A Brief Overview of the Past Seventy Years of U.S. History

George Friedman posted an article on the foreign policy stances and options for both Trump and Hillary.  But it is his brief overview of recent U.S. history that I found most curious.

He says:

A Series of Aftermaths: War Ends, Soviets Fold, Towers Fall

The US emerged from World War II having learned two lessons. The first was Pearl Harbor. It taught that an enemy can strike at any time without warning.

The second was the price of delay. Had the US entered the war earlier and opposed Hitler before the Munich Agreement, much suffering could have been avoided.

Global involvement would be the first line of defense. Cheyenne Mountain, home of the North American Defense Command, would be the ever watchful second line. It made sense yet was exhausting.

During the Cold War, this approach seemed right because the Soviet Union had to be blocked on the ground. It had to be deterred from nuclear war as well. The Soviet Union fell, but the military and economic structures the US had created remained.

The United States intervened in Somalia, Haiti, Kuwait, and Bosnia in the 1990s. The Soviets were gone, but the US still saw itself as the global guarantor of security.

Then 9/11 happened, and the classic American fear was made real. It was an attack out of nowhere. As the US awaited more attacks, it went on the offensive in the Islamic world. It built a coalition that has fought wars for 15 years.

 This is the most compact and informed view of recent U.S. history that I have seen.  This helps us to understand where we have been, where we are, where we are going, and why the U.S. behaves like it does many times.

Doug Casey on Facism in America

Doug Casey has a new article which is surprisingly balanced for him from an optimism standpoint.  All of the reasons that he lists for both optimism and pessimism are well-founded according to everything that I have read and he lists his basic recommendations which I am in the process of executing, despite my somewhat limited resources.

It is well worth a read:
http://www.internationalman.com/articles/how-fascism-comes-to-america

I have it copied below for brevity and long term storage.

Designer Babies will be a Reality Soon

With the coming Biotech Age of humanity of which we are standing on the cusp of, the philosophical question of genetic modification of humans is suddenly a real question.  I am going to throw my two cents into the debate.  Patrick Cox has a fascinating article that raises scientific philosophical concerns.

I like the idea of genetic modification in humans, at least conceptually.

What, you say!?  Aren't you a devout Christian? 

Well, yes, I am, and there is nothing in the Bible about genetic modification, as much as I cannot find anything related to transgenderism either.  So, my judgments will be based on a scientifically informed Judeo-Christian viewpoint.

My first observation is that generational genetic changes are random.  Randomness is both good and bad, obviously.  Randomness is the source of creativity, among other intrinsically human things.  Designer babies mean limiting randomness to what we define as 'positive.'  Therein lies the rub.  What is actually positive both now and going into the future?  I am against genetically modified organism (GMO) food, because I believe it is having barely attributable, but distinct differences in our collective health, not all of which are positive.  I do not doubt humans view of what are 'positive' biological traits now, I doubt whether we will have the foresight as a species to avoid very decidedly bad aftereffects in the future.  Humans as a race are notoriously bad at predicting the future.  I am often no better --although I am often vindicated as time moves forward, sometimes to my great dismay-- but when you are dealing with revolutionary, civilization age-defining technologies a little self-doubt is a very healthy thing.

So, where is the balance?

Human genetics is random.

I think that pursuing genetic modifications to eliminate the decidedly negative things in genetics that we can see and know with fairly good certainty ahead of time is good.  Curing genetic diseases that cause death, good.  Preventing conditions that retard, incapacitate or otherwise, probably good.  Pursue an individual risk vs reward analysis.

Will this genetic disease kill this baby if left unaltered?  Yes?  Then fix it.
Will this genetic disease leave a baby retard or paralyzed?  If yes, then fix it.

Because even if we screw up their genetics in some initially imperceptible but hugely significant way, they were going to die or be physically or mentally retarded anyway, so the alternative was probably worse.

That is akin to trying to improve the average randomness like this.

You start small.  Watch these kids grow up, become productive adults.  Make sure we did not make some catastrophic error in genetics.  Wait 10-15 years and then try something more extreme.

Will this genetic modification make this person more resistant to common diseases? Yes?  Then do it.

 So, wait 10 to 15 years and see if these more extreme modifications don't result in any long term catastrophic consequences for these individuals.

By the time we have been doing genetic engineering of humans for fifteen years, hopefully fringe cases will pop up and the science will be fixed and tweaked to alleviate these cases before we engage in trying to actually positively modify our genetics.

So my thought is this.  Let's avoid the genetic enhancements and focus exclusively on curing diseases.  From that foundation we can begin enhancements that focus exclusively on reducing disease chances in the future.

If you start on enhancements and designer babies, you risk doing something very adverse inadvertently.  We want to take this genetic modifications thing slow to avoid the Asgard problem.

Jumping straight to designer babies is as likely to result in,

than in anything immensely positive to the human race as a whole.  Just ask the U.S. Federal Reserve about trying to control market prices...

So, caution is always good.  The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

Trump

This is going to be a two-part post because I have been neglecting my blog lately, despite my head brimming with topics to write about.  The two topics are completely disparate and have little to do with one another, aside from AI affecting the technology fabric underlying a Trump presidency.  So, sorry, keep your mental compartmentalization ready.

First, Trump.  I don't like Trump.  He is a big government guy and I am a libertarian.  He wants to do all kinds of expensive things with other people's money, which makes him only marginally better than Bernie Sanders and only morally superior to Hillary Clinton.  Currently, we have over 19 trillion USD in sovereign debt, not even considering unfunded liabilities like government pensions, social security, and Obamacare... I have read estimates in excess of 100 trillion USD in unfunded liabilities going forward.

100 trillion.  100,000,000,000,000,000!

Let that sink in for a bit...

Except that this number is so astronomical that most people cannot even conceive of it, let alone begin to fathom the consequences of this number.  But the debt will be paid.  It has to be, because the consequences of not paying it are world-ending (at least in the short term).  And it will be paid, even if other countries take it out of us in blood, which I imagine that they will be more than happy to do if we default on tens of trillions of USD in sovereign debt.

But we can't default, you say!

Technically, yes... you are correct, but a hyper-inflationary money printing extravaganza qualifies as a 'default,' just ask Zimbabwe, Argentina, and now Venezuela.

These countries are examples of unbounded spending on anything... defense, social entitlements, whatever...  eventually you run out of other people's money.   And if you don't think that this will happen here in the U.S., think again.  It doesn't matter how powerful you think you are, the piper must always be paid.  And Trump has all kinds of expensive plans including building walls, tax cuts, tariffs, and boosting defense spending, which I am in favor of, so long as we stop this military adventurism nonsense.  But you cannot do all of that at once without funding it, and there are only two sources of funding, debt and currency.  You can issue debt until you can't when the rest of the world figures out that the emperor has no clothes, then you must print... or cut spending.

Debt is one reason I do not like Trump.

A second reason that I neither trust nor like Donald Trump is that all of his solutions revolve around tariffs.  A tariff is a sanction or penalty on incoming goods from other countries.

That $2000 TV you envy in the electronics store?  $4000 after Trump sanctions the country that manufactures it.

Those $20 clothes at Walmart?  $30-40 after Trump sanctions countries that manufacture them.

Those $50 car parts that you buy from Mexico to keep your jalopy running?  $100+ after Trump sanctions Mexico to force them to pay for the wall.  To say that Mexico is going to pay for the wall is technically true, but in reality you are going to pay for it.

And this is just the beginning. 

Tariffs start trade wars.  That is simply how it works.  So, China will put tariffs on our iPhones and start chasing US companies out of China and ramp up their cyber- and economic espionage campaign to steal IP from us in order to continue making our shit for less than we can.  So, we lose anyway.

 This post is already running way longer than intended, so I guess I will close with the Hillary/Bernie alternative which is equally dim.  You'll have to wait for comments on AI-theism.

A Hillary/Bernie presidency would consist of free shit for everyone.  Great, you say!  I love free shit!

Except that nothing is free.

If we have close to 100 trillion in already unfunded liabilities, why not throw on another 20 trillion.  No big deal, right?  So, sure, we can enjoy our social entitlements until our civilization collapses under the crushing debt load.

So, the Bernie/Hillary presidency, which also has this penchant for big government and spending other people's money, will run out of money long before a Trump presidency will...  and I think there is at least some small modicum of hope that Trump will see the error of his ways before he actually screws us all over.  Hillary and Bernie will be screwing us as a matter of principle, so I don't see any hope down that path.

So, long story short, I am not voting.  I am preparing to run for the hills, so that when the inevitable shit hits the fan I will be protected.  And you would be wise to do the same.

Draw a Secret

Here are some test images from my draw a secret program.

I am, as always, following my simple and stupid methodology.

This post has almost no text and a lot of images, expand at your risk.

The Exploits of the Demopublican Party

Doug Casey is a pessimist, but a pessimist on solid grounds.  The problems that the U.S. faces are real, serious, debilitating, and potentially catastrophic.

The U.S. debt is not going to simply disappear, unless we print our way out of it --which with all of the discussion about helicopter money going around would not surprise me-- and there are severe consequences if this debt is not dealt with.

But the true rot of our country is not purely economic.  The economics are merely following the social and cultural rot that is decaying our country from the inside out.  This rot has its source at the philosophy of humanism, and we are seeing the results of humanism applied and lived out on a mass scale.  And it will only get worse as the idiocracy takes hold.  Our learning institutions are pushing out droves of mindless slaves, who probably couldn't reason their way out of the brown paper bag, while the entitlement culture is eroding what little prosperity was left in the system.  Eventually, the only buyer left in the U.S. Treasury market will be the U.S. Federal Reserve who relies on printing money to fund their purchases.  Japan is already there; the U.S. is only a few steps behind.  The coming economic collapse is very sure, the only uncertainty is the timing.

So, what is the solution?

I am not sure that there is a solution that will actually prevent this, barring major cultural shifts, which I do not see happening.  So, I reluctantly admit that Doug Casey may very well be correct when he says, "the only thing that you can do is protect yourself."

So, to protect yourself against currency collapse (the result of excessive money printing), buy gold, silver, real estate, guns, even Bitcoins might work.   Anything that is not reliant on the U.S. government for it's underlying value.

I really think that Christians should begin banding together and preparing a set of local church arbitration courts to replace the judicial system that will collapse when the government collapses.  At least then some sense of justice will be maintained on a local level, and we can simply arbitrate amongst other Christians for now, and pagans can use it when it becomes necessary.

For European Christians, they need to prepare to care for and protect Muslims when the next holocaust comes; because everything is in place now for the holocaust of Muslims in Europe, all that is required is the spark that lights the keg.

As with all predictions though, the exact timing is very difficult to determine, but this is why we are to remain watchful and keenly aware of the world around us.

You can read Doug Casey's thoughts on the political election in the U.S. here.  Be warned though, there is an auto-play video that will load on the page.  You can read it below if you want to avoid the auto-play video.  And if you feel so inclined, he offers his solutions for purchase, which are very pragmatic solutions.

What is time? World Views and the Basis of Knowing

This was the question posed by this article in Aeon.

Being a physicist -- at least by education -- and a philosopher at heart, I have pondered this question for many years now, and I have an answer that I use in my own systemic narrative.  My concept of time very much plays into my world view.

The author says, "To declare that question outside the pale of physical theory doesn’t make it meaningless," and he is correct.  This question is outside of the pale of physical theory.  Physics and the theories underlying it do not care about whys.  Science exists to answer how, what, where, and when... not why.  Why remains firmly in the realm of philosophy and theology.  But like the author says, that does not reduce the necessity of an answer to this question, particularly when it plays intimately into framing our world view.

Time, in my mind, is a sequence of events, derived from the continuity, consistency, and cause and effect nature of reality.  This idea plays closely with Julian Barbour's Heap concept, and is effectively a relational model of singular universal time.  Things change and the very act of changing defines time.  Change in the spatial dimension does not count, as in a change in the "properties over space as in a house's change from red on the roof to white on the sides." 1  The directionality of time is produced by entropy and the many one-way processes of the universe.  Hot water grows cold.  Houses degrade and eventually decay.  Order degrades to chaos.

Side note: Entropy is why I believe Darwin's theory is absurd.  This world never tends toward increasing order, no matter how long the time scales.

The author goes on to discuss the narrative quality of time with two very helpful videos.  Time, while not being defined by narrative, displays the narrative that is reality.  Events occur and are only memorable, relatable, and understandable in time.  The fact that reality tells a story implies that there is a story teller -- or perhaps many.  There is definitely intelligence behind the narrative quality of time.

He also goes on to address the epistemological grounds of how we know and how we tie that knowing into meaning.  He says that "most threads would follow isolated paths that are without sense or meaning," and while that may be true, it is not necessarily true.  Being a systemic thinker, I believe that every action -- no matter how insignificant or remote -- has universal consequences and thus eternal meaning.  Your choosing to patron McDonald's or Starbucks tomorrow morning may not seem like a significant choice, but this choice may predicate you meeting a future mate or business partner or someone whose interaction changes your life and theirs and perhaps many more for the better.  Even if it does not result in a significant meeting, the event still has consequences which may be unseen, perhaps even forever, yet still play into weaving the grand tapestry of heaps that form reality.  Each action that we do matters enormously.

He continues by noting the breach between science and our concept of reality, which is an area that most scientists fail at.  He notes, "We tend to fence off science from other areas, imagining that a quantum wave function or a set of relativistic field equations express a fundamentally different aspect of time than the kind of time that is embodied in old family tales."  But they are not. Reality is unity.  It is contiguous, rational, and understandable because of the underlying intelligence in the design.

Another author, Francis Schaeffer, whose book "How Should We Then Live?" I am just finishing now, addresses this disconnect similarly.  He addressed the gap by defining two elements that exist, the particulars -- that is you and I and the dog down the street and the lily pad in the bog in Thailand -- and the universals or absolutes.  He points out the chief problem with humanism and humanist thought is this gap.  As he says,

Beginning from man alone, Renaissance humanism --and humanism ever since-- has found no way to arrive at universals or absolutes which give meaning to existence and morals.

All of humanist philosophy, from the Renaissance up until the 19th century, was devoted to attempting to bridge this gap, unsuccessfully because the only crossing that exists is the one thing that they are completely unwilling to even consider, a personal God.  Eventually, philosophy devolved into simply ignoring reason and rationality, and from the end of the Enlightenment up until now has been a violent thrashing between rational observation of reality and the corresponding despair and nihilism or seeking meaning in the irrational arenas of spiritualism, drugs, music, and art.  Everyone you meet will fall somewhere into this paradigm, and all of their actions and motivations are derived from their underlying world view and the corresponding beliefs and standards derived from it.

Either way though, the world is understandable, rational, and relatable, and I ascribe this intelligence of design to the God of the Bible, because what is stated in the Bible correlates mostly smoothly with what I see in reality.  Because of this rationality, I can know and can expect that answers to all questions do exist and that seeking is a worthy endeavor.  There are some inconsistencies between the Bible and reality, but none that I cannot attribute to my own incomplete understanding of this reality of which I am a part.  Belief in the God of the Bible also has a broad host of other beneficial effects such as certainty of purpose, certainty of self and proper place, and an absolute moral standard by which to judge first myself and secondly everything else in this reality.  This moral standard is the basis of order and harmony in society, and compliance with the moral standard is the only means by which utopia will ever be achieved.  All of society, law, and justice revolve around this absolute moral standard, and thus it forms the foundation of just and civil society.

Ultimately, though, our perception of this absolute reality is subjective in many ways, and so deception is widespread and easily confused with truth, which is why it is key that each of us be keen of mind and able to sort out truth from fiction by comparing any narrative that we are presented with against what we know and what we believe to be true.  In this way, I suppose I identify with Pascal who said, "If I believe in God and you do not; and you are correct, we both lose.  However, if I believe in God and you do not; and I am correct, you still lose while I gain everything."  Truth is absolute, but our perception of it is not.  However, enough hints slip through that we can build a partially complete narrative that God had the kindness to mostly fill out in the Bible.  Because of these facts, I can know, I have distinct meaning, and I can judge myself and others accordingly.  It is beautiful to begin to see the world as the system that it is, and it certainly makes me regard God even more because of it.

Brexit: Further Analysis

After talking to more people and finding this article which added more information to the additional dimensions regarding the Brexit option, I have to offer apologies for oversimplifying the Brexit issue in my last post.

So, to my British readers, I am sorry for over-simplifying the issue.  The cultural and sovereignty issues are significant, and I did not consider these in my previous post discussing Brexit.

However, the added complexity has not changed my overarching opinion, simply nuanced it more.  The trade benefits that the EU offers are worth remaining the EU for, but national sovereignty must be maintained.  I still think that they should remain part of the EU, but they also need to make it very clear to the EU that in the event of a disagreement between EU and British policy, the EU policy will simply be ignored.  That way, they avoid having to renegotiate all of the trade agreements with the EU.  They can pull the same card from their own history with the U.S., namely the "f**k you stance."

The British are in a real bind now, not completely of their own doing.  The stipulations foisted upon them by the EU are probably going to force them to exit the Euro system and even that will be a long and vindictive process.  This is better than tying the British train to the EU just as it goes off of the fiscal cliff.  If they do decide to remain with the EU, a healthy and readily usable pool of "f**k you" needs to be at hand to tell the EU to go jump in the lake on issues of national sovereignty.  At least if they are forced out by the EU, it will hopefully expedite the process, and leaving the ball in the EU's court will force the EU to do their own soul searching.

The Naked Emperor

I found an article in The Atlantic that details very intimately the events and circumstances surrounding the Syrian "red line," and Obama's blunder in not fulfilling his word and other foreign policy events of his presidency.

I suppose I should be fair and say that most of Obama's foreign policy has been prudent, and I agree with his assessment that a lot of the world has been "free riding" on America's willingness to intervene.  However, the Syrian "red line" event completely obliterated any path for me to assess his foreign policy as "successful."

It's like Hillary Clinton said here, "If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice."  If he wanted to pull this 'put it before Congress' trick, he should have asked Congress BEFORE laying down a red line.  You cannot lay down a red line and not enforce it if you want to be taken seriously.

Obama, with this one act, did incalculable damage to his and America's credibility abroad.  By the time Obama "found himself recoiling from the idea of an attack unsanctioned by international law or by Congress," it was already too late to be feckless.  He had his opportunity to exhibit prudence prior to his "red line" speech and blew it by laying the red line.

Obama will be remembered as the emperor who bluffed; and when Assad called his bluff, everyone saw that he had no pants on.

Read it on their website first.  I am keeping the article below for backup in case this link goes bad in 20 years.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/

Israel and Salary Caps

I've suggested exactly this idea before, so I will be most interested to see how it works out in Israel: capping salaries at a given percentage of the lowest paid person in the company.

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-1.709326

Being a Delta Rat

So, I was coding earlier today when I received an email from Doug Casey's International Man, which I reservedly follow.  He is good at describing the problems.  The title of the email was "Top Five Reasons Not to Vote."

The problem is political myopia induced by the enforcement of party lines and overarching political philosophies, which push out divergent, independent thought.

Fiat Currency: A Nation's Store of Wealth

Fiat currencies are a curiosity that has arisen in the last 40-50 years that has existed as a secretive matter-of-fact.  It is like the benign secret that all of the folks who created it felt was scandalous, when in reality it is a non-issue.  There are no new problems that are introduced by a fiat currency, simply new forms of the same old problems.  Problems with fiscal prudence, honest dealing, and straightforward politics are the same issues that existed before fiat currencies, but the crooked powers that be now have new ways to steal from people that they did not have available to them before.

For a brief review, fiat currencies are imaginary money issued by a government that backs up the industrious efforts of its people.  The intrinsic value backing a fiat currency is not dictated by the government, it is derived from the faith of the governed (and many times others not governed) who choose to use it.

There is another property of fiat currencies that I have been chewing on for some time that is slowly crystallizing for me.  Fiat currencies represent a store of wealth, in the form of faith and the wealth that follows it, that a country can use in lieu of debt or taxation as source of working capital.  The mechanism by which a country can use this capital is via the printing press, or really today by a central bank mainframe server into which more zeroes are simply appended to the end of a long-type value in a database somewhere.  It is literally as simple as making 1,000,000 into 1,000,000,000,000.

However, the ease of this creation of money should not be confused as a creation of wealth for the consequences of this action are severe if not carefully managed.  First, the government doesn't create wealth.  It never has, and it never will.  People create wealth and the government monetizes and uses a portion of that wealth to accomplish its tasks.  If the government prints too freely, above the wealth creation of the people of the country, then the value of the fiat currency will drop accordingly, thus lowering the relative value of the currency with respect to other nations' floating currencies.  If it is printed vastly beyond the wealth creation of the people, then you enter into hyper-inflationary territory, such as happened many times in the past in places like Wiemar Germany in the 1920s , Hungary in the 1940s, Argentina in the 1980s, Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Zimbabwe in the 2000s.  And despite the Federal Reserve's incompetence in the past, I am glad that they are mostly allowing our currency to float upward in relative value, despite the trade penalties that are paid as a result.

U.S. Dollar Index over the past 5 years.

The fiat currency as a store of wealth can be accessed, much like a bank account for a nation state, to withdraw working capital from in times of need.  It is a good thing to let your currency float upwards and accrue wealth to store up for times of need.  So, despite all of the negative press that our strong currency is getting, I want to ensure that this message gets out.  A strong currency is not a bad thing.  In fact, I would argue strongly that it is a very positive thing, especially for countries who can produce everything they need themselves, especially food and fuel, since those are the two limitations that harm countries who have to import or export large quantities of to survive.  This is a stark contrasting view from Trump who views currency devaluation as a "smart" thing to do.  Sure, it is smart until you need to print money to actually mitigate an existential economic crisis.  If you devalue your currency during stable times, you invite hyper-inflation in the event of a real crisis.

However, this is not to say that the U.S. is on good footing.  As some of the economists that I follow have said, "The U.S. is the least ugly girl at the dance."  We are still ugly, but less so than most other nations in the world.  Since all fiat currencies are ultimately imaginary, it is difficult to measure it's true intrinsic value.  However, if one considers gold, a metal that possesses every property necessary to be used as a substitute for money, you can get a feel for the value of the U.S. dollar against something more permanent.  And although the dollar value of gold has been declining over the past 5 years, it took place before the significant rise in the exchange rate of the U.S. dollar, meaning that the dollar was accruing real value in 2013, while the 2015 exchange rate change is merely a worsening of every one else in the DXY currency basket.

Gold Price in U.S. dollars over 5 years.

This chart is especially significant since many other nations were buying up gold in copious quantities in 2013, most notably Russia and China, so a drop in the price of gold in the face of extreme demand accentuates the potency of this point.

Ultimately, though, the increase in the value of the dollar means that you, dear reader, get a stealth raise as your U.S. dollar-denominated salaries and bank accounts buy more than they did in 2012, although I am sure you already noted this at the gas pump.  I, for one, hope that the Federal Reserve stays out of the way and allows the U.S. dollar to continue to accrue value, as I expect will happen given all of the various crises around the world.  The U.S. is seen as a financial safe haven, despite all of our very serious fiscal and debt problems.