Bitcoin as Sour Grapes

With Bitcoin, we have the glimpse of something important.  Whole cloth imaginary money outside the control of the government.  That is, two characteristics that suggest "impermanence" to my mind.  I am wrong about most things financial so I would not rely on my opinion.  But I am here to inform your thinking and care not a whit whether you get rich or not.  Bitcoin is 20 million units of made up money that has already had 15 million of it distributed to users but has an additional 5 million yet to be found sprinkled devilishly around in complicated computer problems.  It is sustained like everything on the internet by a distributed network that is here, there, everywhere as long as the power is on.  Nothing prevents the manufacture of other block chain currencies.  The supply is potentially infinite but many will not "catch on".  They will be offered in the market and like a slow day at the trade fair wilt into so many spoiled vegetables and thrown out at days' end.

The problem of money that exists only in the ether is that you have to sell it to know it's there.  Otherwise you have an artificial statement of "gains" from somebody like Bernie Madoff.  It's all about trust.  What if I give you my bitcoin and you say you never got it?  Whatever I bought, still sits in your hands. So I appeal to an online exchange:  "Make Mr. Deadbeat give me my purchase"!  Can they?  Who are "they"? So I go to the police.  I gave some imaginary money to this guy in Dayton, Ohio named Wanker on craigslist and he told me it never happened--it must have been in my imagination.  But Here's my e-mail log with the criminal.....

Imaginary money exists because other people say it does.  When they don't--it doesn't.  The value of imaginary money is whatever you can exchange it for.  It has use value and exchange value but no intrinsic value.  As a store of value it might fluctuate or disappear.  Of course it might make you rich!

And the second problem of being "outside the control of government" is important.  The government gets to decide what can be done "outside" the oversight of the government.  But they can't touch it!  Technically true since it's imaginary but they can touch you and that's the problem.  What if Bitcoin trading is made illegal? Whoever logs in to a bitcoin exchange is a criminal and their civil assets are forfeit.  Yes, you can be clever and perhaps evade detection but government could put a few computer whizzes on the payroll and go treasure hunting.  If Bitcoin stays at $1,000 then 20 million of them is $20B.  I am unfamiliar with the FBI's budget but it might be worthwhile to scarf a few of those Bitcoin ledgers up.

So my take on the Bitcoin craze is as a proof of concept.  A lot of people could be induced to use an e-money with the right incentives.  Bitcoin has rewarded the early adopters. Most people however do not have any bitcoin.  I believe 1,000 people hold 1/2 of the Bitcoin already created.  This is a condition similar to the current skewed distribution problem with the dollar.  However, the government could take over the whole concept and make it "fair" as in establishing a lucrative role for itself in the formation of a government e-currency.  They would launch this currency as a UBI (universal basic income) which could be distributed to ALL citizens based upon whatever political criteria they desired to use.  Like the dollar--all other forms of electronic money could be made illegal.  Or they could set up an exchange where ALL currencies could be frictionlessly exchanged with a tight spread and a minimal transaction tax.  What would be the harm in that?  We could all diversify worldwide, paying instantly with the money in our digital wallet that is exchanged instantly by the seller into whatever money they prefer.

Does the government have any bitcoins?  The government closed the illegal Silk Road site and confiscated the accounts in the exchange because they were dealing in contraband.  If a particular money is made "contraband" then there you go.  The government normally "disposes" of illegal drugs that are confiscated but when it captures illegal money through civil asset forfeiture, it claims it and spends it.  The government is able to criminalize the money by allowing the dealers to exchange the contraband into cash and then confiscating it.  Let the deal go down and swoop in for the  profits.  Do they do that?  I am a trusting soul and don't think so but surely the temptation is there.

So what about confiscation in Bitcoin?  How can the authorities access the private network?  My understanding is that they can't now but if they were able to create their own e-money then they of course could (like the communication wiretap problem) have a backdoor created that with court approval would allow confiscation. How many alternative currencies could the authorities allow?  Currently we have at least 50 besides Bitcoin. The central question to me is at what total value of private e-money does the government shut it down?  The total value of dollar financial assets is over $100 Trillion.  The current value of Bitcoin is $15 Billion.  Chump change.  Spare change in the DOD budget.  But I think the critical number is 10% of total asset values by ALL digital currencies.

Because of the small relative distribution of Bitcoin ownership, the increase in value is subject to a rapid fall when the original issuers "diversify" into some other more fungible type of money.  I suspect that at $10,000 they will have "earned" enough and gradually exit leaving the marks with their digital wallets holding imaginary value.  Since Bitcoin is limited to 20 million units it would require a value of $350,000 per Bitcoin to replace the minor value of gold($7 Trillion) in the world financial system.  To actually replace the current world value of assets, let us say $300 Trillion, would require a Bitcoin value of $15 Million dollars.  I think it unlikely that will occur....

I am in awe of the possibilities in private, distributed monetary networks and my own analysis strikes me as "sour grapes" because I have no Bitcoin.  The future, as ever, will be interesting with the Donald at the helm.

Vision and Illusion

     There is a fine line between vision and illusion.  Without a vision, the people perish but I fear that in our need to have a vision we create fanciful illusions. Our search for meaning turns up an answer we can believe in and then, satisfied, we are comfortable with our place in the universe.  Our existence then has value, we have a destiny, and we are cradled in a foundational myth.  I have come to the personal conclusion that our old Gods are illusions. We are currently searching for new Gods.  I do not claim that spirit world does not exist only that our human measures of meaning and value are flawed.  

I am a “cultural” Christian and dependent upon its faith and stories for my heritage. If you ask me, are you a Christian, Hindu, or Muslim?  I can only reply, Christian.  And if we go further and say, are you Christian or atheist—I say, Christian—a secular Christian for sure but definitely not antagonistic to the faith. How can I reject what has formed me? But some ask the question a different way, Are you saved?  No, I am not.  Do you believe the Bible is the one and only authoritative Word of God? No, I do not.  I find meaning in other written words and sometimes in direct experience of beauty and tranquility.   I feel like a seeker.  God has not “spoken” to me in unmistakable terms.  He has not forgiven me for all I may or may not do.  Do I believe in God?  Yes-he undergirds the universe.  Who is Jesus then?  No more God than Buddha, St. Augustine, or Mohammed. No transcendental divinity there.

Christianity has, in modern times, been gradually superseded by the Faith in Secular Progress.  Since Darwin, more and more educated people have jettisoned Faith in a deity for Faith in a hoped for vision of human progress.  But faith in technological progress is an illusion too.  For the 2000 years after Jesus the Church has been the central organizing principle of Reality(for Westerners not Muslims, Hindus, or Chinese). And for that I am grateful. However, I don’t think Moses got it right in Genesis about the details of creation:  the Garden, the Flood, the Pillar of Salt, the burning bush, or the parting of the Red Sea.  They are Ur-myths painted on the unknowable.  Good myth but poor journalism. Billions of people agree (and contest) that Jesus is the one and only son of God. To me he is, like us, the progeny of God.   Our fundamental stories of who we are and where we come from are somewhere between vision and illusion. 

Having been critical of what our Society has made sacred, I will digress for a moment to tell you my creation story.  God in his/her infinite perfection for an infinity of time deigned to become “Real”.  He/she can return to perfection and close down the Reality we currently experience at any time. Thus the essence of God drives the universe. There are then two eternities: a former one, in the past, when God was everlastingly perfect.  And now the current one in which we “progress” toward transcendence. WE don’t go to heaven (or hell). God is in the particulars of living. Some find this materialism dispiriting.  I don’t.  You have your God illusions and I have my Truth illusions, now can we all get along?

The God illusion has us humans quarreling,  but the money illusion is another affront to Truth.  Money is a human idea that has perverted Man’s relation to Nature.  We have too much money.  We DO too much.  We have allowed too many people on Earth. I say this not because I think you (or I) should leave but because of the effect on other species.  We have fairly small populations of tigers, elephants, rhinos, polar bears and the like and an overabundance of fellow human. Our servitude to the Money Illusion has perverted our economics.  We wanted to become rich and we wanted others to also become rich and so we created a plethora of redemption chits called money that has put too great a strain on the natural world.  Money commoditizes Nature and we sell our birthright thinking we are becoming better off.  For a time it appeared with industrial civilization that we had found a marvelous way to all become richer but we were blinded I think by our real dependence on the stored energy in fossil fuels.  Currently, Nature is at peak everything.  What I mean is that our growth model has reached a necessary plateau—because we cannot increase the fish catch, the timber harvest, or the oil production any more.  We are tapped out.   Technology is not a solution for inputs.  We could become more efficient and we should but it will not save our Progress myth.  Progress henceforth should be known as “right sizing”.  Progress is generally thought of as onward and upward, but– to what?

 Sustainability could be considered a re-building of the connections to the natural world and that would be aided by jettisoning the idea of money having value.  Can we walk this money illusion back to some more helpful arbiter of exchange between people or are we content to push the boundary conditions—make up enough money to make everyone rich?   Right now I feel we are in “Let her rip” mode.  And I do not think it ends well. 

So how can we power down industrial civilization?  Many will say it can’t be done because our financial system depends on growth.  Credit is spending money you don’t have with someone’s expectation that you will repay.  A lot of us are doing that.  First we expanded money and now we are growing credit.  Both processes strip value from the natural world and convert it to human commodities, things that can be priced.  We don’t price a tree in the forest but we do at Home Depot.  Everything has a price that destroys its soul. 

But I don’t really believe in a soul either. Perhaps what remains is the ineffability of excellence.  A scent from the past of the Truth lingering in the present.   We should just try to do more with LESS.  It’s practical and does not require war on Nature or on our fellow creatures and neighbors.  I have been a long time member of the Church of Reason and Religion of Progress and I will admit that it is threadbare these days.  It looked like a sturdier Faith when I was younger.   Can the Christianity of the future become  again more Vision than illusion?  What must it jettison, what must it affirm?  Without a Vision the people perish—

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......