2016 year-end news summary (2)

 (This is a continuation of the previous post… )

• Helping the less fortunate…
• Protecting the environment…
• Uncovering life’s mysteries…
• Erasing the barriers that keep humanity divided….

Thanks to noble things like these, which have been happening a lot lately, living on Earth is much better now (examples here…   and   here… ) than it was 100 or 200 or 300… or 1,000 or 5,000 years ago.

At least that’s true for most of us.

(There are always those souls who suffer by choice or by karma or by disease or by bad luck or for whatever reason… but generally speaking, things are a lot better for the average Joe [or Wang Wei or Sergei or Ahmed… or whomever…] than they would have been at any other time in recorded history. Contact just about anyone in the world today via email or tencent or VK or facebook or muslimface or renren or moimir or twitter or weibo or wechat or youtube or rutube… and most of them will probably agree: things are pretty amazing here on Earth nowadays!…)

And I trust that most of us will continue to do our part in the coming years to help those noble trends take root and flourish in the world.

Meanwhile… by contrast…

… there’s one savage trend that’s been causing destruction and suffering like a slow-moving, planetary cancer… and it promises to ramp up and spread with a vengeance in the coming years.

It came to a head with the unlikely (some would say impossible) election of rabble-rouser Donald Trump as US president this past November.

That in itself is an ominous sign, the prospect of Tartuffe bouncing around in the White House like an angry pinball, but this is just one small chapter in the middle of the dark drama. This current chapter could be titled, The Brink of Chaos.

Much has happened to get us to this dark chapter, and it’s fairly easy to predict how the rest of the drama might unfold (or explode might be a more appropriate verb) in the coming months and years.

Let’s start with a very simple outline to get a glimpse of the whole drama.

At first glance the simple outline below will probably start to seem like conspiracy theory or delusion.

So the next article will be a more detailed outline that fills in some of the gaping holes, along with some predictions. And after that… probably at least one additional article with lots and lots of source material.

But first, the simple outline:

A Sketchy Outline of the Dark Drama

1800-1900. With the Industrial Revolution, world civilization evolves into a living system whose main building blocks are coal (for energy) and iron (for structure). Whoever has coal and iron and knows how to use it can become a strong, dynamic, wealthy community or company or nation.

1900-1950. The noble part of humanity gets busy using coal and iron to build great cities (although the environment is often fouled in all the excitement). The savage part of humanity squabbles over who gets the coal and iron. Germany in particular becomes addicted to coal and iron and starts behaving like an addict in denial… robbing, stealing and killing to feed its habit. Nazi Germany masters the art of public brainwashing. The German people, depressed and desperate after losing the First World War, rally under an umbrella of fear, hatred, intolerance, and national pride that is being stirred up through the media by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leadership. Germany’s mineral addiction eventually culminates in two world wars that kill tens of millions of people.

1950-1975. World civilization metamorphs into an oil-based living system. Crude oil or petroleum starts to replace coal and iron because it can be processed not only into liquid fuels for the millions of vehicles spreading throughout the world, but also into solid products like plastic, building materials and fabrics. Whoever has oil and knows how to use it can become a strong, dynamic, wealthy community or company or nation. In the USA and some other countries it’s a wildly prosperous time of gushers… black gold… texas tea….

1975-2000. The noble part of humanity uses oil to rebuild great cities (but often fouls the environment in the process). The savage part of humanity squabbles over who gets the oil, culminating in military devastation of oil-rich areas like the Middle East… and sabre-rattling among the big powers like America, Russia, and China. America in particular becomes heavily addicted to oil and starts behaving like an addict in denial.

2000-2016. World civilization comes to the brink of chaos. Uncle Sam continues to ravage the Middle East to get its oil. He shoves and jabs at oil-rich Russia, trying to provoke the big guy and charm or maybe even kidnap some of his next-door neighbors like Ukraine and Crimea… (and probably oil-rich Kazakhstan in the near future). To get his own crack-house into some semblance of order, Uncle Sam, under the guise of far-right politics, masters the art of public brainwashing through Fox News and other fear-based, hate-based media outlets, and a large, susceptible segment of the American people rally under the new umbrella of fear, hatred, intolerance, and national pride. However, Uncle Sam’s brainwashing isn’t strong enough to mobilize the majority of Americans behind his oil addiction because the American people aren’t desperate enough (like the 1920s Germans) nor gullible enough (as trusting humans sometimes tend to be) to fall in line. There’s still a noble voice of reason running the show in America behind Barack Obama and the liberals… so Uncle Sam, sick and tired of democracy and desperate for more oil, employs his right-wing political dupes to rig his own 2016 presidential and congressional election to take over the government once and for all… and he manages to cast the blame of vote-rigging on Russia as a smokescreen. Clever, eh? (Read a 7/7/17 article about that here… )

Conspiracy theory, eh?*

We’ll see.

Stay tuned for the next article, in which we’ll supplement a more detailed outline with some actual predictions of the ugly things that are likely to happen in the near future….

.                Part Three….

(*PS – If I mysteriously disappear before I can finish this series of articles, it might mean I’ve joined up with Mike Louis Connell, Paul Wellstone, the 2 Kennedy brothers, and some other good souls to finish the job through ITC systems. 🙂 Whatever it takes, eh?    — MM)