Current events

So the Dems "answered the call of history". That might explain why they couldn't answer all those calls from their constituents begging them not to vote for that crazy health care thing.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of universal health coverage, but I am a tad curious how Uncle Samuel plans to pay for it. Heck, I loved the idea of the 24 buffet on that cruise ship... it's the reality of a week and a half of stomach upset afterwards that I wasn't too keen on. The health care debate does serve as a nice launching point for some thoughts on the current events and how much longer we may have before some of the more gruesome of the end times prophecies come to fruition.

Issue 1) Why did we need health care reform in the first place?

When I was a freshman at the University of Texas, some twenty odd years ago, I took a basic macroeconomics class with about sixty other just-give-me-the-diploma-and-shut-up drones. I only remember one lecture out of the whole business; it was the one that made me change my major. The prof was explaining the concepts of elastic and inelastic demand. For his example of "inelastic" demand he brought up insulin and described how chronic diabetics would give almost anything in exchange for the medicine. That was the goal of a thriving company, he said, to make their product or service so inelastic that the consumer would become utterly dependant. I distinctly remember looking around the room to see if anyone else was even raising an eyebrow at the notion of consumer-slavery being job number one. To my surprise, no, I was the only one who wasn't dutifully taking notes -- sickening.

In the past couple of decades America has lost its moral will. All the the nasty stuff that our founding fathers told us would happen if we turned our backs on God is happening. But America has been a immoral corporate shill for more than just a decade or two, you say? I don't think so. Not entirely.

I think it works something an immune system that has been compromised to a critical degree. Ninety years ago our nation may have caught a bad case of Rockefeller, but it eventually fought it off with chicken soup and anti-trust legislation. Now the white blood cell count is so low that we've got a bad case of Exxon and we can't shake it; we've got Monsanto in our blood stream and worse yet, we've contracted a case of Goldman Sachs so bad that I'm not sure how much longer we've got.

When a nation loses its moral fiber its wealth migrate inexorably from weak hands to strong hands. The vulnerable become progressively poorer and something like health care is a perfect example for how this happens.

Health care prices have been consistently rising by something like 10% to 12% a year. At the same time real wages (wages measured against inflation) have been falling for the last decade or so. How does health care command a higher price against consumers who are steadily less able to pay for it? Because it can. It sells insulin -- and things like it. Now if you have health insurance (and if you don't, you're about to) you may have noticed that you and/or your company has to pay more for the privilege every year, it takes a bigger chunk of your salary, and it was going to keep taking a bigger chunk of your salary every year until a government entity looking out for your interests finally stepped in... unfortunately we don't have that kind of government. Here's what actually happened:

The bill is contrived in such a way that is intended to get the people who voted for it reelected -- once. The goodies (universal child coverage, new rules for dropping coverage, etc) kick in immediately. The paperwork and bureaucratic fun-times don't go live until 2014. By 2018 everything is in place, it becomes obvious to all that this was never meant to benefit you, and hopefully you've forgotten who voted for it in the first place.

2) Who actually benefits from this thing?

The large pharmaceutical companies are probably the biggest winners. They got all sorts of perks with very few strings attached. If you watched Fox News you may have heard that a small group of large insurance providers were also popping champagne corks. I don't think so. Big pharma is sitting at the top of that informational food chain that I talked about in the Man of Lawlessness segments (see: Who is the antichrist). The only value that the insurance companies bring to the table is that they allow the government to offload a certain amount of unpleasant responsibility. In other words: they make a convenient scapegoat. Right at this moment the government of our fine nation is promising to pay for a whole host of things that they can't possibly pay for. when they don't, someone has to take the blame, someone who isn't up for reelection. Yes, I realize the insurance exect's are probably already counting the extra cash from the 32 million new customers. I just don't think that becoming a pseudo-government entity a la Freddie Mac and AIG is going to be a cakewalk at this stage of the game. As we'll see in the next post "government bailout" is going to mean something different very soon.

As a final note, consider that the Bible never endorses one form of human governance over another. Democracy is never propped up as "blessed", monarchies are never derided, etc. God doesn't waste any ink telling us how to govern a country. It wouldn't do any good. No system of government can overcome the moral failings of its people. Communism never looks anything like a "commune", it looks like a tightly controlled caste system where one "comrade" gets the goodies, the other gets a paltry government job. And if you watched the wrangling around health care bill you saw what democracy looks like. It looks like 300 million in perks for Louisiana, it looks like special giveaways for a bank in North Dakota, it looks like the revelation that "universal" health care for children with preexisting conditions doesn't quite mean that -- it looks like 2,700 pages of fine print and promises that have no basis in reality.

Next: the economy and geopolitical rumblings.

What is the whore of Babylon - part 6

Okay, so I've spent five posts telling you that the whore of Babylon is the intellectual wing of an anti-God movement doomed to destruction. I've told you that this intellectual wing is made up of persons who have turned intellectualism into a religion and that a high concentration of these religious-gnostics can now be found in the scientific mainstream and are cranking out enough books calling for the end of Christianity that they now have their own section in the bookstore.

Who cares?

The first thing to realize is that when the Bible gives you a long, drawn out description of God's judgement upon a certain group it is not giving you this information so that you can get your jollies laughing at all the poor saps who failed to reach your level of personal holiness. It's a warning. You are being told to avoid a certain thing and being given an explanation of why that thing is to be avoided.

But I'm not a gnostic, you say, so can't we just leave it at that? It's not that simple. One of the teachers of one of the largest Sunday school classes at my former church was teaching a largely gnostic platform. Now, this was a very large group, and this man had a ministry that went beyond the church (he's deceased now, so I see no value in giving his name). How did a man with gnostic leanings get that sort of influence at a megachurch pastored by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention? Because nobody had any feelers out that would have fired off a warning siren at the sound of a teaching system that emphasized the acquisition of arcane bits of theological minutiae over simple trust and obedience in God.

What I am saying is that the traditional view of the whore of Babylon does nothing to prepare the modern church for the threat has long infiltrated it and is right now marshaling outside of it for a prolonged campaign of aggression. We Christians tend to think we are immune to deception -- particularly self-deception -- because we are identified as the "saints". It's true of course, the Bible calls those who have found salvation in Jesus as "saints". The problem is that we have polluted the definition of the word "saint", imagining a perfect creature clad in a shining white toga that levitates from one good deed to the site of his next miracle. This impression came to us from Catholicism, and the pagan demi-gods that the so-called Catholic "saints" replaced in the lives of the ancient Greco-Roman converts.

The Biblical truth is that a "saint" is nothing more than a sinner who has been given a promise of something better by their creator. A saint isn't set apart by his or her own intrinsic goodness, they are set apart by the price that their savior was willing to pay for them. People who put this truth at the center of their lives begin to look more and more like Jesus. They start to sacrifice of themselves for others -- in a host of different ways -- just like He did for us. Contrast this with the disciples of that Sunday school teacher I mentioned before; these young men went around trying to impress everyone with their superior knowledge. Learning is wonderful, it is not, however, a means of salvation, and if you try and make it one you are destined for disappointment.


Now, what is this going to look like when it goes down for the final time?

In a few short years our nation's economy is going to collapse. How long we flounder in bread lines and political gridlock is any one's guess. There's enough national angst to reduce the years to months, but our nation is such a lazy, docile bunch these days that it could take a decade. On top of that there is a host of international facts that could go one way or the other. All in all, I think a fair over/under for this is something like five years. This will end with a national -- at the very least -- and very likely international beast of the apocalypse that goes after the world's remaining resource base (Saudi oil fields, Canadian arable land, ect) with a vengeance. You'll know this stage when it hits because you'll be bombarded with political "mission" statements on your television: these are kind of like Roosevelt's "fireside chats" except that the glorious leader will try and sell you on a grandiose vision of the future where salvation (in both the physical and metaphysical senses) will be achieved through national supremacy and... uh... there's no fireplace.

Along about this time it is going to be "scientifically proven" that Christianity is harmful to psyches and the development of all people, especially children, and will come under government regulation. The teaching of certain Biblical passages will become illegal (in some countries this has already happened) and Christians will be martyred to degree and in places (like the US Bible Belt) that you probably never thought would happen. Those of us who reject the new, sanitized version of Christianity will be going to concentration camps and whatever method of execution this version of the beast wheels out. The scientists who wrote all those peer-reviewed papers proving that we were no good will watch our fates on their televisions and gloat... then the knock at the door and they get to join us in the oven/gas chamber/sausage press.

Somewhere in all this New York city will cease to be something that you and I would recognize as a city. It may get bombed, it may just hollow out when the stock market suddenly goes to zero, whatever form it takes I think New York fits the Biblical description for the representative city in a way that London just can't anymore. In the first "time" the city of Rome was sacked. In the second it was Byzantium. During the third round both Rome and Byzantium got sacked. Next up, during the "half a time", it's the Big Apple's turn. It may not be a "sacking" in the medieval/renaissance sense (Although I wouldn't completely rule that out), but it will be ugly nonetheless.


And this brings us to the final verdict. A whore, or prostitute, is someone who gives away something of immense value (her intimate affection) for a very small and temporal reward. Gnosticism prostitutes the rational mind that God gave each one of us for the small potatoes of a claim to intellectual elitism. And for all its claim to brilliant thinking it does something very stupid when it crawls into bed with the beast. The beast is a very insecure creature and when it has what it wants it turns on the whore. This has already happened historically, and it's already starting to happen again. Bigger than before. Worse than before.

Yeah, I'm depressed too.

Next post, current events: I catch up on the events that were going on while I was cruising around the Caribbean.