"America will fall as Rome did before it," says he

[Lord Iames Osari]

I don't think I saw this up here before, so...

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Senior_US ... _0814.html

[quote]Senior US official likens challenges facing America, Roman Republic
John Byrne

The US comptroller general David Walker issued a report last week in Chicago in which he likened the present situation in the United States to the Roman Republic or an organization that fails to adapt and "may not survive."

Nobody reported it. The first report of the speech came today in London's Financial Times.

Walker, who heads the Congressional, nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has offered dire forecasts for the United States in the past. In interviews with 60 Minutes and NPR, he's said that he believes the US cannot continue to live at such levels of prosperity indefinitely, since much of current prosperity is erected upon debt.

"Throughout history, many great nations have also failed to survive," Walker told an audience in Chicago last week. "I should point out that the longest standing republic and the major superpower of its day no longer exists, and that's the Roman Republic."

He warned of “striking similaritiesâ€

[Dartzap]

Your more likely to fall from grace like the British Empire did. Slowly, but surely, until nothing remains other than the Homeland.


I doubt Iraq will be joining the American Commonwealth, mind

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

I doubt Iraq will be joining the American Commonwealth, mind

Note that India is not part of the British Commonwealth either.

[Dartzap]

I doubt Iraq will be joining the American Commonwealth, mind

Note that India is not part of the British Commonwealth either.

Um.......

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

I doubt Iraq will be joining the American Commonwealth, mind

Note that India is not part of the British Commonwealth either.

Um.......

I stand corrected.

Uh oh. Then I guess Iraq will join the American Commonwealth too --maybe it will accept the US President as "symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such Head of the Commonwealth".

[frigidmagi]

I highly doubt there will be an American Commonwealth. The current British Commonwealth is backed by some shared elements of culture. The cricket league for example.

As for this whole howling of a Roman collaspe... We shall see. We have not even reached the Gracchi brothers yet, let alone the civil wars and the Caesars. So there may be time yet.

[Mayabird]

Granted, all things eventually come to an end, but that doesn't mean it'll happen in an analogous manner to things that ended before. The dinosaurs went extinct in a rather different way from the 95% of species that went extinct at the end of the Permian.

And as Magi pointed out, when Roman Republic collapsed it became the Roman Empire. I'm not seeing an American Empire coming.

[Lord Iames Osari]

Well, no. I never meant to suggest that America would follow the exact same course as the Roman Republic. A large part of what made the Empire possible was that Roman legions were dependent on their field commanders for pay rather than Rome, and their loyalties went with their pocketbooks. I just can't see that happening in the present day, now that looting and pillaging has largely disappeared as a standard and accepted part of military operations.

That's why I asked for people's opinions about what would happen.

[Mayabird]

That's why I asked for people's opinions about what would happen.

Oops, sorry, misread there.

The major problems coming up that could do the country in are the double-whammy of Peak Oil and Global Warming. Those, however, will just be the end-points that lead to the final crash rather than the complete and total cause. Leading up to it will be a thousand, thousand little problems that aren't enough to be fatal alone or even in a large group, but they remove the safety buffers and margin of survival so that when the big disasters do hit, we can't recover from them.

Take infrastructure, for instance. A few bridges collapsing won't kill us all. Sucks to be on them or being the people who need them immediately, but it won't cause the collapse of civilization. So nobody really repairs the bridges, pipes, roads, etc. Now, we're having a massive depression with no end in sight from Peak Oil, plus starvation as agriculture struggles from lack of machinery (no gas to run them) and the climatic effects of global warming. A disaster occurs, say, a flood, and the bridges on a river get washed out. They're not going to get repaired. Those bridges might have been the only way to get food from one region to another that's on the verge of survival. Now they're gone. You might try shipping food by other means, say, little ferry boats. Unfortunately, due to the shoddy educational system of past years, there aren't enough people who can fix the boats when their engines break or can convert them to not need gas.

So starvation sets in, as does disease in the weakened population. People were poor and couldn't get medicine before, and some people were fuckheads who wouldn't get their kids vaccinated because it'd make them sterile or autistic or some crap like that. Refugees from the starving side try to get over the river where there's food. Some of them carry their diseases with them. They spread the epidemic. Result: total disaster.

All the little factors were already there eating away at everything, but only when the big problems hit does it make everything come crashing down. That's how I see it happening.

Naturally, this means any surviving people in the future are going to blame the big things and miss the lesson that if they'd taken care of the small things before the major problems hit, it would have been much less bad. Still pretty bad, but survivable and not a catastrophe.

[frigidmagi]

I actually want to comment on the machinery bit. Most of the farmers in my home state have already converted to none-gasoline fuels. Natural gas is popular as is enthoal (from corn mostly, there are some sugar cane ones but sugar cane is more expensive then corn in Oklahoma).

On the education system, home schoolers in some areas tend to test higher. Let me repeat that, home schooled kids are competing with public educated kids and doing quiet well. There's one of the reasons why people have turned to it.

There is alot of private action being taken to avert or soften the blows, but it would be more effective if the government actually concentrated in fixing them.

[Mayabird]

I worry about this emphasis on ethanol. It's energy-intensive to make and basically means burning food. We have a surplus now but we can't guarantee this for the future. Plus, considering how much coal we still burn for electricity, we're just making the carbon load on the atmosphere worse by doing it, and that'll only screw up the climate more in the future. If it was nuclear, like how Brazil is expanding its nuclear program partly to power conversion of sugar cane to ethanol, it's not as bad, but it's still mining the soil for nutrients to burn it.

Home schoolers in some areas, maybe. I, on the other hand, live in Georgia (though not much longer). Granted, the products of the public education system here are pretty crappy too. Along with everything else. But anywho.

I agree, there are a lot of private actions, small and unfocused, and many of them are badly misguided too, such as the anti-nuclear and anti-GM foods activists. A crash program on the scale of Apollo would really help right about now. Considering how many billions we've blown on that debacle in Iraq, we obviously have enough of a surplus to handle it. I was just trying to illustrate a point there.

I see society right now as being like an obese 40-ish year old with a high-ish paying office job. He eats badly and a lot, buys a lot, is in debt despite his money, house is falling into disrepair, drives a lot, but isn't entirely in trouble yet. He still has time to lose weight, pay off his credit cards, fix up the house, etc etc., but none of the solutions are simple and painless so he just goes along his way. Soon enough, he'll be sick, his house will fall apart (assuming he doesn't totally lose it for not paying his mortgage), won't be able to work, and his life will generally be a disaster. Even a few fixes would make his future life slightly less bad, but he doesn't have the discipline or whatever to do it and nobody's prodding him. By the time necessity prods him, it'll be too late to repair a lot of the damage. And if someone tries to prod him now, he grumbles, and nobody has the strength or the courage to make him do stuff or deal with the grumbling.