Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

AUGUST 30 2015

HOW ACCURATE IS REVELATION, THE LAST BIBLE BOOK?

For the last 2 months I have been translating a Dutch book on Revelation. The book’s original title is: En Voort Wentelen de Eeuwen , which I have translated as And On and On the Ages Roll. The publisher will be Eerdmans Grand Rapids, and the publication date probably Fall 2016. This is the third book I have translated from the same author: Johan Herman Bavinck, a professor of mission at the Free University of Amsterdam.

I have almost finished the English version. I have given it my utmost, doing 4 pages each day, seven days per week. With 232 pages, densely printed at 360 words per page, I have so far done more than 75,000 words out of a total of some 83,000, so I have a pretty good idea what the book is all about.
I was really struck by the accuracy of the predictions because the book itself is a vision, a view 2000 years ahead, of what basically is the situation today.
Basically the book depicts the struggle between the forces of heaven and the forces of God’s opponent who was thrown out of heaven and landed right here on earth. That scene is described in Revelation 12, and the book starts with that chapter. Read it: it’s an interesting piece, and sets the tone for the entire book. Because Satan rules the earth now, Jesus calls him “The Prince of the World.” John too in one of his letters readily says (1 John 5: 19) that Satan controls the earth. That is all too evident today.

In my blog this week I will quote a few excerpts which I found striking. Here is one paragraph that accurately describes today’s world:

“As yet the industrial complex keeps on functioning. As yet the flowers bloom, the harvests ripen, and the heavens above the earth seem peaceful, revealing nothing of the bitter battles fought there between the powers of heaven and the powers of hell. But all this is soon to end. There is a spirit of despair in the air; there is something of skittishness affecting all of nature. All human certainties seem under threat, and all facts we always have regarded as true, now are being exposed as fiction. That’s what John observes with growing amazement.”

Isn’t that striking! It accurately describes the world today, where nothing really is what it seems. I have for a long time been writing that we live in the last of days. This seems to confirm it.

Here is another quote from the book:

“In the next scenario (Rev. 15: 5 till 16: 21) the last things are set into motion. The picture John provides us with is again a succession of sad disasters. In several aspects they remind us of those that happened in Egypt during the ancient Pharaoh regime, but here they are considerably more intense and dangerous. They are of cosmic proportions and even the sun and the earth are part of all this. Pandemics produce panic in the planet’s population, deadly droughts, hellish heat devastate the crops. The culmination of the natural disasters and the pinnacle of pain are caused by an earthquake (16: 18) “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.” The seismographs in the capitals shake wildly and record numbers beyond any ever registered. And the houses tumble, the palaces are ruined. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events rolls over the world.”

Another picture of today. So far we have seen drought and floods. As yet no earthquake but all the signs of the BIG ONE are out there. It will come, and so will a pandemic. Lancet magazine reports that some 90 percent of the world’s population suffers from one or two maladies. Indeed the stage is set for this as well.
Here is something very evident today:

“The catastrophes mentioned here all are of a cosmic nature. They affect people everywhere. Earlier we have seen how in the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here is only the first type mentioned. It is as if the earth, given by God as a present to humanity to be her own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature which for so long, for many centuries, has faithfully served humanity and provided it with all its needs, now has become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown herself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her atomic energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now confronted, in a total humiliating fashion, with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.”
Once nature turns against us, we are helpless. That is the situation today.”

This passage reminds me of James Lovelock’s book THE REVENGE OF GAIA. That book too says that Climate Change is a ‘man-made’ curse. Revelation is totally accurate here. We are the cause of all this trouble. Creation is taking revenge for all the pain we are afflicting on her.

Gail Tverberg in her latest blog – August 26 2015- predicts that “The big thing that is happening is that the world financial system is likely to collapse. Back in 2008, the world financial system almost collapsed. This time, our chances of avoiding collapse are very slim. Without the financial system, pretty much nothing else works: the oil extraction system, the electricity delivery system, the pension system, the ability of the stock market to hold its value. The change we are encountering is similar to losing the operating system on a computer, or unplugging a refrigerator from the wall. We don’t know how fast things will unravel, but things are likely to be quite different in as short a time as a year. World financial leaders are likely to “pull out the stops,” trying to keep things together. A big part of our problem is too much debt. This is hard to fix, because reducing debt reduces demand and makes commodity prices fall further. With low prices, production of commodities is likely to fall. For example, food production using fossil fuel inputs is likely to greatly decline over time, as is oil, gas, and coal production.”

Her conclusion is that:

“We can’t say that no one warned us about the predicament we are facing. Instead, we chose not to listen. Public officials gave a further push in this direction, by channeling research funds toward distant theoretically solvable problems, instead of understanding the true nature of what we are up against. “
A few words about Gail Tverberg. She is an actuary interested in finite world issues – oil depletion, natural gas depletion, water shortages, and climate change. Her blog is called The Finite Earth.

The book I am translating continues in the exact way Gail Tverberg predicts. The human race, you and me, and basically all others, are not ready when the disaster strikes that Gail thinks will happen very soon.

Here is another excerpt of the book on Revelation. Will the human race turn to God? Will these coming disasters cause them to convert?

“There’s not a trace of confusion to be noticed. Of course people are unsure. Of course there also is a good amount of despair. But conversion? No, they cursed God, the God of the heavens! Strange, those modern men and women, who had become convinced that the concept ‘god’ did not exist anymore, all these people started to curse. They always had told themselves that they no longer believed in God, that it was a fairytale, something they had ridiculed all their lives. They had left the church in droves already long ago and had assured their neighbors that God was dead and that they, in line with the spirit of the age, had nothing to do with him anymore. On the census they had written “no church affiliation”, so how come that it was now possible that God suddenly was back, risen from the dead? How come that these educated people, so up-to-date with everything, with the latest gadgets, who never did need God, now suddenly seem to remember that he exists after all? Was there in the deepest crevices of their mind a secret notion that the meaning of life is that we always are in a conversation with him who made and even guides us? Have they understood this more profoundly than they would admit to themselves and to others? In any case, at this so critical juncture, now that the flames of defeat leap up high and start to scorch their fragile body frame, now irrepressibly the certainty arises that God is there after all. No wonder these nervous, these now so unbalanced persons, clench their tiny fists and threaten the Lord of the heavens. They wished they could aim a guided missile at him and so shoot God from his throne. They would crucify him again if they could, would cast him into the deepest black hole, dead, forever defeated. But all they can do is shout out their powerless rage against him who now so powerfully intervenes in the human endeavor of creation and construction.”

Revelation is quite clear here: no mass conversion.

Revelation also says something that concerns the Middle East, Iraq and Syria. It is there where the biblical world began, and civilization started. Is it also there
where it all will end? The Middle and Far East has four countries that possess nuclear capacity. It is a ‘powder keg’ and much more dangerous with these dangerous bombs, and even more dangerous with so many people who have nothing to lose. This next excerpt reminds me of the Middle East problems. John touches here on some problems that happened there in his time. For Scythes and Parthians read ISIS or Sunnis and Shiites.

“In the meantime the world of humanity is in motion. It is getting ready for battle. John relates it in a few small flashes. The river Euphrates dries up, opening the way for the kings of the east. The Euphrates is the borderline that separates the culture of Asia Minor from the barbarians in the East, the Scythes and the Parthians, whose masses have overrun the old (Western) world. The Euphrates is the last frontier, the last protection against chaos. Now that same Euphrates River has dried up. I imagine that this indicates that the kingdom suddenly has become vulnerable. Apparently there still are nations who have refused to submit to the authority of the tyrant. They never bothered this strongman before because then they were powerless. But now that the capital (Babylon) has been reduced to rubble, now that universal lawlessness is threatening to overwhelm the realm, now there is a real danger that they will invade the kingdom and destroy it. Again there is a real threat of war and the nations prepare for the worst.”

We really have no idea how volatile the entire world situation is. The newspapers are incapable of reporting the truth because their management is dominated by big capital and it is exactly big capital that is the anti-Christian force in this world. Its motto is ‘creative destruction’ which is better labeled as ‘creation-destruction’ because that is exactly what its main aim is, believing with the power of religion that the earth in infinite.
Jesus once wondered whether he, upon his return, would find ‘faith’ on earth. Of course there is ‘faith’ and ‘faith’. What he is referring to is ’faith in the coming of his kingdom”, the new earth that he is preparing. The book of the Revelation of John concludes with that, calling it “The New Jerusalem” which is adorned like a bride. The groom is the New Humanity, including Jesus Christ, “The Son of Man”, Humanity personified. The bride is the New Earth, and the we dding is the perfect union between the New Humanity, the Redeemed of the Lord, and the New Earth.

It is for that union we now must prepare ourselves. With the situation as it is today, where our economic situation is so fragile, there is no time to lose.

AUGUST 23 2015

WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE WE GOING?

I am somewhat of a news freak. Each day I read the New York Times, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail (Toronto) and several other news sources. All on line, of course. I also closely follow the financial news, partly because until my retirement, I had been in business for some 40 years. There I made three successive moves: in 1952 I started out in life insurance, then, in 1957, I added general insurance, mainly fire and auto, while in 1963 I branched out in real estate. In 1975 I sold out, moved from the city to the country, where I built an energy efficient house.
In 1979 I qualified as a professional (real estate) appraiser, after a few years of full-time study, living on the interest of some capital, in a day when money still earned 8-12 percent per year, and the cost of living was a lot lower. I remember that in 1975 I paid less than $5 per month for telephone service.
For the world the last 40 years have been an era of transition. Oil spiked, China awoke and moved from a medieval existence to the 21th century, jumping the world’s all important Primary Productivity from less than 40 percent to now dangerously approaching 50 percent.

Primary Productivity

Primary Productivity was 100 percent 10,000 years ago when there were only hunter-gathering people, eating from the earth what was readily available, killing the odd animal, eating the apples and fruits and tubers that would grow back the next year. Agriculture changed all that. Rather than eat the buffalo that roamed the prairies by the millions, we plowed over that fertile soil, grew corn and fed it to millions of beef cattle at great expense to the soil and weather. We call that progress.
Now we have paved the planet, syphoned off the sea-fish, mined the mountains, ruined the rivers, asphyxiated the air, all for the sake of money. And, thanks to oil, thanks to fertilizer-oil derived, thanks to tractors – running on oil – thanks to an elaborate trucking and distribution system – all run on oil – we sired a few extra billions of people, and now we have reached the top, going downhill from here. We now use so much of the earth – almost 50% – that almost nothing is left for wild animals, birds and bees. So they die. We are a race of murderers.

In the process we have abandoned religion, except the capitalist religion of infinite growth, but now that religion is proving false, but, since the church has gone in bed with the spirit of this age, not in name, but in practice, the entire world is groping in the dark, having lost all security. It struck me, while translating a book on Revelation, that in the book the “four living creatures” representing creation, are named before the 24 elders, symbolizing the 2 x 12 elders of the Old and New Testament church. In John’s vision as recorded in Revelation, creation has priority over the human race. I should repeat that: in the last bible book, Revelation, the book that lays everything bare, creation is seen as more important than the church. Wake up Church, and reset your priorities if you want to be relevant in a world where the church has almost completely lost its membership. We are speeding to the End.

The world going up in smoke.

Years ago Bill McKibbon wrote a book “The End of Nature”, referring to Climate Change. Today we see that end in living color when we watch the trees everywhere go up in smoke, not only depriving nature of its natural CO2 absorber, but sending out millions of tons of extra soot into the air. The temperature in California has increased by close to 2 degrees Fahrenheit in a few decades while the Arctic, where most of the methane is buried, has seen even greater increases, setting the stage for a Climate Change explosion as the 20 times more powerful methane starts escaping.

Oil is THE cause of Climate Change. Here is what Thomas L. Friedman wrote in the New York Times last week.
”
Here’s my bet about the future of Sunni, Shiite, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish and Israeli relations: If they don’t end their long-running conflicts, Mother Nature is going to destroy them all long before they destroy one another. Let me point out a few news items you may have missed while debating the Iran nuclear deal.
On July 31, USA Today reported that in Bandar Mahshahr, Iran, a city adjacent to the Persian Gulf, the heat index soared to 163 degrees “as a heat wave continued to bake the Middle East, already one of the hottest places on earth. ‘That was one of the most incredible temperature observations I have ever seen, and it is one of the most extreme readings ever in the world,’ AccuWeather meteorologist Anthony Sagliani said in a statement.”

If you are not familiar with the Fahrenheit gauge of temperature, 163 degrees Fahrenheit is “163 minus 32= 131 divided by 9=14.5 x 5 =72 degrees Celsius.” That is hellish hot.

Another quote from this column:

“Indeed, see Syria: Its revolution was preceded by the worst four-year drought in the country’s modern history, driving nearly a million farmers and herders off the land, into the cities where the government of Bashar al-Assad completely failed to help them, fueling the revolution.
All the people in this region are playing with fire. While they’re fighting over who is caliph, who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad from the seventh century — Sunnis or Shiites — and to whom God really gave the holy land, Mother Nature is not sitting idle. She doesn’t do politics — only physics, biology and chemistry. And if they add up the wrong way, she will take them all down.
The only “ism” that will save them is not Shiism or Islamism but “environmentalism” — understanding that there is no Shiite air or Sunni water, there is just “the commons,” their shared ecosystems, and unless they cooperate to manage and preserve them (and we all address climate change), vast eco-devastation awaits them all.”

Please note that Climate Change is behind much of the turmoil in the Middle East. No wonder millions of young people flock to Europe where a more moderate climate and accumulated riches keep society functioning to some extent. That too is going to change. Under the surface the foundation there too is crumbling. In the Middle East it is lack of water, and excessive heat. In Europe debt will do them in, as will be the case in China and Japan as well. Nothing is certain anymore.
Nihilism rules

The Latin word for ‘nothing’ is ‘nihil’. We have entered the age of ‘nihilism’. It also means that nothing works anymore. Oh yes, we have an election coming up in Canada on October 19. The present government has done Canada a lot of harm, both in the environment and in its reputation as an enlightened country. I am all for a change in government, but, given the financial and environmental situation, basically nothing will change, for the simple reason that the momentum both in finances and the atmosphere will stifle any good movements. Also the mind of the people will make it impossible to alter the course we are on. No wonder the people have become believers in Nihilism, because we are drifting in a fixed direction to destruction, and this will not change.
Look again at the article Friedman wrote, the columnist of the New York Times. The people in the Middle East have nothing to lose, because they have lost everything. At least they have some sort of religion they say they believe in (they probably cannot define it) and Climate Change is far from their minds, so they will continue to kill each other and wreck whatever is still working.

We have now entered the age of ‘nihilism’, which also applies to money as money earns ‘nihil’, nothing, in interest. Next month, September, Janet Yellen is supposed to increase the rate of money from next to nihil, next to nothing, by perhaps 0.25 percent, an increase the world deeply fears because even such a tiny raise may throw off the books of most nations.

The whole world is nervous.

Nobody knows what’s happening anymore. The only certain thing is uncertainty. Everything is worsening. Greece is fueling this uncertainty again. The weather is doing the same, with the past month, July, the hottest ever recorded. A ray of hope was given by a 90 year old man, President Carter, a sincere Christian who now fights brain cancer and speaks about it so smilingly that it reminded me of Paul saying (Philippians 1: 21) “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
Meanwhile, as far as I can see, the climate change movement is effectively dead in its tracks, and we no longer have time to make something happen before the rising spiral of climate catastrophe begins—as my readers may have noticed, that’s already well under way. From here on in, it’s probably a safe bet that anthropogenic – which means “generated by us humans -climate change will accelerate until it fulfills the prophecy of The Limits to Growth and forces the global industrial economy to its knees.

A terrible future await us

The coming crisis will be horrendous. As corrections to crises are wont to do is: they overshoot. The force of the collapse that is certainly to come will be so devastating that much of what we hold dear will be wiped out, including, of course, that monthly addition to your bank account that the Federal government is so kind to credit you each month. It won’t happen tomorrow or next week, or perhaps not even next year, but 2017 could well be the catastrophic year, right after the American Election.

A new book coming on Revelation

That will be a year after a book that I am translating on the last bible book, Revelation, dealing with “The Last of Things”, the final days of our sinful life on earth.
I chose to translate the book because I agree with its main premise, which is that, in order to reach the glorious end that the Bible teaches, the coming of the New Earth, we will have to go through what the Roman Catholics used to call ‘purgatory’.
We are heading for a profoundly humbling experience, to put it mildly. We, technological wizards, are not the demigods we supposed ourselves to be. The Lord, in order to speed up history, made us the recipients of an energy bonanza which temporarily allowed us to turn the wildest dreams into reality: in the last 100 years we fought two world wars to secure access to these energy sources, killing some 100 million people in the process. Thanks to having some 200 energy slaves at our disposal 24/7, we, for a short time, lived the life of kings.

Now this dream is ending, and the end will mean that many multiples of the 100 million killed in wars, and another 100 million killed in car and other energy related accidents, will bite the dust, by which I mean that not millions but billions will experience a cruel death in the next decades. After all how many can the world support on a sustaining basis?
The warnings are out there loud and clear, especially this past week when markets tumbled, gold soared, and the money people became very nervous.

What is the message of this week? We do well to heed the warnings that our way of life can no longer continue. We must look ahead and prepare for a much simpler life, convert to the ways of our ancestors who lived close to God and close to nature, God’s holy direct Word.
I’d wish that church communities would be open to this as they are supposed to know ‘the way of the Lord.”
Where are we going? There is not a grain of doubt in my mind that we are speeding, galloping, racing, to the end of the world as we know it. That’s why I am rushing to finalize that book. Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, MI will publish it. My work will be done in mid September. Pray that I do a worthwhile job.

AUGUST 16 2015

THE EARTH IS ANGRY

Almost every night, for a few minutes, I watch an American channel because it reports the ongoing weather disasters in the USA. And there are plenty of them this year. Last week I saw a dust storm in Arizona, floods in Colorado and New England, fires everywhere. All these happenings are now a daily occurrence.
True these unusual weather events happen in Canada too, but not to that extent. I think it has to do with Climate Change. James Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia which has an equally telling subtitle: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, has in its Preface this sentence: “We have driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up”.

Fond memories

I am old enough to remember those days when there were a mere 2 billion people in the world – compared to 7 billion plus – and the atmosphere was relatively at ease. Not so now. Worse, much worse is yet to come, but, strangely enough, we will not pay attention. Why Not?
Here is what Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, says: “Our brain is essentially a get-out-of-the-way machine. That’s why we can duck a baseball in milliseconds, but threats that unfold over generations fail to trigger our reactionary instincts…… Many environmentalists say climate change is happening too fast,” Gilbert says. “No, it’s happening too slowly. It’s not happening nearly quickly enough to get our attention.”
So don’t expect the world to change when all the governments on the earth will send delegates to Paris in November to discuss “The State of the Climate”. We will read frightening press releases, hear nations make great promises, and the war against the earth will continue, and the earth will become more angry than ever.
Last week Friday in the New York Times I saw an editorial “How California is winning the drought”. Pure hogwash. The earth is especially angry in California, a state built on sand. The Bible warns us not to build on a shifty foundation because when the storms come or drought or too many people clamoring for gold in the so-called “Golden State” then something has to give.

Here is what’s really happening: “California’s rivers and lakes are running dry, but its deep aquifers are also rapidly disappearing. The majority of the 40 million Californians are already drawing on this last reserve of water, and they are doing so with such intensity and without restriction that sometimes the ground sinks beneath their feet. The underground reservoir collapses. This in turn destabilizes bridges and damages irrigation canals and roads.
This groundwater is thousands of years old, and it is not replenishing itself. Those who hope to win the race for the last water reserves are forced to drill deeper and deeper into the ground.”

And not only California. I have a well, and fortunately it contains enough water to provide a life-long water supply for more than 10 families. But it is on an electric pump, so, in case electricity fails- and today anything is possible because the earth everywhere is angry – I have a hand pump, a frost free one, because in the winter with an ice storm, who what happens.

Consider this: “The Earth may be a blue planet when seen from space, but only 2.5% of its water is fresh. That water is wasted, polluted and poisoned and its distribution is appallingly unfair. The world’s population has almost tripled since 1950, but water consumption has increased six-fold. To make matters worse, mankind is changing the Earth’s climate with greenhouse gas emissions, which only exacerbates the injustices. When we talk about water becoming scarce, we are first and foremost referring to people who are suffering from thirst. Close to a billion people are forced to drink contaminated water, while another 2.3 billion suffer from a shortage of water. How will we manage to feed more and more people with less and less water? But people in developing countries are no longer the only ones affected by the problem. Droughts facilitate the massive wildfires in California, and they adversely affect farms in Spain.”
We can go without food for a few weeks: we need water every day, that’s why I have a hand pump, just in case.

Yes, the earth is angry. It reminds me of Isaiah 24. It says it better than I can put it:
The earth is defiled by its people
The have disobeyed the laws
Violated the statutes and
Broken the everlasting covenant.
Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
Its people must bear their guilt.
Therefore earth’s inhabitants are burned up,
And very few people are left.

No wonder that the New Testament repeats it in Romans 8: 22, where it says that: “We know that whole creation has been groaning as in pain of childbirth right up to the present time.”

These words were written thousands of years ago, confirming that soil degradation and the onset of deserts, due to overgrazing and deforestation has been going on for many, many centuries.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his The Upside of Down. Catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization, writes that the Fall of Rome now some 1550 years ago was due to “greater complexity, the empire needed more and more energy, and eventually it couldn’t find enough.”
History is repeating itself. The earth is angry, because its very essence is being consumed.

A friend sent me an article by Andre Nikiforuk, which appeared in The Tyee. The article’s title is The Earth’s Battery is running Low. The subtitle is “We’ve drained our planet’s stored energy, scientists say, with no rechargeable plug in sight.”

The article starts with the following words:
“In the quiet of summer, a couple of U.S. scientists argued in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that modern civilization has drained the Earth — an ancient battery of stored chemical energy — to a dangerous low.
“Although the battery metaphor made headlines in leading newspapers in China, India and Russia, the paper didn’t garner “much immediate attention in North America,” admits lead author John Schramski, a mechanical engineer and an ecologist.
“In the paper, Schramski and his colleagues at the University of Georgia and the University of New Mexico compared the energy state of the Earth to “the energy state of a house powered by a once-charged battery supplying all energy for lights, heating, cooling, cooking, power appliances and electronic communication.
“It took hundreds of millions of years for photosynthetic plants to trickle charge that battery. Those plants converted low quality sunlight into high-quality chemical energy stored either in living biomass (forests and plankton) or more lastingly in the dead plants and animals that became oil, gas and coal. But in just a few centuries humans and “the modern industrial-technological informational society” have spent that stored chemical energy and depleted the Earth-space battery.
“Society partly drains the battery by converting forests and grasslands into agricultural fields. It diminishes the battery further by burning fossil fuels to plow fields and build cities. Human engineering of one kind or another has left a mark on 83 per cent of the planet. In essence, humans depleted the battery to grow exponentially and spend more energy.
“As the battery discharges,” the scientists write, the cooling, heating and electronic services provided to the house “become unavailable and the house soon becomes uninhabitable.”
“The Earth is like a dying cell phone at an airport, says Schramski, but with no rechargeable plug in sight. As we burn organic chemical energy, we generate work to grow our population and economy. In the process the high-quality chemical energy is transformed into heat and lost from the planet by radiation into outer space,” explains Schramski and his colleagues.
“Oil companies, dams and solar networks can’t create energy: they can only tap in to the flow and transform it into a useful form. And in the process of transforming the fossil fuels, heat is lost into the atmosphere and eventually space. All of this energy consumption from stored biomass has left an ugly trail of carbon dioxide and methane emissions that are now creating climate chaos and acidifying oceans. According to Schramski, the stored living biomass portion of the battery represents the basis for sustaining all life on Earth and is what distinguishes us from the other planets in our solar system.

“At the time of the Roman Empire, the Earth held 1,000 billion tonnes of carbon in living biomass, which equaled about 35 zettajoules of chemical energy. Meanwhile chain welding, soil eroding and bulldozing humans have whittled the Earth’s net primary production down to 550 billion tonnes of carbon in biomass and thereby depleted the battery to 19.2 zettajoules. That’s a significant drop.
“I’m not an ardent environmentalist; my training and my scientific work are rooted in thermodynamics,” Schramski says. “These laws are absolute and incontrovertible; we have a limited amount of biomass energy available on the planet, and once it’s exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it. The paper goes on: “The Earth is in serious energetic imbalance due to human energy use. This imbalance defines our most dominant conflict with nature. It really is a conflict in the sense that the current energy imbalance, a crisis unprecedented in Earth history, is a direct consequence of technological innovation.”

So far my quote from this magazine.

In other words: we humans have monopolized the earth at the expense of animals: almost all big animals are gone. Almost all fish has disappeared. Almost all water is wasted. How long can we still last?

If these calculations of the earth’s total stored energy of 1000 billion tons of stored energy, of which we have used up 450 billion tons, that means that there are only 550 billion left. We are almost half-way, almost to the tipping point. Having arrived there, red warning lights will show up, and even more disasters will further drain the earth’s battery. As more forests burn, diminishing the capacity to absorb Green House Gases, and the burning itself adding more and more, and as methane escapes from the ever warming tundra, the pace speeds up, exponentially.

Jesus once accosted the Pharisees, in Matthew 23: 24, saying, none too politely: “You blind guides, you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.” These words were spoken just before Matthew 24, which has as its heading: Signs of the End of the Age. In that chapter Jesus says that “The Angry Earth” will be totally destroyed by you, stupid people, who strain out the smallest of the smallest animal, a gnat, or do a bit of recycling, but fly everywhere in the world for a vacation, creating tons of Green House Gases, swallowing a camel.”

We have painted ourselves in an impossible situation. We are so addicted to fossil fuel that it will kill us if we continue and also kill us when we stop using it.
Well, whatever I say or write will hardly make a difference. Prof. Gilbert discovered that our brains simply cannot fathom the fact that we are on a suicidal path. For centuries, from as far as we can remember, the human race has thrived, has grown in expertise, has become more clever than ever, so we simply look to the past and extrapolate it to the days to come. Never before have we experienced a total global collapse. Yet the Bible tells us so in unambiguous terms. Matthew 24, Jesus’ very own words, spells it out, drumbeat after drumbeat. He hammers it out again in Revelation. Actually the entire Bible confirms it. 2 Peter 3: 10 reaffirms Jesus’ words:

“But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. The heavens will disappear with a roar and the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare”.

That’s what will happen to the angry earth: it will be totally purified and from there on it will be at peace forever.

SUNDAY AUGUST 9 2015

THE TALE OF TWO CITIES

On Thursday August 6 2015, two political debates were held in North America, one in Toronto, Ontario, the other in Cleveland, Ohio. The first one featured 3 men and a woman, with a male moderator who was quite passive and befitting being Canadian, quite polite. And so were the four people. They were, of course, politicians. Nobody else does such crazy things as debating the economy, the environment and national security. I believe those were three topics.
The one woman was Elisabeth May, the leader of the Canadian Green Party a party of two members in Parliament in Ottawa. The other three were men, all professional politicians, paid by the public purse. If Ms. May is Green, Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, also there, is the opposite. He has the worst environmental record of any major country. That’s why he should be booted out.
Of course, there are lots of Green People in Canada, I am among them, but that does not mean that I vote green. It’ll be a lost vote in my rural – green by color but not by conviction – riding. My riding goes Conservative.

Harper has been the ruler of Canada for a decade and most people are sick of him, fed up is the better world. He has the following of the Christian segment of the population but he is an enemy of the environment. I am not sure how that is possible, because, according to the church This is Our Father World. But OK that is a small matter and somewhat of an inconsistency among church people who often take their cue from their American brothers and sisters, adherents to the American Religion which, says Professor Dr. Harold Bloom, goes under the label of Protestant Christianity but has ceased to be Christian.
Perhaps, no, not perhaps but most assuredly, Christianity must be redefined in terms of 21st Century standards. Common Christianity, the Pentecostal – Southern Baptist kind tends to be Gnostic, a heresy the Apostle John condemns in no uncertain terms, but being a gnostic is much easier. It preaches heaven as our destination. P. M. (stands for Prime Minister) Harper is one of those gnostic guys, and so the earth can suffer. The more it suffers, the sooner comes the RAPTURE, the pagan belief that the true believers will be fetched up – raptured – to heaven while folks like me will stay on the evil earth. Yes, Gnostics think that the earth is evil, actually is created by an evil spirit.

There also were 10 men in Cleveland, also all rapture adherents. That Trump man was among them, who only believes in himself: he is the greatest, the best and the cleverest and all the others are dim wits. It says something about the American psyche that he leads in the polls. Americans…. No I will not condemn them. There are a few good ones, but especially the Republican majority are dumb, dumb, dumb, and so these 10 professional politicians, believe it or not, in other to get their vote, they are forced to act dumb. That is what politics does to a person.
Thank goodness: Canada is different. Just imagine: in Canada a confessed Socialist leads in the polls, while that young man Trudeau– 43 years old – is the son of a famous Socialist and probably also is one. So where in the USA the word SOCIALIST is a curse word, almost as bad as being a Commie or a follower of the Taliban or the ISIS, that terrible outfit in the Middle East, in Canada we even have states – we call them provinces – with a Socialist government. Just a few months ago ALBERTA, the most Harper-ite area, went red, not red for Republican but Socialistic Red. So Harper is scared. I really pray that he will not make it.
Oh yes, that debate in Canada. Quite polite. Nobody was shot, nobody was cursed, all very Canadian. I read in the New York Times that these 10 debaters in Cleveland got quite the grilling from the three moderators, especially from the woman on the panel. Of course these questioners were not the run of the mill Republicans.

Back to Toronto.

I am at heart a Green guy, but my riding is a Harper stronghold. The sitting member is a nice fellow: promoted from the backwoods to the back benches. The MPs as we call them – meaning Member of Parliament and not Military Police – are seated in the House in order of importance. The PM and his ministers sit in the front row and so on.
Oh yes, that debate in Canada. Nothing spectacular. I will vote strategically, which means that whoever of the three Harper opposition leaders has the best chance to unseat a Harper-trained-seal gets my vote.
So do I have political convictions? Not of the secular kind. I do vote. As a Canadian by choice I have never failed to vote. In a sense I vote in protest because it has become my sincere opinion that just as the church, political parties too have become meaningless. Perhaps these words create the wrong impression. I am not an anarchist and I am not anti-Christian. I strongly believe in good government and a viable church. But it is becoming my ever firmer opinion that the problems we face as a nation and as a church can no longer be solved.
Let me start with the church, which plays an important part in my life. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall, is: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.” I believe that Bonhoeffer is right.

I better elaborate here because you may not go to church: not too many people do nowadays. I can only do this by quoting another of my favorite people, J. H. Bavinck. He says that there are two kingdoms. Politicians paint a utopia in their quest for votes. The kingdom they promise when elected is one of full employment, low or no inflation, never deflation, a great environment, and low taxes. All are mostly lies, because we now know that all this has become impossible due to our raping God’s creation.

Bonhoeffer and Bavinck point to the Utopia that is coming: God’s Kingdom. You see God created this world, and it was perfect. Somehow we listened to God’s enemy, the Evil one, who whispered in our ears that we too could be god, be like Don Trump and have it all. So we sinned against creation. Jesus, in principle, restored that creation, and, when he returns he will bring the New Kingdom. That’s ‘the end’ Bonhoeffer is talking about. That is the message for the church, to look forward to the coming of the Kingdom, the restored earth and work for that goal.
I’d wish that the church would follow Bonhoeffer’s recommendation. Then the church would suddenly become a hot item, because, finally, it would have become relevant.
And here the church – and its irrelevance – intersects with politics. Politics would suddenly gain prominence if it too would deal with reality and not simply talk about growth, job creation, and slaying deficits, none of which will happen, but sincerely work to restore creation.
Well, let me tell you: all is not well. We are entering the final phase of Western civilization, and it ain’t going to be pretty. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall is, and I repeat: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.”

In this the church fails miserably. What must be done today is to prepare for the time – and it can come soon – when Climate Change will either fry us out, because of lack of water and dangers of fires, or drown us out. The hundreds of thousands of refugees from Africa and Asia, seeking some sort of livable life in Europe are proof that large sections of the earth – which God called good after each phase, and did so seven times when it was completed – are now so bad that dust storm take people’s breath away, literally. We better get used to extremes, also in politics, also in crime, also in all fields, because degradation of the environment and of people’s psyche goes hand in hand.

But in these debates, neither in Canada nor in the USA, anybody even hinted at them. All I heard were platitudes, downright lies, such as boasting that jobs can be created. How? By going into more debt? By spending more on infrastructure? Ah, Japan did that, paving roads to nowhere. China did that, building millions of apartments, complete cities with shopping centers, where nobody lives, six lane highways with not one vehicle on them. Lots of jobs were created, and now, now what? Debts, Debts, Debts, were the result. The only trouble with debt is that it has to be repaid. Either by the lender, who goes broke if it is not paid, or by the borrower, who might declare bankruptcy. So in the end everybody suffers and is worse off.

You want an answer to the malaise everywhere? So is my other favorite theologian, J. H. Bavinck.
Here is a direct quote of his book Between the Beginning and the End: a Radical Kingdom Vision. In his conclusion of the chapter on The Kingdom, he writes: The human kingdom is a utopia, an idealistic impossibility, something that is and is not, something that arises but cannot last. Building the Tower of Babel fails every time it is attempted. Over against all these kingdoms God makes his own kingdom come. These human kingdoms resist God’s plan with every fiber of their being; they act like demons in their fuming rage against God’s intention.

So what is God’s Kingdom?

God’s kingdom includes the sea and the plants, the mountains and the valleys, all that that was and is and is to come – all of it, all of creation, incorporated in a great and mighty whole. God’s Kingdom is the place where all things are in their rightful position and where everything can fulfill its function and work toward its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God – all in harmonious veneration.
That is what Bonhoeffer refers to when he writes that the church must witness to that end. Here the church fails miserably. Yet all signs are there that we are running to the end, hell over heels, is the expression I believe. Do we hear that when we listen to the tales these politicians spin in the two cities? Have we heard them say that this world now is full of our junk and empty of what was there originally, when God created it and all was good?
We are blind and our politicians and our church leaders fail to show us the way. Of the ten in Cleveland nothing even remotely related to this was heard. Of the four in Toronto, a few words of caution were uttered, but also hardly anything relevant.

Believe me soon we will be in for a rough ride. Deflation is the worst of all economic perils. It is on the way, with miraculous China heading the pack. We live in a finite world, where the doctrine of Infinite Growth is the Devil’s Holy Grail. He knows he is defeated, and like a true fanatic, he is redoubling his efforts, and our politicians in all cities are his eager executives.

The tale of two cities is not really about Cleveland and Toronto, about Republicans and Democrats, about Harper and his opposition. They all are on the one side, are all in the same camp, in the camp of Babylon.
The real tale of two cities involves the two cities named in the Bible: Babylon, the bastion of the Evil one, where Cleveland and Toronto find their home and The New Jerusalem, representing God’s Kingdom to come.
Make your choice.

AUGUST 2 2015

OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, REALISM

Some people don’t like my columns because they find them pessimistic. Especially mothers with children fall into that category because the future I paint is one of threatening scenarios, so they close their eyes and minds to the inevitable bad times the entire world population is facing, especially children and young adults.
Also many others who shares my views on Climate Change, just cannot bring themselves to admit that there really is no cure for Global Warming, and disagree with me that planetary conditions will only deteriorate because of my conviction that human nature will never change, (We are born and conceived in sin, and therefore children of wrath!). I sincerely believe that even if we try (and we must) the capitalistic society has made it impossible to significantly moderate our energy-saturated society.
Preachers like Joel Osteen preach optimism. His motto is “You can be rich too”, just like Mr. and Mrs. Osteen. They bought a disused football stadium in Texas somewhere and preach the gospel of Prosperity, a heresy if there ever was one. With a regular attendance of some 15,000 people, their weekly take, assuming each drop $20 on the plate, is $300,000. The Osteens probably get a good percentage of that. Politicians exactly do the same: always promising growth. Ever heard a politician mention a future of bad times? Yet last year a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll revealed that 76 percent of Americans did not feel confident that ‘life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.’ This is 10 percentage points worse than the poll had ever recorded. Yes, 3 out of 4 Americans are in a down mood. Almost all of them, if they miss one paycheck, have trouble paying their bills.
Last week the New York Times had an Op Ed article entitled We Need Optimists. That is the last thing we need. We Don’t Need More Optimists: unchecked positive thinking simply is dangerous: unbridled optimism is just another way to ignore real issues, which are Climate Change, uncertain future for many, debts till they die and beyond.

I headed this column with three words: pessimism, optimism, realism.

Which one do I prefer? As a society we don’t have a whole lot of patience for realists because our politics, our newspapers, our visual and audio outlets are dominated by people who tell us what we want to hear.
So what do we want to hear?
People are very insecure. Many of the jobs are subject to outsourcing, either going abroad or to mechanical slaves, such as robots. Driving trucks has become a major source of employment, yet driver-less cars and trucks are now a distinct possibility. We now see entire factories without human bodies. No wonder people feel insecure. A.I. Artificial Intelligence poses a danger to brain jobs too. So we crave security, even though religion, the only real source of security, is scorned.
When I landed in Canada with $200 in my pocket, there were lots of job opportunities. Strangely last week I had a dream. I had finished my schooling and did not know what to do next. In my dream I was totally at a loss what my next step would be, yet in my 64 years in Canada – I landed in New York on July 4 1951 and entered Canada in Fort Erie on the way, by train, to Strathroy – I never have been a day out of work. Yet I still had that scary dream. Somewhere in the past I must have suppressed these feelings of insecurity.

Today is different.

I think society has totally lost its way. Nothing is what it seems. Now that we in Canada officially have an election in October, it will rain promises. Already where I live our own tax dollars are liberally disbursed to buy votes. For a few months optimism will be in the air. No politician will mention that trade pacts will eliminate jobs at home and create polluting jobs in India and Vietnam and China. No politician will mention that China is going down, fast. There they overbuilt, over-borrowed, over-polluted, went overboard on the stock market, used the savings of their extended families in the hope of an easy buck. Chinese are notorious gamblers, and this time the gamble will not pay off. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, all mineral exporting countries, will also be the victims of these high-stake gambles, involving some 64 million unoccupied dwellings, unused bridges to nowhere, airports, harbors, all vacant. That sort of optimism is back-firing in spades. We also will be its victims.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of an excellent book on the perils of optimism, Bright-Sided, looks at its dangers. She mentions the Iraq fiasco, how that war was sold on optimistic premises, one of them being that invading Iraq would be a cakewalk, that it would be over in a few weeks, would cost a few million, and within a year would start paying a dividend. Now a few trillion dollars later, the mess there has become unsolvable: American optimism at work! She mentions the book claiming that the Dow would reach 36,000! Where is it now, 20 years later? Not even half- way and declining. Housing prices could never go down! Optimism was not only patriotic but was also a Christian virtue, or so we learned from the proliferating preachers of the “prosperity gospel,” whose God wants to “prosper” you. In 2006, the runaway bestseller “The Secret” promised that you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, simply by using your mental powers to “attract” it. The poor listened to upbeat preachers and took out subprime mortgages.
One of the interesting things Ehrenreich describes in “Bright-Sided,” which is subtitled “How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” is the origins of American optimism. While we typically assume that optimism and the U.S.A. have walked hand in hand from the beginning, the country was founded by Puritans, and it remained Calvinist — with its emphasis on depravity and sin — well into the 19th century. American optimism – Reagan comes to mind – was necessary to pull away from all of that, but the happy talk became a commodity, and was co-opted by the corporate culture and adopted by the election machine to brainwash an increasingly suspicious electorate.

Another look at China

Today China is an excellent example of optimism gone haywire. The Chinese economy is bloated with monumental mal investments and stupendous excesses—–the likes of which have never previously been visited upon a modern industrial economy. Someday soon reality will rush in causing a crash that will resound even in my back yard.
Chinese companies have expanded their debts from $2 trillion to $28 trillion in just 14 years. This will lead to a thundering deflationary collapse.
Stated differently, profits there have already nearly vanished in upstream sectors like coal, steel, aluminum and cement. They are now eroding in shipbuilding, construction equipment, solar equipment, and other capital goods; and will soon be falling in overbuilt consumer industries, especially, automobiles, as well. Like Japan in the mid-1990s, China is heading for an era of profitless deflation as its credit binge comes to an end. The meme of the day—–that China doesn’t have so many gamblers—-is hilarious. From stem to stern, China’s version of red capitalism has evolved into the greatest gambling den in history. The whole thing is a giant farce. It is worth repeating: more than 60 million empty high rise apartments, ghost cities and malls, endless strings of bridges, highways and airports to nowhere. China used more cement in three years than the US did during the entire 20th century.
What does the Bible say about this?

What is needed is a balanced and moderate approach, neither dwelling on the downsides nor a forced jumping for joy: we need a sober, hard-headed realism about our accomplishments and failings, not empty cheer-leading, guided by the Bible.
The Bible is a pretty realistic book. We sing “This is my Father’s World” and that was true and will be true again, but that is not true today. Ownership has, for the time being, been transferred to God`s great enemy. In Revelation 12 it related that there was a war in heaven, (verse 7) and Satan was thrown out of there, and he landed feet first right here on earth. 1 John 5: 19 spells this out quite clearly: We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the Evil one. You can’t pick and choose in the Bible. You either accept it all, or none. That`s why Jesus said that We are not of this world. By that he means that we do not belong to the world where Satan dominates. Jesus repeatedly says that The Prince of this world will be driven out, (John 12: 31) clearly indicating that Satan, not Christ is in charge at this moment.

That is realistic talk. That is not beating around the bush. We better get used to it that at this precise moment not Jesus, not God, not the Christian community, but the Evil one calls the shots. That`s why there is at this point of history no ground whatsoever for claiming that all is well. It is not. All is not well. Satan rules this world. Not believing this is denying the biblical truth, is denying that Christ`s sacrifice was an necessary act: it was necessary precisely because Satan rules the roost here. But also the Bible is quite clear that his ruling the world will come to an end, his rule will have an expiry date. However before that happens, before he is also thrown out of the earth, just as he was thrown out of heaven after a fierce fight, and landed right here in your and my backyard, from here too he will not be go without a cruel struggle, which will affect us all, through tremendous terrors. We may sing Jesus Reigns with hands and arms up in the air but the evidence is entirely to the contrary: Satan still reigns here and now, and is all around us.
Fact is that we are on the way to the ultimate disasters, and, as the Bible tells us without a blush in Matthew 24 `many false prophets will appear and deceive many people`, there will be great distress, but God in his grace will cut short the end times, will return before we all perish.
That is the realistic picture. The pessimists see no hope at all. They have lost the biblical promises and see only a future of increasing hardship, higher pollution, more fraud and abuse, more natural disasters, more heat and drought, more floods and famine. The optimists, most of the church people included, deny that Satan calls the tune, deny that he rules the world for the time being, and believe that somehow all will turn out well. Today even the best church, if there is such a thing as the best church, usually misses the crucial emphasis on `the coming of the Kingdom` the approach of the New Creation when Christ will be All and in All.
Until that time the church – almost all of them – will continue to conform to the world. When I was a small child, more than a few decades ago, there was something like a separate culture for the church people, legalistic as it was, such as strict Sunday observance and abstaining from worldly amusements. That separateness was also evident in schooling, dress code and other facets of life. Today there is none of that. By and large the only way Christians are different from the `world` is that they attend a church service for an hour on Sunday. At least the Amish are consistent. At least some ultra-orthodox Jews are different. At least the Muslim people are recognizable. By and large, not the church people, including me, I am sorry to say.

I am a realist. Not an optimist in the worldly sense, but an optimist in the Biblical sense because I live in the hope, the constant hope of Christ`s return to set everything straight and forever ban Satan, the Evil one from the earth.

JULY 26 2015

MY CROCK POT, GREECE AND EUROPE

I am a man of regular habits, and that makes life easier. Every evening, when I do the dishes – we don’t have a mechanical dishwasher, just a human one (me) – I also clean the crock pot of our slow cooker, always being careful not to bang it or, worse, drop it, because replacement are impossible to find.
Each evening I fill it with a cup of organic rolled oats, and when I go to bed, promptly at 10 p.m. I scoop in 3 ½ cup of water, plug it in and in the morning 2 smooth meals of oatmeal porridge are ready. Nothing is simpler.
The slow cooker itself is more than 30 years old. Our youngest daughter used it in university and somehow I inherited it. It only has one speed, actually no speeds at all: no knobs, nothing to set, so also nothing that can go wrong. Oh, the old time simplicity!
When the old insert broke, I had to buy a complete new cooker, but that new thing did not work very well, so I inserted the removable pot in the 30 year old machine and now, despite my ever so careful handling, there is a large vertical crack, now also joined by a smaller horizontal one, about three-quarters of the way down.
These cracks somehow remind me of Greece, the vertical split, and Europe the horizontal one. It won’t be long or Greece will split from Europe, and go back to its former national currency: the drachma. And after that it won’t be long before the Euro goes as well, to be split again into marks and guilders and francs. The two cracks point that out, even though my reasoning may sound cracked as well. What is sure is that before too long my cracked crock pot too has an irreparable break, and will become garbage.

When Greece or Finland or Portugal or Spain – all countries with unsustainable debts – go alone, they can regulate their own financial affairs and not be subjected to draconian austerity, imposed by Germany, the only country who has benefited from the Euro, the common currency for 18 countries in Europe. “Das Herren Volk has certainly thrown its weight around in this affair, where nobody came out a winner.

So, why the Euro?

The introduction of the Euro was based on the vision of “sustainable growth” and “social inclusion”. Both these concepts have been written into every European treaty from Rome to Maastricht. Nice-sounding words, and both totally meaningless today. “Sustainable growth’ is an oxymoron, is a contradiction in terms, because any growth is unsustainable for the simple reason that the earth is finite. “Social inclusion’ is totally negated by Germany’s cruel treatment of Greece.
In 1998 or thereabouts the new currency was introduced, aptly called the Euro. Basically it was a political decision. The 20th Century had seen two devastating wars and, so it was thought, more political cooperation, especially in the financial world, would prevent another disastrous war. And, yes, 70 years later no military conflict has taken place. The new currency has benefitted especially Germany which is the leading economy in Europe. Thanks to the Euro all participating countries had access to cheap money. Greece really wanted some of that and, thanks to some clever book keeping, it was admitted to the club, where one of the rules was that national budget deficits could not exceed 3 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. But rules are there to be broken, and they did, with the consequence that deficits soared. Deficit is a nice word for debt. Today debt is the great enemy of stability.
Debt is only manageable when economies grow. If the debt carries 2 percent in interest, and the growth is 2.5 percent, then debt can be carried. If the debt carries 2.5 percent in interest and the growth is 2 percent or less, then we have troubles. Today we have troubles, big troubles, because the growth is much lower than the cost of money. Actually in many ways we have deflation in raw materials, in oil prices, in minerals, but inflation in food products, thanks to weather related events, mostly. People may pay a little less for gasoline, but all food products are shooting up. Soon Janet Yellen, the woman at the top of the money-mountain in Washington wants to increase the cost of money, and that will really screw up matters.

Back to Greece.

Greece is really being screwed. Basically Greece is no longer an independent state. Europe has imposed such cruel economic measures there that comparisons have been drawn to the Treaty of Versailles, which set Europe on the path to Nazism after the end of World War I. But the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which ended a small country’s brave experiment in policy independence, is almost as good an analogy. In crushing Czechoslovakia, the invasion also destroyed the Soviet Union’s reputation, shattering the illusions that many sympathetic observers still harbored. It thus set the stage for the final collapse of Communism, first among the parties of Western Europe and then in the USSR itself. Today Europe’s reputation is in shatters.
To many Greeks, the debt the country has amassed is the evil fruit of austerity policies, imposed from the outside that asphyxiated its economy and trampled on its sovereignty. Today that debt is more than 310 billion euros, or almost $(US)339 billion, make that more than $400 billion (Can). Basically there is no way that Greece can pay its debts. It needs to have a substantial amount of it forgiven, but Germany, Greece’s largest single creditor, says that Greece’s debts are a sacrosanct commitment that must be paid as a matter of law and of principle, forgetting that in 1948 Germany was forgiven many more billions.
The current stalemate
So for the time being, we have a stalemate which sooner or later will be broken. Greece cannot pay its debts. Germany does not want to lose the $200 billion lent to Greece. A big reason for the stalemate is the nature of Greek debt. In many previous international negotiations — including those over money owed by Latin American countries during the region’s debt crisis in the 1980s and the €107 billion in debt that Greece got written off in 2012 — the creditors were mostly foreign banks and other investors. In this case, though, the Greek government’s debt is held mostly by other governments. So tampering with this debt is impossible without approval from lawmakers in Germany and other countries, and any losses would be borne by taxpayers in those nations. Nearly 60 percent of Greece’s debt is held by fellow euro-zone countries, which gave Greece a second bailout in 2012 and are now preparing to throw it a third lifeline worth a further €86 billion. Germany’s contribution to the two initial bailouts was more than €50 billion, making Berlin the biggest contributor.
But some experts believe that once German contributions to the European Central Bank and to other lenders are taken into account, Berlin is on the hook in Greece for upward of €100 billion.

Small is beautiful

Oh, I wish that politicians were wise and let go of their megalomania. “Megalos’ is the Greek word for ‘big’ and ‘mania I don’t have to explain: we all have a touch of it. Politicians want power: the bigger the stakes, the better they like it. That’s how the Euro-zone came into being. The saying goes, Think locally, act globally, or is it the under way around. Never mind. My thinking is ‘think locally, act locally’.
“Small is beautiful.” That’s the title of a book written by German-born, English educated economist by the name of E. F. Schumacher. It was written in 1973 and immediately become a best-seller. The sub-title is Economics as if People mattered.
The title says a lot about the book and the subtitle even more. The European Union has imposed measures upon the Greek people with total disregard of the population there. The Euro goes directly against the notion that “Small is Beautiful.” To the politicians, abolishing the German Mark, the French franc, the Dutch guilder, all good currencies in their own right, now all superseded by the one Euro, signify that Big, not small, is Beautiful.
The book advocates that human beings remain close to the nurturing land in both fact and spirit. Of course today we see rapid world-wide depletion of the world’s resources and the corresponding destruction of the environment: even the sharks in the seas are angry at people.
Much of what Schumacher predicted has come to pass: we now see every day how traditional economics is bringing the world to the edge of ruin. My wife recalls how in the late 1930’s her father, a minister, was extremely afraid that Hitler would start a war and overrun Europe. People in the know sensed the approaching danger, which proved justified when war broke out in 1939. Johan Huizinga, a well-known Dutch Historian in the Dirty Thirties wrote a book with the telling title: In the Shadows of Tomorrow (In de schaduwen van morgen) where he too expressed fearfulness.

Today we again live “In the Shadows of Tomorrow” the unavoidable cataclysm that is to come, and will ruin everything we hold dear.
By failing to heed Schumacher’s advice that “Small is beautiful” we have built a society entirely on debt. That immense debt, thanks to ultra-cheap money, those untold trillions, created out of nothing, sheer computer generated, with nothing to back it up, has caused China to use in one decade more cement than the entire world used in the 20th Century. Now China stopped growing leaving overcapacity in oil, in coal, in iron ore, in manufacturing capacity, all of which will have such a backlash in the years to come that, rather than inflation – which wipes out debt – we will experience deflation which enhance debt and make it much more difficult to come to terms with the trillions of dollars governments, corporations, and people owe to banks. Deflation means lower prices but also lower profits and less tax income and more unemployment. It means depression, means banks going belly up and hunger and hardship. All this means that within a few years, perhaps sooner, the entire world economy will crack up, just as my crock pot, just as Greece and just as the Euro.
What should we do?

Schumacher is correct: small is beautiful. In the book by that name he writes: “Next to the family, it is work and the relationships established by work that are the true foundations of society. If these foundations are unsound, how could society be sound? And if society is sick, how could it fail to be a danger to peace?” Today meaningful work is quickly going the same way as viable families. Also we are in a global war against creation, a war where everybody is a loser.
There is indeed a satanic element in our contest with creation. All of us, Christians, non-Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, we all, without exceptions, are allies with the Evil one, the Satan who hates God and who, from the very beginning, has as his sole aim to destroy creation. Take China: the Chinese central government is building a city which will have 150 million inhabitants, with no provisions for schools or for parks because those are the responsibility of the local councils.
Schumacher writes that the upper limit for a city is about 500,000, the size of Hamilton, Ontario. Go bigger and problems multiply, so much evident in traffic congestion, and human degradation, in unaffordable rent, in factory food. Give me a place in the country any time.
What was the norm during the depression and the 1940-45 War will become necessary again. I mean the growing of food, where a “Small (garden) is Beautiful”. Most of the year we are privileged to eat from our small, 2,000 square feet – about 200 m2 – garden where much of our food is grown. With rolled oats porridge in the morning prepared in my crockpot, the main meal at noon –usually totally home grown – and little or nothing in the evening, a slice of bread perhaps, a few nuts, we stay healthy. In the summer I spent only a few hours in the week to look after the garden. Just as everything else, it takes a bit of discipline. Nowadays with raised gardens, even on a small city plot much can be grown. Try it.

And buy a crock pot, even though they crack sometimes.