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.
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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.