Author: bfaure

The end of the year and the beginning of another always brings a group of lists. The ten best, the ten worst, the biggest trends, the new year’s resolutions, the people who have left us.  The one predictable thing about doing lists that predict future events in the year to come is that they are almost always uniformly wrong.  Our best understanding doesn’t remotely approach the effect of unknown forces, inventions, human responses and the ignorance of actions that truly define what happens. We can look back and chuckle at our awkward expert ‘nonsense’ when placed against the reality of outcome.  Pollster Frank Luntz, who is still churning data through focus groups in 2015, predicted in 2002 that the inevitable democrat party nominee to challenge George W. Bush for the presidency would be “Tom Daschle, Senate majority leader”. Tom Daschle who?  Noble Prize for economics winner Paul Krugman, persisting as an outstandingly wrong way prognosticator for the New York Times, put forth this whopper in 1998:

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

The predictions regarding science and innovation are particularly spurious. Take Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold’s 1997 statement that “Apple as a company is already dead.” Apple of course is now worth three times the value of Microsoft.

Those of you who think the climate forecast can be accurately predicted a hundred years from now, might remember the 1970 Earth day predictions of University of California Davis Ecologist Kenneth Watt:

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Not exactly, Kenneth. But, in fairness, even Nostradamus didn’t get it all right. So, Ramparts is too smart by half to suggest the future, but it is fun perhaps to describe some impressions and directions  and see what happens – if we prove right, we told you so; if wrong, we can at least claim to be as clairvoyant as a Noble Prize winner like Krugman.

Trump-mania will be a spent force : This is a dangerous impression to start with, if our credibility is at stake.  The polls would suggest the Donald Trump as a political force continues to grow ever more so and all attempts to derail have simply strengthened him. But actual elections are why we do not have a President Giuliani, Glenn, Connally, or Hillary Clinton 2008. Trump’s major weakness as a political figure versus political celebrity is Trump.  His strength from day one has been his steadfastness as an anti-immigration candidate, and it will be his downfall.  Trump, to stay consistent, has had to throw ever wider circles around his anti-immigration invectives that started as reasonable, if infeasible stands regarding the southern border, into progressively ludicrous statements regarding, well just about everything.  Bellicosity works when you are convincing those who need no convincing, but as the field of competitors progressively narrows and you need to convince the skeptical voter, the ignorant, conflicting statements you espouse become a progressive problem. Trump needs victories or second place finishes in Iowa or New Hampshire, or bellicosity rapidly becomes a spent force.

2016 will be the ‘hottest’ year on record: It is the last year of the Obama administration and almost all the legacies, from Obamacare to World Peace,  are coming to an ignominious collapse.  The final legacy is global warming and the billions of dollars linked to securing this legacy demands that no matter what the weather, the measured year temperature will have to be the hottest ever.  The industry of settled science demands the narrative be preserved, and so it will be.  Put your thermostats away, next year’s temperature is already known, and it ain’t going to be reported going down.

Attendance at major  sports venues will be trending down:  Big sports and big money have permanently bonded and the direction is ominous for the entertainment value of sports.  Ticket prices continue to climb, team loyalty is drying up as teams are leaving for far more economic markets, and television access for the average fan will soon be pay only.  Instant replay is killing sorts spontaneity and sports as an omnivorous consumer of are youth is creeping down to the middle school level.  When the venue becomes contrived, and the outcome progressively economically determined, sitting in the stands will be a thing of the past.  Why bother to freeze to death, when your team has no chance and the game ticket costs a week of salary?  If the teams’ make money, whether you are there or not, the die is cast. The money will not be made on tickets supporting your team, but progressively on the internet fantasy teams.  Why be committed to a team when everyone’s players can be on your team?

Europe, America, and Russia will all see at least one major terrorist incident: This impression is one of the sadder, but easier, ones.  Europe and America are still enthralled with the concept of Frances Fukuyama’s End of History argument and the tragedies that have befallen them since are predictable in that history does not suffer denial easily. Unfortunately, when it comes to philosophic world views, Huntington’s the Clash of Civilizations looks like the more insightful recognition of the world around us. Until the liberal democracies wake up to the threat building against them, they will be vulnerable and prone to the next outburst, and it won’t be a little one.  Russia will suffer its tragedy because it is overextended as a world enforcer, at the precise time the homeland is vulnerable and weak, buffeted by stratospherically low energy prices that are the primary nutrient to its one asset economy.  Putin’s need to appear invulnerable will only increase his vulnerability.  Unfortunately, I think 2016 will be a good year for the bad guy.

The Arab Winter will claim at least one more government – Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia: Admittedly this is the most ‘out there’ impression, but the pattern has been established.  The Arab Spring was the hope of the Middle East joining the modern world, but the early momentum collapsed into the dangerous chaos of the Arab Winter currently fanning out from the calamity in Syria.  The ugly stepchild of the Arab Spring, ISIS, now threatens its Sunni providers in Saudi Arabia, and with the stalemate in Yemen and the collapse of oil prices, the sheiks are in a progressively intolerable vice.  Their response to the absent American presence has been to build a league of 37 Sunni nations to ‘defeat terrorism’, but it is really pointed at their sworn enemy Iran, and one wonders if the forward projection will make them vulnerable from within.  Jordan lives as long as Saudi Arabia can support it, and Egypt is at the same mercy.  If the there is no American support, the edifice of power will likely collapse from within in one or more of these countries, and the Middle East will become an even more unstable place (if that’s possible).

The strong foreign policy candidate will win the 2016 American presidential election:  The Trump phenomena reveals a progressive uneasiness in America regarding the future, and, God forbid,  a significant terrorist event were to occur, that would  seal the deal.The world abhors a vacuum and President Obama’s obsessive need to reduce America to an also ran, puts us squarely in the sites of those who would do us harm. The need for Hillary Clinton to tie herself to this progressively vulnerable foreign policy position will be her undoing, and it won’t be close if trouble occurs.

If Republicans do not win the Presidency, the party will split and cease as a national party:  The wins of 2010 to gain the house and 2014 to gain the Senate have reflected back as a complete waste of effort to the conservative voter.  The national party runs afraid of looking obstructionist and proved it again with a calamitous budget agreement that secured for President Obama and large business interests everything they wanted.  The final strike of losing the Presidential election will be the third strike, and conservatives will never again associate themselves with a party of spending apologists.  The threat that three parties will never knock the liberal agenda from power will be immaterial; the national Republican agenda has no respect for its base, and this with a loss, will be finally and justly reciprocated.

There I said it.  And when you say it on the internet, you say it forever.  Hopefully I’m no more accurate then the prognosticators that have had their impressions dashed upon the rocks of history.  The negative nature of my future impressions deserve a real rock dashing.  There just seems to be a sense that we are just hanging on, waiting for some sign that it is okay to be ourselves again, to be prosperous again, to be spiritual again, to be strong again as Americans.  It won’t be under this sad wisp of a President.  With a little luck, maybe we can survive his Presidency to thrive again under a truly positive force. America, it’s your last chance.  Don’t be fooled by the demagogue or the liar.  Anyone else, we got a chance.

 

Look anywhere around you in today’s unstable world and the strain of inexorable change and the reaction to it is a fundamental tenet of the instability.  This is certainly not a new phenomena but the current neurotic response is in many ways more universal based on the incredible speed by which change decimates in our electronic and global culture.  We are now not so much resistors to change as we are reactionaries.  The reactionary nature I think bleeds out of our superficiality, and our aversion to the hard work associated with being an individually unique soul , accepting the burden of attaching some meaning to our existence. We are unwilling to evaluate change as progressive or regressive based on deeper values, but rather instinctually and aggressively react to the very presence of different interpretations or opinions that would add to or depth of understanding.  We have become scared of our own shadow, because we are no longer interested in understanding how a shadow is formed.

The Industrial Revolution may have created the seeds of our current neuroses.  Prior to the power of industrial magic, distances for thousands of years were consistently understood.  We were limited by the speed of a running man or perhaps the horse he rode upon, the capability of sail across a body of water.  We hunted or grew our own food, or we lost the battle of survival from the lack of sustenance.  The power of steam and eventually the combustion engine however forced enormous change, rapidly reducing distances and placing goods and services into people’s homes without requiring the physical labor or risks associated with producing them.  We could now live and work distances from our survival supplies, in innumerable and creative ways that increased individual initiative and  incentive.  The increased capacities did not come about without a significant disillusionment that ‘old times’ and ‘old ways’ were somehow better, and more human.  Yet the concern about progress was weighed against the value to the individual – more goods were seen as better quality of life for more people, individual achievements were honored as indicative of the human spirit, horrors such as slavery and religious wars seemed anachronistic to a comfort with a ‘modern’ concept as to the primacy of individual thought and expression. With such benefits came the growth of reactionary impulses that feared the potential that one might fall behind progress, or simply be left outside looking in.

The examples as to our neurotic fear of other now expresses itself in many shades across cultures.  its common cord however is the unwillingness to judge ‘other’, not to the extent of its potential benefits to culture, but rather its very existence as a threat to a demand for an accepted normal.  Examples abound.

The concept of political correctness covers a universe of fear of other and the individualism it promotes.  Several decades ago, it was thought that individuals were capable of rationalizing controversial subjects and forming expanded and complex ideas about right and wrong. Television shows promoting such concepts, like All in the Family or Fawlty Towers used comedy to open our controversial prejudices to the light of discussion.  The Wall Street Journal reports that the BBC in today’s world attaches sensibility warnings to shows that may offend, and erases out Basil Fawlty’s more ‘objectionable’ discourse for fear ‘average’ people will be unable to digest the deeper truths.  The article further examines the  response by Yale professor Erika Christakis to an email put out by Yale University Intercultural Affairs Council to urge students to avoid certain Halloween costumes for their offending potential,  to frame an argument that individual expression that may even border on insensitive or obnoxious may actually promote the concept of vetting ideas through open debate.  The very idea that other viewpoints other than the accepted viewpoint by culturally progressive and politically correct councils brought an explosive fury upon the professor with threats of expulsion and violence.  No isolated event,   campuses across the country saw furious efforts to squash any form of speech that deviated from the accepted version of appropriate speech, and demanded the scalps of the identified non-conformists.

The campus thought police that look to stamp out free speech seek to eliminate any avenue for more complex thinking.  ‘Safe zones’ are being set up on campus where individuals can be assured all thinking is communal and reactionary, and the definitions of right and wrong can be uniform, so no one is confronted by change or their righteousness threatened.  Individual thought brings the potential of complexity and even personal growth – in essence threatens change to the status quo.

The fear of change created by individualism is the foundation of the histrionic demand for uniformity regarding supposed anthropogenic global warming.  The science must be accepted as settled, because to develop other theses is contrary to the avoidance of change.  Global warming hysteresis is based upon the concept that current climate is ideal, and any change must be avoided, regardless of cost. The acceptable costs to ‘control’ climate are the destruction of individual initiative, global redistribution of resources, and top down regulation of what qualifies as acceptable behavior.  The need to ignore the realities that carbon dioxide levels have fluctuated long before man was felt to influence them, that temperatures rose and fell over centuries independent of man’ influence, and that different climatizations incentivized different cultures over time is anathema to the elite’s demand for the cessation in climate change. No matter the accumulated resources of the entire globe would be insufficient to affect in minuscule fashion the actual climate of the planet; the very futileness of the effort would speak to its righteousness in the conceptualization of those who seek to destroy individual expression and avoid change.

In its final form, the fear of change that modernity brings through individual capability has lead to an enormously murderous force to avoid change.  The radical Islamist ideal of not even avoiding modernity for themselves,  but instead forcing reactionary concepts from the distant past to somehow revert the world to a previous reality speaks to its neurotic lack of self esteem.   Cloaked in supposed religious piety, the need to force conformance with seventh century concepts of slavery, female servitude, singular belief systems, and totalitarian justice implies a distortion of culture that even the seventh century would have had problems with.  The self actualization that religion provides in allowing an individual a deeper understanding of  a reason for being, is perverted by people who are offended by society’s lack of willingness to accept their own stilted inadequacies and respect for other.  The jihad of radical Islam is not an righteous argument for a life of higher piety.  It is an effort to use religion as an excuse to avoid individual actualization, for the fear that such an actualization would degrade them in God’s eyes, as much as their own.

We are living through a crisis of confidence in our own capacities as thinking beings to build a better world.  Perhaps this was inevitable when the very threats to life itself, starvation, disease, and poverty began to recede, and with them the common threat they presented to us equally.  We have had these crises before, out of which sprung the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Age of Science to the positive development of the best that we are today.  Change is therefore not to be accepted or rejected, but rather dissected, understood and adjusted  for what it may mean to our own self development and progression as a species.  The current hysterical and violent reactionary nature speaks to our fear of the unknown and our desire to remain constant whatever the consequence.  Modernity is after all eventually only the ancient standard for another time to come.  As Yogi Berra so succinctly stated, “the future ain’t what it used to be…”

 

On a recent Ricochet podcast, conversation centered around a commenter’s observation that America had become a fundamentally unserious country.  The specifics of the observation centered upon the current Presidential debates as compared to the content of the 1960 Presidential debate between candidates Nixon and Kennedy.  The essence of the 1960 debate is recalled to have centered upon an in-depth discussion by the candidates regarding America’s role in the world, her security, and whether a potential “missile gap” existed between the United States and the Soviet Union that threatened the uneasy peaceful existence created by the policy concept of mutually assured destruction.  In contrast, the recent presidential candidate debates have focused on  the perceived need for government to regulate fantasy football, whether one candidate considered the other “ugly,”  and what candidates “hated” most.  We are surrounded by burgeoning societal debts, immigrant crises, provocative totalitarian movements, genocides, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and crumbling of value structures without clear vetting of what is to take their place, and we are comfortable with our potential leaders defining each other as a “loser”, “dumb”, ‘ugly” or “lazy” in our search to find people who will have to address the world’s increasingly  complex problems.

Where does such unseriousness come from?  Being oblivious to growing problems is not a new phenomena per se. Each generation’s interpretation of the succeeding one had the patina of derision regarding their ‘seriousness’ in addressing life’s challenges.  The Lost Generation that propelled out of WWI was considered drifting and aimless. The Silent Generation between the wars was self absorbed and capable of superficial frivolity, yet bore what was eventually the Greatest Generation of WWII. Leave it to the greatest among us to have introduced to the world the Baby Boomer Generation  that redefined self absorption for all time. And so forth, through Generation X, the Millennials, and the current Generation Z.

There are many contributors for producing the current brand of unseriousness of the country given the problems faced, but a few rise to the occasion of this brief essay.  First and foremost is the death of civics and geography in the insight of those who would hazard opinions on the formidable problems we face.  The concept of citizenship seems a tired relic of the past, formed from the concept of the dreaded nation state.  A nation state had borders, a shared philosophy of citizen-hood, and a conviction to defend those ideals.  In the case of many of the nation states of the West, the border has become porous cheese, with the unvetted intake of individuals who are looking only to the economic benefits offered by the acceptor nation, with no intention of absorbing its principles of citizenship.  The nation state progressively demands little in the way of preparation of either its immigrants nor its citizens regarding the responsibilities of a citizen in acknowledging the country’s geographic reason for being or foundational principles.  Ask the average citizen the difference between the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and a blank stare emanates. Further emptiness in rationalizing concepts as to how and why the borders developed, why individual states exist, and how resources historically determined the facts on the ground.  What has replaced such concepts is a general globalist vagary that has the depth of a television commercial as to “shared” responsibilities for big ideas like equality of outcome, keeping the oceans and earth safe from humanity, and allowing the equality of all cultural concepts no matter how devastating they may be to the individuals who suffer under them.

Second is the profound self absorption that increasingly dominates public discourse in the form of victimhood.  Born out of legitimate attempts to understand the effects of crime, historical inequities, and the economic forces that determine outcome of opportunity, the discourse has deteriorated into infantile rants that remove all notions of self responsibility and with it the understanding that in a free society an individual can effect control over their own destiny.  The tools of individual improvement, most profoundly the strength of a classical education based on analytic thought, ability to digest and understand complex ideas, and obtaining the knowledge base necessary to eventually expand one’s knowledge has devolved into reducing measures of accountability,  providing education that revolves around victimization not actualization, and denigrating true achievement.

Third is the overwhelming influence of social media, that has reduced complex ideas to bulletin board remarks, dramatically reduced the digestion time on events to discern their deeper meanings and undertones, and elevated the tyranny of public scorn onto every dissenting thought. Take the Facebook promotion of the Hillary Clinton candidacy pictured above. What do we want? – We want a Woman Presidency, We Sure Do. Does it matter what her opinions might be on the issues of the day, her previous performance in leadership positions, her character for addressing the great responsibilities inherent in such a position?   Not So Much.  At a guttural level, social media weaves the superficial emotions that occur at the breathtaking speed of the internet to firm opinions without measured consideration or the value of dissenting opinion.  This has invaded the so called Fourth Estate – the traditional journalism that was structured in the world of freedom of the press and free speech itself to hold leaders accountable for their actions, investigate in depth their process of decision making, and root out those that would take extra-constitutional or dictatorial means for achieving their ends.  In a society that increasingly won’t read and reflect, the headline gains in stature, the edited video stands in for the historical record, and the depth of comment is quickly superseded by the next attention getting superficial event.

And thus so usually defines the collapse of civilizations.  The Roman citizen more interested in the gladiators battling in the Coliseum than the gladiators defending the empire’s borders.  The British King more interested in maintaining his colonies’ obedience than adjusting and modifying his approach to their grievances.  The West has had quite a run, but the mighty battleship hides a rusted infrastructure that is progressively at risk to catastrophic collapse from a well placed shell.  We best get more serious in our approach, or when the vaunted shell comes, we may find ourselves in the middle of a hostile ocean with no lifeboats to be found.  Now that, is down right #serious.