The Futility Economy

(The following essay comes from Whiskey and Gunpowder, a free email from Agora Financial. It was written by James Howard Kunstler.)

On the first business day of the New Year and oil traded above $80 a barrel, which means the price has re-entered the danger zone where it can crush industrial economies. This is a central element of the predicament we find ourselves in. The US economy is essentially a Happy Motoring economy. During the whole nervous period since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, American gasoline consumption hardly went down at all, though so many other activities collapsed, from house-building to trucking. Yesterday, The Seattle Times published a story with the idiotic headline: Oil Touches $80 on US Economy, Demand Optimism. Apparently, they think high oil prices are “a good sign.”

How much can a nation not get it? Would $100 oil ignite a new orgy of “consumer” spending and another round of investment in commercial real estate? Welcome to the Futility Economy. This is the economy where Nature and its material companion, Reality, punish us for our stupidity and fecklessness. This is the economy that will tear the United States apart, after it bankrupts us at every level, and mercilessly drives the population down by one-third through starvation, homelessness, violence, disease, and sheer political cruelty.

Whatever you thought our economy was the past thirty years — whatever model of it you have in your head — that is definitely not what we are going back to. Like one of Dickens’s Yuletide ghosts, Reality is leading us by the hand into new circumstances. We resist like crazy. We throw our hands over our eyes. We don’t want to look. We want to return to the comfort of our dreary routines — living in places that aren’t worth caring about, weaving endlessly in freeway traffic, drawing a paycheck at the air-conditioned cubicle, inhaling Buffalo wings by the platterful, with periodic side-trips to the state-chartered casino where there’s always a chance of scoring a lifetime’s income on one lucky bet. And at the end of the day, you can retire with a simulated prostitute on your laptop screen! And not even have to fork over a dime — except perhaps for the Internet connection fee.

Reality is taking us out of that familiar, if sordid, realm, whether we like it or not. Our destination is an everyday economy where you rarely travel far from the place you live, where you have to make provision for you own health, your own old age, your own income, your own diet, your own security, and your own education. If you’re really fortunate, some or all of these necessities can be obtained in conjunction with your neighbors in the place where you live — but don’t expect an increasingly mythical federal government to supply any of it. Expect a new and different way of organizing households based on extended families and kinship groups. Be prepared for agriculture to return to the foreground of everyday life, where farming is back at the center of the economy. Think about how you will cultivate your best role in a social network so the things you do will be truly valued by the other people who know you. Learn how to make your own music and write your own scripts. Try to study history. Resist cults. Keep your mind clear and your senses sharp.

Even if you have a dim sense that this is where we’re headed, most of you probably want to stay where you are. The investments we’ve made in the current mode of existence are so monumental that we can’t imagine letting go of them. This will be the theme of American life for the next couple of years as we struggle mightily to escape the confining armor of the Futility Economy and move closer to ways of life that have more of a future. Right now, all the power and authority in our culture has dedicated itself to remaining inside that old armor.

The Master Wish around the country, including among people who ought to know better, is that we can “solve” our economic problem by finding some other way to run all the cars. Even hardcore environmentalists yammer incessantly about hybrid and “plug-in” cars as the “solution” to our blues. One of Barack Obama’s first acts as president was to “save” the giant car companies. This is exactly the kind of signature behavior of a Futility Economy. It’s based on the idea that we have to continue driving cars all the time and for everything, at all costs.

The religion of the Futility Economy is Techno-Triumphalism, which is the belief that an endless sequence of magic tricks performed by shaman scientists can defeat the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which rules the universe — which true scientists ought to know cannot be defeated. Their colleagues, the shaman economists believe in parallel magic tricks, such as the idea that increased borrowing can “solve” a problem of runaway over-indebtedness. These are the actions that currently engage the people in charge of things in our society.

Given this current state of things, and the current course we’re on, my guess is that when the falsity of these ideas and actions are exposed, they will become evident not gradually but very rapidly and shockingly. The people in charge of things will lose their vested legitimacy in a flash, and the institutions they command will become irrelevant overnight. The process would be traumatic for all of us as routines we counted on for a thousand particulars of everyday life vanish or collapse. A Great Indignation will rise across the land over the perceived swindles involved. A lot of effort will go into avenging the swindles instead of rebuilding an economy out of the ashes of futility.
-end of quote from Whiskey and Gunpowder

As I’ve said before, I don’t always agree with Mr. Kunstler, but you have to admire the way he can paint a picture with his words. My own apocalyptic leanings make it difficult for me to imagine that things will devolve in the same manner that he is predicting, but I do believe his essential point is valid – that the way of life embodied by the common version of the American Dream is destined to become an historical oddity. It is not representative of current or past global human experience, not even in the so-called developed world. As such, it is an unsustainable anomaly and our way of life WILL regress to the mean.

The Yeast People

(The following essay comes from Whiskey and Gunpowder, a free email from Agora Financial. It was written by James Howard Kunstler.)
The Fate of the Yeast People

Every time I do a Q and A after a college lecture, somebody says (with a fanfare of indignation) — so as to reveal their own brilliance in contrast to my foolishness — “You haven’t said anything about overpopulation!”

Right. I usually don’t bother. Their complaint, of course, implies that we would do something about overpopulation if only we would recognize it. Which is absurd. What might we do about overpopulation here in the USA? Legislate a one-child policy? Set up an onerous set of bureaucratic protocols forcing citizens to apply for permission to reproduce? Direct the police to shoot all female babies? Use stimulus money to build crematoria outside of Nashville?

It’s certainly true that the planet is suffering from human population overshoot. We’re way beyond “carrying capacity.” Only the remaining supplies of fossil fuels allow us to continue this process, and not for long, anyway. In the meantime, human reproduction rates are also greatly increasing the supply of idiots relative to resources, and that is especially problematic in the USA, where idiots rule the culture and polity.

The cocoon of normality prevents us from appreciating how peculiar and special recent times have been in this country. We suppose, tautologically, that because things have always seemed the way they are, that they always have been the way they seem. The collective human imagination is a treacherous place.

I’m fascinated by the dominion of moron culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape — the fiasco of suburbia — to the way we feed ourselves — an endless megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts — along with the popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the NASCAR ovals, and the gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. To evangelize a bit myself, if such a concept as “an offense in the sight of God” has any meaning, then the way we conduct ourselves in this land is surely the epitome of it — though this is hardly an advertisement for competing religions, who are well-supplied with morons, too.

Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers in that struggle was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on “TV dinners,” motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their granddaddy’s day. Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football. It’s hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.

And they were able to express themselves — as the great chronicler of these things, Tom Wolfe, has described so often and well — in exuberant “taste cultures” of material life, of which Las Vegas is probably the final summing-up, and every highway strip, of twenty-thousand strips from Maine to Oregon, is the democratic example. These days, I travel the road up the west shore of Lake George, in Warren County, New York, and see the sad, decomposing relics of that culture and that time in all the “playful” motels and leisure-time attractions, with their cracked plastic signs advertising the very things that they exterminated in the quest for adequate parking — the woodand vistas, the paddling Mohicans, the wolf, the moose, the catamount — and I take a certain serene comfort in the knowledge that it is all over now for this stuff and the class of morons that produced it.

A very close friend of mine calls them “the yeast people.” They were the democratic masses who thrived in the great fermentation vat of the post World War Two economy. They are now meeting the fate that any yeast population faces when the fermentation process is complete. For the moment, they are only ceasing to thrive. They are suffering and worrying horribly from the threat that there might be no further fermentation. The brewers running the vat try to assure them that there’s more sugar left in the mix, and more beer can be made from it, and more yeasts can be brought into this world to enjoy the life of the sweet, moist mash. In fact, one of the brewers did happen to dump about a trillion-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar into the vat during 2009, and that has produced an illusion of further fermentation. But we know all too well that this artificial stimulus has limits.

What will happen to the yeast people of the USA? You can be sure that the outcome will not yield to “policies” and “protocols.” The economy that produced all that amazing wealth is contracting, and pretty rapidly, too, and the numbers among the yeast will naturally follow the downward arc of the story. Entropy is a harsh mistress. In the immediate offing: a contest for the table scraps of the 20th century. We’ve barely seen the beginning of this, just a little peevishness embodied by yeast shaman figures. As hardships mount and hardened emotions rise, we’ll see “the usual suspects” come into play: starvation, disease, violence. We may still be driving around in Ford F-150s, but the Pale Rider is just over the horizon beating a path to our parking-lot-of-the-soul.

It’s a sad and tragic process and, all lame metaphors aside, there are real human feelings at stake in our prospects for loss of every kind, but especially in the fate of people we love. The human race has known catastrophe before and come through it. There’s some credible opinion that “this time it’s different” but who really knows? We have our 2012 apocalypse movies. The people of the 14th century, savaged by the Black Death, had their woodcuts of dancing skeletons. Feudalism was wiped out in that earlier calamity but, whaddaya know, less than a century after that the Renaissance emerged in a wholly new culture of cities. Maybe we will emerge from our culture of free parking to a new society of living, by necessity, much more lightly on the planet and for a long time, perhaps long enough to allow the terrain to recover from all the free parking.
-end of quote from Whiskey and Gunpowder

I couldn’t keep myself from providing you with another dose of Mr. Kunstler. Even if you don’t agree with him, you have to admit that reading him is definitely entertaining.

Another guest opinion

(The following essay comes from Whiskey and Gunpowder, a free email from Agora Financial. It was written by James Howard Kunstler.)

In The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and ineffectual — that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in years ahead, whether it was a government, a state university, a national chain retail company, or a giant midwestern farm. It is characteristic of the compressive contraction our society faces that giant hyper-complex systems will wobble and fail. We should expect this.

There are going to be a lot of disappointed people out there who will be suffering terrible losses and real pain in daily life. Societies don’t do well when the public falls into the broad despair that is the opposite of hope. That’s when the long knives and the tribal animosities come out and things get smashed.

Within the context of conventional party politics — the kind that has been baseline “normal” in the USA for a long time — we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for “hope” — if not hope itself — the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They’re flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government’s name. They’re willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against “the malefactors of great wealth.” They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return to the prior state of reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a “consumerism”) that has made us so ridiculous and unhealthy.

The trouble with self-delusion, either in a person or a society, is that reality doesn’t care what anybody believes, or what story they put out. Reality doesn’t “spin.” Reality does not have a self-image problem. Reality does not yield its workings to self-esteem management. These days, Americans don’t like reality very much because it won’t let them push it around. Reality is an implacable force and the only question for human beings in the face of it is: what will you do? In other words, it’s not really possible to manage reality, but you can certainly choose to manage your affairs within reality. We won’t do that because it’s too difficult. This harsh situation leaves the public increasingly with little more than bad feelings of discouragement and persecution

Reality unfolds emergently, and this ought to interest us. For instance, I have maintained for many years that we are approaching the twilight of the automobile age — and the implications of this for daily life in the USA are pretty large. For a long time, I had assumed that this change of circumstances would proceed from our problems with the oil supply. But reality is sly. It has thrown two new plot twists into the story lately. America’s romance with cars may not founder just on the fuel supply question. It now appears that our problems with capital are so severe that far fewer people will be able to borrow money from banks to buy cars at the rate, and in the way, that the system has been organized to depend on. Our problems with capital are also depriving us of the ability to pay to fix the hypercomplex system of county roads, interstate highways, and even city streets that make motoring possible. What will we do?

For now, a cashless government gives out cash-for-clunkers, which is basically a self-esteem building program designed to make the government feel better about itself because it is ostensibly taking 11-miles-per-gallon cars off the road and replacing them with 27-miles-per-gallon cars, thus forestalling scary problems with climate change. It’s dumb of course, but the failure of leadership is comprehensive. Even the elite environmentalists at the Aspen Institute are preoccupied with finding new “green” ways to keep all the cars running. They put zero effort into the idea of walkable communities, or restoring the railroad system, which will be the reality-based remedies for the car-dependency problem.

The extreme right is, if anything, even more childishly delusional. For them it comes down to “drill, baby, drill.” They know nothing about the geology of oil — they don’t even believe that the earth is more than six-thousand years old, meaning they don’t believe in geology, period — but they are inflamed with the faith of eight-year-old children that we must have a lot more oil in the ground because this is America and God loves us more than people in other parts of the planet so it must be there. As their disappointment mounts, their childish ideas will turn cruel and sadistic. They’ll seek to punish anybody who believes that the earth is more than six thousand years old. The catch is, if they get into power in the election cycles ahead, they’ll be impotent and ineffectual even at persecuting their enemies.
-end of quote from Whiskey and Gunpowder

Although I don’t completely agree with Mr. Kunstler, I do get his point. I probably have the advantage of having read more material from him over time, so I have a framework or context for my understanding. My intention in quoting him in this space was to get across the idea of Reality as the Rock we are being pressed against by the Hard Place of our current circumstances. Reality cares nothing for the political spin that has become a substitute for news of current events. So, dear reader, please take the time to think critically about what you read and hear. Consider what advantage could be gained by the tale teller, if you were to believe the tale as it is told.

How We Live Now, by J12H

How We Live Now

by JOHN TWELVE HAWKS

We drink our morning coffee with a drop of fear. The television news alternates between staged media events and new threats to our lives: terrorism and airline crashes, global warming and car-jackings, an epidemic of avian flu. All the threats are different, but they have one common theme: it’s impossible to truly be safe. Somehow all of us have become victims—or potential victims—of a long list of dangers.

With these threats fresh in our mind, we travel to work tracked by pervasive electronic monitoring systems. There’s a Global Positioning device inside our automobile and another within our cell phone; both inform a computer of our exact location. A transponder knows when we approach a toll booth. A transit card records our trip on the subway and stores the information in a central data bank. And everywhere we go, there are surveillance cameras—thousands of them—to photograph and record our image. Some of them are “smart” cameras, linked to computer programs that watch our movements in case we act differently from the rest of the crowd: if we walk too slowly, if we linger outside certain buildings, if we stop to laugh or enjoy the view, our body is highlighted by a red line on a video monitor and a security guard has to decide whether he should call the police.

These two modern conditions—a generalized fear coupled with sophisticated electronic monitoring—shape the world of “The Traveler,” my first novel. Many critics have reviewed the book as science fiction, an idea that amuses me; although “The Traveler” is set toward the end of our decade, all the technical aspects described in the book are either in use at this moment or far along in the development process. I didn’t write the book to predict the future; I wanted to use the power of fiction to describe how we live now.

This new technology of control and the wide-scale manipulation of fear combine to create something I call “The Vast Machine.” Does the Machine really exist? Are we living in such an environment? And, if this fiction turns out to be the truth, what difference does it make to our lives?

The first icon of the 21st century is the closed-circuit surveillance camera, slowly panning back and forth as we move beneath its gaze. A few years ago, it was estimated that the average person in London was photographed at least 300 times by different CCTV cameras on their way to work; the amount of cameras has probably doubled since the terrorist bombings on the London tube.

Chicago gives us a typical example of the rapid spread of surveillance cameras. There are over 2,000 cameras in the city and hundreds more are introduced every month. Mayor Daley stated that “The city owns the sidewalks. We own the streets and we own the alleys.” Then he announced plans to put surveillance cameras in commuter cars, on buses and on the city’s street-sweeping vehicles.

The outline of a Vast Machine becomes apparent when we examine the new “smart” cameras used in Chicago, London, and Las Vegas. The computers attached to these machines contain a template of what should be determined “normal” behavior for a person. If anyone behaves differently, those actions are immediately detected.

During the next few years, surveillance cameras will also feed data into computerized facial recognition systems. There are about 80 “nodal points”—unique features—in every person’s face. Facial recognition systems transform our unique features into complex algorithms that are checked against a database of driver’s licenses and passport photos. The idea that a surveillance camera could identify a stranger in a crowd was thought to be fictional by some of my readers, but first-generation recognition systems have been operational for years. At the January 2000 Super Bowl in Florida, dozens of surveillance cameras automatically scanned every person in the crowd and compared the faces to a database of criminal mug shots.

These days, people are routinely photographed when they pass through airport immigration checkpoints, and that image is compared to the biometric data (fingerprints, iris scan) embedded in the passport. But the new biometric passports to be introduced by the United States reveal another aspect of the Vast Machine. Although the passports are ostensibly being introduced to protect us, they actually make it more dangerous for American tourists in foreign countries.

The passports contain a radio frequency identification chip (RFID) so that all our personal information can be instantly read by a machine at the airport. However, the State Department has refused to encrypt the information embedded in the chip, because it requires more complicated technology that is difficult to coordinate with other countries. This means that our personal information could be read by a machine called a “skimmer” that can be placed in a doorway or a bus stop, perhaps as far as 30 feet away.

The U.S. government isn’t concerned by this, but the contents of Paris Hilton’s cell phone, which uses the same kind of RFID chip, were skimmed and made public last year. It may not seem like a problem when a semi-celebrity’s phone numbers and emails are stolen, but it is quite possible that an American tourist walking down a street in a foreign country will be “skimmed” by a machine that reads the passport in his or her pocket. A terrorist group will be able to decide if the name on the passport indicates a possible target before the tourist reaches the end of the street.

The new RFID passports are a clear indication that protection is not as important to the authorities as the need to acquire easily accessible personal information. The means of acquiring information are expanding every day. Most people realize that the GPS devices in automobiles allow a central computer to determine a car’s precise location. But there are also hidden sensors placed in car tires as well as a “black box” under each hood that records car speed and direction (generally used in the event of an accident).

While our location is being tracked, computer programs automatically read and evaluate emails without our knowledge. Carnivore is one of the programs mentioned in my novel. It’s a “packet sniffer” developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation along with a variety of other on-line detection programs—like Packeteer and Coolminer—that reassemble message fragments and analyze data. Like the smart surveillance cameras used in Chicago, the Carnivore programs establish a standard for what is normal, and everything else is automatically judged as being suspicious. Gradually, all these evaluation systems are becoming independent of any direct control.

“The Traveler” describes for the first time in any book the secret computational immunology programs being developed in Britain. These programs behave like the leucocytes floating through our bloodstream. The programs wander through the Internet, searching, evaluating, and hiding in a person’s home PC, until they detect a “dangerous” statement or unusual information. After gathering our personal information, they return to the central computer. There is no reason why they can’t easily be programmed to destroy a target computer…such as the one on which you’re reading this essay.

Once you look beyond surveillance cameras, you can find the Vast Machine everywhere. Infrared devices and x-ray machines can “see” through walls of homes and vehicles. New data systems can instantly evaluate ATM and credit card activity, building a computerized image of our personality and buying preferences. Viewed in isolation, each of these technological developments is not a major threat to our privacy. But the growing computational power of computers allows all of these monitoring tools and databases to be combined into one total information system.

In January 2002, former Reagan administration national security advisor John Poindexter was appointed to be the head of the U.S. government’s newly formed Information Awareness Office. Poindexter had been convicted in 1990 of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing congressional inquires into the Iran-Contra affair, but this didn’t seem to disqualify him from his new position.

Under Poindexter’s leadership, the IAO proposed a “Total Information Awareness” program that would place all personal information about U.S. citizens in one central database. According to New York Times columnist William Safire:

“Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site your visit and email you send and receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as ‘a virtual centralized database.’”

In his book “No Place to Hide,” Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow describes how the controversy over Total Information Awareness resulted in public protests and Poindexter’s resignation. But TIA did not disappear; it was simply renamed the “Terrorist Information Awareness” program, and the technology was passed on to U.S. intelligence agencies. Poindexter may have lost his job, but his vision lives on.

Total information systems are being developed in every industrial country. In Europe, these systems are almost exclusively controlled by the government. In the United States, weak privacy laws have also given private industry almost unlimited power to create dossiers of every American citizen.

I feel strongly about the growing power of computer monitoring systems, and that belief has a great deal to do with my decision to retain a truly private “private life”—even when dealing with my agent and publisher. It seemed hypocritical for an author to attack the loss of privacy in our society and then display his personal life to promote a book. Although I have avoided the media, however, I’ve talked to a wide variety of people about these new forms of surveillance. A few people have been disturbed about the intrusion, but many have given a more typical response:

“They (our leaders) know what’s best.”

“It’s a dangerous world.”

“Honest people have nothing to hide.”

Believing that the government knows what’s best is an argument that barely merits a serious discussion. Any high school history student can come up with hundreds of examples of when a king, dictator, or elected official followed a destructive, foolish policy. Democracy doesn’t protect our leaders from having a limited, parochial vision. Often a politician’s true priority is career self-preservation.

The prompt arrests of the four suspects of the failed July 21 London bombings indicated that surveillance cameras and other elements of our electronic society can help protect our society from terrorists. But in destroying our enemies we run the risk of destroying ourselves—those elements of personal freedom and tolerance that define and sustain our society. We seem to be blindly giving up our rights without asking our elected officials how their actions will truly defeat our enemies.

“And so what if they know all about me?” asks the honest citizen. “I’m good person. I’ve got nothing to hide.” This view assumes that the intimate personal information easily found in our computerized system is accurate, secure, and will only be used for your benefit. What if criminals access your information? What if corporations deny you insurance or employment because the wrong data has ended up in your file? What if you simply want to take control over who knows what about you?

Obviously, our government needs to know certain facts about us so that elected officials can enforce laws and protect our borders. But during the last few years, information gathering has gone far beyond the standard data shown on a driver’s license or income tax form. These days it is easy to target someone and find out his medical condition, the names of his friends, and the titles of the books he’s checked out of the library. This data can be used in sophisticated ways to predict behavior.

In every religion, saints and prophets go off alone when they want to talk to God. We need moments of true privacy to evaluate our thoughts and experiences; to decide what we really believe. There is a reason why a curtain—real or symbolic—is placed around the voting booth in a democratic society. If privacy truly disappears, freedom itself will vanish with it.

It’s clear that the new computerized technology has resulted in the end of our conventional view of privacy. But a true picture of the way we live now involves more than Carnivore programs and radio frequency chips. The Vast Machine monitors our actions, but it also gives us a reason for that intrusion. The reason is always the same: those in power are working to protect us.

Fear is a necessary part of our survival; the response is programmed into our neurological system. But in the 21st century, modern communications make it possible for everyone to know instantly about any possible danger, however remote, however far in the future. The Internet multiplies these sources of information, relaying threats both real and imagined.

In his insightful book “The Culture of Fear,” Barry Glassner shows how many of our specific fears are created and sustained by media manipulation. There can be an enormous discrepancy between what we fear and the reality of what could happen to us. Glassner analyzes several “threats” such as airplane disasters, youth homicide, and road rage, and proves that the chance of any of these dangers harming an individual is virtually nonexistent.

Although Glassner accurately describes the falseness of a variety of threats, he refrains from embracing any wide-reaching explanation. It can be argued that the constant message of impending destruction is simply a way for the media to keep us watching television—“Are cyber predators targeting your children?” is a tagline that is going to get the audience’s attention. What interests me is not the reality of these threats, but the effect they have on our view of the world. Fear encourages intolerance, racism and xenophobia. Fear creates the need for a constant series of symbolic actions manufactured by the authorities to show that—yes, they are protecting us from all possible dangers.

In “The Traveler,” powerful men use fear to keep the population under control. While I don’t believe that a shadowy group of Illuminati are guiding the industrial world, I think it’s clear that a variety of institutions use fear to manipulate public opinion.

Awareness of the past seems ever less important as history is superseded by the present crisis. Most people can still recall the so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction used to justify the war in Iraq, but the fact that the WMD never existed seems to have disappeared from the day-to- day public discourse. We simply moved on—to a new threat.

Many of our leaders have gone past the old-fashioned politics of the democratic era and entered into the politics of fear. People running for national office no longer emphasize their view of economics or social change. The leading political question of our time has become: who can ease our nightmares?

We are being watched and controlled without our knowledge, but the biggest surprise is that there is little broad-based objection to this significant change in our society. Instead of resisting the Vast Machine, many of us have given into cynicism and distraction. Our contemporary culture has become a brilliantly colored surface without a deeper spiritual meaning. We care more about celebrities than our own neighbors. Are Nick and Jessica getting divorced? Is that famous actor secretly gay? Staged media events allow us to think that everything is false. Our sense of powerlessness—the belief that an ordinary person does not matter—has twisted our lips into a sneer.

Although I recognize the growing reality of the Vast Machine, I refuse to accept its authority. Each one of us needs to make a choice about what kind of world we want in the future. The pose of rebellion based on style and attitude is an empty gesture. Political affiliation is not a relevant part of this decision; privacy and personal freedom should be fundamental right for everyone.

The first step is awareness: the realization we are being monitored without our consent. When we use a shopping card, there’s no need to also include accurate data in the application. Why should our desire to get a discount on detergent require us to provide our address, our phone number and other personal data? All of us need to protect our home computers with programs that destroy spyware. We should realize the implications of giving our social security numbers to large corporations. In real life, protecting one’s privacy is never a single dramatic action; it’s based on adopting a new attitude toward the powerful forces that want to reduce our lives to a digital image.

We have the power to resist the constant message of fear.

We have the power to use technology, not as a means of control, but as a tool to improve our own society.

In my novel, people are waiting for a Traveler, a visionary, to emerge from the darkness and change their lives. The Travelers are almost extinct, and the last few are defended by a small group of fighters called Harlequins. A great battle has started that will be described in the next two books of the trilogy.

In the real world, our battle will be made of small gestures—small decisions—to protect our private selves from the intrusions of the Vast Machine. No outside force will save us. We must look into our own hearts to find the Travelers and Harlequins—the prophets and warriors—who will keep us free.

A Brief Diversion

I’ve written extensively on topics concerning the US economy over the past several weeks. Today I’d like to step off of that path for a little side trip. If we stipulate, for the sake of this argument, that the US economy is going to suffer an irreversible decline, then what would be the potential effects in the world? For a moment I’m going to think some great thoughts.

First of all, as I believe I’ve shown already, the US dollar would cease to be the global reserve currency. That means that the nations of the world will do business with each other by exchanging some currency other than the US dollar. That is easy to say, but what exactly would that mean to the average American? Initially the US economy would follow a path that could be described as “inertial”. That is, what is in motion will try to stay in motion. So we’d continue to consume, as individuals, and we’d continue to spend, as a nation, as though we had all the money we wanted. But eventually we’d come to recognize that the US dollar wasn’t getting the proper respect we think it deserves. Oil from the Middle East will cost more than it used to. Trinkets from China will cost more than they used to. Cars from Japan will cost more than they used to. The world will be less and less eager to accept US dollars in exchange for the tangible goods and services that it has to offer. Of course, this leads to price inflation in the US. It leads to higher interest rates on US government debt. The US economy, 70% dependent upon consumerism, will slow down even further. Tax revenues will drop. The deficit will grow. It is a vicious cycle that reinforces itself. There will be tremendous political pressure on the US government to mitigate the impact of these negative forces. Not only that, the current administration has the mindset that it can, and should, try to mitigate these “bad things”. So things will continue to get worse, for awhile. Nevertheless, reality will set in.

At some point, however, the US government will be forced to acknowledge that they must reign in spending. More accurately, they will discover that they must reduce the magnitude of the deficit spending. The first step will be to increase taxes, because they are ideologically unable to reduce spending. But higher taxes, along with the global economic changes that are outside of their control will eventually force them to abandon massive social spending, and we’ll eventually see a federal budget that is lower, year-over-year. By the time we get to that point it will be far too late.

One of the areas of the federal budget that I expect will see the most active trimming will be in defense. In fact, I believe we’ll see real defense budget declines from the start. It won’t have to wait until the crisis hits. But I don’t see the defense budget going to zero. I do see the budget shifting away from deployment, away from production, away from an active military. I expect that we’ll continue to spend on R & D. Think about it (that is what this is all about, after all). Congress will resist any decrease in spending that will impact their district. At the same time, the administration will recognize that defense dollars are just about the last federal spending category that creates high-value US jobs (you know, the ones that result in tax payers). There are literally millions of tax-paying workers that are supported by the US defense budget. So I do not expect the defense spending to go to zero. I do expect to see fewer and fewer programs transition into production (production is threatening, R & D isn’t). I do expect to see less and less US troop deployments around the world. I do expect to see more and more US troops pulled back from foreign stations.

These things will happen because of economic necessity and because they are in perfect alignment with the ideological leanings of the current administration. This is the closest we’ll come to a sure thing. But what will it mean, globally? That answer will have to wait until my next posting.

Is it near?

Thinking about the end of the world this week. Actually, it seems I trip over that subject more often these days. The tenor of the news doesn't seem to help. I read through Matthew 24, where Jesus responded to the questions of his disciples about what would be the signs of the end of the age. There are many different opinions about the end of the world, but I still think that we can take a few valid points away from this passage, independent of your particular brand of eschatology.

First, we are warned to give no heed to those who claim "Christ is here" or "Christ is there". In v 30 he says, "At that time...they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds...". So, it will be evident to all, you won't need anyone else to tell you that Jesus is here.

Second, Jesus confirms the validity of the prophecies of Daniel in v 15. There are many opinions about the book of Daniel, but I'll stick with Jesus on this one. As another point, the Apostle Paul also refers to the coming "lawless one" in 2 Thessalonians. I might have more to say about this subject in a later post, but not right now.

Third, we are to be faithful to His calling. We must not think we can delay our obligations just because we don't think he is coming anytime soon.

Fourth, the time may be unknowable, but we should be able to recognize the season. There will be signs.

As for recognizing the season, the signs of the times, I think there are abundant reasons to say that the time of His appearing draws near. What is near? 2 years? 10 years? 50 years? I don't know, but I can't see it being 50, probably much close to 10. Why do I say that? Think about the power that now exists to destroy. This is unique in history. At no other time has it been so easy to achieve the destruction of all life. The religious and racial hatred has been with us from time immemorial, but not the means to destroy. And the geopolitical forces currently in play will not allow a significant pause in conflict. The Muslim world is growing larger every day, the "Christian" West is in decline. The godless Chinese are wanting to take the leading role in the world economy. And Russia is not ready to become a footnote of history. And then there is Iran. Is it so difficult to imagine an alignment of Russia and Iran that gets hostile against Israel?

And Israel is the key. I cannot imagine God allowing that nation to be destroyed, yet the forces arrayed against it are poised to do just that (if their rhetoric is to be believed).

So I'm thinking we are in the season of the end. Watch world events very closely. Interpret them through the lens of scripture, and particularly with a view toward how things will affect Israel.

Getting old, I guess

Not a whole lot to say today. I've been encouraged to record my most recent prognostications, however I'm having trouble remembering what they were. Perhaps someone out there could help my memory...?

Sometimes we are our worst enemy

The recent murder of abortion doctor Tiller in Kansas is a sad affair. No matter what your opinion on the subject of abortion and, specific to Dr. Tiller, late-term abortion, this murder should be considered a terrible act without any reasonable justification. I'm sure that the murderer didn't reflect on the longer term consequences of his actions. Those will left to the rest of us to address.

I expect that this event will become the rallying cry for those in the pro-abortion camp. This will become the poster child for changing the discussion on the allowability/desireability of any kind of debate on the topic of abortion. Soon all those who choose to protest abortion will be a priori judged to be capable of murder (forgetting for a moment that we are all so capable). It won't stop there, though. Abortion protesters will become pre-disposed toward murder. In fact, any protest will be seen as simply a precursor to the act of murder. Hence, all abortion protests will be outlawed. There will be vigorous application of this prohibition to all venues. You won't even be able to write a letter to the Editor of your local newspaper without coming under serious persecution/prosecution.

You may think that my prediction is too overdone. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

What is the point?

What is the point, you may have asked yourself, to these great thoughts that are being thunk? It is a question worth asking, and answering. But before we go there I think it might be profitable to spend some time putting the big picture together. This will give us some context for our future discussions, a framework to place the various puzzle pieces we examine.

First of all, it is my view that we aren’t headed for a glorious future filled with human accomplishment. I don’t know how long it will take us to not reach that end, but we are inexorably moving away from it. That was a backward way of saying that we’re headed towards an uninviting destination in the proverbial hand-basket. Of course, this outlook is colored by events happening in America that aren’t necessarily representative of the rest of the world, but I don’t think that matters. As an example, Mark Steyn has written in “America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It” about the rapidly changing demographic in Europe, citing the low birth rates of the ethnic European peoples at the same time that immigration and the high birth rates of the Islamic people in Europe are already altering the political landscape and in as little as a decade or two that continent will be controlled by persons who lack a Western cultural heritage and are followers of an extremist religious philosophy bent upon domination and extermination of all who hold an opposing point of view. So, the bad news is all around us.

And the evidence pointing to this conclusion can be found in a variety of places. The shifts in cultural mores, political thought, economic conditions and geo-politics can all be indicators of the overall direction of life. I recognize, however, that others might look at the same set of conditions or circumstances that I am viewing and come to a dramatically different conclusion. That, in itself, is a strong argument in favor of my point. It used to be, not all that long ago, that Americans shared a fairly consistent view of the world. This view was independent of ethnic, economic or religious background. There was a common understanding that some things were right and some things were wrong. Kids didn’t grow up as hooligans because even when parents weren’t around there were always friends, neighbors and society to censure and decry shameful behavior. In fact, as a society we’ve entirely lost our sense of shame. How else can you explain the debased and moronic antics that pass for humor and entertainment on TV and in the movies? In some ways I can find sympathy for the revulsion that religious Islamists feel toward our society. I can’t sympathize with their extreme positions, but I think I know where they’re coming from.

I’ll pick up this thread next time and we’ll see where it goes from here.

Stand By

After incessant cajoling from my compatriot I've decided to take pen in hand, figuratively speaking, and become one of the authors on this blog. Stand by for occassional posts as I seen various evidences of this trip we are all making in the proverbial 'handbasket'.

I hope you enjoy my musings.

Security

Expect the Democratic Administration to pursue with great vigor a foreign policy of appeasement and conciliation. Our troops will be withdrawn from the current hot spots, and in similar fashion to #3 above they will go beyond that to recall troops from even more overseas locations, as well. They’ll be rallying to the cry to “bring our boys home”, which will be the setup for the next item. The added benefit to this policy is that it will free up some dollars that had been going to the Defense Dept. so that they can be more “productively” spent through the various entitlement programs, otherwise known as voter snares.
With America taking deliberate steps to disengage from any appearance of hostile intent with respect to anything having to do with Islam, the radical element of that culture will begin the plotting necessary to bring down a rain of terror on the US and Israel. This will be evidenced by a period, probably less than a year, of apparent peace. This will be the time they take to lull us into a false security and to establish their own readiness for what follows. It might take longer, if the US is slowed down in extracting itself from the Middle East. I don’t believe they will want to start something while US troops are still in the field.
Terror strikes against both the US and Israel will follow. I expect that the damage in Israel will be kept within limits, since I don’t believe there is any illusion in the rational Islamic mind about Israel’s willingness to use any means necessary to protect itself. The key word is rational. If irrational Islamic radicals start to move against Israel I think we could easily transition into a situation that would potentially be a fulfillment of the events of Ezekiel 38.
I expect the terrorists will place fewer limits upon what can be done against the American people and the homeland. I think they will strike in a variety of ways, against populations and against our infrastructure. I believe they will attempt to disrupt our commerce and our communications. Chaos in America will free them for action around the world. I also think they will strike against Europe and foment Islamic rebellion in those countries. The “sophisticated” European disdain for America’s “cowboy diplomacy” will not save them from the terror.
The clueless Democrats will blame the initial terrorist attacks on Bush, on his policies and actions that have caused fear and loathing to rise in the hearts of otherwise peace-loving Islamists. I don’t know how many thousands of Americans will have to die before it starts to dawn on even the Democrats that those people really do hate us and they want to kill us.