In nature, water likes to take the easy way out.  Water flows downhill the vast majority of the time.  Every once in a while, though, the river decides to jump its banks and change course.  People act much the same way, the vast majority of the time.  If everybody else is doing it, that’s because the energy it takes to get out of the rut, the river valley of behavior if you will, usually is less return than the energy expended.

When all of your friends are liberals, it is easy to bash Trump, and much harder to talk about the ways in which his actions have benefited the country as a whole, or are at least less bad than the alternative.  It is easy to say he’s a racist and a disabled phobic instead of acknowledging the Aegean stables of corruption he’s working on cleaning out.  It is much easier to complain about the local city council than it is to run an honest campaign, win, fix the budget, ban fracking, and overturn the local ordinances banning gardening and livestock.

It is much easier to complain about not being healthy than it is to adopt the lifestyle which promotes health year round.  It is much harder to put down the chocolate and delicious sugary things than it is to stare at beautiful bodies and wish you had one.  It is much harder to actually exercise 14 hours a week than it is to just play with your kids instead or read a good book.  That’s not even touching drug and internet addiction.

So here we are.  One of the things that is hard to do, is religious fasting.  Whether it is Orthodox Christian fasting (vegan practically half the year), or Muslim Ramadan fasting (a month of living the vampire life), not eating is hard to do when everybody around you is.  It is hard for the Mormon to not drink alcohol or coffee when on business trips.  It is hard for the Jew to only eat vegetarian when out at a restaurant or at their non-Jewish friends’ house.  It is even harder for the person with food allergies to eat in public.

It is also hard when you’ve got rules like, you can’t eat food from dishes which aren’t blessed and clean.  Or you can’t buy animal products from people outside of your religion.  It is easier to just be able to buy everything, to eat anything anywhere.  However, then you end up obese and sick, because it was easier to drive than to walk, and it was easier to buy the pesticide laden produce than to grow it yourself when the flood and the insects destroyed your garden a couple years in a row.

For now, it is easy to globalize stuff, and to centralize stuff.  That will change.  Think about what things are easier to tax, and what things are harder, and you can see where the future streams of human behavior might flow.  Magic itself is not immune to this.  Sigils are hard to tax, but widespread sales of candles and incense and statues of Santa Muerte are not.  What is easy, but risky?  What causes social behaviors to change over very short periods of time?  What social behaviors have stood the test of tens of thousands of years’ time?  Is there something I wish to culturally appropriate that falls in the latter category, but is hard?  Since I’m socially isolated anyway, what keeps me from doing hard things?

Every once in a while, I like to look back at my predictions, and see where we are on the timeline.  Over a decade ago, I knew that there would be civil war within the US, including more than one military coup.  We’ve come quite a way along the rose-strewn path since then.

Trump has done many things, and one of them is a dramatic polarization of people.  I just have to mention the word “Trump” and you can see the intense emotional response in my liberal friends.  A number of them would still love to see him impeached.  For why?  Because guns, schools, abortion, healthcare, and socialism, or was that communism?  So hard to tell the two apart these days.  Not that Pence would be better on all of those fronts, they just are so angry they can’t see a better way to obtain their objectives than beheading the king.

Are we closer to that part where people mistrust the government more?  You betcha.  Are we closer to civil unrest?  You betcha.  Is there are change in the civic religion?  Yup.  It is subtle, but it is there.  No longer are we shooting for the stars (goodbye NASA).  No longer are we doing everything we can to improve technological progress.  Oh sure, Elon Musk and his cohorts are still trying to get into space, but the vast majority of fundamentalist/evangelical Christians who wish to return us to living in the 11^th century are most definitely not.  A bunch of spiritual but not religious people who live as one with the land also are not interested in technological progress.  They choose which technologies work for them, not the other way around.

So here we are at the end of some of the archons, and the beginning of the rise of others.  If God would not allow his people to build a tower into heaven at Babel (door of the god), what makes you think that Jupiter and Set would allow Elon Musk to do anything substantially similar?  It makes me wonder which demon nine people in China decided to conjure up in a warehouse in the middle of the dusty desert, struck through with a river full of life, and also full of death.  Such is the way of things, after all.  Rising things fall, and when they fall, other things rise.

My daughters are going on a youth mission trip this summer.  While I am not Christian, my husband is, and so my children go to church.  Last night, there was the mission trip fundraising meeting, where youth were being extroverted youth, and I got to remember exactly why I hate churches and groups of people.  It was the banter that got to me.  That and the cellphone use by the other youth.  They couldn’t leave their cellphones alone.  My kids don’t have cellphones, which is a whole ‘nother topic in itself.  The youth group leaders could not keep the room on topic, and the younger leader also instigated the off-topic banter at times, completely isolating the new kids and not allowing them to talk.

Ah, but that wasn’t what I was writing about.  Churches can only raise money by parasite/charity.  I get it, they’ll lose their non-profit status if they do things for profit, but it changes the way business is done.  When a youth group is fundraising, and not the women’s group, or the committee that runs the homeless shelter, or the college students, or the national charity organization’s overhead, they are limited in what they can do.  Bake sales are out, because another part of the church gets to do those.  Rummage sales are out, because another part of the church gets to do those.  The youth can put in labor for another part of the church, or for their congregation at below minimum wage rates, or they can do an auction of stuff, or put on a talent show, or a parents’ night out.  They can’t do another dinner, because that’s already been done too recently.

The list of things they can’t do is much longer than the list of things they can.  They can’t run a for-profit ongoing business, of any kind.  They can’t go outside of the church community and sell their services on craigslist.  They can’t invest in stocks and bonds and use the excess to run their programs and mission trips.  Thus, they have no stable source of income at all.  They have no clue about how to drag in the big whale donors, because youth group leaders are poor and don’t run in those circles.

I was thinking about the Ferengi Rules Of Acquisition as I was sitting there, increasingly alienated from church culture entirely.  Churches are parasites.  They take the money from their congregation, and flow it out into the greater community, which would be good in the Solari Report sense, IF the money actually stayed within the community, but it doesn’t.  It goes to another State, or even another Country entirely.  The realization that Churches of all stripes are financial tapeworms was a chilling one.  The Ferengi would have the money coming in, and it would stay within the local community instead of being siphoned off by the national church, by the 85% overhead of the church’s national charity organization, and they would certainly invest it wisely.  They would be feeding the local children in soup kitchens instead of digging wells in Africa or building houses in Mexico.

I think my values have changed in the last 30 years.

One of the things which bothers me a lot is the burden of knowledge.  Knowledge is a burden, in the same way that ignorance can be bliss.  As somebody who watches and learns and synthesizes vast swathes of information out there, sometimes the endless chatter gets to me.  It is not easy to sit and chat with the other soccer parents in good humor, while knowing full well that a lot of people are going to die in the next 10 years.

Do I need to explain why I’m certain a lot of people are going to die in the next 10 years?  I feel like I should at least provide an inexhaustive summary, yet again.  First, we have the hydrocarbon problem.  From peak oil production, to peak oil exports in the Land-Export model, to the war cycle causing supply disruptions with tanker wars and pipeline failures both manmade and not.  Knowing that hydrocarbons are the source of a bunch of pesticides and fertilizers, that hyrdrocarbons are required to mine the potash, that they’re required to run the processing facilities, to make the plastic bags, to make the cans, to deliver all the food hither and yon, and much more.  Our food supply is very entangled with hydrocarbons.  For that matter, so is our water supply.

Next, we have the banking problem.  The petrodollar has failed/is failing.  The debt can never be repaid, so it won’t be.  There are rumors of Russia/China going back to a gold-backed currency, and stepping up their financial warfare efforts.  Identity theft becomes more rampant.  Bitcoin is a sabot.  China is putting in the infrastructure for a completely new banking paradigm, and may be why the financial center of Empire shifts to Beijing.  The dollar gets rejected as the US chooses to become more isolated, bloated, bureaucratic, and police state.  Tax All The Things leads to dollar rejection, which leads to volatility and financial uncertainty, and financial uncertainty leads to demand destruction in a potentially deflationary spiral plus capital flight.

We also have a climate problem.  We have floods and droughts, winter turning straight to summer without spring, a reduction in pollinating insect life in certain locations, and a change in chill hours.  We still have wind and hail destroying crops, as well as things like wheat rust reducing yields substantially.  We have a sunspot cycle which isn’t helping things.  Plus the food we do grow has less nutrients because the soil has been killed, the microbiota isn’t there to make the extra nutrients bioavailable.  Plus 2000 more locations besides Flint, Michigan still have even higher levels of lead in their water.  That’s not even touching Peak Water, as aquifers run dry.  We also have deadly viral illnesses which are becoming more common, or maybe they just spread more rapidly than they did in the past.

Understanding that the future is headed downhill, that people won’t be able to meet their needs no matter what their ideologies say, can be difficult to tolerate.  Yet, I must.  I can’t handle alcohol, so I’m not one to drown my sorrows in wine or harder.  Instead, I go run, or swim, or bike, and do something that makes me sweat.  To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter whether the government is run the best way ever, if the oil, the food, the water, the medical care just simply can’t continue on at the same levels as before.  People are still going to die in much greater numbers than usual.  Even so, perhaps there is a reason that declining empires right after the peak have vicious warlords at their helm, followed by self-absorbed megalomaniacs during their further decline.  Perhaps the pattern is necessary to drive people to flee to better locations, to encourage the rise of the death rate before the resources run dry so that everybody else suffers less.  It isn’t clear that bad governments are a bad thing.  If they encourage self-reliance and self-resilience in the downswing of public confidence, perhaps they necessarily prompt people to decentralize.

Meanwhile, social media is cracking down on hate speech, and by the way, everything is hate speech.  At least, everything digital is hate speech.  Analog speech is still just fine, especially if you don’t show your anxiety over the future and can talk about the weather, or where they think the best burger place is within the soccer league boundaries.  For some reason, I value it more now than I did.  Perhaps, in the back of my mind, I know they’re going to die, so I seize each precious moment I’ve got?