June 24 2017
TRUMP: A GODSEND
Former President Obama, in his speech at the Montreal Chamber of Commerce on June 6, used the phrase: INFLECTION POINT, which Google defines as “A time of significant change in a situation: a turning point.” Having pledged not to criticize his successor for a while caused Obama’s speech to be quite run of the mill, even though the new president has set out to destroy any and every piece of legislation that originated from the Obama regime, of which Health Care and Environmental regulations are the most prominent.
I listened to Obama’s entire 40 minute address, and, apart from the word INFLECTION POINT, I heard not one sentence that was new. I can’t understand why people pay big bucks to hear past presidents such as Bill Clinton or, in this case, Barack Obama, spout platitudes.
A new era ahead.
Just as the church can no longer reform itself – see last week’s blog – so too the entire world economy is in the same position. After all: “everything is connected to everything else”, is one of the laws of ECOLOGY. Matters move in tandem. The financial system is on track to tip over the brink, because all elements have become too ossified, too far out from reality to be able to be reformed.
Here are some simple questions: “Do you really believe that CLIMATE CHANGE can be stopped? Do your really believe that if Hillary had become president, we would have seen a different political scene? Do you really believe that CAPITALISM will disappear? Do you really believe that the $250 Trillion World Debt will ever be paid? Do you really believe that CANCER can be beaten?”
NO to all these questions because we live in a culture where politics, the economy, US healthcare, the entire issue of climate, is beyond repair.
Oh yes, matters look basically normal: the sun still rises, the days still have 24 hours, people still go to work, children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren are still added to the world, people still fall ill, suffer and die: in other words, life goes on in its normal rhythm, yet when we study matters closer, we see that standard solutions no longer work: we have gone too far to be able to remedy the situation.
I am old enough to have experienced the pre-industrial age. I don’t mean that I am 200 years old, but I have intimately known my grandparents, who were born in the 1860’s, now more than 150 years ago, in the rural Western part of the Province of Groningen, adjacent to Friesland. There rural life had been basically unaltered since 1700, at least at the remote location where my maternal grandparents lived: no electricity, the horse and buggy stage: only the bicycle was contemporary.
In 1923 my parents married and moved to the city, some 35 km away, the first ones to do so of the entire extended family.
I was their fourth child (in five years), and after me another five were born. Grandparents, being what they are, were quite eager to host me when another baby saw the light. (I was named after him). So I received, as a youngster, a good taste of what it was to live without electricity and running water, rising with the sun, and going to bed early. A tranquil life, centering on the animals, with the barn attached to the living quarters, on church and community based entertainment: choirs, brass bands, youth meetings, church gatherings, etc.
Then the INFLECTION POINT, the TURNING POINT, was the arrival of the automobile. Between 1950 and 1990 the car transformed the country to become an extension of the city and effectively killed small, mixed farming with a dozen cows, some pigs, and a flock of chickens. It also made the small baker and grocer superfluous, with the rise of box stores.
The last 25 years – from the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the arrival of the Computer to today – I regard as a period of gestation, where the real changes were born, found their footing and brought on immense modifications. Just as the automobile altered the entire way of life that existed before 1950– not for the better as we now discover – so the computer, in its manifold manifestations, is upsetting everything and I mean everything, from the way we eat, sleep, drive, work, communicate, think, court, worship, everything.
And just as the unintended consequences of global automobile use are now showing up in drastic Climate Change, so too the universal application of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, will fundamentally affect human behavior, also not for the better. Just as the automobile deprived us of natural mobility, walking, running, perhaps biking and horse riding, and was and is a factor in heart and respiratory diseases, not to mention physical injuries and deaths, so the remorseless advance of Artificial Intelligence may further deprive us of creative thinking, in essence rob us of our very humanity.
We now are faced with the unrelenting march of “progress” that has been the consequence of the computer. I put ‘progress’ in quotation marks because its consequences are still not entirely known.
Of course I am a computer user. I let my subscription to the Globe and Mail lapse – I had to pick it up at the store 5.5 km away – and now see it on line, as I do with the New York Times, the Guardian and other news sources: no paper waste, more efficient. But it also eliminated a lot of jobs in the newspaper industry. So there has been a definite INFLECTION point, a real change in the way NEWS is being delivered. Eventually it will affect all modes of life.
DEBT
The way we rely on money has also changed immensely. In the good old days people bought stuff when they had saved up the money.
Today the rapid rise in living standards and prosperity of the past 50 years has been largely based on rising debt levels, ignoring the costs of environmental damage and misallocation of scarce resources. Debt today stands at a ‘never-to-be-repaid’ 325 percent of global gross domestic product of about 75 Trillion Dollars, amounting to some 250 Trillion Dollars.
Debt has allowed society to accelerate consumption, as borrowings are used to purchase something today against the promise of future repayment. Unfunded entitlements to social services, health care and pensions increase those liabilities. The bill for these commitments will soon become unsustainable, as demographic – growing old and frail – changes make it more difficult to meet.
Debt is not confined to money: the greater debt is the degradation of the environment which will result in phenomenal future costs. It will entail either rehabilitation expenses – restoration of what once was – or irreversible changes that affect living standards or quality of life. We have not at all costed the profligate use of non-renewable natural resources which deny these commodities to future generations or increase their cost.
Expect a tremendous INFLECTION COST there once this starts to bite, a cost so high that it is impossible to remedy: we have gone too far.
Even though many now see DEFLATION as a threat – and it is – the odds are that INFLATION will kick in once food, energy, water becomes in short supply, as growing population, increasing living standards, pollution, erosion, floods, droughts, materialize.
The WEATHER turning point.
Over the past 130 years, global surface temperatures have risen about 20 times faster than when the Earth was in the process of slowly emerging from the last ice age. Over the past 40 years, the rate of global warming has been 3 times faster yet.
During the past 7,000 years, when human civilization was able to develop and thrive, Earth’s temperatures and climate were quite stable, with the temperature change varying not more than about 0.5°C. We, energy hogs, have now caused that much and more warming in just the past 25 years.
Margaret MacMillan in her book THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE devoted one chapter to DREAMING OF PEACE. Yes, there were, prior to 1914 millions of people joining the various peace movements, because there was a general feeling that war could erupt, as everywhere in the Western world nations were preparing for war. It made me think of the environmental movements today, such as Greenpeace and the David Suzuki Foundation and the many, many books that warn us of coming Climate disasters. Yet, in 1914 war came, not to be concluded until 1945. So also WEATHER DISASTER will come, now already evident from the preliminary skirmishes we are encountering. Actually Sam Carana in his ARCTIC NEWS reports that on May 28, a few weeks ago, sea temperature was 1.8°C or 3.2°F warmer than 1981-2011, that means that the 2.0°C will be reached within a few years since oceans cover 70 percent of the globe.
Dr. Carana specializes in temperature readings, especially in the Arctic where the weather is changing 3 times as fast as anywhere else, and also where the buried METHANE, 30 times more lethal than CO2, our automobile exhaust, is in the process of escaping from the permafrost tundra there. THERE LIES THE ULTIMATE INFLECTION POINT, because once methane emerges it will result in a sudden TEN DEGREE CELSIUS spike in world temperatures.
A POSSIBLE CONVERGENCE OF EVENTS?
It has long been my conviction that we will experience a convergence of all possible disasters. I believe that the Middle East could well serves as the CATALYST, the area where civilization began and, I believe, will end, completing the circle of history.
This week I am reading Margaret MacMillan’s PARIS 1919, SIX MONTHS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD.
It is fascinating to read how this learned woman, in her PARIS 1919, describes how France and Great Britain haggled over the same countries now so much in the news: Syria, Mesopotamia (Iran-Iraq), Palestine, Lebanon, all regions formerly under the rule of the Turks in the Ottoman Empire that fell apart after 1918.
Then too OIL was at the heart of the conflict. Reading about Mosul and Aleppo and Baghdad and Basra in 1919– now constantly in the news as well – shows that the decisions made then, still affect us today.
Margaret MacMillan writes, “In 1919 there were no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together. Basra looked south, toward India and the Gulf; Baghdad had strong links with Persia (Iran), and Mosul had close ties with Turkey and Syria. Putting together the three Ottoman provinces and expect to create a nation called IRAQ was, in European terms, like hoping to have Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs make one country.”
The history of the dictatorship-plagued region has shown that there is no such thing as a short and decisive war. The Yemeni and Syrian and Afghanistan conflicts show this. Total instability in the heart of the world’s most energy-rich region will send global economies into shock, create more opportunities for terrorists, will bring further foreign interventions, spark new waves of refugees, and make the entire world less safe, less stable, and less prosperous. George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, would have done well to have studied the Middle East History before embarking on war in Iraq and Afghanistan, a war now in its 16th year with no end in sight.
The fuse for today’s Middle East TURNING POINT was lit at the 1919 PARIS conference. The fuse is still inching its way toward its fatal destination. At the same time CLIMATE CHANGE is accelerating this process. The EROEI factor – Energy Returned on Energy Invested – plays a role as well, as real cheap oil is only available in the Middle East, while Oil-Sand Oil and Fragging Oil take a lot of energy –and thus pollution – to obtain energy.
The global TOTAL INFLECTION – TURNING POINT will occur when unbearable heat, Category 6 hurricanes and typhoons, gigantic earthquakes, a pandemic, nuclear war, collapsing economies, all coalesce to cause the entire world to succumb to chaos.
The election of TRUMP is a true indication of the impossibility to solve the world’s problems. He is the great DIVIDER, the great DISTURBER. His ascendancy will simply speed up the process of total disintegration. He embodies destructive evolution.
He’s the real GODSEND to bring about the COMING OF THE KINGDOM, God’s new creation.