When TSHTF here, I don't think it's going to be because we all grab our guns and march on the state capitol.
I'm 99% sure it's going to be because of a major natural catastrophe.
The invisible hand of God is going to tickle California in its belly button, and it's going to kick and splash and spit up a couple of cities here by the ocean.
In other places of the country we have what they call your "climate change deniers." Here we have what I call "Quake ostriches."
People who are no different than the ones that buy, sight unseen, swamp land in Florida or a sinking manse near the Bayou.
And they are all the richest people who live in the most expensive Coastal communities and cities. The Richer they are the more precarious their situation seems to be in many cases.
The really wealthy people want to live in ill-founded glass high rises, gravity defying architectural monstrosities, or preserved historical structures which have had the past cracks patched over and been reinforced.
None of which matters because they're almost all sitting on a very shaky piece of land at the very edge of a very shaky piece of land.
Those people are not thinking about the fact that a major earthquake would be possibly accompanied by a major tidal wave, and what with the rising oceans...
Also the balance of this spinning Earth is Shifting slightly.
Slightly, in these terms means millions and millions of tons of what was ice is now water, and it all went downhill into the cracks of the Earth and the oceans.
This rebalancing of the Earth's crustal system maybe very slight in the overall scheme of things, but when you are in a state of unstable equilibrium it might only take a slight jar to set off a harmonic reaction which brings the whole thing apart.
We don't live in that part of the state.
We live far away in a part of Calif that really has no problems from quakes. I have friends who live close to the ocean and I know the city where they live was wiped out by the ocean and rebuilt next to the ocean.
I sometimes think about the fact that it might be much nicer to live next to the ocean.
For about 5 minutes.
Which is coincidentally about how long it would take the ocean to remove a trillion dollars in real estate from the face of the Earth after a really major quake.