predictions – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Will Islam still be a major world religion in 100 years?

This question has been on my mind recently, as we watch the escalating protests in Iran, many of which appear to be directed against the religion just as much as they are against the regime. Yes, Iran is Shia, while most of the rest of the Islamic world is Sunni, but I’ve heard quite a few rumblings of religious discontent in the Sunni world as well, which don’t show up on the front pages since Sunni Islam doesn’t typically have a central religious authority the way most Shia sects do (it’s kind of like the difference between the Catholics and the Protestants in that regard).

But this goes beyond just the news of the day. The more I look into this, the more it seems evident that Islam is deeply threatened by the rise of the Internet, and is probably falling into terminal decline because of it. Historically, Islam depends on controlled speech and fear of other Muslims to keep its adherents from leaving the faith. The Internet breaks down both of those things: it provides a medium where people can share their ideas freely and anonymously, and it allows the formation of niche interest communities independent from the mainstream.

From what I understand, most of the statistics that count the global Muslim population do not make a distinction between true believers and people who do not practice the faith, but still identify as Muslim. Which means that there is probably a large percentage—perhaps even a majority—of self-identifying Muslims who don’t actually believe the religion. I forgot where I saw this, but there was a survey of Iranians that provided some evidence that this is the case in that country, at least.

It’s crazy to think that a major world religion might collapse in the next hundred years, but this has happened before. Two thousand years ago, the majority of the world was pagan, but you’d be hard pressed to find a true-believing worshipper of Zeus/Jupiter anywhere in the world today. Fifteen hundred years ago, Zoroastrianism was a major world religion, but now there are less than a million adherents.

Things generally change less than people expect in the short term, but more than people expect in the long term. One of the more interesting ways that I think the world could change in the next hundred years is with the collapse of Islam as a major world religion. I can’t prove it, of course, and I don’t particularly want to get into the weeds of the argument, but since I do occasionally write stories that take place in the near future, this sort of thing interests me. And one thing I think we all can agree on is that with all of the turmoil of our current age, it’s going to be a very different world 100 years from now.

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:

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.
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.
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.

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.

We’re going to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the coming years

This is what you get when you get a religious revival in a collapsing postmodern culture that has lost its ability to create good art. As the revival takes root, the artists embrace it and give it voice in ways that we haven’t seen before.

As the Great American Revival continues to spread, we’re going to see a new wave of creative dynamism in the arts, driven by this new influx of religious conservatism. It’s going to produce some really wild and interesting stuff. This is just the beginning.

Fantasy from A to Z: X is for eXpectations

What sort of books are fantasy readers looking for today? What are the expectations that readers have for the genre?

Overall, the fantasy genre is growing. Sales are up, both in traditional and indie publishing, and the big names in the field (like Brandon Sanderson) are doing quite well. It’s clear that the fantasy genre as a whole is robust and healthy.

When you break it down by publishers and subgenres, however, things start to look a little different. Romantasy is dominating the traditional publishing world, but most of it is little more than pornography for women, dressed up with fantasy trappings. And because of how traditional publishing now relies on a few big blockbusters to make most of their earnings, romantasy is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, making it much more difficult for debut and midlist authors in the other fantasy subgenres.

In the world of indie publishing, litRPG has begun to demonstrate some staying power. It was the new hot thing back in the early 2020s, but it’s attracted enough attention and developed enough of a following that it has become a major subgenre that is likely to endure for some time. I could be wrong about that, but from what I see, that’s where most of the innovative authors and whale readers (ie >1 book per week) are focusing their attention these days.

But because of the way that the algorithms tend to govern the indie publishing cycle (and the way that indie publishing has unfortunately turned into a zero-sum, pay-to-play game with online advertising), the rise of litRPG in the indie publishing world may very well be sucking all of the oxygen out of the room in the same way that romantasy is sucking it out of the traditional publishing world.

Both subgenres are also very gender-biased, with women gravitating toward romantasy and men gravitating toward litRPG. This reflects the broader social and political trend of men and women going separate ways, across a whole host of different metrics. So as the gender divide continues to widen in society generally, that will probably reinforce the divide between romantasy and litRPG, creating a positive feedback loop (or death spiral, depending on how you look at it).

Sword and sorcery continues to do okay, and has probably been given a boost by the recent release of Conan the Barbarian into the public domain. But most of sword and sorcery got siphoned off into grimdark back in the 00s—in fact, you could say that sword and sorcery reinvented itself as grimdark. And while grimdark has resisted the feminization of literature, standing as one of the few remaining bastions where male readers continue to feel at home, I think grimdark has already passed its peak. In a post-pandemic, post-Trump world, I think most readers are hungry for books that are less nihilistic and more uplifting.

Which brings us to epic fantasy. While Brandon Sanderson continues to dominate this subgenre, with his massive kickstarters and huge book releases, it’s debatable whether his readers are hungry for more epic fantasy, or just for more Brandon Sanderson. He’s kind of a subgenre all to himself. Recent streaming adaptations like Wheel of Time and Rings of Power have failed miserably, and Game of Thrones has fallen almost totally out of cultural significance, with George R.R. Martin’s failure to finish the last book (and Patrick Rothfuss’s failure to finish his own series) becoming something of a meme.

In fact, the failure of these two big-name authors to finish writing their books may have struck epic fantasy a mortal wound. Because of how they have been burned, a large number of epic fantasy readers are now unwilling to commit to a series until after it is complete. But very few authors can afford to write a truly epic series and release the whole thing at once. It takes several years to write a series like that—and what are authors supposed to do if the first one flops?

In other words, debut epic fantasy authors are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. If they release the first book by itself, it will probably sink into obscurity before they can write and release the next book. And if by some measure of hard work and tenacity they manage to write a whole series and hold back from publishing until they’re ready to release it all at once, if the first book still fails to sell, they’re SOL and all that hard work was for nothing.

This is also why traditional publishers are so unwilling to publish a new epic fantasy series from a debut or a midlist author. A bestseller like Larry Correia might be able to dip his feet in that pond (and do quite well—I highly recommend his Sons of the Black Sword series), they won’t do that for anyone else. Which is fine, except that indie publishing epic fantasy is just as hard—arguably more so.

For these reasons, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin have done more to kill epic fantasy than they have to grow it.

But this may actually have created an opportunity for those authors who are willing to drive into the smoke. After all, there’s much less competition if you can manage to break in and build a decent following. But how much hunger is there for epic fantasy, compared to other fantasy subgenres? And how can a newer/midlist author reach them, without a big push from a publisher or the algorithms?

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Fantasy from A to Z: Q is for Quests

What is your quest in life? What is your driving goal, the thing that gets you up in the morning? What do you hope to accomplish before you go the way of all the Earth and depart this mortal coil?

Quests are huge in fantasy literature, because they resonate so much with our own lives. Most of us are not just merely existing, drifting aimlessly from one life event to another—or, if we are, there is something deep within us that yearns for greater meaning and purpose in our lives. Quest stories give us that sense of meaning and purpose.

I asked Grok to define “quest” in the context of fantasy literature, and this is what it told me:

In fantasy literature, a quest is a narrative framework where a protagonist or group embarks on a challenging journey to achieve a specific goal, often involving adventure, trials, and personal growth.

Grok then gave me a list of five things that all quest stories typically include:

a clear objective,
a journey,
challenges and trials,
some kind of character transformation, and
some kind of symbolic meaning.

One of the best-known examples of this is Frodo’s quest in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which is actually a subversion of the traditional quest story, because instead of seeking to acquire the object of the quest (in this case, the ring of power), Frodo is seeking to destroy it.

The objective is to take the ring to Mount Doom and drop it into the lava, because that is the only place where it can be destroyed.

The journey takes Frodo far from his home in the Shire, across nearly the whole length of Middle Earth to the desolate lands of Mordor, where the Dark Lord is gathering his forces.

Frodo faces all sorts of challenges and trials, from the attack of the ringwraiths at Weathertop to the near-death experience with Shelob the spider. But perhaps the greatest challenge comes from the ring itself, which is constantly tempting him to submit to the Dark Lord’s will.

The story transforms Frodo so completely that by the end, he finds that he cannot return to his former life in the Shire. He leaves Middle Earth for the Grey Havens and sails with the last of the elves to the Undying Realms beyond the western sea.

As for symbolic meaning, the whole book is rife with it, from Gandalf as the Christ figure to the ring as a metaphor for the temptation of absolute power.

But what does an epic story like this have to do with us? How and why does a quest story like this one resonate so deeply with us? After all, very few of us have been attacked by giant spiders, or had a murderous experience with a ghost-like entity from beyond the veil. So why do we resonate with the idea of a quest?

I can only speak to my own experience, but this is how my own life has resembled something of a quest:

My objective, ever since my college days, has been to make it as a professional fiction writer.

The journey has been more of an internal one than an external one, though I have traveled a bit for conventions and the like. I also spent a year teaching English overseas, not only to make ends meet, but to gain the sort of life experience that I thought would lead to better writing. In fact, I’ve taken a lot of odd jobs along the way, all of which have given me experiences that I’ve later drawn on.

As for challenges and trials, it’s been an extremely difficult road, because the vast majority of aspiring writers never manage to make a living at it. I’ve made just about every mistake that it’s possible to make (except writing porn—though some people would argue that not writing porn is the greater mistake). Overall, I can say that pursuing this writing career has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life.

Has it transformed me? Yes, it has—and I know this because one of the major things that attracted me to my wife was my passion for writing, and the diligence with which I have pursued it. If I’d taken the path of least resistance instead of pursuing this difficult quest, I probably would have ended up as a morbidly overweight slob, addicted to porn and video games—in other words, the kind of person my wife would have never given a second glance.

As for symbolic meaning, I’ll say this: when my first child was born and I held her in my arms for the first time, I had the distinct impression that “this is her story now.” As a writer, I’ve pored over lots of writing advice, and one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received is to remember that every character is a hero in their own story. So when I had this powerful experience of holding my child for the first time, is it any surprise that one of the lessons I’d learned from my quest to become a professional writer helped me to understand the deeper meaning of that moment?

Those are some of the ways that quest stories resonate with me. I’m sure it will be different in your own life, but the main points are likely all there—which is why the quest story has become such a powerful archetype.

Of course, not all fantasy books involve a quest of some kind. In recent years, “cozy fantasy” has become something of a thing, where the story is less of a quest than a low stakes, slice-of-life sort of tale. Perhaps the most successful example of this is Travis Baldree’s Legend and Lattes.

Why do those stories resonate so much? Frankly, I think it’s because so many of my fellow Millennials feel like they have failed to launch. We came of age during the Great Recession and the Global Financial Collapse, saddled with way too much student loan debt. With all of the bankruptcies, mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and delayed retirements, many of us struggled to find meaningful work. As a consequence, many of us were forced to move back in with our parents and put off major life decisions like buying a home, getting married, and starting a family. Far too many of us have sadly put off those decisions indefinitely. And things haven’t gotten much better in the decades since. Indeed, our Boomer parents have the dubious distinction of being the only generation in American history to enjoy more prosperity than every generation before and since.

But I do think that is changing with the rising generation. There are a few key ways in which Zoomers are the diametric opposites of Millennials, and one of them has to do with this hunger for stories about quests. Just compare Epic: The Musical to Legends and Lattes. The contrast is stark. So as Zoomers come into their own, I think this subgenre of cozy fantasy is going to fade. It may stick around for a while, but I don’t think it’s going to be more than a tiny niche.

After all, what is your driving goal in life? What is your own personal quest?

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The key to understanding the Middle East (and possibly the world)

I just finished Douglass Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults, and wow, is it an incredible book. Difficult to read, simply because of the grim nature of the subject, but a very powerful and very timely book.

My own thinking on Israel and the Middle East has changed a lot since the October 7th attacks. For the record, I studied Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic in college in the 00s, traveled throughout Jordan, Egypt, Israel, and Palestine / Judea & Samaria while I was pursuing my degree. I’ve kept up with geopolitical developments over the years, including during the Arab spring, and have helped some of my Arab friends navigate those developments.

The apocryphal Churchill quote that “if you’re not a liberal by your 20s, you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by your 50s, you have no brain” very much describes my own experience. I used to be very sympathetic toward the Palestinians, but after the October 7th attacks, my position has shifted almost 180 degrees.

The thing about the Middle East is that even though it’s complex, it’s not really that complicated. Within the Middle East, there are basically three kinds of people:

the Jews,
the people who want to kill the Jews, and
the people who really don’t care.

This dynamic has defined the politics of the region since at least the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 600 BC, and possibly quite longer. Possibly, in fact, since the very first Hebrews migrated to the region during the Bronze Age Collapse.

(As a side note, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Levant since our first historical records of the Jews. In other words, this is the one place in the world where the Jews are indigenous. Therefore, anyone who argues that the Jewish State of Israel is a “colonist” state is, in effect, arguing for the extermination of the Jews, because there is no other place in the world where the Jews can live and not be considered colonists. At the very least, they are laying the foundation for the ideological position that the Jews should always and everywhere be treated as subhuman.)

With the above dymanic in mind, there are only two configurations that possess any sort of inherent stability. The first is that the Jews are the people in charge of the region AND constitute the majority of the population. That way, even if all of the non-Jews fall into the kill-the-Jews camp, they are still not powerful enough to carry out their plans.

This was the state of affairs from the days of Ezra and Nehemiah basically to the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Following the Babylonian exile, the Jews returned to their homeland under the (mostly) benevolent rule of King Darius of Persia, who allowed them to rebuild the temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed. When Alexander took over the region and the Greeks began to Hellenize it, the Maccabees and other Jewish rulers still managed to hold their own.

But all of that changed when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD. They put down the Jewish revolt with utter ruthlessness, making a desert and calling it peace. They drove the main body of the Jews out of their ancestral homeland, making sure it would never be such a hotbed of rebellion again. They also renamed the region “Palestine,” after the ancestral enemies of the Jews, the Phillistines. The name “Palestine” was originally an insult to the conquered Jewish people, just like the name “Britain” (ie “land of the painted people”) was originally an insult to the conquered Celts. And just like the British came to own the term, the Jews also came to own the term “Palestine” until it was appropriated from them by the Levantine Arabs who wanted to kill all the Jews.

From 70 A.D. until the early 20th century, the Jews were a minority in their own homeland. And so long as their numbers didn’t get too large, things were relatively stable. Sure, there were plenty of people who still wanted to kill them all, but so long as the Jews mostly stayed out of sight, most of the non-Jews frankly didn’t care. It was only when their numbers began to grow that the I-don’t-care faction bled into the kill-them-all faction, leading to pogroms and mass rapes and all sorts of insane atrocities.

But then, in the 19th century, the Jews began to migrate back to the region in large numbers. This led to an inherently unstable configuration which persists to this day, where the Jews and non-Jews are roughly equal in number. The Jews formed the State of Israel with help from their Western patrons, who provided a degree of metastability. But the situation is not long-term stable, and hasn’t been for the last 150 years.

The Americans tried to solve this problem by bringing together the Jews and the people who want to kill the Jews—as if they could ever make peace. This was incredibly naive. So long as there are Jews, there will be people who want to kill them. Individuals may be persuaded to change their positions, but the ideologies of antisemitism are as persistent as the Jewish people themselves. The death cult will never be satisfied until all of the Jews are dead.

What October 7th showed us is that the three-way dynamic of the region is still very much in play, and that the kill-the-Jews faction is still far too strong. And given the way things are changing here in the United States, I suspect that the Jews have, at best, another generation before their Western patrons become unreliable, and the metastable nature of the current configuration begins to deteriorate.

The Abraham Accords are changing things in a very positive way. For once, instead of trying to get the Jews to make a deal with the people who want to kill them, we are moving away from that silly nonsense and cutting those people out of the equation by making a deal with everyone else (like we should have done in the beginning). And with the way that Iran was utterly defeated in the latest war, it looks like that might actually work. But even then I don’t think the situation is going to be long-term stable unless it ultimately leads to a mass resettlement of the Palestinians, because that’s the only thing (aside from the senseless massacre of millions of Israeli Jews) that puts us into a stable configuration.

I think the Israelis know this. And I think that Israel is going to get a lot more aggressive in the coming years, much to the consternation and perplexity of their friends here in the West who do not understand this three-way dynamic (or who think that the key to peace is for the Jews to play nice and not fight back, so that most of the non-Jews fall into the I-don’t-care camp).

Because here’s the thing that almost no one is talking about: the impetus for the October 7th massacre was the transportation of several red heifers to Israel from a ranch in Texas. In order to build the third Jewish temple, the land of the Temple Mount (where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stand) needs to be ritually cleansed by the ashes of a pure red heifer. The reason Hamas called their operation the “Al-Aqsa Flood” was to appeal to their Muslim brothers to defend the temple mount.

From what I understand, most Jews do not currently want to rebuild the temple, and the State of Israel itself has taken strong measures to suppress those who do. But every time the Jews have had a commanding presence in their own ancestral homeland, they have built or maintained a temple on the Temple Mount. So once they feel they’re strong enough, they will probably do it again. And when that happens (or as it is beginning to happen, perhaps even now), I think that this three-way dynamic will become much more of a global phenomenon.

Remember how I said that AGI is a pipe dream?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted my thoughts on AGI (artificial general intelligence) and all of the doom-porn floating around that we are years, or possibly even months, away from the emergence of an artificial superintelligence that will either usher in an Edenic post-scarcity utopia, or exterminate all of mankind. Believe it or not, this is a big fear in Silicon Valley, among the people who are building these systems (though I suspect that the top-level executives don’t really believe it and are instead exploiting that fear to serve their own ends).

My view, in a nutshell, is that we will not see the emergence of AGI or superintelligence under the current research paradigm, because the current paradigm is based on pure materialism, assuming that intelligence itself is merely an emergent phenomenon, and that if the conditions for that emergence can be replicated, a human-level (or superhuman-level) intelligence will be created. My prediction is that in the next 1-3 years, AI development will run up against a wall, and all of the scaling in the world will fail to produce the sort of drastic gains that the doomsayers are predicting.

Well, it seems that we may be much closer to that wall than I supposed. I’m not super familiar with this YouTuber, but I’ve been following a lot of his content recently, and he seems to be very intelligent and also very keyed into what’s currently happening in AI development. And in this video, he may have just pointed out the wall that we’re about to run up against—if indeed, we haven’t already.

In any case, it’s worth watching, especially if you are looking to incorporate AI into your work life. Lots of practical advice, too.