I've gotten some emails from folks asking my opinion on "How's it all going to end?" As in, what major crisis is going to finally cause the American Giant to fall down and go boom? Guess what? There won't be a major crisis that does it. It's going to be a slow cascade reaction of crisis and disasters. What's more, it has already begun. We've already seen several of these disasters. More are on the way. The end has begun and is upon us.

Now, if you want to see what it will look like, have a look at Detroit. Here's a city that was THE epicenter of American vehicle manufacturing. The pride of American can-do hoo-ha and all that jazz. In fact, I'm going to coin that phrase into a word to describe American arrogance: American Candohooha.  I know, it sounds like a river back east, but let's use it anyway. American Candohooha supported a population of over a million people in Detroit. All kinds of snazzy buildings and houses. They thought it'd last forever. Kind of like the ghost towns you find out here where I live. They thought that would last forever, too, and now you need a topo map to find these places.

Detroit now has about 700,000 people. They had something like 70,000 abandoned buildings. People starting fires left and right in them, sometimes up to 30 fires a night. The fire department was stretched to the limit and finally, a new fire commissioner said let fires in abandoned buildings just burn. Don't fight them. Wake up, America: This is your future. Detroit declared bankruptcy. This is where all major cities are eventually headed. American Candohooha is the past. What, the federal government is coming to save you? Did they save Detroit? Think about it. If the federal government really cared about Detroit, do you think they'd have let an epidemic of arson like that continue? No. They'd have called it "terrorism" and there would have been tanks and troops patrolling those neighborhoods with orders to shoot arsonists on sight and they'd have sent in a thousand fire engines and an army of federal firefighters. But Detroit has no value to the feds. Obviously.

The federal government knows something many of us don't want to admit. Eventually, several regions in the United States are going to cascade into collapse a lot quicker as they gain momentum. It's like an avalanche. It begins with the loss of manufacturing economies in cities where that is the lifeblood of that city. Once that's gone, the tax base that supports the infrastructure goes away. Thus, you can't really afford to take care of it anymore. Then with all the abandoned buildings, the fires begin. Before you know it, the place looks like Berlin in 1945. That's what happened to Detroit. That is the future of America as a whole.

The feds are probably trying to figure out exactly what they're going to be able to hold onto and consolidate as the "United States". Some regions are probably going to slowly move towards secession not because of political ideology, but for mere survival. Look, the feds sat there and let Detroit burn night after night and couldn't care less. Not every state or region is going to accept that from them. Not the Southwest I know. I would say we could look to probably Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and possibly Utah and Colorado forming a new nation of their own once their major cities start burning. California will be crapping bricks within a couple years because we'll block them from the Colorado River water. Arizona is already saying we need to start pinching off California's access to that water because of an epic drought we've got going on here.