 

Now from the Japanese point of view, there is some sense to it. A big military buildup is a perfectly fine sinkhole to through money at if you want to kick start an economy.  And unlike, digging and refilling ditches, you have shiny new ships and missles to show off after your done.  Granted, the upkeep on weapons is a little higher than on refilled ditches, but.....look how shiny they are!

 

The easiest comparison is to look at the British Empire when it began to get over extended.  Mind you it was not over extended because it was doing all that poorly, but was having problems with rising powers stretching their resources.

 

One of the British reponses was to pull out of some areas, and get new allies to help them in this area.  One primary area they pulled out of was the Far East.  And the ally was Japan.  And it worked very well in World War One.  At the cost of letting the Japanese take over some obscure German possessions, the British were able to concentrate their fleet against the more serious threat.  What would have been a slight edge over the Germans in home waters, became a major advantage.

 

Of course, as we know, this was not working very well for the British by World War 2.  Granted some of the problems with the Japanese were pushed by their Americans, but their weakness in Asia, and death match with the Nazi's left them far too vulnerable.

 

So, we have the United States, as the dominant world power, trying to reduce its fleet size, at the same time that you have a new competitor coming into place.  Fortunately the Chinese don't nearly have the aggressive history that the Japanese did, the Chinese already have their place in the sun to some degree, but competition is competition.

 

Supporting yourself with strengthened allies is an old strategy.  In this case it is even better because it involves a buffer state (Japan is between us and China to some degree) so we don't have them on some far off undefended flank.  Of course that strategy has had its problems in the past:  just ask the Romans about those barbarians, or for that matter the British about American Colonists.

Shocking oil shocks ahead?

Let's start with the source:

The world might be drifting into an oil price shock
Paul Stevens, Financial Times, 25 July 2013 (hat tip: NC)

Not the usual way to look at an article at FT is to do a search of the title, click on the link, and then fill out a little survey.

There are two new dimensions to international oil markets that are creating a dilemma for Opec and may be sowing the seeds of an oil price shock. The first is the fallout from the Arab uprising, which began in 2011. The second is the development and application of shale technology – horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” – to oil production.

A significant consequence of the upheaval in the Middle East and north Africa is that oil-producing governments need more revenue to pay for social policies that will assuage popular unrest. This requires higher prices. For example, in 2008 it was estimated that Saudi Arabia needed about $50 a barrel to balance the books. Last year estimates put the figure closer to $95. 

Such high prices will produce market responses and this is where shale technology comes in. This relatively high-cost technology has led to a dramatic increase in oil production, most obviously in the US. The new Review of World Energy Statistics from BP shows that 2012 recorded the highest single-year increase in US oil production ever.

 

What they seem to be arguing, is that the unsustainable demographic pressures in the Middle East are contributing to higher prices, which will open the doorway to new (higher cost) resources, which will simultaneously cause supplies to be flush, and a crash in demand due to the initially high prices.

 

They are making the reasonable presumption that Saudi Arabia is not in a position to act as the oil price regulator: keeping prices low enough to inhibit competition, while high enough that they can make money.

 

All of which strikes me as a reasonable wild ass guess.  It is not at all unusual for there to be cycles within cycles.  The obvious, large question is the price of this new extraction.

 

What I find interesting is the last paragraph, which brings in a sort of secondary effect of this scenario:

If prices do drop, it could lead to further unrest in oil-producing nations, spooking the markets. The result would be much greater oil price volatility. In that case, security of supply concerns – based on fears of physical disruption – would be overtaken by concerns about the macroeconomic impact of oil price volatility. At the very least, this would increase pressure to further regulate the paper markets. 

For producers it would bring to the very top of the agenda the need to diversify their economies away from oil dependence. This has long been an aim but for the most part with very disappointing results which will, in turn, feed the consequent political upheavals. Overall, oil markets are in for a rough ride.

Part of that is an obvious swing at the American Bankers (J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sacks come to mind) who have been accused of manipulating the commodity markets to their advantage.  After J.P. Morgan was hit with massive penalties they have decided to get out of the business, so talking about regulation after the horse has left the stable is safe for a captive news source.

But even in a rose tinted scenario, the up side has a pretty nasty down side.  My wild ass guess is that oil won't get all that cheap, and we will still have a lot of instability: but that's just me being gloomy.   Supposedly post-Japanese melt down, a number of countries are supposed to be abandoning their nuclear reactors.  That is a lot of energy for sustainable sources to make up on their own, and even the sustainables require fuel inputs on the front end.