Bitcoin and Nuclear War

 I, quite frankly, do not understand Bitcoin, or anything associated with it, but I wish that I did.  If I were a youngster today, I would make a sincere effort to get my head around it, in as much as it seems to be growing in importance both inside this country and out in the rest of the world as well.   Putin is talking about using the principals underlying Bitcoin in his effort to replace the dominance of the US dollar in international trade and people like Elon Musk are taking it seriously.  All of this, while this country continues to spend more than we are making - no matter which political party dominates the halls of power in Washington DC.  The American people are on a sugar high that is, at some point, going to crash our economy.  Individual politicians milk the situation to get political power over the rest of us, but, today, none of them even begin to address the imbalance between the world’s resources and mouths.  I admittedly do not know, but I suspect that Bitcoin is nothing more than another charade designed to cope with this failure on our part.

As I look out into the world around us, I see entirely too much conflict.  Conflict that adversely impacts the economies of the countries directly involved, but even more importantly, the international economy.  At some point we, you and I, will wake to the relationship of the world’s standard of living to our own lives, but I fear that it will be too late to successfully address the problem.  Very unfortunately,  leaders like Kim Jong Un, Xi Jin Peng, Vladimir Putin, and soon the Ayatollah, all have nuclear weapons and the delivery capability to destroy the ability of the earth to feed the number of people currently clinging to it.  Instead of thinking about all of this as we select our own leadership, we continue to permit our precious feelings to dominate our actions.  Neither political party speaks to the fundamental problem that faces humanity.  Instead, we quarrel mindlessly about the age of the fetus, the price of gasoline, the sign on the bathroom door, and our precious feelings.  Our focus on the relationship of carbon dioxide and climate change is illustrative of the same stupidity.  We have figured out that there is a relationship between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the earth, but we fail to think about the fundsmental relationship of population size and carbon production.

The problems that face humanity are humungous, but that does not change the need to address them.  Never will “leaders” start thinking about them if the people that gave them the leadership role do not start thinking about them.  People in the aggregate may well be too self-centered to make that intellectual leap.  If my pessimism is warranted, the difference between Harris and Trump is of temporary import.  Harris expedites, while Trump merely delays the next chapter in the devolution of humanity.  I choose to vote for Trump, but I recognize that it will not solve the long term problem facing us.  In order to do that, you and I are going to have to start thinking more deeply than we are now. My pessimistic derives from the fact that I see no evidence that we intend to do that.