Tag: current events

How the world really works

This interview is two and a half hours long, but it’s worth listening to every minute. It completely blew my mind, and connected a bunch of things I’ve been wondering about—not in a conspiratorial way, where everything has an explanation, but in a way that makes pragmatic sense while also opening up to tons of other questions.

The TL;DW version is this: our world operates a lot like the world of the Dresden Files, with a secret history and world that is invisible to most of the mundane normies. But instead of magic, the hidden world runs on money, power, and influence. And instead of factions like the Fey, the white/red/black vampire courts, or the Denarians, the primary factions are the MIC (military industrial complex), the FIC (financial industrial complex), and the TIC (technology industrial complex). And China, which is the only major nation state that hasn’t been brought under the control of the FIC, TIC, or MIC, thanks to the iron fisted rule of the CCP.

But just like the magical world of the Dresden Files lives in fear that the mundane normies will wake up and turn on them, the people who run the world need to give the rest of us stories that will keep the masses happy and distracted, lest they rise up and ruin their ongoing machinations of power. Because even though any one of us has little to no power, as a group we have far more power than we know. Which is why they try to turn us on each other, with stuff like woke vs. MAGA, liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right, Evangelical vs. Muslim/Mormon/Catholic/whatever. It’s all fake. All divide and conquer.

The way to break the system is to remove their leverage over you. Pay off your mortgage, get out of debt, become self reliant etc. For businesses, it means to run a private company with no long-term debt or publicly traded stock, that runs a reliable profit without having to raise capital from outside sources. On the extreme end, you can opt out of the dollar entirely by going full crypto and moving to a jurisdiction where that isn’t against the law.

Under this view, what’s happening with the Iran War right now is a controlled demolition of the post-WWII world order, and the creation of a new one. Trump is an agent of the FIC, which wants to defeat the MIC by ending the endless wars and bringing peace to Western Asia (what the MIC has gotten us to call the “Middle East.”) Closing the Strait of Hormuz is the mechanism for accomplishing this, which is also in China’s interest, because the MIC is standing in the way of China’s Belt and Road initiative. Once they have destroyed the IRGC and brought Israel out from under the MIC (by ending foreign aid), the MIC will probably accept Ukraine as a consolation prize, turning that into a long-term conflict that will allow them to plunder Europe instead. The new world order will be much more stable, though the US will be much less powerful. But on the bright side, we avert WWIII.

At least, that’s what I got from it. Like I said, it’s a fascinating interview.

The most realistic AI worst-case scenario

When it comes to AI, there are a lot of crazy doomsday scenarios floating around out there—just like there are a lot of pie-in-the-sky, utopian visions of an AI-dominated future. But while nobody knows exactly what the future will bring, I think most of these projections are totally wrong. Instead, I think that AI will neither save us nor doom us—but it will completely change us.

With that in mind, I thought I would share this discussion of AI, which is one of the most grounded and realistic discussions of the subject that I’ve heard. It’s also one of the most insightful. We’ve created a technology that we barely understand, but it’s still just a new technology, not a savior or an antichrist. In a hundred years, when our great-grandchildren understand this technology and take it for granted, they will probably laugh at how we thought of it (assuming, of course, that Yudkowsky and Soares are wrong, and we aren’t all exterminated by a superintelligent AI).

The thing about Minneapolis that scares me

I learned four things by living through covid. They are:

  1. Whatever the mainstream narrative tells you to believe (or not to believe), you should probably believe the opposite.
  2. Whatever the government tells you to do (or not to do), you should probably do the opposite.
  3. Accusation is projection is confession.
  4. At any given time, the most important story is the one that no one is talking about.

As the situation in Minneapolis continues to escalate, it’s not just the action on the ground that has me worried, but the rhetoric itself. Specifically, the one that has me worried is the accusation that ICE is somehow Trump’s Gestapo.

Obviously, this is ludicrous on its face—a wildly false accusation meant to rile up the useful idiots, many of whom received a public school education and thus know almost nothing about the actual Nazi Gestapo. But because accusation is projection is confession, it’s actually much more than that.

If there’s one thing that’s consistent about the left, it’s that they always accuse their enemies of doing the things that they are actually doing, or that they want to do. So when they say that Trump has some sort of Gestapo, that’s a very strong signal about their future plans, if they ever get power again.

The key question is this: by accusing Trump of setting up his own secret police force, are they confessing to something they hope to do, or to something that they are actually setting up right now? In other words, are they projecting something that’s purely aspirational, or do they already have the databases and surveillance infrastructure set up so that they can have a secret police force up and running the moment they come back to power in Washington again?

Thoughts and predictions about the Great American Revival

As I’ve written in previous posts, I think the United States is in the opening phases of a major Christian revival, on par with the first and second great awakenings. We’re currently passing through the later stages of a fourth turning, which will likely culminate in some sort of major armed conflict, though at this point I think we will actually avoid falling into a hot civil war.

But where most first turnings are followed by a period of reconciliation and national unity, I don’t think we’re going to get that this time. Instead, I think we’re going to go straight into a second turning, which is typically a period of spiritual awakening as the old religion either gets renewed or gets thrown out in favor of the new. The last second turning was in the 1960s and 1970s, and it gave us the religion of woke leftism. In this next great awakening, I think that’s all going to get thrown out.

Right now, we are still in the opening phases of a major national Christian revival. We saw this most clearly in the funeral services for Charlie Kirk, where public officials openly invoked the name of Christ—something that would have been unthinkable only a couple of decades ago. But Christianity is returning to the mainstream culture in a big way now, and I think that trend is only going to continue to expand.

In broad terms, here is the trajectory that I think the Great American Revival is going to follow:

  1. It will start with a period of unity and good feelings, as the various Christian factions work together to get everyone converted and defeat the anti-Christian woke left.
  2. After the revival defeats the woke left and sweeps over the culture, it will begin to stall out, and the various Christian factions will begin to turn on each other.
  3. It will end with all of the Christian factions turning on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not just with anti-Mormon rhetoric, but with actual violence.

Currently, there is a cultural trend where men are turning increasingly to Christianity, while women are turning increasinly away from Christianity. I believe that the first phase of the Great American Revival will end when that trend line is broken, and women begin to turn to Christianity in large numbers.

Why will the begin to turn? Because leftist women tend to be miserable, and they also tend not to reproduce. The world has not yet lost the positive influence of its righteous, believing women, and within the next 5-10 years, I think that these women will succeed in bringing the culture back from the brink of nihilistic, anti-human, leftist despair. I am actually quite optimistic about this.

But after the revival has succeeded in overthrowing the old religion of woke leftism, either by destroying or recapturing our major cultural institutions or by building new ones to replace them, the revival will begin to stall. It is at this point that all of the major sectarian divisions between the various Christian factions—many of which go waaay back to the Reformation, the Great Schism, or even the Nicean council itself—will begin to come to the forefront.

Ever since Christianity conquered the Roman Empire, it has been divided against itself. It will not conquer our culture without all of those old fault lines and divisions coming to the surface again.

This is how we get to the third and final phase of the Great American Revival. As the infighting grows feircer, and the war of words becomes heated, a lot of new Christian converts are going to become disaffected with the churches they initially joined, and are going to start investigating other factions. As they begin to do this in large numbers, I think a very large portion of them are going to find and join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Obviously, as a member of the church myself, I’m more than a little biased. But there are many good reasons why I think this is going to happen. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has experienced more or less constant exponential growth since its founding almost 200 years ago, and the period from 2022 to 2025 saw nearly a million new converts join the church worldwide. If current demographic trends continue, a hundred years from now the world population will be under 1 billion people, and something like 200 million of them will be latter-day saints.

There are other reasons, but my goal with this post is to give a broad picture rather than a deep dive. I’ll leave it to others to give their analysis. Bottom line, I think that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is going to do exceptionally well in this Great American Revival, to the point where all of the other Christian factions will ultimately come to see the Church as a major threat.

Most other Christians—Protestant and Catholic—don’t even consider the “Mormons” to be Christian. So when the revival begins to stall out, and the old sectarian divisions begin to return, the other Christian factions are going to need a common enemy to unite them—and that enemy will be the latter-day saints.

The seeds of this have already been planted. Anti-Mormon rhetoric from Evangelical pastors like Mark Driscoll has inspired at least one mentally ill person to shoot up at least one of our churches, and there have been numerous arson attempts against our churches and temples that have failed and quietly not made the news.

And there’s also plenty of historical precedent. In 19th century Missouri, the anti-Mormon violence got so bad that we were driven violently from the state by the state militia, after suffering rapes, beatings, massacres, and the destruction or theft of most of our material belongings. There is a reason why the Mormons made the pioneer trek to Utah, when the territory was little more than an empty high altitude desert.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the wild card that makes this Christian revival different from all the other ones in our nation’s past. It’s a very unique (and uniquely American) Christian denomination that has a tendency to unite all of the other factions against it. And ultimately, I think that’s how the Great American Revival will end.

There Is No “AI Bubble”

In my various and sundry travels over this desolate wilderness we call the internet, I’ve recently heard a lot of people talk about this thing they’re calling the “AI bubble.” The basic theory is that all of this AI development is being artificially propped up, that it isn’t nearly as profitable or as transformative as the AI proponents claim. When the music stops and the curtain gets pulled back, all of these AI companies will collapse, and all of this AI that nobody asked for will get scaled back to something normal. Or something like that.

But here’s the thing… the fact that so many people are talking about the “AI bubble,” to the point that it’s now a talking point, is pretty strong evidence that it’s not actually a bubble. When a true economic bubble happens, nobody calls it a “bubble” because everyone is so euphoric about it. Indeed, it’s that very euphoria that fuels the bubble. Housing prices only go up, donchaknow. AOL and Pets.com is totally the way of the future. So shut up and mortgage your house so you can buy the latest tulip.

With AI, though, it seems that all of the most vocal people are anti-AI and want it all to go away. Indeed, the main driver of all this “AI bubble” talk seems to be fear that AI will drive large numbers of people out of work. So what’s actually happening?

I do think there is a bubble in our economy, but I don’t think it’s being driven by AI. Rather, I think what we have is a debt bubble, which is very close to unwinding in a catastrophic way. The only way to stop that from happening is to grow the economy faster than the debt bubble is inflating, but at this point, the only way to do that is through some hugely transformative new technology, such as generative AI.

So all of the forces that want to keep propping up this debt bubble have turned to AI as the salvation of our economy, pumping billions and billions of dollars into it in the hopes that it will yield the sort of economic growth that will allow them to keep growing the debt. But for ordinary people, it’s a lose-lose scenario, since if AI succeeds, lots of us will be out of work… but if AI fails, the economy collapses and lots of us will also be out of work. Hence why so many ordinary people see AI itself as the problem.

Here’s what I think is ultimately going to happen: AI will prove to be super transformative in the long run, just like the internet, but it won’t save us from the debt bubble the way that our business and political elites so desperately hope that it will. The debt bubble is going to pop, and we are going to have to face up to the consequences of decades of very bad fiscal and monetary policy, with or without AI. But after the dust settles, AI will play a major role in the rebuilding of the economy, for good or for ill.

Did I predict it?

On July 24th, 2024, eleven days after the Butler Pennsylvania assassination attempt on President Trump’s life, I posted the following prediction:

9. In the first year of Trump’s second term in office, at least one of the following three things will happen: A second global pandemic,

Nope.

A domestic terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, or

No, thank goodness.

A major banking collapse and/or sovereign debt crisis that destroys the global economy.

No, though not for lack of trying. Seriously, I think this was one of the biggest unspoken goals of the Schumer shutdown earlier this year: to crash Trump’s economy in a way that benefits Democrats in the 2026 midterms. Thankfully, it seems to have failed.

So it looks like this prediction was a swing and a miss—though it could just be that the timing is off. After all, the day after the 2020 elections, I predicted in my personal journal that we were about to experience a rash of major political assassinations, but that didn’t start to play out until after the 2024 elections. The hardest part about making predictions is the timing, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if one (or all) of these things happen by the end of 2028.

Thoughts on the Mormon church shooting

Over the weekend, there was a horrific mass shooting at a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Michigan. The shooter apparently rammed his truck through the front wall of the chapel while the congregation was taking the sacrament, and as people were coming up to help him and make sure that he wasn’t hurt, he pulled out a semi-automatic rifle and began shooting them. He then proceeded to set up several IEDs to hinder the search and rescue efforts while he lit the building on fire, using gasoline.

I’ve heard different reports about what happened next. The police arrived on the scene quite rapidly, engaging in a firefight with the shooter and ultimately killing him. However, I have also seen reports circulating from eyewitnesses that members of the congregation also engaged in the firefight, and that at least one of the police who responded may have been an off-duty law enforcement officer attending the church services.

In any case, the shooter was killed, but not before he had killed or wounded nearly a dozen people and set a fire that burned the structure to the ground. The fire and IEDs prevented the first responders from going into the burning building and searching for survivors, until after the structure had collapsed. Thankfully (and miraculously), everyone got out in time, so there weren’t any people who died because they were trapped in the burning building while the first responders couldn’t get to them.

Needless to say, this is an unthinkable tragedy that has all of us members of the church in shock. Many of us are wondering what could possibly motivate someone to attack us like this, and in the last 48 hours, the picture that we’re starting to get of the man is very disturbing. He apparently was an Iraqi veteran who was suffering from PTSD and mental illness, which means he almost certainly didn’t get the help he needed from the VA. And while it seems he was a conservative, the motivation probably has less to do with his politics and more to do with religious hatred.

Ever since the church was formally organized in 1830, there has been a concerted effort by anti-Mormons to destroy it. If you search for anything about Mormonism online, you will also find some extremely vicious anti-Mormon literature. As with other forms of religious bigotry, such as anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, it comes at us from all directions, but in recent decades most of it seems to have come from the evangelical Christian right. There are pastors on YouTube right now who are monetizing their channels and building engagement by calling us “demonic” and claiming we are led by the devil himself. Others seek to ridicule our most sacred practices by posting videos of our temple garments or our temple services, which are not open to the general public. It’s always been something we’ve had to deal with, especially at events like our semi-annual General Conference where you can often find protestors waving placards that say things like “Jesus Saves, Joseph Enslaves!”

When I was following this story on Sunday afternoon, trying to piece together what had happened, I was shocked to find people posting these anti-Mormon talking points on conservative news sites like The Daily Wire. The vast majority of the response from our Catholic and Protestant friends, including our Evangelical friends, was genuinely sympathetic and full of condolences. But there was still a minority of Christian commenters who thought it entirely appropriate to use this story as an opportunity to tell us that “Mormons aren’t Christian.”

Do you realize that this anti-Mormon rhetoric is likely what radicalized the shooter to kill us? Yes, he was a disturbed and troubled man, but there’s a reason why he felt justified to take up arms against us. My guess is that he heard that Mormons are “demonic” and “not Christian” one too many times, and drew his own conclusions. And while he alone is responsible for his own actions, the public rhetoric matters too.

It’s the same exact thing we saw with the Charlie Kirk assassination. For years, Charlie Kirk’s political enemies called him a racist, fascist, white supremacist, etc, escalating their rhetoric to the point where a disturbed individual felt he was justified in killinghim. And just as it’s disgusting for people to say “Charlie Kirk didn’t deserve to be shot, but he really was a racist and a fascist,” it is also disgusting to say “The Mormons didn’t deserve to be killed, but they really aren’t Christians.” Especially while the church was still on fire, and the victims of the attack were succumbing to their wounds.

Up until now in the culture wars, religious conservatives of all stripes (including Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Latter-day Saint, Jewish Orthodox, and some other small minorities like Hindu (represented by Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy)) have been united by a common enemy: the woke left. And for the last two decades, the woke left has been the dominant cultural force. But all of that is beginning to change, as the culture swings back from the excesses of peak wokism and the Great American Revival begins to enter the mainstream. And as the Christian revival sweeps our country, I think we’re about to enter a very dangerous period, where we no longer have a common enemy to unite us.

So here is the question: as religious conservatives take back the culture and the woke left is forced into the political wilderness, are we going to remember our American creed of “E Pluribus Unum” as we work to make our country great again? Or are we going to fall into a modern ideological rematch of the 30 years war, with Catholics and Protestants sniping at each other, various branches of the Evangelical Right vying for dominance, and everyone turning on the Jews and the Mormons? Because the seeds of that conflict are definitely in the ground.

I’m not saying that Evangelicals shouldn’t be allowed to say that “Mormons aren’t Christian.” I understand how that’s a core belief of some people, who are deeply troubled by our rejection of the Trinitarian creed. And I understand that there are many Christians who still love us even though they believe we are going to hell, and want to do everything they can to help us be saved. But dude… if you really love us, why are you saying all that stuff while the bodies are still warm? I’m not calling for you to be silenced, but I am calling for a de-escalation of the rhetoric, before some other deranged madman watches one too many Mark Driscoll videos and decides to take up arms.

That’s a lot of heavy stuff to consider, so I want to end with what is probably the best response I’ve seen to the Michigan church shooting, from the Babylon Bee:

Mormons Respond To Attack By Continuing To Be Amazingly Kind To Everyone

[9/30 UPDATE:] …aaand once again, the Babylon Bee gets major points for predicting the actual news, because members of the church have set up a GiveSendGo for the family of the shooter. It has already surpassed $125,000 in donations.

Where do we go from here?

So the alleged shooter has been found, and it appears that he acted alone. He wasn’t from our local community here in Orem, but he was a fellow Utahan, I am ashamed to say. Still, his arrest does bring a degree of closure to this heinous act, at least in the immediate future, though I suspect we will be experiencing the fallout of this violent assassination for some time to come.

Where do we go from here? I don’t know. A lot of it depends on what happens in the coming days. The tensions are escalating dramatically between the right and the left, so if that escalation leads to physical violence, it could be catastrophic. I hope and pray that that isn’t the case.

On the other hand, I can see a lot of good coming from this tragedy as well. People are comparing Charlie Kirk to Martin Luther King, and saying that this is a turning point for our nation. A lot of people are turning to God because of this, which is gratifying to see. A lot of other people are turning away from the radical left, whose evil is now bare for all to see.

I do think there is a lot of truth in these statements. Decades from now, I think we will look back on this event as the moment when the Great American Revival went mainstream. And just as we look at MLK’s assassination as the moment when segregation lost to the civil rights movement, we will look at this as the moment when the transgender movement and the woke intersectional left decisively lost the culture wars. In the long-term, their voices will fade into irrelevancy until they are little more than a curious footnote to this turbulent period of our history.

But the short-term is much less certain, and it really does feel like our country is poised on the edge of a knife. And when I think of what the future may bring, I can’t help but think of what the prophets and apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been preaching for the last several months—specifically, the need for peacemakers in today’s world. There’s a lot of anger on my side of the political divide, some of it righteous, some of it otherwise. But if more good than evil comes of this tragedy, I sincerely believe it will be because of the peacemakers.

In many ways, Charlie Kirk was a peacemaker. He stood up boldly for what he believed, even to the point of controversy, but he was never violent about it. And though he was a passionate debater, he also listened to his opponents, and did his best to understand them and address them in their own terms. It was that quality—his ability to listen—that kept him from crossing the line from debate into contention.

Of course, his opponents hated that, and tried to paint him as a hateful and contentious figure, but all of that was just a projection of their own faults onto him. Everyone who knew him personally—including many of the people who differed with his beliefs—say that he was nothing but gracious to them personally, and went out of his way to reach out to them in their own moments of personal struggle. That is the mark of a peacemaker.

Charlie Kirk showed us how to stand up for our values with words instead of violence. He never compromised his values, but he also treated everyone—including his opponents—as a child of God. That fact made him truly a peacemaker. I can think of no better way to honor his legacy than by following his example.

Thoughts on the Charlie Kirk assassination

I heard the news shortly after dropping off my daughter at BYU kindergarten. The shooting apparently happened while we were on the road. Utah Valley University is only a couple of miles from our house, and the hospital where he died is only a mile from us.

I saw the videos of the assassination, including the now-censored one that showed it up close. I also saw the videos of the alleged shooter being hauled off in police custody, though now it appears that the University is saying that he wasn’t the shooter. This is such a fast-moving story that we probably won’t know exactly what happened until at least 24 hours from now, and there may be some things that we never know. And since I wasn’t there when it happened, I can’t comment on the shooting itself.

I just have to say, this is not who we are here in Utah. The shooter may turn out to be a Utah man, but that is not who we are—the rest of us. And I don’t just mean right vs. left, conservative vs. liberal. Most of us here in Utah swing MAGA (in fact, I’ve got a couple of neighbors who are still proudly flying their Trump flags), but we’ve also got some neighbors with rainbow flags and decals, and I’m sure that the vast majority of them are just as horrified that this assassination happened in our community. In fact, they’re probably afraid of how the rest of us will react.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Charlie Kirk’s family. I can’t imagine how horrible that must be, not just to lose your husband and father, but to have the footage of his violent death plastered all over the internet. I hope that more good than evil ultimately comes of this national tragedy, and that Charlie Kirk’s work will live on for many years to come.