Reality: Not the Same for Everybody

I was thinking, I should start with the idea that Reality is created. It didn't just happen. Perhaps it always has existed.  The Big Bang was 15 billion years ago. That's a long time but we regularly count things into the Trillions.  The US deficit is $20 Trillion. Twenty Trillion years is a pretty small part of the infinite Past.  We could have had thousands of sterile and uninteresting and unconscious Big Bangs producing nothing but heat, light, space, and hot rocks.  So there has just always been stuff and it re-combines forever.  This particular combination may therefore not be that memorable or important.  We like to think Reality is a Truth that includes us but a materialist could argue--it's just another day of Universal irrelevance.

So we could say that matter, in time, generates "consciousness".  But what if we said that consciousness creates time and matter?  Everything just is--eternally present and we experience in consciousness a small part of it. When I was young I could not picture being dead except as an eternal sleep so considered that "awakeness" was the only thing and I would necessarily be re-incarnated as some other consciousness when I died.  Kind of a Buddha idea, approaching Nirvana.  Kind of a Hindu idea--endless cycles.  In Western philosophy, Nietzsche and the eternal recurrence--a perhaps similar idea.  In short nothing is happening if something's not aware of it.  The tree falling in the forest problem of creating "sound".  If there were a spaceman on a hot rock in the 3rd re-iteration of the Big Bang forty trillion years ago then the rock would exist, but if there were no spaceman--sorry folks, the rock is not there.  It is an imaginary rock.

I have what I think is my real life but I have imaginary lives too.  I think about lives I could live and so in a sense, do.  I could activate them but I am apparently comfortable not doing so.  Now actually I have had interesting dreams in which I am still myself but in vastly different circumstances.  Upon awakening I realize I acted and thought similarly but was in a sense a different person.  I have had several dreams in which the character I seem to be in the dream re-joins experiences he has had in other dreams.  So I am in an apartment in Paris interacting with dream friends (upon awakening realize they are not people I actually know) and I leave and meet someone on the stairs going out who I only vaguely know.  Where do I know him?  Oh, I remember, I met him in another dream from several weeks, months, years ago when we were taking a sailing class together.  In a kind of generic place at the beach with a porch that looked kind of like the view from Wolf's Bay Restaurant in Orange Beach, ALA. that I recognized when I woke up.  My immediate sense upon waking was that the "dream me" continued on down the stairs in Paris and was continuing my "other" life until I rejoined it when I fell asleep again and re-connected--so to speak.

So you can't not be conscious.  It's an ur-condition.

Now here it might get a tiny bit weird.  I am me and having a pretty good time but when I don't wake up anymore(die) I become some other consciousness--maybe you, maybe your dreams.  I just "flow" elsewhere and experience something else, eternally.  There's not anything else.  There's just this.  Having only this we should make our lives better for all the people(consciousnesses) who will have to live it.  And what others suffer, so shall we.

Heaven.  Doesn't it feel like a ludicrous idea?  Everything you know and think about is incredibly small and unimportant in the grander scheme because there is actually another more important place--10x-100x more important and better than here where you will know why you had to put up with what happened to you here.  Here--our Reality--is a dream and we wake up to God.  I'm not saying it's impossible.  In fact it sounds nice but it tends to devalue and minimize our pathetic little lives.  Oh right, that's human sinfulness and I have just made the Christian case for acknowledging God's otherworldly greatness.  But do you need the Jesus Christ bridge or can you just do your best?

I have never really wanted to go to China because I had such a great trip there in a dream.  It has been my most luminous and intense dream.  I awoke at 6:00AM  and fell back asleep.  I then took a several week trip to China by boat--leaving from Birmingham.  I had been searching for my grandmother's house and arrived in a bad part of town that I had not been in before.  There was a dock, and a cruise ship, so I got on and we left for China.  I had a stateroom and explored the ship, playing in the casino-eating well, playing shuffleboard and standing at the bow like Titanic sniffing the sea.  It took several days to get to China by boat and then I toured Shangai, Beijing, and the Great Wall.  I looked over the terra cotta soldiers in an immense trench and toured a dental school where they showed how they trained students using older dental equipment.  I observed the pedo clinic with little Chinese children who were nervous about their dental appointments but they had a nice playroom for them where they were all watching Lion King.  The various departments were connected by outside stairs that you had to go out among the trees and I had to stay in a dorm room with bunk beds instead of a hotel. We took trains to our various tourist sites.  The tour directors spoke excellent English and I wondered whether I had taken a pill that made me hear proper English when they were in fact speaking Chinese.  Everyone was just too friendly.  I could not find my way back to the boat to come home so awoke with a start because it might have left me and I saw that it was 6:20AM and I felt I had been gone a very relaxing 10+ days.  There were a number of people in the dream I did not know in real life but felt as if I had met them sometime.  They seemed to be from other dreams.  Perhaps if I had been diligent about recording all I could remember about earlier dreams, I could make a connection but you have to realize that the immensity of detail I would have to write down after this dream would have been impossible.  It's like multiplying a 20 minute story into 2 weeks.  Could I have remembered upon waking what cards I took at blackjack or what foods I ate in the restaurant?  It was all intensely present and slowly dissolving as I remembered it.  Like any experience.

Listening to other people's dreams is usually boring.  Having electric dreams is NOT boring. My dreams are typically engaging and seem to be a normal reality for most of it and then there is usually a turn to something dark and foreboding that begins to wake me up. Perhaps, I am walking and I see a tiger far away hunting a gazelle but I realize the tiger could possibly see me, then he does see me!  I know I am easier to catch than a gazelle so the tiger begins to move toward me. I turn to run and I am slow like molasses.  Quick. Wake up. I have not experienced being eaten by a tiger... I hope there is nothing prophetic about these dreams.  I was hit one time by a wrecking ball exploring a house and know I got all the way to big thud and flying through the air but I merely startled awake.

So, is there a Creator? If you have to ask and don't know then you cannot be told.  Whose word would you take?  Could you have a vote among your friends?  What about a sample of random strangers--kind of like asking the audience in Who Wants to be a Millionaire?.  So I am telling you this, there is a Creator.  I imagine he wants all his "children" to be great human beings.  He wants his tigers to be good tigers and killer whales to be the best and mosquitoes to do what they do and he/she  is just very interested in what happens.  That's what gives everything meaning.  Without a Creator I think we have a meaning and destiny problem.  If we are responsible--not God, there is no justice.  If God exists but does not judge we are merely irrelevant thinking rocks populating the universe.  if God judges, there is another (higher) God reality.  Can you pick the kind of world you want to live in?  Yes.  That's the charm of being fallen creatures.  I may have said enough about God.

I have to show you Reality before you will do your part.  That's why I am talking all the time.  Talking, talking, talking--there's Reality right there pointing, writing, so if I shut up will you listen?
Reality is not the same for Everybody but oh how we struggle to make it so.....

A Short Bio

You will excuse me, I hope, of living a life of liberal bias.  It’s a free country. Or so they say.  I am a liberal though I prefer to say ‘progressive’ because I am more attentive to how what is happening now informs the future rather than being overly concerned with the past.  As they say, it’s just a goodbye.

I am not a complete idiot so I would like to talk about my liberalism.  I came by it honestly.  I went to a Quaker school while Vietnam was a hot war and I was attentive to my duty but concerned that the fighting was wrong.  I thought to protest was the patriotic thing.  Now who was I to dispute the grand marshals of American exceptionalism;  Rostow, McNamara, and Bundy?  Weren’t they Kennedy’s “brain trust”?    I thought America was too militaristic and needed to quit throwing its weight around.  I was for a 50% reduction in DOD expenditures even when the Soviets were a “threat”. (Read Seymour Melman.)  Of course, I could see the danger of nuclear war but the Soviets had a country no one wanted to live in and would do much to escape if they could.  They did not seem to be much competition for how to organize a grand and glorious State.  They seemed in fact pretty shabby.  So even in the turbulent late 1970’s, America was the place to be.  Conditions were in flux and it seemed time to get busy on a future that included all 4 billion people on the planet.

 In my mind America needed to address the essential contradictions of capitalism, the problem of “externalities”, the problem of valuing the resources we all are dependent on, and then of course planning for energy and resource limits.  How were we going to include the developing nations in the project of civilization?  It did not seem right to argue for 3% growth for us and 5-7% for them which would enable them to “catch” us in 150 years.  Actually it did not make sense to “grow” forever.  A little sustainability was in order.  These concerns appeared in books like Limits to Growth or Small is Beautiful. These issues had been brought to common awareness on the first Earth Day and now we were working through them politically. The 70’s were turbulent. Capitalism was consciously selfish.  The inattentive and poor were being victimized. They thought the system cared about justice and fairness.  Yes, it was gloriously productive BUT it had big failures.  The hippies pointed it out but were unable (and unwilling) to actually follow through on difficult almost revolutionary change. Young people’s criticism was unfocused, lazy, and selfish. They wanted a so-called Clinton “third way” that would not require too much of a sacrifice. 

  I was in to hope and change before it became fashionable.  Genial Reagan aggravated my worldview because he was ancient history, unable to understand the present, much less the future.  He was the pretender of the greatest generation—an actor not a thinker. And he was senile! He was stuck on the whole American exceptionalism thing and unable to comprehend that the rest of the world HAD a world view.  In short, it was all about US, and our glorious future was just a riff on our world saving past.   It was the feel good politics of the stupid—we were facing all these modern, critical issues and he was trying to return to the 50’s.  Who would speak for the necessary organization of the future?  So our country was misdirected in the 80’s from the recognized problems of the 70’s and forced to try a return to Mayberry  while building the biggest f***** army on the planet.  We had  neighbors that were reluctant to listen to us so we took a stick to Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama and let everyone know the Monroe Doctrine now applied to the whole world once Russia took a powder.  WE were the end of history.  Now that we were the sole superpower it was time to shuck the Miss Congeniality shtik  and get the whole world shaped up to our satisfaction.     As you may know it was libertarian Karl Hess(speechwriter for Barry Goldwater) who advanced the pithy idea that liberals think everybody else is stupid and conservatives think everybody else is lazy.  Ok guilty.  It only makes sense to work hard at something that has a prayer of working.  We are deep deep into stupidity at this point. 

So OUR biggest idea for the last 20 years has been “show me the money”.  We learned to just make it up and then promptly forgot it’s supposed to be a measure of value, not permission to pillage.  Value!  What an outmoded concept!   It’s OK, we thought,  everyone has money now instead of lives of value.  But the rich desired to be Icarus and fly not only up to the sun but to the other suns called stars and they needed everybody else’s  money to do that.  So they demoted them to Marx’s Industrial Reserve Army and piled up the money so they could escape Earth’s gravitational field and enjoy the incredible lightness of being.  How are we going to get these yoyo’s back to planet earth?  They have their international trust funds and multiple international houses with private jets and are planning on helicoptering from gated community to tiny personal island and back whenever necessary while the middle class pack mules try and find out where the feeding stations are when the whole edifice collapses.
 

COLLAPSE!

Who brought this subject up?  Was it Jared Diamond in 2004 with his best selling book after the successful Guns, Germs, and Steel?  Probably.  Since then, as in circa September 2007, I have been a reluctant (because I am earnest optimist) believer that systemic failure was at least possible. By dint of some ameliorative action we could  have politically addressed some of the consequences of that unhappy fate but to some degree we have known the future would not be an unalloyed success.  Progress was not going to be for everybody.  It was not a completely zero sum game, events were too complicated for that, but in a real sense, the overpopulated resource constrained world was starting to play musical chairs for keeps. We watched the World Trade Center Towers fall and felt it was possible that the whole modernity project could sputter and fail like a high performance car that had not been properly maintained.  So around 2005 it seemed the Zeitgeist had found its new metamorphosis and there sprang into the developing internet blogosphere the peak resource, peak oil, and financial system destruction acolytes.

     They have all been around at least 10 years maintaining that the collapse of civilization and the world financial system is happening--soon. Just around the corner.  Once you get into this sub-culture you wonder how prevalent the thinking is.  In my everyday life as a dentist in a southern defense industry town, I note that very few of my neighbors,  friends, extended acquaintances and even my family for that matter are particularly worried about the collapse of western civilization.  I detect no worry that the Big Short redux could claim their bank account or that the electricity grid could sputter and just go out.  The idea of no oil in gas stations seems farfetched. They don't worry about nuclear storage issues at our local TVA reactor.  Obviously Rome was a Western civilization that collapsed some 1800 years ago but the concern that it is our "turn" to collapse is never mentioned in polite company.  It's true that we Alabamians are a little slow to recognize and adopt the new, new thing.  We have a certain protective religious conservatism that is not in a hurry to change.  We are so-called "late adopters".

    In truth I have a pretty big bone to pick with my fellow southerners as they have been foolish supporters of policies that have only further emasculated, enslaved, and undermined what they say they hold dear.  They have been big time warmongers, demonstrating their US patriotism by supporting a plethora of military interventions both unhelpful and unnecessary.  Southerners don't mind fighting and prefer to demonstrate their patriotism by being willing to support the cause of freedom.  Whether it actually creates any freedom is an uncomfortable question.  I don't really detect any angst or chagrin about the results of our "good intentions" in Afghanistan or Iraq. Perhaps they thought the wogs deserved it.   Now personally I think they have been played the fool--sending our young and marginally employed to wars and police actions of dubious merit but they are proud of this sacrifice and don't want to hear it impugned.  As payback they kind of expect to be left alone to go to church and watch NASCAR.  They don't like being told they have to hire the transgendered, put illegal Mexican children in their schools, and rehabilitate criminals.

   And my town has benefited mightily from the wars abroad.  My representative thinks it's the greatest thing ever to cut the rest of the federal budget to give the DOD more money to "keep us safe".  More drones, more helicopters, more missiles--good.  More jobs.  I must confess that it has supported my business, teeth need fixing and having good insurance helps those employed to get treatment.  So if you talk to my mayor he will highlight how we recently have located a Polaris ATV manufacturing facility and a Remington gun plant here.  More good jobs.  Things are coming up roses here.  I have even heard that the Arsenal is planning to bring the FBI training facility here that would consist of 2,000-4,000 new jobs.  War and security are making us rich.  In truth we have other high tech businesses like NASA, Adtran, Intergraph,  and Hudson Alpha genomic research.   Where is the collapse in all this good news?

     They say that pride goeth before a fall and I suppose that we are proud of the concatenation of circumstances that has put us in the modern catbird seat.  Ten years ago my office was downtown surrounded by Housing Authority low cost apartments but they have all been razed--new apartments renting for $1200/month are going up downtown with new restaurants and the like.  Young people are moving in.  How do they afford these rents?  I have no idea.  The restaurants are packed.  Everybody has money it seems.  Where does it come from?  The government? Parents? I can't tell you the number of military retirees that settle here because we have a commissary and a veterans hospital.  I played in a charity golf tourney that raised $25,000 and when I parked I couldn't believe all the new SUV's with disabled vet plates or stickers on their windshield detailing their branch of service.  What I am suggesting is that the idea of collapse is just so obviously wrong for those of us situated in Fortunes good graces.

     But I am a collapsnik and as such I look for a useful role to play.  I do not see the prepper, doomer,  and survivalist world view as being anything a society would consciously aim for.  It goes for individualization when what is needed are societal solutions. Personal planning could obviously be a necessary mitigation strategy but they are not plans that foster community.  The national political catfight actually confuses the issues that most localities need to be addressing.  How does one both think and act locally while the news is everything that is happening somewhere else? It is irrelevant and meant to distract.

    I like to talk probabilities.  I read Ted Koppel's book Lights Out last year and he pegged the likelihood of grid failure in the next 10years at 50%.  What do you think?  Is it 1%, 10%, 50%, or virtually certain?  Grid failure is a catastrophic civilizational collapse in short order.  Without power, modernity is just not possible.  A one week in house camping experience would be a salutary reminder of how electric dependent we are but a 2 month power outage is close to inconceivable.  And the chances of it are 50%?  I can tell you that my utility company is more than certain that it has emergency plans in place that would prevent that possibility.  I guess, if it happens, we will get an apology by mail or an announcement on the radio.    I am not too worried about terrorists, they are a certainty but quite localized.  Nuclear accidents like Chernobyl or Fukashima or even a military mistake are always a concern. We have been lucky.  I realize we have enemies but the blowback from attacking us would be apocalyptic.   Another gas crisis is possible.   We stood in line in 1973 but it strikes me that given all our wasteful consumption, we could easily drop demand by 25% with a painful price increase.  People with gas want to sell it for other things and unless international trade stops, gas would likely be available at some price.

    But it is the financial system that collapsniks are sure will fail first.  Money is currently imaginary and illusory so when it disappears all of the signs of prosperity will vanish.  How likely is another financial crisis?  I have heard the mainstream experts say we have stabilized the system.  In 2007, I thought the chance of system wide financial failure in 10 years was close to 90%.  I am coming up on being very wrong (or just early).  Should I change my mind?  Debts are unpayable, climate is changing, resources are diminishing, populations are increasing and migrating, pollution is increasing, growth is slowing to a crawl. Why don't we just call our permanent recession - sustainability?  Is healthcare going to be fixed?  Are pensions going to be payable?  Indeed! And No and no.  At some point we will all be left with what we have.  So ask yourself,  what do you have?  If the bank owns your home and doesn't like your re-payment efforts, the house is not yours to live in.  It might be gifted to you because the banks are insolvent and can't collect but I do not think I would count on a gift mansion.  I would PAY for one house and finance to the hilt an investment house that would pay off if debts were forgiven.  It should be a "good" investment, not a hope and a prayer.  That would be called an albatross.

    So what happens if you own your house but all your neighbors have big mortgages and lose their homes in a financial crisis?  You are likely to get new neighbors.  Neighborhoods should become self aware of their financial vulnerability by creating an index of independence--how close a given set of houses is to being paid for.  If you like and can work with your neighbors, then your group can face crisis a lot better than you as an individual.

   Many people consider suburbs ugly and dysfunctional.  Not so fast!  They often have a good population density.  A little land for home economy activities and enough people for protection.  Apartments in a big city strike me as being vulnerable and lonely rural outposts have weaknesses.  You have to go so far to get stuff.  If you don't NEED anything, fine, but I have not met the home repair project that doesn't require a trip to the hardware store.  My house is not really set up to live in without power.  And I am not talking about the TV and internet.  Refrigeration and Heating/AC are a big deal.  We have about 4 months of comfortable living in our climate with no central air but I do not have a solar array that could run a 4-ton heat pump.  I could heat a room or two with a fireplace insert but if all 1,000 of my neighbors were doing it, our neighborhood would look like the Sahara desert in 3 years and we would  die of smoke inhalation before then.

    Financial crisis is likely sometime but what sorts of impacts will it have?  Will you have a job?  Will there be products in the store, like food?  Can you get money out of the bank, how much?  I prefer to assume that the impacts will be on our future buying power rather than have stores without food, gas stations without gas, and banks without cash.  A financial crisis will chew up the future value of money but leave the present limping along in coping mode.  Civilization won’t just stop.  But I can’t be sure about that so I’ll keep going to work until something changes….

Grandma Suffragette and Temperance Warrior

"I'm 3 times 6, 4 times 7, 28 and 11".  That is how old my grandmother always was.  Every time I asked her.   She was impossibly old when I was in grammar school and she was a terror at Scrabble.  If you played and didn't get to 350 points, it did not count, even if you won.  She was born in 1889 and was 6  months older than her husband which bothered her so much she didn't want anyone to know how old she actually was.  That was what my Dad said when I asked why she always answered with that silly riddle. She was a pre-WWI temperance warrior and suffragette.  If women could just get the vote they would abolish access to demon rum and reclaim their families. She had determined that foolish men drank away their pitiful pay at the end of the week and women had to make do with what was left.  She wanted power to change things.  When I was young, my parents had a New Years party with neighborhood friends.  I remember my grandmother showing up at our house unannounced and walking through the revelers in the living room taking the drinks out of everyone's hands and pouring them down the sink.  Drinking was wrong and it was not done on her watch.  She voted in 1919 and never missed an election.  She was a big fan of the "idealistic" Wilson despite his Presbyterianism and her conservative Southern Methodism.  She loved Roosevelt (and his wife).  My father turned into a Republican and despised him, convinced he ruined America.

    My grandmother remembered life in rural Alabama when there were no cars or planes.  She remembered NYC before WWI.  She was a so called yellow dog Democrat and loved Jimmy Carter.   Reagan was an actor and not a serious person. She took me on a trip in 1956 and we flew on a DC-3, just like the movie Casablanca.  You got on the plane and walked uphill to your seat.  She had 3 children:  the oldest son was her best and brightest-the lawyer-a major at Iowa Jima, her daughter the concert pianist, the most talented.  My father was the youngest, little fat Stanley.  He of course developed deep reserves of drive, ambition, and personality.

My father was just like Arnold Palmer.  Dad died at 80 and Arnold only recently passed away but when I see a picture of Arnold Palmer and read the obituary, it feels as if my father died again.  My father loved golf and people.  He did periodontal surgery on thousands of people and I can report that I have practiced for 30 years on his patients and not one says anything but that they miss him.  For him to enter a room was to brighten it, to leave it, left it emptier.  They are all dead now:  Dad, Grandma, even my Mother who should have her own monument in front of the courthouse instead of a Civil War soldier. She was a tireless volunteer on every Board in our little town.  But a soldier's early death is more poignant than a lifetime of service. I am a many generations Southerner.

I have come to talk about 9-11.  Let me tell you what I remember because I did not experience it watching TV.  I had NPR radio on in my office.  I started seeing patients at 8:00A (9:00AM ET) and heard a small plane had hit the twin towers.  Shortly thereafter a passenger plane was said to have plowed into the other tower.  They were both burning.  I was very busy and the radio was just background, planes-terrorism-everybody in shock--yada,yada--I had teeth to save.  At 10:30 a tower fell.  Shortly thereafter the other one. I reflected on 50,000 New York deaths.  I felt a malevolent Evil had shockingly arisen.  I had the general feeling that approx 25,000 worked in each tower and I pictured them both falling erratically on surrounding skycrapers. After lunch I got a call from a parent whose daughter was on my soccer team, was the game this afternoon cancelled?  I was the coach of the U10 Purple Dragons.  I said of course not.  I loved coaching soccer and whatever problems were going on were in New York City and Washington, DC.  Why would we change a kid soccer game in Alabama?  An hour later I was contacted by the League Administrator to say all games were cancelled. I considered that decision a mistake. But the idea that there were people who hated America so much that they would plan to kill innocent people was unbelievable to me.  I had worked in foreign affairs 20 years before and hosted people in my home from all over the world for 15 years and could not understand where the hate was coming from. We had just had 4 Palestinians from the Gaza strip stay at our house and we listened to their stories.  They disliked Israel and our support for their settlement policy but they were sympathetic to our loss.  I knew we had a CIA dirty tricks department screwing around in other people's country but I thought the serious people controlled them. I thought the overall effort of America was to help all these countries.  Perhaps we were no longer loved and admired?  Maybe we were culpable because we had not politically reined in our MIC? 
    Driving home I knew everything I thought I knew about America had changed.  I picked up my oldest son from daycare, he was 11.  I drove him around aimlessly muttering to myself that there must be something we could do.  There was something that needed doing,  something that had to be understood, what was it?  Everything was completely the same--and completely different.  It was a giant pause.  Whither America?

I don't know how many Americans are conspiracy theorists about 9-11. I want to say 25% know they don't have the full story and have reached for  an explanation that is more substantial. I just don't have a good feel for how many hard core false flag enthusiasts there are.   If you ask people what they really think about 9/11, they look at you quizzically, they really haven't thought about it.  The official story just is.  Not exactly believable but not exactly worth shouting about publicly and ruining your reputation. Well,   I have seen the WTC-7 videos and reflected on the Truth about this event. And I remain suspicious but unwilling to accuse the government of crimes against its own people. If I had to accept there was an our own government neo-con plot to take down 5 Middle East countries that were opposed to Israel and they created an event to rally Americans for action in the Mid-East, I would be forced to become a revolutionary.  I know my government lied about Vietnam.  I know it has lied about many international interventions from Iran to Guatemala to Panama to Chile. It has lied about spying on me.  It lies to do what it wants but how could the government itself be malignantly treasonous without numerous people speaking up?  It does not seem as if our dysfunctional government could pull off that level of secrecy.

 I saw the video of the fall of the towers and WTC-7 when I got home that night.  I heard a recorded report by the BBC about WTC-7 before it actually fell which the news mentioned but did not go into again and likewise I saw Silverstein on tape in the afternoon say the building was so badly damaged that it would have to be "pulled".  Since it had already happened I thought it puzzling that you could consider bringing a building down at 3:00pm and then have it fall at 5:00pm.  That is quick work. How is it possible that in the midst of all that destruction, somebody sticks some dynamite sticks on support columns and a couple of hours later, BOOM, there goes a 47 story building in its own footprint?  I thought demolition was more complicated than that. But that is not what was said to have happened.  It fell due to office fires that on film never looked that bad. It had an obvious damaged corner and would have logically fallen over in that direction.  But it didn't.   It was only later that night that I saw the film of the falling  Towers.  I had imagined wrong--they came straight down and did not tip like I thought.  I imagined the middle buckling and the top tipping over and the weight dragging the whole thing over. Wrong. It appeared to be 'blowing up'.  I watched the pancaking with wonder.  I did not even realize that most people had evacuated and only the fireman were going UP the stairs when it collapsed.  When I heard that "only" 3,000 people had died I was surprised.  I expected 10x as many.

I do not know what to do with the standard story.  I know that Bush I and II are connected to the Saudi's and have been for a long time.  Saudi "investors" bailed out Bush the younger in the mid 80's from some poor oil investments. So the administration went to a lot of trouble to deflect blame from that country and its representatives in the US.  The hijackers were Saudi but we protected the diplomats from that country and gave them safe passage home without asking them much about what they knew and when they knew it. We certainly didn't incarcerate them all and waterboard them.  The Saudi ambassador was not jailed but flown home.  We were told the hijackers had nothing to do with the government of Saudi Arabia and I accepted the truth of that.  Now I find that less than credible.

And then we intervened in Afghanistan and attacked Iraq.  Why did we do this?  I imagined that we would send some helicopter gun ships to Kabul, chase down Osama bin Laden, kill him or bring him home and be done with the whole Afghanistan operation in a week.  Whoa!  That was obviously not the plan, we are still there 15 years later.  We attacked Iraq too!  I listened to some flimsy rationales about weapons of mass destruction from Colin Powell and the Administration but the knowledgeable UN observer,  Scott Ritter, who was a US marine, said the evidence was simply not credible. But war is the health of the State.  I find it difficult to believe that most Congressional representatives support Israel by taking money from its supporters and are paid to stay silent about facts they may be aware of that do not support the received wisdom about 9-11.  Surely someone would spill the beans.

But the facts are these:  Both towers sag or drop slightly at the floor where the airliners hit.  Then they start collapsing from the top by "blowing up".  Why would they blow up at the very top?  I can understand pancaking after 5-7 stories have collapsed but each floors support would have to be taken out as the above weight collapsed on it.  It would be somewhat jerky until the weight of the above floors was massively greater than the supports and then it might appear to be blowing up and the speed of descent close to free fall.  Do the towers fall at free fall or slightly slower?  I understand WTC-7 actually falls at free fall speed.  That is obviously a problem for the official explanation of  what occurred.  The official report says they did not check for explosives because they did not expect them to be there.  Does this make sense?

I am still skeptical of the demolition narrative because someone would have had to pre-plan the destruction while counting on a bunch of Arabs to do what the FBI had uncovered they were planning as cover for the real story.  Two FBI field offices reported to DC headquarters in July that Muslim terrorist suspects were taking airliner flying lessons in two different locations around the USA.  They were obviously on the radar as suspects but the warnings were apparently ignored.  And don't you need miles of synchronized wiring and explosives to take down a building? and wouldn't flying a plane into that choreographed demolition make it more difficult to plan on the demolition actually working?  I would be interested in a demolition story.  How technically it could be done.  To simulate it collapsing on its own would not be the same as blowing out all the supports on the lower floors--that would be obvious.  Blowing the supports from the top down might be interrupted by the destruction of the airliners on the lower floors.  And if it was wired for demolition how many floors would need explosives?   Wouldn't interviewing the people who worked on all the floors notice some unusual activity during the previous months?  I haven't heard any reports or claims about that.  But what if it was done at night?  A night clean up crew might have some stories about that or not.  Has there ever been a nano-thermite building demolition?  How would it work?

  The controlled demolition story seems like overkill to me if in fact the al-Quaeda plotters are going to be "allowed" to accomplish their plan.  Just a few deaths from the airliners and in the building itself would be enough to suggest the horrific possibilities that could have occurred. ( Recall the basement bombing some 9 years earlier). You would not need to destroy the buildings unless there was some other reason to destroy WTC-7 besides going to war in the Mid-East.  Were planners going for a twofer?  Destroy the evidence for implicating (or convicting) some big criminals like Enron, Global Crossing and their government supporters?  I believe the prosecution records for numerous security fraud cases were housed in WTC-7.  The New York Fed was located there, maybe picking up some gold in the basement of the Fed Reserve vault would be useful?

America is unsettled like I am unsettled because there is a vague suspicion that much of what we are told is untrue.  Media is used to shape a narrative and support policies that support American empire.
You will not find me dwelling on Truther sites but I have a very uneasy feeling about our own government's complicity in the actual events of September 11, 2001.

So I ask myself, What would make the official story completely believable so I could rest easy that the government is working not just for American advantage but also for a better world that recognizes the POV of all contending countries? That it acts on principles that can be stated to its citizens?  After all, they are acting in our name.  

I have become sympathetic to the plight of 1930s Germans as their country and its enlightened history was bent to evil ends......

E-money Re-visited

I am sorry to again flog this nifty new idea that all money belongs in banks where it can be watched and controlled.  I don't like the implications. After earning it, it is OUR money. Money is supposed to be a kind of civilizing "tool" that can serve it's 3 functions.  We use it as a basic unit of account, a standard.  It is also a currency - medium of exchange but finally a store of value.  It is possible to define money so as to do each of these jobs more precisely or less rigorously.  It is supposed to optimize all 3 but if its exchange function is promoted over its store of value function then perhaps those dependent upon it for "savings", are losers.  Such is in fact the case.  Savers are being savaged.  There was a time when money was something external to human definition.  It was not an agreed upon ideal but an archetypal "thing"-Real.  That concept of money being Real is under attack. As only a number in an account it is a permission in a relationship, not a thing.

E-money is designed to accentuate the idea of "currency" and phase out the idea of "store of value".
Once you have determined who gets to create money and who has to use it then saving can be "managed"  An entity that can limitlessly create new money does not need to worry about "saving".  Our government has unfortunately worked itself into that condition.  It has so much old   debt that even being able to create new money out of new debt is not enough to pay all its responsibilities.  Hence, a new solution:  electronic money.

E-money has to be held in banks and is therefore vulnerable to negative interest rates.  Negative interest rates are nothing more than a fee for holding currency.  Money that is held or saved is taxed at a rate to encourage its expenditure.  Earned money then CANNOT be saved, it must be invested which is subject to risk.  When you receive money and negative interest rates are in effect, you have to buy something with your money.  If not, it "decays".  Taxes or transactional costs can be imposed on all electronic expenditures and this can encourage or discourage various activities.  Money becomes a tool for governmental control.

When we conceptualize this NEW monetary system we see that the formerly prudent, are losers.  What they have loaned or accumulated is gradually undermined by negative interest rates and positive inflation.  Consider 12 years of -6% interest rates and +6% inflation.  An income of $100,000 is only worth 1/4 as much. Savers are ruined. The point of all this is of course maintaining the power to create money.  This benefits a small minority close to the source of the money creation and is a cost to everybody else.  If you accept that the government can create whatever amount of money it needs for whatever reason (soldier in distant lands or provide everyone a basic income) then taxes are just an insult because they are not necessary.  No one needs to pay taxes if the government can create whatever money it needs.

So we are actually moving to a new monetary system.  We formerly had a gold system that was slowly changed from 1933-1971 to a "dollar" system based on Treasury debt.  Now we owe too much so the system needs to change again.  We could go back to a more honest gold system but that would undermine the current elites.  It would also provide a LOT less money.  If we reduce the amount of money--a lot less economic activity is possible.  That could be considered a good thing for an over-stressed environment.  Years of monetizing our natural world has actually made us poorer though we continue to consider turning forests into lumber and fish into cat food-economic improvement or a measured increase in GNP.

So I think that is the real issue.  Our monetary system needs to help us value our natural patrimony of air, water, and soil accurately.  We cannot let a drive for more money kill the natural environment.  We can make up whatever symbols we want to of success but if the fundamental source of our wealth is destroyed then we will be lost as well.

The Decline of Western Civilization

In a book called the Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler he suggests 1914 was the beginning of the decline of western civilization. I feel more comfortable pegging the start of decline when the World Trade Center towers fell.  Progress was not a sure thing till then but it still seemed as if good decisions could ameliorate decline. So  it's not the end of history it's just the end of industrial/technological expansion.  Spengler's insight is that cultures have a natural life span, like people, and these  phases almost organically follow one another just as youth, adolescence, maturity, and senescence have a chronological order.  One stage follows the next.  

So when did the idea that Western Civilization (industrial society) was going to “collapse” first occur to me? It was in discussing Guns, Germs, and Steel with my Dad at our weekly lunches, thinking about how cultures become ossified and hard to change, realizing ours was one huge interlocking worldwide complexity and subject to many vulnerabilities.   Diamond's next book was Collapse!  So it was 2003-2004.  Growing up I assumed that things would continue getting better because they had always done so.  It was a bright and happy view of the future for a young person.   I make no Cassandra like claims that “I knew failure of civilization was inevitable” but I can report that in thinking about a socially productive career in the early 70’s,  I stumbled on Lester Brown’s article on the Coming World Food Crisis in Foreign Policy Magazine and was grabbed by the idea of an international policy career. A helping career.  A "social justice warrior (SJW)" career.   The article introduced me to Malthus for the first time.  Now Malthus had been a known quantity for a long time and his predictions of future mass starvation due to geometric population increase were made in the 1790’s. They have not come true.  We have only gotten richer, more comfortable and well fed. Conditions have changed however; the wilderness we inherited is gone to parking lots, factories, and suburbs. Our natural ecosystem has been substantially degraded in the last 50 years and environmental pollution has made the planet a lot less bio-diverse. Our air, water, oceans, forests are not as healthy as they were 100 years ago.  When I was born there were less than 3 billion people in the world and when I started my professional public policy career in 1975 there were not yet 4 billion.  Today we have 7 billion.  I sought to improve the condition of the world's poorest billion people through targeted development assistance but today there are more hungry people, despite all our growth and development efforts, than there were then. There is more war and more refugees.  We have demonstrably failed thus far at creating a roughly equitable and sustainable world.  Since it is not “sustainable”, it will decline, degenerate, or “collapse”.  All the same process just a difference in rate of change.
     The essential recognition then was that the USA used 25% of the world's resources and yet was only 5% of the world's population.  Fortune had put us in a sweet spot and if we were truly interested in justice-then WE would be getting a lot poorer in the pursuit of an equality that included all the world's people. I didn't think America wanted to face that Reality and my quick calculation in 1979 was that world p/c income was approximately $2,000 or 10x less than our p/c income of $20,000.  "Development" that aspired to bring the world's poor up to our standards with trade and aid were doomed to fail.  We needed another model that focused on environmental stewardship and economic sustainability.

      The oil crisis of 1973 was a wake-up call that our US economy was dependent upon ever more oil consumption.  Peak oil production for the USA was in 1972.  Alaskan oil has allowed us to cushion the rate of decline and  pretend it is Morning in America for another 30 years. Instead of conservation, we sold SUV's to suburbia.  Our current fracking effort has temporarily increased our declining production but it will not return oil production to early 1970’s levels. And even if it does it seems to be a last gasp scraping the bottom of the barrel type of effort.  Injecting chemicals underground to float out the last available hydrocarbons has big environmental costs and is not by any measure long term sustainable.    World peak oil production occurred around 2010.  Currently we are bumping along a plateau  in production with the price generally dependent upon the level of economic activity.  We are dependent on “cheap oil” to run our civilization but it is no longer cheap.  Our way of life needs a downsizing but our focus is still on increasing growth not fostering sustainability.  We have been incredibly wasteful over the years with our precious oil resources. "Price" does not completely capture the importance of a liquefied, dense, energy source. It may be a heretical idea, being a capitalist market economy and all, but our short term focus may not give oil its proper long term value.  It does not "count" the value in 100 years to our children.  A little careful utilization and a focus on efficiency would have gone a long way toward making the necessary decline in global interdependence and complexity less dramatic.  This “rightsizing” process is Collapse of the growth myth.  The process is actually one of simplification. We could say that our modern task is to de-construct our global interdependent world and  control our ragged stagger to sustainability.

   So how fast are we declining?  Right now we are at peak.   In retrospect we may be able to pick a point but for now it is a plateau.  Our “decline” or “collapse” is personal not generalized.  The poor are getting poorer and the middle class is shrinking. More individuals are becoming worse off in the US/Europe than are becoming better off.  In poor countries it may be true that more are becoming better off ( I am thinking of China) but I think perhaps with greater vulnerability.   Many thoughtful commentators (Diamond, Catton, Heinberg,  Foss, Martenson, Kunstler, Greer, Orlov) feel major collapse is coming SOON but most people I talk to are content to believe in the future, believe in the political process and just go along putting money in their 401-Ks and sending their kids off to college to get a good job.  Their future sense is positive.  As in the past, the future will be better.  When civilization is ascending—our collective sights are set on the stars and the improving Future.  Our capabilities are like the engines of a rocket accelerating and blasting us higher but when the engines cut out we start coasting.  Our civilization is currently coasting. We have arrived where we have always been heading-masters of the illusions we created and now subject to the gravity of reality.  We are surveying the world from the heights of our achievement, but we are not headed higher. We will bump along the plateau for awhile trying to figure out which direction to go,  and then we will head down.  How far, how fast?  With the engines off and out of fuel, the direction is set but the trajectory is unclear, will it be slow or fast? A glide path or a stall?   Do I need to persuade you of this or do you already know it?  I think you already know it.  There is a possibility that Science, Technology, and Progress will “save” us but it is an article of faith and not demonstrably certain. Our belief in Progress or Science and Technology suggests we will continue improving and continue growing, like experience has taught us, but it is possible that conditions are “different this time” and we may not be attending to the most important facts.  Our faith in Progress may be an illusion.

It seems analogous to the mid-19th century when a God centered universe placed mankind at the center of his concern. It was obvious that Nature was all about us but Darwin told a different story. We are ephemeral and transitional.  The dinosaurs died after 120 million years roaming the planet and so might we.  Now the Faithful operate with a different set of beliefs.  Spiritual belief has many forms or paths to Truth, but its essential task is to free man from materialism and provide salvation by certifying the Good.  If, as they assume, the next world is all that really matters, many believers do not have to worry so much about conditions in this world. Perhaps we can just write this ephemeral experiment off as a failure. Prepare for the Second Coming.  Rapture. Reincarnation.  Christians have always understood us as sinners. Humans are flawed and will go extinct when  God takes back his own. Your only earthly project is to acknowledge your ultimate dependence on God and your human limitations.

    Collapse thinking requires a psychological state of acceptance like being told you have a fatal disease. You can deny it but eventually you have to do the Kubler-Ross thing.  (You do have a fatal disease, it is called being born.) You can persist in your illusions of permanence but it is not true. Our civilization has a support system that no longer works for the majority.  It works fine for the rich and well connected but not the poor, war torn refugees, slum dwellers, and the homeless. And maybe not for you and your children. So if this decline is happening and unavoidable why are our leaders not discussing it? They may still be gripped in the progress myth or they may know but don't have an alternative.  Perhaps they are preparing for things to be alright for them but they don’t have a plan for me and you.  They may be doing the best they can or they are clueless and craven opportunists.  I don’t think WE know what sort of leaders we need.  Changing conditions after centuries of progress have not shown us what we must do.  Sinking in a limitless sea we are unsure which way to swim for shore.

So if we do not give Malthus any credit for being prophetic about future famine and collapse then let’s single out Hubbert—a paper in 1955 predicting world peak oil production in 2005 (close to when it occurred).  In the 60's & 70’s, nuclear energy  was going to take up the slack in energy production but of course it was expensive and dangerous.  Even after 40 years of experience with nuclear, I do not want to increase its role in energy production, I would like to decrease it like Japan and Germany have attempted to do. I'd like to go further. Clean up the toxic mess at all the nuclear facilities while we still have resources to do so.  Who wants oozing radioactive sites when the electricity grid fails?  Another Cassandra was Rachel Carson.  We don’t even know how many or how bad the toxins in our environment are:   nano-plastics, pesticides, GMO's, top soil loss, fresh water quality/aquifer depletion.   Donella and Dennis Meadows modeled Limits to Growth in 1972 and pegged 2015 as the crossover from falling resource availability to rising pollution costs.  Those predictions have been roughly accurate and show that we are now entering the age of contraction.  The Soviet Union “collapsed” in 1990 and numerous other countries have politically fractured:  Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Ukraine.  Other countries have “wobbled” and are limping along:  Argentina, Cyprus, Venezuela, Greece, Spain, Italy.  The global interdependent world system is on the ropes.  Is there another system?  Is there another idea about how to organize things?  The elite tend to think more centralization will be helpful.  This is obvious, they run things. A world government, a world financial system with a common currency is suggested. I think not.  I think we are in downsizing mode.  There is nothing we can all agree on so it’s take care of your own backyard.  We could call this the managing decline model.  A new localism.
    The image that accompanies "collapse" is running people.  When a society collapses we call these people refugees.  We have a lot of refugees because of failing societies.  First we have to stop this war nonsense.  We have to make where people live, livable.  If we destroy the infrastructure in all these countries, where are the people going to go?  We already know that when we turn Mexico into a drug supplier for our bad habits then the crossfire is going to send them HERE.  Blowing up Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya has put millions of people in untenable environments.  And that is not counting Egypt, Sudan, and the rest of Africa.  Is S. America any better?  Brazil is trying to host the Olympics in a Zika frenzy-well we’ll see how they do and Argentina has the usual inflation problems but they both pale beside the oil rich Venezuela that is sliding toward disaster.  I have not heard that things are going well in Central America—too many people, too few opportunities.  They have gang problems as well.  So a number of areas are struggling with what could be called societal breakdown. Some of it is a result of interference from outside interests that are acquiring resources or exploiting gains from trade.  Other breakdown is a result of factions within the country.  These divisions can be roughly broken down into legitimate opposition and criminal opposition.  Criminal opposition to state power is present in every country and organizes to protect itself.  It becomes "organized crime".  All the rackets present in every country from drugs, to gambling, to sex trafficking, to protection, to counterfeiting products, to running scams and tax evasion are narrow hierarchical systems that employ and prey upon those left out of the status quo.  If we have seen The Godfather movies we know the basic structure of this kind of social organization.  One's primary loyalty is not to the disembodied State or the ideals of democracy, it is fealty to the leader.  It tends to assume a zero sum solution, with us or against us. Political opposition in a country is a little different.  It operates under laws that specify the rules of the game to acquire political power. Private companies seek rules that benefit them.  Not too surprising there. Lobbyists, interest groups, activist groups, and political parties make up this "legal" influence on State action.  These battles are constant:  who gets regulated, who gets taxed, who gets subsidies, who gets contracts.   So we have outsiders, insider factions, and criminals who have "interests" in every locale.  There is no "Away".  We are all in the game.

What may be dawning on us and is different than the recent past here in America is our understanding that the status quo is not benign and supportive of our wish to pursue our private individual interest.  Government appears to be interested in defining "us", as Bush the younger tried, with "you are either for us or against us" or in categorizing us as members of a group:  WASP, Latino, Gay, Evangelical, Democrat .   Although I am "for" the fight against terrorism I am "against" how we are pursuing it.  Thus we are free as long as we follow the rules  and do what we are told.  These requirements could get gradually more onerous.  Yes you are free--send me 1/3, no 1/2,  of your income, buy health insurance or you can't see a doctor, register for the draft. Someone decides we need a toxic waste dump and we have decided to put it in your neighborhood.  We need a wind farm off-shore of your beach house, fracking companies need to drill in your area.  States are required to provide prisons of an acceptable standard with no funds to do so.  Immigrants from wherever must be housed, given a court date and hearing and sent to schools at your expense.  You should report anything suspicious--spy on your brother now. Do what is asked of you or be cast down with the sodomites to quote a notable jailer.  There is no "right" to be left alone.  Demographically and politically we are defined into groups and manipulated against one another, all the better to manage us.  If we accept the category assigned to us then we are provided the proper response against the evil (or just misguided) "others".
   America defines itself as the land where categories melt into E pluribus unum.  This has always been more of an ideal than a reality though 100 years of increasing income has solidified the central ideal that America is about a future of "Progress".  It is both the exceptional and indispensable nation.  We are neither but seem predisposed to meddle to prove to ourselves that we matter.  The ideology of "growth" funds the belief in Progress but if the majority of people are not improving, the future of individual freedom is in danger of being lost.This notion of individuality and melting pot unity has reached a state of extreme psychosis in the national mind.  What is America beyond "show me the money"?  It is an "opportunity" without a coherent narrative anymore.  Diversity leads to Balkanization, not to unity.  A right to something is necessarily someone else's obligation to provide it.
    The term "collapse" is a terrifying image.  It seems to me that TV and movies have taken upon themselves the artistic challenge of presenting  various alternative images of collapse.   For the last 10+ years we have been given images of dysfunction and dystopia:  Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Hunger Games to prepare us psychologically for a shift in our living conditions.  Years of being "entertained" by violence and sex" have left us expecting a world where that rather than justice matters.  Is it even possible to walk back to a world that honors virtue more than avarice?   What road could we plausibly take to return to a world of trust and hope that does not seem ironic or hypocritical?  Our leaders do not seem predisposed to deliver it.  Decline is manageable with good leadership but collapse is certain without it.  Whither America?  

The "Ease" and "Sophistication" of E-Money

       Is the elimination of cash convenient for exchange and a good idea?  No.  It is not.  It is a very palpable loss of freedom. It is foolish because it is complicated and more subject to abuse and manipulation.  We hear daily reports of hackers and credit data bases being compromised.  We have Lifelock advertisements pitching us to protect our online identity.  The digital payments world is a jungle that threatens your financial well being.  Now in fact we actually make a lot of exchanges without actually using paper money and given the option of both e-money and standard currency can freely choose how to protect our wealth.  By value I would surmise that 90% of transactions are done with checks or electronic payments.  Perhaps measured by number of transactions  more small transactions are done with cash. Cash normally completes the deal.  When it changes hands, the contract  is done.  Cash is the paper note form of the legal tender. It is actually as necessary as gold WAS to an honest monetary system.  What can it possibly mean for the government to claim that the money cannot be touched or held but only assigned to your electronic ledger as a number? "Dollars" become "numbers" that the Bank says you can spend in approved ways.  How many ways can that "right to spend your own money" be limited?   Do you have money if you cannot use it? The variability and undefined nature of money subjects the users to potential abuse.  “Flexible” money is subject to manipulation.  Fixed money is subject to shortages.

         The whole question of a “good” monetary system turns on the definition of money.  Is money a thing or an idea?  Money to be truly useful (and honest) needs a specific definition.  A vague idea is certain to be misunderstood or manipulated.  So despite money being a medium of exchange and store of value it is also a unit of account which is the characteristic that requires a specific definition.  Quantities of abstract things are nonsensical viz. how much do you love me?  Our money, a dollar, is undefined. You are paid in dollars that are undefined. You save in dollars that are undefined. But a foot is this far.  A pound weighs this much.  That’s what a “standard” is.  This matters to me but does not seem to be a major concern to most people.  Essentially the approximate historical value of a dollar is good enough for it to “work” for most people. I want to know who gets to define it and what prevents them from re-defining it when it is convenient or necessary. Who gets to say what a dollar is; you, your bank, or the government?

      I confess to being a hard money guy but let’s look at the ease and convenience of electronic money.  It is being touted as “better than cash”.  So you work at a job to earn money and that is Real.  You have to put in the hours. And what do you get for that?  Chits that allow you to buy things. When you are young your parents may have given you an allowance that you either did chores for or were responsible for spending for some defined needs to teach you budgeting, saving, and managing money. The allowance was “conditional”, if you did what you were supposed to, you were allowed to continue receiving it.  If you failed at managing it in some way, say by buying marijuana rather than clothes, your allowance could be stopped.  Your ability to spend was controlled by your overseers (parents).

  Electronic money is somewhat similar to an allowance.  Your money is “yours” in a provisional sense, someone else (the bank) must agree that you have it to spend.  You can make only certain kinds of transactions.   Every transaction is a banking act; Buying bubble gum, Paying a babysitter, selling used goods at a garage sale, loans to friends.  Every transaction must be certified and approved to be you.  The rules to prove that it is in fact you require you to be dependent upon another party (your bank) agreeing that you are you and have authority to spend your own money.  Every transaction is almost like a credit approval. “You” are the “credit score” or “ID proof” that is allowed to spend the money  in your account.  A dollar is merely a unit of account number in your bank account.  You can spend until your bank says you do not have any more.  Do you have money or credit?  Is there any difference?

Frankly I have a problem with the complexity.  Think about it.  Every transaction needs the internet.  To properly certify the transaction both parties must have a computer.  Each computer must be connected in some way to a certifying bank.  If either personal computer(or phone) is down—if either  bank computer is down –if the internet is down or not available—the transaction cannot be accomplished.  Let’s go further,  what if the power is off? Do you have money?

If the authorities were to eliminate cash for our ease of use, then what exactly “is” a dollar? “Numbers” in an account.  A dollar, just a floating idea of what everybody thinks it is.  Its value is what the two parties engaged in exchange agree that it is. This value may or may not remain constant and so makes it difficult to consider it a store of value.  When you have a Rewards account with an airline or credit card the ‘rewards’ can be adjusted by requiring more ‘digits’ for a flight or can be phased out by a particular date.  This complicates the idea of “saving” since it is not clear what the future value could be.  Can the government produce all the dollars it wants with a magic Aladdin’s lamp?  Then they are not bound by the numbers they have in their accounts.  If they want something—they rub the lamp(push a digital button to put more numbers in their  account).  I have  to work, they rub the lamp. Taxes are not necessary if the government can produce all the money it needs or wants.  Stupid me, I work--the government (through a fair and impartial system) puts money in its own account. Then it can give it to whoever it wants!   Some might consider there is a fairness issue here.  I consider a system like that-Unjust. 

E-money is completely dependent upon a functioning electricity grid and the internet.  All transactions then become embedded in a web of contract law that makes them provisional.  All transactions take place over time rather than settle with an exchange at a particular point in time. In short, when exactly do you buy something?  When you hand over the cash, the item is yours.  With e-money, ALL transactions are “reviewable” for their appropriateness.  They become “approved” transactions that happen over a period of time.  They enter a legal world.  Let me give an example.  Several years ago, as a dentist, I had a new patient who required a small surgical procedure.  He had insurance that we checked and it paid 80% of the cost.  The remainder was the patient’s responsibility.  So on the day of service we did the procedure the patient paid his 20% and 3 weeks later the insurance company sent us the balance due of the fee.  Transaction done.  One year later I received a nice note from Blue Cross that they had recently done an audit of their accounts and realized they had inadvertently provided coverage to patients who in fact did not have coverage.  My patient did not have coverage when we provided the service and so they were billing us for the payment they had made.  Wait a minute I protested—you said he had coverage you can’t expect me to pay you back?  Well yes they did and they had a means of enforcing it.  I have other patients with Blue Cross coverage and they would deduct what I owe from those payments.  They would “pay” Mrs. Smith’s claim that they owed me and apply it to the balance I owed.  Sweet(for them).  They said I could collect from the former patient.  Right.  Money thus enters this nether world of contract law. 

For 40 years I have been aware that I have a “battery” problem.  I don’t mean I beat my wife.  I mean when I am ready to use some device or machine, the battery is dead.   I jump in my car, the battery is dead (or stolen).  I want to take a cute video of my son.  I haven’t used the camcorder in a month, dead. I forget to charge my phone overnight, the next day I am on fumes.  It winks out.  How do I buy lunch when my phone is dead?  Go to plan B.  Credit card.  Debit card.  Suppose there are transaction fees or limits or I forgot my card.  Do I go hungry?  E-money becomes inconvenient. 

What about Simplicity?  Suppose I would like to buy a donut from a street vendor?  He takes Apple-Pay and I don’t have the app.  I suppose the critic would say the seller should be savvy about all the ways a customer could pay but he may be charged for it and not want to.  Once encumbered in this manner, the fees begin to mount.  With no cash a seamless web of payments would be nicked for fees all along the payment scale just as now an ATM visit dings the holder for $2-$4. 

The government considers itself responsible for producing the legal tender.   It is illegal to transact in any other private money.(That is a separate rant and one that would entail a large change too)  The reason is obvious—a purchase entails taxes and a payment for labor especially creates “obligations”(worker’s comp) and  taxes as well. If you transact privately, government has missed a tax opportunity.  It considers this illegal.    Every exchange has a transaction cost associated with it.  With a cash payment this responsibility is hidden.  E-money makes it easier to ensure the authorities are paid their required fees and it creates the possibility of transactional costs added by the facilitators of the exchange—banks, credit card companies, etc.  With e-money—money only exists in banks.  It can be exchanged but it cannot be removed from the system.  You are not allowed to take your own ball and go home.

     It seems to me that E-money will necessitate a black market currency.  I guess it is possible to buy heroin with a bank card if you call it something else (I myself don’t know) but people would necessarily be unwilling to do black market transactions with the legal currency.  So two currencies would likely develop—undercutting the usefulness of e-money. 

Cash is the paper note form of our money the dollar.   It is a shared social idea of value.  We all agree it has some rough value in exchange for any other good.  It’s “worth” 1/100^th of a shoe or an apple or 7 inches of copper pennies.  It itself is not defined.  It used to be defined as so many grams of silver—specifically 371 g of silver but gradually that definition has disappeared.  When dollar redemption for gold in 1933 was suspended domestically and then internationally in 1971, the dollar became “an idea” of value.  Who decides what a dollar is worth?  We all do by our acceptance of it.  Where do dollars come from?  Most of us know the answer to that question; the Federal Reserve, banks, and people based upon the power to do so.  I create dollars when I charge shopping purchases and banks create dollars when they make loans.  The central bank makes dollars when it credits dollars and accepts “assets”.  There is no limit to the number of dollars that can be created.  I find this paradoxical.  There is a fixed amount of fresh air, clean water, land, and resources and they are essential to life but they have a dollar value while a dollar that is imaginary can be created in unlimited quantities.  Curious.

So for 45 years we have had a currency unit that is not defined.  This could be considered unusual especially since a number of very important decisions are based on what value it has.  Everybody cares how much they get paid.  Most people consider saving money to be a good thing but it does not make sense if in the future it may have a different (lower) value.  If money is a social construct, it is not entirely “yours”.  If someone else can decide what YOUR money is worth—could we not argue that its value is suspect?  So I am not comfortable that money is simply a practical social idea used for exchange managed by government for the good of all. What are the dangers of this definition?  Danger #1 is changing the definition.  Danger #2 is producing too little or too much of it.  How much IS enough?  Danger #3 is its relative social importance.  Is having money more important than being honest?  I do not mean they are mutually exclusive –why not both- but its centrality to exchange in a complex society gives it a fundamental value similar to health.  How much health is enough?  Personally I want a fairly high standard for what is ‘healthy’. I also want a high standard of value.  If I am sick how much does health cost?  What is it worth?  Like the pearl of great price, everything I have.  In short to live in this society I have to care about money.  As someone once said about war—you might not be interested in war but war is interested in you.  You might not be interested in money but others are interested in your money.  If you have “no money” it could be said that your participation in our current civilization is marginal.  Money defines what you can do and so defines you.  If you don’t accept the label there may be a LOT you cannot do.  So go ahead and "drop-out" become a hunter-gatherer or self sufficient farmer.  Join a gift economy. The rest of us will talk about cash.

For years I have heard money managers talk about stocks bonds and cash.  As in, the market is getting over-valued and it is time to “go to cash”. Inconceivable.  I don’t think they mean what I mean when they use that word.  Cash means dollar bills in your mattress, wall safe, or wallet not money market funds, short term treasuries or bank CD’s.  Cash is federal reserve paper notes.  Going to cash in an investment account to my way of thinking is not possible.  You can go to money instruments but you do not hold cash in a Schwab or Vanguard account.  You do not have “cash” in the bank.  Everybody knows you have loaned the bank your money and the bank has loaned it out.  We’ve all watched Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life and there is some cash in the vault but it is not “yours”.

Having physical cash is a check upon the unlimited power of a bank to create loans and therefore money.  A monetary system without cash is one more remove from a defined unit of exchange.  A dollar reserve note is not redeemable for anything but another note BUT digital money is NOT even in your possession.  You own the right to the money but it is not “yours”. It is a social construct that can be re-defined by someone else.  A subtle but very important difference.

So let me make one more point about the “ease” of electronic money.  Let’s envision a system similar to an EZ Pay toll app that simply deducts numbers from your account as you go about your daily affairs;  picking up a magazine, buying a coke, getting lunch, it all just comes automatically out of your account as you do things.  Money goes into your account from however you earn it and it goes out as you do stuff.  This is easy.  Is it desirable?  Where is your say so in what comes out of your account?  Could you be charged for breathing valuable air?   What if they make the sidewalk downtown a toll road?  What if the price of things changes randomly so called “peak hour pricing” for certain goods or activities?  The algorithm is determining what goes into or out of your account.  You have the “freedom” to monitor it carefully or simply pay whatever is expected of you.  I am looking in vain for the freedom that would attend a system like this.  I see it as a lure to drain whatever numbers(money) you have into the reservoirs of the mega-rich and put you on a treadmill of debt.  I do not consider e-money an improvement to our current system which is itself seriously flawed. As I said, I tend to be a hard money advocate, preferring fixed money to flexible money. The big problem with defined money is the amount that goes into “hoards”.  If savings can be freed up to flow into other uses, then we have discovered the system that will permit the maximum amount of freedom for each and every one of us.  The essential problem is that we need a "tether" of value otherwise the rules of the game can be changed capriciously to some (or everyone's) detriment.  So let us ask, if we eliminate cash, Cui buono? You?  because you don't have to soil your greasy hands with it or someone else who can create what they need and siphon off what you have.  And if all else fails and they need it, well they can just take it.  Pass a law that what is yours is now mine.  So call your Congressman--who is paying him?

Christian Self Destruction

Christianity is a fundamentally sacrificial religion.  Can it survive? God first, last and always. The believers are only relevant as part of God's "plan".  What is this plan?  It is faith based and transcendental.  Is it actionable as in "sell all your earthly possessions and follow me"?    The fundamental centrality and importance of God is Ten Commandments #1. YOU become exalted by your sacrifice to and for God. God is #1-you are ancillary and only something in his care and protection.  You gain true humanity and  heaven by true humility.  Does thinking bad of ourselves free us to be good? This drives success based, goal oriented people crazy.  To lose is to win or to say it differently to win is to lose.  Exalt yourself-lose, exalt God-win.

As a cultural idea this is frighteningly naive.  To undertake having a servant mentality works against your earthly interests as it compounds your heavenly treasure.  No matter what happens--God will save you if you put your trust in him.  Maybe not here on earth but surely where it matters.  So if your sacrificial strategy loses here on earth then we gain eternity for having the nth degree of faith.

This is very convenient and not at all provable.

Should our self interest be a rough guide to action?  Frankly, how could it not be?  How can one be essentially altruistic?  If one were, it would be sacrifice for no discernible purpose except demonstrating one's capacity for self abnegation.  When ones says I am dependent on Christ--I put him ahead of everything else, we should ask, How is this possible?  I have to get up everyday and do something.  How do we know God's requirements for EVERYTHING?   Jesus is always right there helping.  Really?   HE does not need my belief, I do.  His desire is for me to be a full and complete person. 

I am a human AND spiritual person.  Some mix of both.  Should I say my human nature is irrelevant and my spiritual nature is my true identity?  What would Socrates injunction to "Know thyself" mean if it was not a product of some mental effort rather than faith profession?  Christianity is a closed loop.  Life everlasting is gained by valuing the only Life we know as insignificant as possible.

Justice is getting what you deserve.  None of us pleaded for consciousness.  We were gifted it.  When we want to know God we have only our self to discover him.  It is OUR action to accommodate him.  If he is spinning the story then our responsibility is listening.  So to what do we commit?

So I became a cultural Christian.  I suppose that is a denomination like Baptist, Evangelical, Methodist, or Catholic.  We have some minor differences......Do I love God?  Uh-Yes? And as for loving Jesus-sure why not?  Miracles, as an idea, give me a problem.

I mention these concerns as prelude to the question of whether a Christian nation can succeed? or whether defining it that way necessarily imposes a strict requirement of failure and redemption in Heaven.

The Enlightenment project began 400-500 years ago as a realization that engaging the World could lead to Progress in a way that reliance on God could not.  The Renaissance started a human self improvement project that retained its church based moral center as a comfortable home base but pushed out to explore what was possible and what could be improved.  The human improvement project flowered and became the industrial revolution and the science/technology revolution.  The story of man's conquest of Nature to moderate its determination of his fate.  In 1860 Darwin made it more obvious that the Christian worldview that humanity had grown up with, was limited, and Progress, as a pure ideal, took its place.  Man had religion as an adjunct not as a foundation and his vision turned from Gods will to Man's will be done.  Religion mouthed the old comfortable words but society really believed in a scientific future.

Progress still rules as the central organizing principle of society.  Religion sustains but Progress is driving the change we experience. Progress and rationalism however have lost their direction.  They are no longer guides.  Our clear vision has turned dreamlike and slides into nightmare.  Progress doesn't lead anywhere--and rationality can't fix it.  We can only throw up idols and dance madly to make them meaningful.  Nobody believes really believes in them.  The old religion is a leaky vessel for our new cutting edge philosophies but many attempts are being made to refurbish it.  The thoughtful among us are not persuaded.

Our challenges are not only philosophical.  Industrialism is toxic.  Economic growth forever is impossible.  Progress is becoming decline and tending toward collapse.  We have a litany of existential problems.  There are the Near Term Extinctionists (NTE) and the Extinction Rebellion cohort.  Climate change proponents have a model of action that says everyone must immediately stop what they are doing and do nothing or join the climate change movement.  You are either for us or against us.

And the deniers.  They don't buy that the only thing to do is shut down the system we know and currently are operating under.  They quite rightly ask, isn't it what is providing for us all?  We can't quit what we know how to do.  So either we must or we won't and it seems likely to me that we won't until conditions mandate it.  It is hard to imagine shrinking carbon release at all(we never have despite 50 years of talking about it), much less by say 10% per year and of course inconceivable that we could quit using fossil fuels in the next 20 years.  It would be rational to first stop the growth in CO2 production, then take steps to reduce it, and as we succeeded, more steps to minimize it.  But we have no philosophy of LESS.  We have changed from 500 years of growth and progress to needing something else and we have no vocabulary for it.  Everybody should strive to live on 1/2 their income.  Those of us who are rich might find that difficult and uncomfortable but the majority of people in the world living on $2 a day would die on $1 a day.

So there may be no political decisions to make.  There are no Rational options.  There is simply nothing useful to do except conserve oneself.  Preach sustainability.  Aim for what it could be.  Make do with less.  The new motto:  Success is less.  Who is going to endure this sacrifice while the clueless and uncomprehending are building their dream homes, collecting their favorite toys, and making airline reservations?

So is it war then?  Diplomacy by other means?  Lets talk about globalism then.  A world organization of some kind that would help all nations and people work together to solve BIG problems.  If we look at the arc of western history we see it coalesce from many localities into principalities into nations and the first beginnings of a world order.  But now that progress has slowed and decline begun, it is impossible to create a freely chosen viable world order. But Totalitarianism may yet triumph.  It could be some dystopic 1984-like system but entropy would continue to operate and re-localization will gradually occur.  Strong nations will be in play for many years or at least as long as the modern financial system lasts and then smaller political units will form.  Big is most protective and has the most freedom in a balance of power world.  People will try and retain those structures but infrastructure requires energy and that will be diminishing. Few regular people want globalism and it is proving to be unworkable anyway.  The modern corporation has made its play at running a transnational enterprise but it is under attack.  Modern multinational gangs like the Mafia, Exxon, IMF, Colombian cartels,  Mexican drug gangs, or Russian oligarchs also have significant international power and are an "alternative" organizing principle.  Globalism was an ideal because Progress demanded it but with the shakiness of our  global financial arrangements that goal of international comity will not be succeeding.

The task of dismantling complexity to prevent catastrophic failure unfortunately triggers failures that can lead to conflict.  How could our American Empire give up power and influence voluntarily?  We would have to be prepared to accommodate to what other people want.  To leave Iraq and still want their oil will cost us more money for the oil.  But that should be the aim of policy.  A better global citizen,  not becoming a better more powerful hegemon. Empires collapse and so will America's.  When is the Second Coming?  After 2000 years, Tomorrow is not likely that day.