Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

May 22

PRO TRUMP? ANTI CHRIST.
SICK BODIES, SICK MINDS

Last week I wrote that the disappearance of trees deprives the people in the world of the power to combat the polluting pests that invade our respiratory systems, our lungs and throats, and mold us for a multitude of maladies.
No wonder ill health is now a global issue. That America is in the throes of a systemic health crisis can no longer be denied. According to the U.S. Department of Health And Human Services, more than two-thirds (68.8 percent) of adults are overweight or obese. (Overweight is typically defined as a body-mass index (BMI) of 25 or higher. A BMI of 24.9 is not exactly featherweight; I would have to add 20 pounds to reach a BMI of 24.9. )
The health risks of being overweight or obese include:
• type 2 diabetes
• heart disease
• high blood pressure
• nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (excess fat and inflammation in the liver of people who drink little or no alcohol)
• osteoarthritis (a health problem causing pain, swelling, and stiffness in one or more joints)
• some types of cancer: breast, colon, endometrial (related to the uterine lining), and kidney
• stroke
It’s even worse elsewhere. According to the influential medical magazine THE LANCET, 90 percent of the world population already suffers from some sort of disease.
Yes, the general overall health is poor.

I blame the use of carbon-based products. There is not a person in the world free of chemical contaminants, due to the universal presence of airborne particles originating from automobile exhausts, electricity generating stations, pesticides and fertilizers. Yes, the tens of thousands of compounds originating mostly from our oil-based industrialization have invaded the very essence of humanity. I expect that, once a PANDEMIC has a foothold, the onslaught will be unimaginably fierce and deadly.

Body and mind are intimately connected. There is a Latin stating that MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO, which means that a “sound mind and a sound body go together”. The opposite is true as well: an unhealthy body leads to a deranged mind: sick bodies, sick minds.

That’s what we have today: a lot of deranged minds. It does not take a great number of them to create a lot of havoc. I taught high school for a few years – wasn’t very good at it – and discovered that a few bad elements can throw the entire class in disarray. The same is true wherever. Anger, frustration, and plain stupidity are poisoning society. They are roiling the ranks also of the educated and people you would normally think of as the protected class.

Take the USA, a good example of SICK BODIES, SICK MINDS. Donald Trump comes along and says he understands and sympathizes with average Americans; and he’s the one who expresses that frustration in terms that a majority of the unprotected can understand. Other candidates may sympathize, too, but what comes out of their mouths sounds like conventional political yak-yak. Whatever you want to say about Donald Trump, when you hear him speak he doesn’t sound like a normal politician.

What is true on the political scene also applies to the economy. There too the old investment models no longer work as the underlying tectonic plates are shifting under our feet, making our old models spit out unreliable predictions. So it’s time to seriously think about throwing out our patterns for political predictions, because we’re in the middle of what is likely to be an epic generational shift in voting procedures. There too past performance is not indicative of future results.
Regular readers know that I am not very optimistic about the fate of us humans: we have created a society that is rushing to the abyss. The problem is that we see ourselves as gods, and have assumed infinity as our hallmark and live accordingly. We have forgotten about the GOD who really is infinite. We have ridiculed this GOD: worse have ignored him and so have lost the wisdom that comes from fearing the true GOD.
With us as gods there is no place anymore for the real God. So God has abandoned us. The rebellion we see in the voting public really is rebellion against God. Pro
Trump? Anti-Christ!

That has been especially evident in our treatment of creation, GOD’s crown jewel, the very object of God’s love.
Not everybody undergoes a true conversion, a life-shaking experience. I did in 1972-3. Then two books then changed my outlook on life: a Dutch book questioning heaven as the destination for Christians and pointing to the new Creation as our eternal habitat, and LIMITS TO GROWTH by Dennis Meadows. Realizing that not heaven but a renewed earth is where I will dwell forever and ever, caused me overnight to become an ardent earth-lover, reasoning that when our ultimate destination is this very earth, then I must now live that life of eternity. Meadows convinced me of the FINITENESS of all earth’s resources. These books two have changed my life: a true conversion.

Forty years later Dennis Meadows, in January 2013, was interviewed by the German weekly DER SPIEGEL, published in English, at the 40th anniversary of that book. In that interview Dennis Meadows said more clearly than ever that HUMANITY IS STILL ON THE WAY TO DESTROYING ITSELF.
Meadows makes a perhaps somewhat confusing distinction between universal and global problems. His words:
“You see, there are two kinds of big problems. One I call universal problems, the other I call global problems. They both affect everybody. The difference is: Universal problems can be solved by small groups of people because they don’t have to wait for others. You can clean up the air in Hanover without having to wait for Beijing or Mexico City to do the same.

“Global problems, however, cannot be solved in a single place. There’s no way Hanover can solve climate change or stop the spread of nuclear weapons. For that to happen, people in China, the US and Russia must also do something. But on the global problems, we will make no progress.”
So how do we deal with problems that are global? It’s deceptively simple: We don’t.
His core message remains valid today: Humanity is ruthlessly exploiting global resources and is on the way to destroying itself.
When asked whether he believes that the ultimate collapse of our economic system can still be avoided he answered:
“The problem that faces our societies is that we have developed industries and policies that were appropriate at a certain moment, but now start to reduce human welfare, like for example the oil and car industry. Their political and financial power is so great and they can prevent change. It is my expectation that they will succeed. This means that we are going to evolve through crisis, not through proactive change. Even if we want to – and I am one who wants to – we no longer can change the way we live.”

Dr. Meadows is entirely correct. Except for an occasional couple, very few takes Climate Change seriously. TV has as its main source of income the automobile industry, urging people to purchase their polluting products. Oh, yes, governments talk big and perhaps even try to influence people somewhat – not too much because that might backfire – but gradual change will never solve our real big problems. The bitter truth is that we simply will continue what we are doing until we are in the midst of a full-blown crisis. Nothing can avoid that.

The ultimate outcome is the end of the world as we know it: and I say GOOD RIDDANCE. A TRUMP victory – very likely – and Britain leaving the European Union, the so-called BREXIT – also very likely – will only increase the tempo of deterioration, simply because the MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO is no longer the deciding criterion in our day.

My brother in the Netherlands sent me an item about Isaac Newton. On 22 February 2003, the Daily Telegraph (London, England) published a front-page story announcing Isaac Newton’s prediction that the world would end in 2060. Then people thought that 400 years in the future would be the same as an eternity. Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician, most famous for his law of gravitation. He was the man who, in the 17th century, started the scientific revolution. Of course he then could not have possibly imagined today’s conditions, with a carbon-based industry, nuclear bombs, and a world population increasing from some 500 million then to more than 7 billion now. And Climate Change!

Admit it: we have painted ourselves into a corner. We no longer can change course to prevent ourselves from hitting boundaries. We hit the wall face first, and only then do we pick up the pieces and take it from there.
Jacques Cousteau, a French naturalist, was also quite blunt about it:
The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers: a demographic explosion that triggers social chaos and spreads death, nuclear delirium and the quasi-annihilation of the species… Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.

We see it all too clearly in the weather. Climate Change is not increasing in a linear way but exponentially. Actually everything is on an exponential path. Since Newton in the 17th century, and especially since the Industrial Revolution world population, industrialization and resource depletion have grown exponentially, while our answers to them go only linearly.
True, today we live longer, but we are in many ways much weaker than our ancestors, kept alive by drugs and oil-based conveniences. We have become so dependent, as modern western men and women, on the blessings of our energy surplus and technology that 9 out of 10 of us wouldn’t survive if we had to do without them.
There is a more or less general recognition that we face three global problems/crises: finance, energy and climate change. Climate change should really be seen as part of the larger overall pollution problem. As such, it is closely linked to the energy problem in that both problems are direct consequences of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
When we use energy, we produce waste; use more energy and we produce more waste. And there is a point where we can use too much, and not be able to survive in the waste we ourselves have produced.
So we change a light bulb and get a hybrid car. That’s perhaps an answer to the universal problem, and only perhaps, but it in no way answers the global one. With a growing population and a growing average per capita consumption, both energy demand and pollution keep rising inexorably. And the best we can do is pay lip service. Sure, we sign up for less CO2 and less waste of energy, but we draw the line at losing global competitiveness.

Small changes won’t do it.

The bottom line is that we may have good intentions, but we utterly fail when it comes to solutions. And if we fail with regards to energy, we fail when it comes to the climate and our broader living environment, also known as the earth.
We can only solve our climate/pollution problem if we use a whole lot less energy resources. Not just individually, but as a world population. Since that population is growing, those of us that use most energy will need to shrink our consumption more every passing day. And every day we don’t do that leads to more poisoned rivers, empty seas and oceans, barren and infertile soil. But we refuse to even properly define the problem, let alone – even try to – solve it.
Almost all people in the world now experience a sense of dread. And they have valid reasons. Sick minds rule. No wonder people are in a state of panic because they sense that the old ways have not worked, so perhaps, perhaps, voting for Trump or Sanders and for Brexit will do the trick. Of course it will not: it will make it worse. There are no answers anymore: that is the predicament we are in.

Let me rephrase that. In John 17 Jesus’ prayer is recorded. There, in verse 14 he states that those who believe in him do not belong to a world of which Satan has taken possession, where God has left us to our devices. There Jesus asks the Father to protect those who live for and look for the New World to come: His Kingdom.

There’s where we are at, there’s our answer: ora et labora, pray and prepare.

MAY 15 2016

THE PAWNBROKER

So, who is this PAWNBROKER? Wait, not so fast.

First some general stuff. We all know that pawnbrokers do not have a good name. They exploit people whose access to ready cash is non-existent, and, in order to raise money, they pawn a precious item, such as a wedding ring or another piece of jewelry, something valuable and not something needed for day-to-day survival. When they want that treasure back, they can redeem it by paying the advanced money plus, of course, interest. If it is not bought back within a certain time, the pawnbroker may sell it.

Pawning was popular at one time. In Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century, there were nearly as many pawnbrokers as pubs, lending money on anything from bed linen and cutlery to father’s ‘Sunday best’ suit. Margaret Atwood, in her book on PAYBACK: DEBT AND THE SHADOW SIDE OF WEALTH recalls how her parents, respectable middle class people, then living in Montreal, pawned an item to pay for a hospital bill. That was during the Depression 1929-39 when cash was in short supply and banks were loath or even unable to lend.

Let me be a bit more specific.
Suppose that I have a very precious item, a real large diamond, and in order to live the life of riley and enjoy the world’s pleasures to the full, I pawn that highly valuable item so that I can party and visit all the world’s dream locations.
Heard that story before? Look no further than the parable of the PRODIGAL SON. He cashed in his inheritance and boozed and gambled it away. In the end, of course, the Reckoning comes, as was the case with this young fellow about whom Jesus tells this story as related in Luke 15: 11- 32. There this spendthrift ended up in hell and, utterly broke, made his way back to his paternal home.
Not quite a pawnbroker story, but close, as he pawned his future to live in the presence.

I believe we are doing something quite similar.

But what about that PAWNBROKER?

First some more ancient history. When God formed the earth the potential for enhanced beautification was built into the structure. I gather this from a text I quoted last week – Genesis 2: 9. There it says that God made all kinds of trees, “beautiful (most important) to look at and good for food (of secondary ranking).”
Then God, generous to a fault, gave creation to us to beautify it, to make it even more marvelous and eye catching and fabulous. Where do I get that idea? Well, simple, in the text the beauty aspect comes first. That to me suggests that our primary task in life is to enhance creation, is to promote the arts, to make and write beautiful music, paint marvelous pictures, build pleasing structures, and make great gardens.

Has that been the case?

No, I don’t have to elaborate here: the newscasts repeat it ad nauseam. Just one line. Thomas L. Friedman, in last week’s New York Times column wrote: “U.S. foreign policy now is all about containing disorder and messes.” That’s the world today: global unrest and disasters.

Back to way back, when all things started in the Garden of Eden: the good and the bad. There the Devil made humanity look at the tree again. THE TREE. Why the tree? There is no more precious item in creation, apart from us humans, than THE TREE.

As soon as I had bought the parcel where I built our house in 1975, I planted 4000 trees. I had read in THE NEXT ONE HUNDRED YEARS by Jonathan Weiner, how Greg Marland of the US Department of Energy had calculated the number of trees needed to counterbalance the C02 we pump into the air. He came to 4500 new trees for a typical North American, much less, of course, for people in Africa, India and China. I figured that being careful, having solar energy, building a solar passive house, well insulated, growing food, bike wherever possible, our burden on the atmosphere would not exceed 2000 trees. What are the highest users of oxygen? CARS. With their combustion engines they cannot operate without a constant supply of oxygen.
Fortunately we – my wife and I- live among trees: to the north and east there is a lot of old growth, both hardwood, such as oak and maple but mostly pine, and to the west we planted those 4000.

Diane Beresford-Kroeger, in her book THE GLOBAL FOREST describes how trees are our lungs and absorb our pollution. She writes: “A healthy tree with a wide canopy around a house will significantly reduce particulate pollution. Urban forests and forested areas in our neighborhoods, parks and cities have the same effect on the urban environment. Global forests do this on a planetary scale. They form a living wall for health and a basic barrier to the pillage of pollution.”

The opposite is also true: creating conditions – as we have done – where forests go up in flames, increases the occurrence of PANDEMICS, because the harm we do to our trees, we do to ourselves. Now with untold millions of trees going up in smoke, not only depriving us of precious sources of CO2 absorbance, but also creating millions of tons of Carbon Dioxide in the process, we are losing the battle of Climate Change in an accelerated fashion. Don’t for a minute think that we can avoid the effects of Global Warming: it will speed up beyond the most pessimistic estimates.

Wendell Berry in his THE UNSETTLING OF AMERICA connects it all to religion. “Agriculture means cultivation of land. And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of ‘culture’ and ‘cult’. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in ‘culture’.”

Of course. As I so often have said: the earth is holy. Working in the earth is a religious act. I feel that especially now, in the spring time. That means that working in the garden where I use a spade to make beds and a rake to smooth them out is an act of worship. When doing that I thank the Lord for allowing me to till his holy earth and so grow our food. I have a feeling of elation when I work the soil, a sense of holiness. Writes Berry: “To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle”.

Both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck have said that “God, we and the earth are one.” I fully sense that. Once we forego ‘being true to the earth’ faith is no longer possible. That is a radical statement, I know. The Belgic confession comes to mind again which asks the basic question: HOW DO WE KNOW GOD?, and answers it by pointing to creation as God’s Primary Word. Writes J. H. Bavinck: “That is why Scripture and Creation are never at odds. They always form a unity where the one reinforces the other.” Psalm 119: 105 unambiguously says: “Your word – the Scriptures – is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path (in creation).

TREES are so precious and personify creation: every tree symbolizes the planet. I believe that with that in mind God planted some special trees in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
We now are starting to see that we cannot live without trees. Yet, thanks to our disastrous living habits, wantonly altering the weather, causing drought and heat, we are killing THE TREE OF LIFE and with it ALL OF LIFE. We now also are discovering what is good and what is evil. Good means fidelity to the natural world. Evil means exploiting the natural world for our own purposes and greed. It seems to me that natural life centers on trees.

John in his book REVELATION in Chapter 12 sees a dragon. There he did not think of all sorts of monsters such as they appear in the Babylonian and Egyptian myths, but was primarily focused on what is described in Genesis 3. This dragon is not the primeval ocean, not some sort of mythic monster, not the personification of the chaotic powers in the cosmos, but he is the ‘ancient snake’, the ‘devil and Satan’ who ‘has seduced the entire world.’
That he is depicted in Revelation 12 as ‘the great red dragon’ must indicate that he is as red as flames as if he wants to destroy the entire cosmos in his roaring rage and frightening fires. There is only one dragon, one mind-killing monster which throughout all the ages, especially today, has only one goal: death and destruction.

That process of death and destruction is now in full swing.

The fires we see burning in the northern forest, especially in Canada and Siberian Russia, are unstoppable until the winter sets in – if there will be a winter. This past January there were forest fires in Alaska, and we know how far north that is. Last winter, at times, it was warmer on the North Pole than in much of the USA. This essentially means that global fires could burn all year.

All this finally brings me to THE PAWNBROKER.

God created the earth. He then gave it to us and this precious possession we PAWNED it because we wanted to speed matters up, reluctant to go the slow, organic way. We wanted to be able to act like gods, just like the Prodigal Son, and Satan offered us that very possibility on condition that we transferred the ownership of earth to him, which we did, so he gave us carte blanche to pursue our desire.
Just as that young fellow in Jesus’ parable, we squandered our inheritance. We now see the earth’s treasures diminish in value, exactly what the great PAWNBROKER had in mind, because his intent was not to make a profit, but his payment came in the form of REVENGE: the destruction of the cosmos which God called ‘good’ seven times.

Today we are, whether we like it or not, aiding the Devil in his aim. This year 2016 is already the warmest ever. More extreme heat will accelerate fires, already at their worst. When Noah’s flood had subsided, God promised never to initiate a world-wide disaster again. Now we have become like gods and are capable to destroy the world all by ourselves.

What or who will redeem this world out of the clutches of the PAWNBROKER? Today this is not a simple case of expensive jewelry, that, with a bit of luck, or perhaps, from the proceeds of an inheritance, can easily be redeemed.
What is at stake now is the very survival of the planet: the lives of billions of people are at risk, plus all the animals, the plants, and, of course, the trees.
But there is HOPE. Through these disasters God is bringing his Kingdom.

The central point of the Gospel is not us, poor humans and our pain and suffering; rather, its entire focus is aimed at the unique and powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom.

It is God’s intention to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one overarching harmony. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise will of him who lives and rules forever.
Christ on the cross paid the price, including principal and interest, to buy creation back from THE PAWNBROKER, who in that curious interval between making the ‘real estate’ deal final, and taking possession, is out to destroy as much of creation as possible, with, sad to say, us as his unwilling, or mostly willing, allies.

All this makes John 3: 16 the most important text in the Bible. It has everything to do with the redemption of creation, buying it back from THE PAWNBROKER and restoring it to its former pristine condition.
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The Devil’s Fiery Fury

May 8 2016

The world is in a mess. More than 330 million in India directly suffer from drought, due to two (2) failed monsoons. Many millions in Africa too will go hungry. Another 400,000 are fleeing Syria. Then there are 800,000 desperate migrants in Libya alone, frantically trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe where people don’t want them because these refugees are “harbingers of bad news,” and “embody the collapse of order”. By their presence, these black people tell the ‘burghers’, those well-fed European folk, that all is not well with the world.
These simple Africans, with their hungry faces and lean bodies, bring back memories of that terrible war 1939-45 when also millions were on the move. But then all of Europe faced the same predicament. Now, thanks to oil and borrowed money – trillions of units of each – we all have grown rich and self-satisfied. That the New World order, our global dislocation because of Climate Change and trillions in DEBT, has been mainly caused by Western people – we – is conveniently forgotten.
So what do we do? We demonize these DPs, these Climate-Change- Displaced Persons, picturing them as the Devil Incarnate.

But where is the real devil?

Look no further than a passage in Revelation, Chapter 12: 12. There the real truth is revealed: “But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! Filled with fury, because he knows that the time is short.”
That’s what is at play today. Today the Devil calls the tune, all because there was a war in heaven. Yes, heaven was not always a peaceful place. The result of this war was that the Devil was thrown out of heaven, now vying for vengeance.
Where did he end up? Right here on our planet, feet first. Watch out, because this means that demonic armies have thrown themselves onto the world with such unbridled ferocity and awesome fury that it can only have the most terrible results.

I love the last bible book REVELATION. It says what it means: revelation indicates exposure; revelation means telling how it is; revelation lays bare what sin long has obscured.

And the world is waking up to the efforts of those in power who refuse to tell the truth. There is a Dutch saying: “Even though the LIE is fast, in race with TRUTH it comes in last.” In the End all will be revealed. That is the basic message of the last Bible book.
Last week I read a column by a Greg Mannarino of Traders Choice. He echoed the words of REVELATION: “Nothing is real. All of this (the current economic scene) is being played to keep people believing that the system is working. The stock market is almost at its highest ever, but that does not mean that the valuations are real.
Greg Mannarino continues to say that “We have never seen anything like it in the history of the world. We are in uncharted territory: it’s all an illusion to keep the stock market booming. Every single asset, debt, housing, metals, it’s all fake, it’s all being distorted. The system is built on one premise and that is that we must ‘BELIEVE’ that it will work. If that confidence is rattled the whole thing will implode. And when that confidence is finally lost, and the fraud exposed – and it will be – the destruction that follows will be one for the history books.”

One of the laws of ECOLOGY says that EVERYTHING is connected to EVERYTHING ELSE. A financial collapse will affect everything. Millions upon millions are going to die world-wide, because if there is no way to pay, then nothing can be sold. People will be scrambling doing everything they can do to survive to provide for their family and themselves. That will include force: there are 300 million guns out there in the USA.
When the financial system collapses it means widespread violence, looting, killing in the streets, CHAOS in other words, everybody for themselves, while law and order disappears. That’s what happens when people are desperate, can’t get food, have no way of going from place to place.
It’s becoming more evident by the day that our entire financial system – actually all of society – is built on fraud. A carbon-based world cannot endure, as we now are discovering, because it robs the earth of stuff that has gestated there for millions of years and we burn it in an eyewink. It’s like trying to eat a year’s supply of food in one hour: we simply choke to death.

Already the elite are building bunkers, something foretold in the last Bible book as well. “The kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty and every slave and every free man hid in the caves and along the rocks of the mountains”. (Revelation 6: 15).
That’s how it starts: the massive move to safety. Out of the high rise condos, and the townhouses, out of the packed cities, they flee as far as possible away to the safe hiding places hewn out in the mountain caves. Just as when a city is threatened by bombs and people seek refuge in their underground bunkers, deep into the earth, so now too people flee away, far from the horror-provoking terror that confronts them from all directions, running away from themselves, from their own conscience, from their own God.

Fort McMurray’s hellish fire gives us a glimpse of what is in store.

The last Bible book, Revelation, tells us about the LAST DAYS when everything becomes what it is. Admit it: we now live in a masked world, a world in disguise. Matters today are not what they are, are different from what they seem. That is the secret that this world so carefully wants to conceal. Now already we see brief flashes of the images and counter images which play such an important role in the book of Revelation. Now we can detect glimpses of what can be seen as the heart of this book, its dominating theme. This can be captured in one phrase: I repeat
EVERYTHING BECOMES WHAT IT IS.

Economists are good at measuring the past but simply can’t forecast future events, particularly recessions. That’s because recessions aren’t caused merely by concrete changes in the markets. Beliefs and stories passed on by thousands of individuals are important factors, maybe even the main ones in determining big shifts in the economy.
Look at the political play in the USA. We see the revolt of the masses. We see the anger there. We see how voting for Trump displays the despair many feel, how their standard of living has declined, because ever increasing personal debt is overwhelming millions of households. Worries that a big downturn might be imminent scare many witless because they have no resources fall back on.
In April, for example, the International Monetary Fund reported that the world economy was in a “fragile conjuncture.” What it fails to say is that the world is exhausted, that it is finite, making infinite growth impossible, yet it remains the mantra of the politicians.

Confidence is what makes the world tick. Money, as we have seen, is created out of nothing. Soon we will be showered with the stuff, giving all a basic income. Why not? It simply involves some computer manipulations. But will this instill confidence?
John Kenneth Galbraith in his book 1929, THE GREAT CRASH has shown that there were no sure indications, even after decades of research, why the DIRTY THIRTIES suddenly started: it came as a real surprise to all ‘experts’, the economists. I remember how Queen Elizabeth, visiting the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2008, asked the professors there why they had not seen the 2008 recession coming. Good question.
Basically global recessions tend to begin when popular opinion switches and the slogan ‘shop till you drop’ dies out and people start saving for the ‘rainy day’, or simply pay off debt. Psychology matters a great deal. Suddenly people become uneasy, shut their collective wallets, and, bang, we have a recession.
Times have changed. Back then, immediately after the market crash of October 1929, church sermons had a powerful impact. Churches were full. Imagine: sermons were influencing public opinion! Congregations were told that many businesspeople had behaved like gamblers and hucksters. These sermons and other word-of-mouth sources, moralizing about the stock market crash spread, affected mass psychology.

Frederick Lewis Allen, in the epilogue to his 1931 best seller “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”, wrote that cultural values changed after the crash: People began to dress more modestly, adopting a new formality and religiosity, reviving Victorian sexual taboos. It is reasonable to assume that many of these changes had an economic impact, mainly by discouraging spending.

Then there still was a GOD factor.

Now the opposite is true: tobacco use is on the upswing, suicides are at a record high, overdose deaths a daily occurrence, mass shootings common and nudity display – thanks to clever surgical body enhancements – the thing to do. Now there also is a voters’ revolution, sending tremors through the USA political scene.
Why this sudden dissatisfaction? People no longer see a way out, have lost God and hope. They consider that anything is better than the current situation.
Now the DEVIL is in full control and we feel his fiery fury.
We are on the cusp of world-wide changes: all for the worse. The fires in Fort McMurray are not an isolated event: today wherever there are trees, there are fires. Every minute in South America’s rainforests the size of two football fields go up in smoke, set ablaze to grow more soya beans there. The same is happening in Indonesia for palm oil.

Greed and Climate Change destroy the “Trees of Life”, exponentially increasing global temperatures as fewer trees means less capacity to absorb CO2 while the fires generate extra CO2 producing a double whammy. That’s how we feed THE DEVIL’S FIERY FURY.

So what’s going to happen to the economy?

Recessions are normal phenomena. Since World War II, there have been four global recessions, according to the International Monetary Fund, which defines such an event very specifically as negative global per capita economic growth over at least one year. They occurred in 1975, 1982, 1991 and 2008. Oil has been named as a fundamental factor in each case, with price spikes blamed on the Yom Kippur war of 1973, the Iran-Iraq War beginning in 1980, the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War and again, due to China’s booming economy, in 2008.
Now Oil is again implicated. Not its high price as before, but its low price: too low for expensive sources to be developed. Now, thanks to the fires in Northern Alberta, where Tar Sand oil originates, there is a good possibility that production there may cease altogether. The same is true already for exploration in the Arctic. Of course oil is the main source of Climate Change and, ideally, its use should be eliminated completely.

Karl Marx has observed that “every city has a little Ireland in it”. In the 1840’s the Irish depended on the potato to survive. When potato blight bit, millions died. The same is true for money: if money fails in its function all cities – Beijing, Cairo, Delhi, London, New York, Paris, Toronto, Vancouver – all those urban jewels, will shatter, will starve.

The lust for money is the root of all evil. In the Garden of Eden, trees then were described as (Genesis 2: 9) “pleasing to the eye and good for food,” the aesthetic having priority over economics. When the Devil (Genesis 3: 6) pointed the fruit out, he reversed the order: “Good for food and pleasing to the eye,” giving preference to the monetary aspect.

There’s where our trouble started. That was the original cause of the downfall of our civilization.

Next to humans trees are the most important creatures on earth. Forest fires signal planetary suicide, a direct result of our life style. What happens to trees will happen to us.

Brace yourself: THE DEVIL’S FIERY FURY will only intensify. “But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! Filled with fury, because he knows that the time is short.”

MAYDAY (1)

May 1 2016.

There is a call MAYDAY, which has nothing to do with the Month of May, but is simply a phonetic pronouncing of the French M’AIDEZ, which means HELP ME, a distress call, one that now is heard much more frequently. It is a prayer, somehow, a request for assistance.
Today the earth is calling MAYDAY, reminding me of Romans 8: 22, where it says: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth.” What that really means is that the earth is pregnant and soon a new earth will be born. But before that happens we all will experience a lot of LABOR PAINS.
Last week I ended my column with these words:

Brace yourself. Bad times are coming. My guess, it will be worse than in the 1930s as climatic conditions will greatly aggravate the food situation and trillions of debt will cause major inflation. Then, in the Dirty Thirties, Governments believed in balance budgets, causing untold hardships, which could quite well have been one of the causes that triggered World War II. Now, facing a Filthy Future, the unleashing of unlimited liquidity, by catapulting cash into the economy to cause inflation, this avalanche of money will destroy whatever is still valuable.
This was again confirmed by an article one of my readers sent me last week. In it a man with the name of Satyajit Das, living in Australia, born in India, having been a banker, corporate treasurer, academic and author, thus possessing a wide range of experience, is interviewed in regards to a book he wrote: THE AGE OF STAGNATION: WHY PERPETUAL GROWTH IS UNATTAINABLE AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS IN PERIL.
He too believes that tough times are ahead. Here’s what Mr. Das says: “Food production has to increase by roughly 50 per cent by mid-century to feed a larger population but also to meet demand for different types of food. As people get richer, they want more protein. This requires larger scale production facilities. The amount of arable land on the planet, about 3.4 billion acres, has not changed very significantly for decades. It is shrinking because of climate change and other problems.”

And that is just one source. Actually negative news has become a monotonous melody that is putting people to sleep. Of course we are running stuck. Of course with a population growth of more than 350 percent in my lifetime, while the arable and is quickly being eroded, somewhere soon we will see frightening inflation and deepening deflation, the worst of all worlds: deflation of the goods we own, houses, cars, vacation properties, and inflation of the stuff we need: food, utilities and clothing.
Today all signs point to perilous times. We can ignore the signs, convincing ourselves that my jeremiads are overblown. But that is not a good strategy. Somewhere I read a quote: THE HAND FORMED TO FEED US HAS BECOME THE FIST THAT FIGHTS US. That certainly applies to a Carbon-based society including agriculture.
White’s Law, one of the core concepts of human ecology, points out that economic development is directly correlated with energy per capita> As more pollution affects production and per capita energy use begins to decline, the inevitable result is a long era of economic contraction, leading to the collapse of most economic and cultural institutions. Of course infinite growth in a finite world is simply impossible. Excessive heat in India has already immobilized 330 million people.
The Teacher wrote in Ecclesiastes some 3000 years ago “There is a time for everything… a time to be born and a time to die”. That also applies to our era where we witness the last gasps of humanity as it speeds towards extinction, foolishly accelerating the inevitable, ever faster running toward self-annihilation. Einstein’s observation is now more relevant than ever: “The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Our stupidity personified in Donald Trump and bewitched as we are by having 200+ energy slaves at our disposal night and day, provided by coal, oil and gas, has caused the earth itself to become our enemy, the very source on which our life depends: indeed: the hand formed to feed us has become the fist that fights us. The struggle for the remaining energy slaves has placed us and the planet in mortal peril.
Now our entire world is in suspense, anxiously suspecting that the next phase for us is the arrival of the unexpected, the improbable, the final stage of humanity. All sorts of hints are out there, but few take them seriously.
Declining Intelligence.

I had long suspected it, but now a Dutch scientist, Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis of the University of Amsterdam has found proof that we have much smaller brains than our ancestors. That doesn’t mean that you or I are dumber than our forefathers, but it does mean that, on the average, we, the human race in general, have gotten more stupid. His study indicates that we have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian era, which roughly covers the 19thCentury.
How did he do it? Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004. Each study gauged participants’ so-called visual reaction times reflecting a person’s mental processing speed, considered an indication of general intelligence. In the late 19th Century, visual reaction times averaged around 194 milliseconds, while in 2004 that time had grown to 275 milliseconds.
Why are we getting dumber?
Here are some indications:

(1) Toxic chemicals in the environment can reduce intelligence. Examples include flame retardant everywhere in furniture, lead (found in many lipsticks), certain pesticides, fluoride – used in many city water systems – and radiation, which can reduce brain size. When a tsunami overpowered the Fukushima nuclear plant, radiation spread covering the Pacific, now reaching the shores of California. Expect even dumber TV shows and movies to emanate from Hollywood.
(2) Humans used to eat a lot of Omega 3s when wild game animals were part of their diet. They have much higher levels of these essential fatty acids than domesticated animals. If we only eat the modern, mostly processed food stuff without getting enough omega 3s, expect even more health and intelligence problems.
(3) The Science Daily notes: Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment increases learning behavior. We ingest these bacteria when we spend time in nature. Since most of us are city dwellers, we don’t inhale any of these good bacteria. Also most native culture used a lot of fermented foods containing healthy bacteria. Eating lots of yogurt and sauerkraut is good for the brain.
(4) Exercise boosts intelligence. Run, bike, walk. I get my best ideas when I run. Our forefathers and –mothers – were always physically active. Television has mostly been a curse for society. Shut the boob-tube down and start reading.
(5) Stress reduces sound thinking. With many people working several part time jobs high levels of cortisol – the chemical released when one is under continuous, unrelenting stress – and poverty can physically impair the brain and people’s ability to learn.
(6) Relaxing activities, such as meditation, keeping a journal and prayer have shown to enhance growth in certain areas of the brain.
(7) Lack of sleep reduces our thinking capacity. Many of us suffer from a chronic sleep deficiency.

We must prepare for collapse

Why do I list these items? They are all prerequisites for preparing for collapse, where we’ll need all our wits. Not surprisingly they also are necessary for entering the Kingdom to come. It seems to me that the Lord wants people there who are alert and open to new ideas.
You will notice that many of these 7 conditions have one feature in common: live close to the earth, grow as much as possible our own food, don’t be afraid to get dirt in your system, all of which promote intelligence. Listening to the earth is our holy duty.
Here is a new-old- idea. The Bible on several occasions state that The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom. (Psalm 111: 10; Proverbs 1:7; Prov. 9: 10), which, in essence, says that intelligence starts with ‘fear of the Lord.” This is another reason (#8), perhaps the most important one, why we are losing our marbles: we got rid of biblical religion.

A word of warning.

Today, in a society totally different than when these words were written 3000 years ago, we have little idea what ‘the fear of the Lord’ means anymore, so we give these words a pious twist and leave it at that.
What do they really signify? First the word ‘fear’. It has nothing to do with anxiety, being afraid, trying to avoid an encounter with God. The opposite is true. The world’s greatest composers and painters are a good example. The ‘fear’ of Bach, Rembrandt, van Gogh – fill in your favorite artist – is the beginning of getting to know them better by listening to their music and admiring their works of art. “Fear” here means ‘awe, admiration, deep respect.’ The same is true of “The Fear of the Lord”. By closely studying God’s work of art, his creation, we can only state: “How great Thou art.” Proverbs states that “In wisdom He made everything.” The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, because getting to fully know his creation takes more than eternity.

Our Western civilization, which is often called Christian, has a faulty view of reality. We correctly believe that God and humanity have a relationship. However for most church goers ‘nature’ is subject to human exploitation and has little or nothing to do with God, so we can destroy it freely, which we do and continue to do in spite of creation suffering severely. Again the “heaven” notion plays dominant role, something which I will touch upon in the next blog.
Here is how we usually see reality.
GOD
|
|
HUMAN
|
|
|
EARTH
We have a connection to God, but, based on an erroneous interpretation of Genesis 2: 15 where the old translation used the word ‘dominate’, we eagerly implement this faulty view, forgetting that, just like Jesus who came to serve (Matthew 20: 28) we too must ‘serve’ creation. This is shown in the triangle below.
GOD
/ \
HUMAN —————— EARTH

This basically illustrates that God is supreme. We depend on him. So does the earth. But the earth also depends on us and we on the earth. We all are mutually dependent, a truth that is valid for eternity. Bonhoeffer has said: God, Humanity and Earth belong together. The Earth- not heaven – is our eternal habitat. Therefore we must treat it as such.
I am reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Its subtitle is The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE. Taleb’s main thesis is that Collapse cannot be predicted, and I agree with him. But when it does happen, it is analogous to the death of society because our life, yours, mine, everybody’s, depends on a guaranteed supply of liquid fuel and electricity.
Eliminate the one or the other of these energy sources, both Black Swan events, and within a day total chaos ensues, followed by deaths in the billions. These are not the only dangers: our entire financial system too is built on trust. Once this is gone, so goes our economy which cannot function without money.

Why we cannot change

There are several reasons for this. One is plain lethargy. Another is a line Upton Sinclair wrote: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary or livelihood depends on his not understanding it.’ Take our beloved motor vehicle. We all need cars to go to work. At least 20 percent of all jobs are related to our highly polluting automobile, from traffic cops to insurance agents, from highway construction to TV ads, from its manufacturing to money lenders and salesmen of new and used cars. I should add funeral homes and our medical system to this list as well. One million people die in car accidents while 20 million are injured. Yet we love our cars, and refuse to own up to our dependency. No wonder that Green House Gases are higher than ever.

More about this next week.

APRIL 24 2016

THEN AND NOW

This week I am talking DEPRESSION, not the clinical type, but the financial one.

You’ve heard it before “History repeats itself.” It does, but never in exactly the same way. The depression of the 1930’s is still fresh in my memory. I am sure that we will see another one soon. But times have changed and the nature of the next DEPRESSION will be completely different.
For one thing it will affect many more. When the last Depression started in 1929 there were just over 2 billion of us on planet earth. We now have more than 7 billion, and these billions use a lot of carbon-stuff. In THE ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY WORLD, historian J. R. McNeill writes that “No other century – no millennium – in human history can compare with the twentieth for growth in energy use. In 1800 the world used 400 million metric tons of oil equivalent; in 1900 that had increased to 1,900, and in the year 2,000 to 33,000 million tons. He calculates that the world in the twentieth century used 10 times as much as in the thousand years before 1900 A.D. In the 100 centuries between the dawn of agriculture (basically since Adam and Eve) and 1900, people used only about two-thirds as much energy as we did in the twentieth century.

We now live with the unintended consequences of this tsunami of poison, as all that energy is Carbon-based and we now know what carbon-based fuels are doing to the world in general and to the less advantaged in particular.
Reading the New York Times of April 20 proved to be a depressing experience. Three items caught my attention:
(1) 330 million people in India – mostly small farmers and their families – face famine due to the failure of two monsoons.
(2) Thomas Friedman, in his regular Wednesday column, relates how in large segments of Africa the same drought drives men to seek jobs in Europe.
(3) Some 500 of these migrants drowned this past week trying to travel from Libya to Italy.

Our outrageous use of energy – unparalleled in human history – is causing this to happen. Shame on us. Shame on us.

That is one difference between the 1930’s and today: our extravagant use of Climate Change energy. Has life really improved because of it?
Last week I mentioned the KUHN CYCLE. Thomas Kuhn observed that progress is not steady and gradual, but is marked by sudden paradigm shifts. There’s a period of normality when everybody embraces a paradigm that seems to be working. Then drift sets in, where anomalies accumulate and the model begins to seem creaky and flawed. That too applies to the weather, as we now see not a linear (1,2,3,4,5) but an exponential (1,2,4,8,16) rise in temperature.

All this applies to a myriad of matters. Current economic theories no longer work. In spite of planet poisoning energy use – the equivalent of each of us being served hand and foot by some 200 slaves – life is more strenuous, more debt-ridden, more godless than ever before.
Take a look around: Democracy is at cross roads. Attempts to patch up the models fail. Everybody is in anguish, but nobody knows what to do. Established firms collapse and billion dollar companies become worthless overnight as the old remedies prove useless.

Times and circumstances change, but those in command look to the past for guidance which offers no solution, because the past no longer provides answers and, of course the future is unknown. Gone are the times when the future was a continuation of the past. Gone are the days when young people followed the parents and grandparents in church attendance. Gone are the days of financial security.

Take pensions. For a while I was a member of a pension board, overseeing not a large fund, about $150 million. The assumption then was that the moneys would earn about 8 percent per year, and thus future benefits were based on this assumption. That particular fund invested half in bonds and half in stocks. Bonds today earn only a pittance, while stocks are extremely volatile. Yet the assumption always was that the future would be as prosperous as the past. All the pension funds world-wide are faced with a dilemma: with bonds basically stuck at 2-3 percent yield, the money managers have artificially driven up the stock market in a desperate attempt to generate yield. More and more people depend on pensions, as savings are almost non-existent. No adequate pension means that many will have to work till the bitter end, leaving fewer jobs for young people.

How do today’s conditions compare to THE GREAT DEPRESSION which happened now almost 80 years ago?
John Kenneth Galbraith in THE GREAT CRASH 1929 tells a good story. This well-known Harvard economist – Canadian born – relates how prominent colleagues and leading politicians assured worried investors then that stocks were not overvalued, just days before they plunged to almost zero. Never trust a politician to offer accurate predictions.

Today we hear these same optimistic voices, but it seems to me that the next downturn will be much worse. Once the downturn starts the Good Times will never return. The 1930’s Depression was cured by the onset of World War II. A World War now will only make matters worse.
My reasoning is simple: the world is exhausted. There are Limits to Growth, and we have reached those limits. Nobody can exactly predict when this point is reached. Galbraith writes: “The causes of the Great Depression are still far from certain.” So no wonder the politicians and businessmen of the late 1920`s sounded quite sincere when they dismissed claims of a prolonged financial disaster. Once it had a grip on the nation, nothing seemed to work. In 1933 the total production of the economy was down by more than 30 percent.

During that Depression there was 25 percent unemployment, while the Stock market plunged to close by 90 percent. Canada – commodity oriented – saw even higher rates of unemployment: as high as 33 percent.
Then prices deflated and wages collapsed. My father in law who was a minister of a large congregation (in Groningen, the Netherlands) seeing how his parishioners were suffering, voluntarily asked for a decrease in his stipend, even as he had more than 10 kids at the time, my future wife included.
Then governments hated deficits and were loath to spent money they did not have. There was no money to support the needy, so people really suffered because they had no cash.

Economists always have been fascinated by the Great Depression and its mysterious appearance in spite of all signs to the contrary. I read one likely reason: with agriculture mechanizing, there was a sudden influx of no longer needed farm workers, and with no other jobs available they flooded the unemployment lines. With no social welfare programs at all, church and other charity agencies became overwhelmed, and the appearances of bread-lines and soup kitchens created an impression that nothing worked anymore and so people started to think that times were going to be bad and stopped spending.

Are matters different today? Yes and no.

The world’s financial institutions are in even worse shape than the last time. Then thousands of banks went broke. Now business ethics have changed and everyone expects the government to “step in.” Laws are already in place that requires government inter¬vention in many instances.
In the 1930’s depression if a man – there were very few women in the work force – lost his job, he had to find another one as quickly as possible simply to keep from going hungry. A lot of other men in the same position competed desperately for what little work was available, and an employer could hire those same men for much lower wages and expect them to work harder than what was the case before the depression.
Today, thanks to robots and lower overseas rates, wages too have been stagnant and even reduced. This is another reason why no recovery is possible: people earn less and have borrowed to keep up appearances. Fortunately today many can claim unemployment insurance, and, once this is exhausted, there is welfare, while the funds last.
However, Governments depend on tax income to pay benefits. When that decreases so do the payouts. Already today in the USA 50% of the country is on some form of welfare. Food stamps, aid to families with dependent children, Social Security, and local programs are already under severe pressure, and these are prosperous times.
Imagine a recession. Imagine a sudden collapse as happened without warning in 1929. With untold trillions in debt, the reckoning – so far being postponed by all sorts of gimmicks, including Zero Interest Rates – cannot be postponed forever. When the tidal wave hits, we’ll be totally overwhelmed.

Today entire generations have grown up without ever having learned how to survive with little money and no basic skills: computer skills or manipulating an I-pad will be no help. During the 1930’s the majority of the people in the world either were small time farmers or recently had left the country-side in search of jobs, but still had good rural connections back home. Today, even those who live in the country – including farmers – have no real survival skills. Most work far away which means that today 95 percent of North American people are city-oriented and money dependent.

Income tax came to the U.S. in 1913, and by 1929 the average family’s income was $2,335, which meant that they were mostly income-tax exempt. Also there was no Social
Security tax, no state income tax, no sales tax, and no estate tax. Today we all pay taxes in some form or another. In most Western countries, the total of direct and indirect taxes is over 50%.

However, given that governments’ expenditures for pensions, health care and welfare are constantly climbing, expect higher taxes, further reducing available income, and thus diminishing disposable income.

During the 1930s Depression deflation dawned: Will history repeat itself? No. Prices are dropping a bit today but the power the government has over the economy today is far greater than what was the case 80 years ago. Instead of letting the economy cleanse itself by allowing the ?nancial markets to collapse, governments will probably bail out insolvent banks, create mortgages wholesale to prop up real estate, and central banks will buy bonds to keep their prices from plummeting.

All of these actions mean that the total money supply will grow enormously. Trillions of dollars will be created to avoid de?ation and induce inflation. As a matter of fact plans are in the works to give everybody a guaranteed minimum income to ensure that spending power will be available.

I know that the Bible is not a book for science, especially economics. It does give some economic hints such as: The desire for money is the root of all evil (1Timothy 6: 10).

Curiously it also mentions that in THE LAST DAYS we will see INFLATION.
I find this in the Bible, in Revelation, the last Bible book, which suggests that in the Last Days (and I am sure there’s where we find ourselves today) we will experience INFLATION, BIG TIME.

Revelation, chapter 6 says that immediately after the second horse, right after the breaking of the third seal, the rider of the black horse arrives, carrying in his hands a scale, and while he proceeds, there is a voice that says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.”
Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. Money loses its value and the costs of the normal daily needs increase all the time. A quart of wheat was about what one person needed to stay alive, which meant that a laborer by working could only earn enough to keep himself from starving, but not his family. Were he to use barley, instead of wheat, the situation would be more manageable, but even then it would be impossible to maintain a family. The prices mentioned here are about eight times the prices normal in those days.

I have mentioned already how in India and Africa, due to drought, food prices have increased dramatically. As Climate Change intensifies, even we in the Western world will be affected.

Brace yourself. Bad times are coming. My guess, it will be worse than in the 1930s as climatic conditions will greatly aggravate the food situation and trillions of debt will cause major inflation. Then, in the Dirty Thirties, Governments believed in balance budgets, causing untold hardships, which could quite well have been one of the causes that triggered World War II. Now, facing a Filthy Future, the unleashing of unlimited liquidity, by catapulting cash into the economy to cause inflation, this avalanche of money will destroy whatever is still valuable. What should we do?

That is next week’s topic.