I'm working on a piece that uses a "Distant Mirror" theme ala Tuchman, comparing what's happening with us to what happened to Rome. I don't know if you read my book reviews in LiBT-04 but I think The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper (2017) became one of my favorite books for providing a framework on how to visualize the collapse of a society under climate pressure.

It's freaky that the collapse of Rome started in 150AD when the climate started getting cooler but that the first sign of collapse was a pandemic in 165AD. The echo with what's happening now is so weirdly perfect.

But yeah, hundreds of millions of starving people aren't going to go quietly. If this is as bad as I think then the next 4-6 years are going to be brutal. On top of that is going to be brutally bad weather. I know you read my first piece and the section on infrastructure. We are woefully unprepared for this.

It's happening too soon. We are not ready. We are going to loose chunks of the country out of this. We could see towns and even cities like Portland burn to the ground. It's going to be bad.

But collapse takes time. We still have reserves, we still have social inertia, continuity has not been fractured yet. Unless global agricultural output falls to nearly zero I think we will come through this one. But it's going to traumatize us and weaken us as a society.

That's the lesson of Rome, collapse is a death of a thousand cuts. It takes time. This is the beginning, I'll be dead before the end.