Wednesday, June 30, 2010

A Bad Future for Everyone


By Alan Caruba

Every so often it’s a good idea to take stock of the threats facing the modern world. Any student of history will know that this analysis is going to be grim. Take a deep breath and read this for a few minutes. After that, you may need a stiff drink!

I have this theory that the world goes mad every twenty to fifty years, forgets what the devastation of war does to nations and the lives of those who want nothing to do with war.

It has been sixty-five years since the end of the last world war, fought in Europe, Russia, and in the Far East, China, the Philippines, Pacific islands, and against Japan. Much of the world lay in wreckage, millions were dead.

After that the U.S. spent a total of twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, in Vietnam, followed now by nine years in Afghanistan, and seven years in Iraq, not counting an earlier invasion to drive Saddam out of Kuwait.

Though the scale was small, war came to the American homeland with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York at a cost of nearly 3,000 lives along with the attack on the Pentagon. There have been smaller terrorist attacks since.

In the combined military services, the U.S. has over 1.4 million men and women under arms. The United States of America maintains some 700 bases around the world. We are the sole guarantor of any measure of peace, of any resistance to tyranny.

The single greatest threat to freedom worldwide is the resurgence of militant Islam. More than a billion people are Muslims, but the locus of the attack on industrialized, modern nations has been the Middle East, a region of the world that remains trapped in this seventh century retrograde religion. If successful, it could drag the world back to a new version of the Dark Ages when humanity will be oppressed by a faith based on the hatred of all other faiths.

Trying to accommodate Islam is an invitation for conquest. It has a history of building mosques over or near the holiest sites of older faiths.

The environmental movement took shape in the late 1960s and, from around the late 1980s, the greatest “scientific” fraud ever perpetrated, global warming, was launched by the United Nations and maintained through a huge propaganda program and, as often as not, by various national leaders, including our own.

Billions were allocated to research and other responses to this non-event. The planet was not in the throes of a sudden and dramatic warming, nor is there any need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. For the past decade, the planet has been steadily cooling.

The rise of the United Nations following World War Two has been a ceaseless quest for control over the world’s population. The UN has never successfully deterred any war, large or small. It seeks to undermine the individual sovereignty of nations. It is a cesspool of corruption and deception.

The other major threat has been the specter of communism that gained momentum at the beginning of the last century, primarily in the former Soviet Union, thereafter spreading to China and other nations. It takes the form of socialism in many nations, including our own. As an economic system, it is a total failure. It engenders huge governmental apparatus, centralized planning, and attacks on the ownership of private property. It destroys innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.

There is, too, the prospect of the growth of the Earth’s population to eight billion by 2050. It will be coupled with the demand for more sources of energy, oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear. The Earth’s resources may or may not be finite, but the stresses this will put on nations as they compete for what does exist are seen in the bizarre refusal of successive U.S. administrations to open its own huge reserves of coal and oil for extraction and use.

Yet another factor is the stress on the global banking community. The potential failure of nations like Greece, Spain, Italy and others have put huge strains on other nations that are, in one way or another, invested in them. These troubled nations have two things in common, aggressive unions and socialism. The huge debt of the United States, now at $13 trillion, surpassing our annual gross domestic product, poses a threat to the entire world’s financial stability.

Population, financial stability, a militant religion, and energy all will place stress on the nations of the world in ways that have historically erupted in warfare.

Finally, there is something called the Grand Solar Minimum, a diminution of radiation from the Sun that is likely to precede a new ice age. Since the period between ice ages is generally 11,500 years we are at the very end of the current interglacial period.

To put that in context, we and the rest of humanity are living in the period in which the human race created what we call civilizations.

Dennis Avery. a scientist with the Hudson Institute, notes that “Humans have known for 400 years—since Galileo—that sunspots correlate with climate changes on earth. A startling lack of sunspots predicted both the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer Minimum that begin in 1460, and the Maunder Minimum which began in 1645. More recently the Dalton Minimum predicted the severe cold of the early 1800s.”

These factors all portend a very bad future for the whole of the Earth’s population no matter where they live, what they believe, or how they behave.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

11 comments:

Michelle said...

Well-written, Mr. Caruba, with many points for us to consider as we try (however futilely) to chart our course into the future.

Dave's Daily Day Dream said...

Glad I checked this in the afternoon, Alan. Just in time (as you so courteously recommend) to pour a cool one. Maybe two.
Our situation is dire, but not a surprise to those who care to read. Most however, are happy with their six pack and remote.
One can take comfort in the notion that it is all Biblical - go figure!

Alan Caruba said...

@Dave: So, despite my warnings of future horrors, you take them as an excuse to toss back "a cool one"? Is there nothing I can write that will scare the pants off of you? Lord knows, I AM trying! :-)

Geoff Simon said...

Indeed, a thought provoking commentary on the plethora of world problems. But I think the biggest threats come not from those who espouse socialist views or those who block the production of energy essential for the conduct of commerce. The biggest threat has been and always will be - apathy.

Americans have grown too comfortable, and too many are willing to lap up the leftist pablum spread by an irresponsible mainstream media. I am continually amazed at the people I encounter who attempt to defend the indefensible - the radical legislation and reckless spending that has become the norm in Washington since Barack Obama took office.

Americans, especially those who recognize and understand the threats you describe, need to take the time to educate the gullible and misinformed, so that they too are aware that the freedoms we've come to take for granted can and will be taken away.

Ronbo said...

Alan:

Reading your latest article I couldn't help but think of "The Merry Minuet" by the Kingston Trio:

They're rioting in Africa.

They're starving in Spain. There's hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain.

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles.

Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch and I don't like anybody very much!

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud, for man's been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud.

And we know for certain that some lovely day someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.

They're rioting in Africa. There's strife in Iran. What nature doesn't do to us will be done by our fellow man.

Yowie13 said...

Climate wise we are in for a rough trot, very rough indeed. It looks like we are going into a mini ice age. The result in a few years is likely to be famines with millions dying as the first world struggles to feed itself the 3rd world will be abandoned.

Lets hope however we are only going into a mini ice age. If we plunge into the real deal, which we could any time, then billions will die and our civilisations will crumble. But do our civilisations deserve to survive. While technology has been evolving in leaps and bounds, socially and morally we have been devolving since the early 1900s.

False flag operations costing thousands of lives. Banking and finance greed destroying economies around the world. Politicising Science with bogus global warming. Intollerance & Fundamentalism arising in all religions. Maybe our civilisation deserves to get crushed under the ice and swallowed by the sand of the next glacial period of our current ice age.

LarryOldtimer said...

We are destroying our civilization (as are all western civilizations) with the absurdity of anthropogenic (human caused) global warming. Those with PhDs which have proposed this either don't know enough about the fundamentals of both chemistry and physics to know better, or are simply ripping off the government by way of government funding for useless "studies", or both. Certainly, western universities have graduated far more people with PhDs than there is useful work for them to do!

Certainly they were never taught about the importance of margin of error, or weren't paying attention in class.

The "climate scientists" have "adjusted" previously measured temperatures (which had very large margins of error), and are extrapolating tiny supposed "trends" far into the future. They have muddled past temperature data to the point that there is no way of reasonably attempting to determine whether the overall temperature of the planet is getting warmer or cooler.

When economies collapse on a widespread basis, war is inevitable. The more widespread the economic collapse, the more widespread the war will be. As I have said before, we in the US are most fortunate that our only geographical neighbors are the weak nations of Canada and Mexico.

You are again spot on, Alan. It is going to be a hard row to hoe for my children and grandchildren, and yours.

Anonymous said...

Gheesh Alan all I have is coffee. You should have warned me to go to the drive thru before reading.

Druach said...

Many 'civilizations' have come and gone over the centuries and millions have died at the hands of others or through pestilence and plague. However, if we can prepare for the coming 'end of the world' what do we do and where do we go?
Any part of the world could be affected by volcanic ash, earthquakes etc. No matter where you are, food production will suffer and to store food for a few years would require resources that only our esteemed governments or bankers have.
I did plan on having a few large plastic bins with a store of freeze dried food or food in vacumn packs, but realistically, I have realised that I would be better prepared by learning a suite of survival skills and now carry a firelighter and a small penknife on my key ring at all times. I wish you all well.

Druach (ancient Celt for the wise one i.e Druid)

Druach said...

Dear Alan,
Having spent some time contemplating the future as I am sure many of your readers have done, I did initially think that a store of several years supply of freeze dried and vacuum packed food in a secure, defendable place would be best. But unless you have the resources of our esteemed governments or you are a banker I doubt that even in my wildest fantasies I would be able to afford the land or the construction required.
I also thought that joining forces with other like minded people may be the way forward. But I have seen with my own eyes how the behaviour of ‘civilised’ people under severe stress can degenerate back to basic animal instinct and what they will do to ensure the survival of their own families.
I have however, come to the conclusion that the best preparation for your own survival is to learn a suite of survival skills i.e. firelighting, trapping, water preparation, defence etc and to live on your wits and be your own keeper.

Wishing you all well in the future.

Druach said...

Dear Alan,
Having spent some time contemplating the future as I am sure many of your readers have done, I did initially think that a store of several years supply of freeze dried and vacuum packed food in a secure, defendable place would be best. But unless you have the resources of our esteemed governments or you are a banker I doubt that even in my wildest fantasies I would be able to afford the land or the construction required.
I also thought that joining forces with other like minded people may be the way forward. But I have seen with my own eyes how the behaviour of ‘civilised’ people under severe stress can degenerate back to basic animal instinct and what they will do to ensure the survival of their own families.
I have however, come to the conclusion that the best preparation for your own survival is to learn a suite of survival skills i.e. firelighting, trapping, water preparation, defence etc and to live on your wits and be your own keeper.
Wishing you all well in the future.