Susie posted this on Facebook earlier today. I hope I’m not stealing a post: How America Could Collapse. It’s really too big to excerpt, but here’s the gist: we don’t make anything anymore, and our supply chains are so long that when something goes wrong at the manufacturing end you get a major impact on the consuming end. Think about the japanese tsunami, which negatively impacted car manufacturers, or the 1999 earthquake in Taiwan that crashed the computer industry. Then imagine exponentially worse:

It was in the 1990s that American multinationals, spurred by government policy, began outsourcing operations to China. At the same time, the Clinton administration steadily relaxed antitrust enforcement, leading to massive corporate consolidation and the creation of the virtual firm. By the early parts of the last decade, the ideal American multinational made its profits by using its market power to gut labor and supply prices and by using its political power to eliminate taxation. All of this turned giant American institutions against making things. This is why we rely on a British factory to make our flu vaccine, why global videotape production was knocked offline by a tsunami and why that same event slowed the gigantic auto industry. US corporate leaders now see the idea of making things as a cost of doing business, one best left to others. What has happened as a result is that much of the production for critical products and services that make our economy run is constructed by a patchwork global network of suppliers all over the world in unstable regions, over which we have very little control. An accident or political problem in any number of countries may deny us not just iPhones but food, medicine or critical machinery.

Read the whole thing, and hen read Dimitri Orlov’s “Social Collapse Best Practices”. While I don’t encourage panicking, it’s always wise to have a lot of dried beans and water in your pantry. Dehydrate those tomatoes in the backyard. Stockpile some propane tanks if you have a grill. Make friends with your neighbors. And yeah, maybe buy a gun and learn how to use it, just in case.