COINCIDENTAL NEW NORMAL

This subject has been pondered by many thinkers, survivalists, and writers of post-apocalyptic fiction and the subject of the book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild the World from Scratch by Lewis Dartnell, scientist, writer, and UK Space Agency research fellow at the University of Leicester. (Dartnell, 2014) Imagine that an event thrusts humanity back into the hunter-gather era. Without electricity, computers, fossil fuels, fossil fuel fertilizers, plastics, modern transportation, banking, manufacturing, government, industrial farming, modern medicine, modern infrastructure, water treatment plants, sewer systems, trash pickup and so on. Existing stockpiles of medicine would soon run out. Water infrastructure would stop flowing or would become contaminated. Sewers would back up. Trash would pile up. Disease would become rampant. Animals and crops would die off. Existing fuel store would get used up. Mankind would experience a huge die off. But perhaps worst of all, what if we also lost the

We have seen them all before, and we shall see them all again as history rhymes along regardless of the century or the generation of humankind nominally in control of events. But the next time we are visited by widespread, large-scale urban riots, a dangerous new escalation may be triggered by a fresh vulnerability: It’s estimated that the average American home has less than two weeks of food on hand. In poor minority areas, it may be much less. What if a cascading economic crisis, even a temporary one, leads to millions of EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards flashing nothing but ERROR? This could also be the result of deliberate sabotage by hackers, or other technical system failures. Alternatively, the government might pump endless digits into the cards in a hopeless attempt to outpace future hyperinflation. The government can order the supermarkets to honor the cards, and it can even set price controls, but history’s verdict is clear: If suppliers are paid only with worthless sc