Forget Global Warming – What About Global Madness?

Forget Global Warming – What About Global Madness?

Throughout history, human life has been dominated by misery.  Wars, famines, plagues and natural catastrophes were rampant, not to mention tyrannies that were cruel and oppressive.  Life was brutal and short.

A few candles lit the darkness.  For those of us fortunate enough to have been born in the Americas and Europe during the twentieth century, it may be difficult to understand what life is (and was) like for those born far from the candles.

My maternal grandmother was born in East Europe in the 1880s, was orphaned in her infancy, and raised by relatives.  She bore seven children, the first four of whom all died at very early ages.  She then immigrated to the US, where disease broke out on her ship and killed most of the passengers.  The ship was quarantined in New York Harbor until no one had died for a couple of weeks, and then the survivors were allowed ashore.  A year or so later, the 1918 influenza epidemic overwhelmed the same city, so severely that there were corpses lying in the streets.  Twenty million died worldwide, more than in the war which ravaged the same generation.

My other grandmother had a less tragic life, but by today’s standards, one of hardship.  To the day she died, she cooked on a wood burning stove, pumped water from the back porch, and used an outhouse.  Living on a farm, the Depression years did not cause them hunger, but she rarely had cash.  I remember the jar of Indian Head pennies she had hoarded.

We have it easy.  After a recent storm I was without electricity for two days.  Trust me, you never know how central electric power is to your life until you have to do without it for more than a day.  We dared not open the refrigerator door.  Nightfall brought virtual blindness.  The summer heat and humidity were stifling.  The inability to watch TV and to make telephone calls were frustrating, even maddening.

Yet this was in the USA, and however uncomfortable those two days were, we had confidence.  The lights would come on again, and life would return to what we so casually call, normal.

Much of the world is not like that.  Not only is the summer heat stifling in most impoverished regions, but that is the least of the worries of many people.  Death is a constant specter, looming darkly just outside the front door at every moment.  It may come in the form of disease, crime, or war.  Tyrannies deprive people of their freedom and dignity, and smother them in constant fear, anxiety and frustration.  For those people, there is no promise that tomorrow the lights will come on.  The candles are very far away indeed.

In watching the news about ISIS, one is reminded of the rampaging hordes of barbarians that throughout history periodically swept across Europe, orphaning large portions of the population, leaving ruin and desolation in their wake.  Vikings, Huns and Mongols, to mention only a few, devastated what are today gleaming cities and centers of culture, but which in those times were wooden villages where farmers struggled daily to eke out a living from the dirt.

Today, we witness the same thing happening in the Middle East.  Unlike in days of yore, the tragedies are painfully visible to anyone who cares to watch the news on television or the internet.

Shockingly, many do not.  They live in their tiny little world of physical pleasures, absorbed in sports, entertainment and the night life.

One wonders.  What will those people think when terror comes into their own neighborhoods?  Yes, we do have high crime areas, but those are due more to ignorance than to foreign invaders.  The uneducated in America suffer not from a lack of schools and libraries, but from a cultural disease that values physical pleasure more than the dignity of work.

Nine-eleven (2001) woke us up for a day.  The Boston bombing disturbed our slumber for another day.  Now and then we are shaken, roused from our sleep.  Then we get back to what we call normal.

Fear normal, because normal is mass slaughter.  To paraphrase British Foriegn Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, 3 August 1914 on the eve of World War One:  when the candles are snuffed out again, they might not be relit in our lifetime.  It’s not paranoia when they really and truly do plan to kill you. 

I visualize an entire American city incinerated, while the adjacent city carries on, oblivious that it is next on the list.

Forget global warming, it is global madness that will do us in.

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/9/27/forget-global-warming-what-about-global-madness.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forged in Faith

We can, and should, separate church from state, but we can no more separate faith in God from public policy than we can separate rights from the Constitution.

The inception of the United States of America is rooted in two opposing philosophies. One of them is the Greek tradition of democracy and reason; the other is the Hebrew tradition of faith and discipline. Or, one might ask, are they really opposed?

These two philosophies somehow fused during the years that saw Christianity rise from an obscure cult of Jews into a major world religion. During that time and later, the Greek idea of democracy gradually took ever firmer hold in Europe, which alongside Christianity, began its thousand year journey toward parliamentary democracy.

This unnoticed revolution took hundreds of years to work its way into the psyche of western thinkers. The pinnacle of that revolution was the founding of the United States.

While many secularists deny that America was founded as a Christian nation, the evidence is just too overwhelming to draw any other rational conclusion. Yes, many of the Founders were Deists, not Christians, but all of them were so well versed in the Bible that their writings are saturated with references to the God of Abraham. The Judeo-Christian influence on their thinking was a dominant factor in the formation of our country. Not one of their statements of principle comes from any other major religious tradition.

Despite the fusion of the Greek and Hebrew worldviews, despite their being joined in the formation of the idea that, “all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,” despite all that, the two worldviews never quite completed their merger. They remained quietly at odds with each other for centuries during a period of truce.

That truce is over. America is once again separating, philosophically speaking, into two warring factions.

One of them is the familiar Christian faith, along with its Jewish root, the belief in a creator God who intervenes in the lives of individuals and nations, and who reveals to us what is morally right, and what is morally depraved.

The other is the secular worldview, which combines atheism and naturalist-materialism.  This worldview holds that there is no credible evidence of God, and therefore no reason to believe in what it calls the myths of Christianity. That view avers that nature is all that there is, and that nature is composed only of material governed by mathematical rules.

Such worldviews have consequences.  One of the consequences of the Christian worldview is that all humans are regarded as specially created by God for a divine purpose, and are therefore to be treasured in their own right, not at the whim of an earthly ruler.

 The consequences of secularism are much darker. While one of the tenets of secularism is that, “Man is the measure of all things,” natural-materialism considers humans to be nothing more than a happenstance by-product of natural processes. If we are considered to be nothing more than chemical processes, doomed to oblivion in an uncaring universe, then that cannot help but shape social policy, one that instead of being humanist, is inhumane.

That dark effect has not yet reached its nadir, but only because the old moral traditions are still deeply embedded in our culture. They will not disappear overnight.  But with time, the Biblical underpinnings of our culture will continue to erode. Legalized abortion is only one visible effect. It has already redefined what it is to be human, defining it downward.  We have seen only the beginning of its tragic descent.

As American society turns further away from God, so it will also turn further away from human rights, from liberty and freedom, and toward tyranny.

The monstrous tyrannies of the mid twentieth century serve as dire warnings. Communism and fascism massacred untolled numbers in Europe, and the imperialism of a false god (emperor) murdered millions in Asia . All were based in a world view that considered individual humans to have no sovereignty, no inherent rights of their own. People were deemed to be simply tools of the state, to be sent to their deaths by the millions, in the pursuit of evil purposes.

Faith is not, of course, a political tool. We do not embrace it for political purposes. That, indeed, would be contrary to what faith in God really is.

Instead, faith is embedded in our human nature. Birds fly, fish swim, and humans worship God. We freely choose to accept faith or to reject it. In doing so, we also choose the consequences, which are either humanity or inhumanity.

Faith is not contrary to reason. True, we can no more reason our way to faith than we can count by ones to infinity. In both cases, we get there all at once. Faith gives context to reason. It affirms that our lives have a plan, a purpose and a meaning far beyond merely the biological. Our deeds have eternal consequence.

Apart from faith, nothing makes sense.  Apart from faith, there is no plan, no purpose, no meaning.

Natural materialism strays so far from reason as to even deny that free will exists. Free will makes us into independent, sovereign entities, capable of choosing other than as nature would dictate. Therefore, natural materialism falls apart as soon as it accepts that free will is our nature. Free will cannot be the product of a cold, uncaring universe; it can only be the gift of God creating us in His own image and likeness.

Faith will not destroy reason but uphold it. Faith will not conquer democracy, but give it meaning.

There should be no war between reason and faith, but those who have rejected faith are drawing the battle lines. History is about to repeat itself, but the future is ours.

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/9/23/forged-in-faith.html

Socialism – The World’s Most Intractable Addiction

An alcoholic employee was called into the boss’s office and was given an ultimatum.  It went something like this. 

You are a valued employee, and because of that, you have been given numerous chances to correct your deficiencies.  Yet you continue to come in late for work, or some days, not at all.  You continue to miss important deadlines.  When you meet the deadlines, your work is either incomplete, or contains numerous errors. Other employees have tried to cover for you, but it only detracts from their own work performance.  Therefore, no further concessions will be made to you, and no more excuses will be accepted.  This is it.  Either take control of your life and perform according to standards, or else, turn in your keys in return for your final paycheck.  Which will it be?

The above story is probably true, many times over, but I have fictionalized several elements of it.  First, the reality is that instead of an employee, the real story involves a country. Second, instead of alcoholism, the reality is socialist economics.

The country is Argentina, but many other countries fit the description.
Argentina Bets on Price Controls

Argentina is on the brink of collapse. 
I wrote about this recently in The Bold Pursuit, "Yet Another Socialist Paradise is Collapsing."

Instead of the technical details, this time I wish to focus, as I did in the fictional account of the alcoholic, on the psychology of addiction, not addiction to a drug, but to ideological beliefs that have been consistently and repeatedly shown to be false, and worse than false, catastrophic.

Socialism as an economic and political system is inexplicably addictive.  One can understand its initial appeal, because that appeal is simplistic, easily reduced to mindless slogans. Socialism addresses the scourge of poverty by saying simply, give money to the poor people. It addresses the problem of high prices by commanding sellers to lower their prices.  And when all the socialist remedies only dig the hole deeper, the last ditch resorts include raising taxes, confiscating wealth from those who produce it, and entrenching a class of voters who will never make the short-term sacrifices that are necessary for their long-term benefit.

Socialism has even more appeal when it is contrasted to our present economic system, the one we mistakenly call capitalism, but which is more properly referred to as “crony capitalism.”  A better term for that system might be, feudalism.  In any case, the present system as practiced is a twisted perversion of the free market system.  Compared to it, socialism starts to look good to those who are stuck on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

While socialism’s initial appeal might be understandable, what is not excusable is the persistent failure to recognize that socialism is not the easy way out of economic injustice, but is rather a fatal dependency on remedies that do not work.  Compared to truly free markets, socialism is a disaster.  Would that there were a truly free market to prove this.  Free markets have, alas, all but become extinct, and what now passes for capitalism is in reality a close cousin of socialism, even in the United States.

Is there a remedy?

It is no longer possible to simply do away with the century (and more) of clutter that has destroyed free markets, and to replace that clutter with the few basic principles that allow anyone—literally anyone—to have free and unfettered access to the marketplace.  Those principles include truly representative government, anti-trust laws, anti-fraud laws, and property rights.

The entrenched social powers are so firmly in control of our economic system that—and this is quite literal—a child can no longer start and operate a sidewalk lemonade stand in the US. In order to do so, the child would have to hire a consultant to navigate the government regulations, the legal hurdles, and competition from lemonade producers who can crush any hint of competition.  In other words, to sell ten cents worth of lemonade, a ten-year-old child would have to have about ten thousand dollars in startup financing.  Think of it as the 10-10-10 rule. 

The problem extends upward from there, to many thousands of good business ideas that are never given a chance to succeed.

This inability to create new businesses without large investments up front would have, according to the founder of hardware giant Home Depot, prevented his corporation from ever having gained a foothold in the marketplace.

Make no mistake, large corporations, although many of them benefited from free markets when they were first begun, now oppose the very idea.  Partnering with big government, big corporations lobby for ever more oppressive regulation of business, knowing that that will stifle competition.

In doing so, they have persuaded millions of welfare recipients to settle for a life of indolence and hopelessness that is poisoning our society from within.

The real tragedy of this is that there are places in the world where there is a remedy. Argentina is a prime example.  When a social and economic system is in the early stage of collapse, the prospect for reform rises dramatically, as people become desperate to find a solution to their problems.  This brief window of opportunity has opened in Argentina.

Unfortunately, the window is all too often closed by those who instead of free markets, impose the harsh hand of raw power.  This seems to be happening in Argentina and elsewhere.  Instead of more freedom, people tend to seek less of it, in the form of dictatorships.

The outlook is bleak.  Nation after nation, addicted to spending, taxation and overregulation is killing the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg.  Revolutions are inevitable.  Social collapse will follow, as will wars and rumors of war.

Still, even this outlook is not entirely bleak. There was a revolution in 1776 that, centuries later, still points the way to justice and prosperity.

We need a reset button.

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/9/8/socialism-the-worlds-most-intractable-addiction.html

Tha Bankers War

The more I read history, the more I realize that we see only the tip of the ice berg, and not even that much.

I recall reading about a man who travels the US, asking permission to explore old barns.  In them, he finds farming tools, finds the same kinds in almost every old barn, so they must have been very common, but nobody today knows what they were used for. 

The lesson is that in only a very few years, historical facts that were widely known to one generation, are completely forgotten by the next.

History is not so much recorded as it is reconstructed, often from personal letters stashed in an attic for lifetimes.

The ancient Roman city of Herculaneum was all but unknown until the mid-1800s when a well digger fell into it by accident.  This was a large city buried by the same volcano that destroyed the more famous city of Pompeii, yet Herculaneum disappeared from history.

One of the most disturbing facts of hidden history I learned concerns how World War One got started, and how America got into it despite President Woodrow Wilson's vow to stay out of it.

A more accurate name for that war might be The Bankers War.  US bankers loaned so much money to Britain and France that when it appeared that Germany was about to win, the bankers ran in panic to Wilson and got a bailout, not just in money, but in American blood, simply to recover their ill advised investment.

All sides in that war were grievously at fault, and the war need never have begun, and could easily have been ended early on.

This was why in 1941, only a very small proportion of Americans wanted anything to do with fighting Hitler.  Few people believed he was any threat to the US, and Americans were distrustful after having been lied to in 1917 and sent to war needlessly.  Hitler was, of course, vastly more evil than was the relatively harmless Kaiser of WW1.

Fast forward to today.  We do not see more than a tiny portion of what is going on in current events.  We have the broad outlines of a corrupt federal government, reeking of scandal, blatantly violating the Constitution, accumulating vast amounts of power, including technologies we can only imagine.

What we do not see is the dark forces at work behind the scenes, the dirty deals, the false propaganda, the assassinations and murders, and more than enough to make a James Bond spy novel seem like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

We are the pawns in a vast game beyond our understanding.  The kings and queens of this chess game casually send thousands of people needlessly to their deaths without so much as a pang of conscience.

This is why I rarely listen to politicians.  I trust very few of them.

--Robert
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Seven Days in September – Will They Finally Do It ?

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/9/2/seven-days-in-september-will-they-finally-do-it.html

Over the past few years, I have posted several commentaries referring to the fictional political thriller titled, Seven Days in May. That novel (and movie) is about an attempted coup d'état in the White House – by high ranking national security officials – who believe that the policies of the (fictional) president are gravely imperiling the nation.

The coup fails and the moral of the story is that law, by the Constitution, rules America and that there is never any justification for substituting force for the ballot box.

Obama's presidency has not only been marked by violations of the law, but perhaps worse in the eyes of highly-placed policy officials, marked by ineptitude and failure. Generals and intelligence chiefs might very well (I am sorry to say) tolerate trashing the Constitution to achieve results they view as pragmatic. What they likely will not tolerate is failure. When failure becomes fiasco, they will become concerned. When it shows signs of becoming catastrophe, they might risk their own careers and take desperate action, if not to save the republic, then at least to save themselves.

Judging from recent interviews and public statements by such officials, they have not yet become concerned, but they certainly seem to have sat bolt upright and taken notice, as grim reality sets in. Their public statements might be viewed as simple lack of coordination between speech writers, but they also might indicate shots across the bow, so to speak, subtle warnings to the president to shape up.

While presidential dereliction of duty is plain to see in the news reports, there are likely much more serious derelictions going on behind the scenes. Surely, security and military officials must have more than once commented to each other—albeit in carefully phrased, deniable words—that they are disappointed that the president has consistently dismissed their advice, only to see the world stage become more dangerous as a result. They must resent being repeatedly blamed by Obama for his own failures. They must know far more than we know, exactly what the failures of the administration have been. I suspect it goes far beyond the “I don’t have a strategy,” category, and far into the “I don’t have a clue,” classification.

Beyond a doubt – Barack Obama has, for some time, now posed a clear and present danger to the Republic. It is the duty of government to respond decisively to such threats. His golf outings and fund raisers are more than mere matters of appearance and embarrassment. They demonstrate conclusively that the pilot does not have his hand on the controls, but instead is outsourcing his policy decisions to radical ideologues who share Obama’s left wing world view. They are almost literally trying to “community-organize” the world, but the world is not cooperating. On the contrary, international disorder is beginning to run riot as the looters (dictators and terrorists) discover that no one is on duty to stop them.

Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini is said to have been tolerated by his public despite his oppressive policies, because as the legend goes, he kept the trains running on time. Obama could not even manage to keep Obamacare running on time, and it remains a fiasco today, with worse yet to come.

Obama’s foreign policy failures have cost American blood, strengthened our enemies, weakened our alliances, and made the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Throughout it all, he has never admitted error except in the most self-serving terms.

My personal perception (and I have no inside knowledge, of course) is that there is a segment of the national security apparatus that may soon become concerned, even alarmed. My fear is that when they finally take action, it will not end well.

The final chapter is yet to be written.