Author’s Note: This post was originally published 7/14/24 entitled: “The Great Disrupter & the The Great Pretender.” No one could tell what it was about. So, I changed the title.
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90% percent of my readership is an international audience. Maybe 10% is American. Yet, I live in America. I am impacted by what happens here.
That former President Donald Trump – whom I refer to as “the Great Disrupter” – survived an assassination attempt yesterday should be of no consequence to your consideration of potential cosmic disasters described on this website. The Sun cares not at all who is President of the United States or whether there is a United States, or whether there is even an Earth, for that matter.
Nevertheless, I do believe in God and I do believe He may be trying to help us.
I was going to compose an Update reflecting upon the incoherent leadership of the Great Pretender: a title I have ascribed to the current President, Joseph Biden, who maybe should be called “the Great Warmonger.” His dementia was dominating the American media yesterday, until the shooting of last night.
But for the world, neither a demented American President nor a vulgar former President is of consequence. If anything, the Shanghai Summit was the news. Yet, for most Americans, they were not aware of it, and couldn’t even find it on a map. What the rest of the world does is of no interest to them. How Americans can consider themselves “world-class” in the face of such ignorance demonstrates the over-confidence which only the ignorant enjoy.
As for most democracies, Americans choose their leaders based upon crass, primal instincts: fear, greed, lust, etc. I call them “primal” because they are uninformed instincts. Americans do not know what is in their best interests. They choose their political leaders like their women choose their husbands: through the swirl of seduction. Primates do a better job.
Many American Evangelicals believe that God “spared” Donald Trump. They have come to believe that he is the “Lord’s anointed” and that he is under “Divine protection.” And we cannot deny that this was “the finger of God.” Even from the barrel of an amateur shooter, the bullet missed its deadly target by a mere two inches.
However, “spared today, snared tomorrow.” Trump could slip and bump his head from taking a shower tonight and die of a concussion.
A movement based upon one man – chosen or not – does not make for a new beginning for anything.
Russia’s quarrels with Western Europe are more ethnic and geographical than ideological. Reading a 19th Century headline from a London newspaper concerning the Crimean War (yes, there have been others) would read much the same then as today.
The quarrels in the Middle East between Zionists and Palestinians, the Sunnis and Shiites, the Turks and the Kurds, go back even further.
This is what Christ meant when he said “wars and rumors of wars” being the false signs of His coming (Matthew 24). Everything is new to the Americans because they are ignorant of history. They know nothing of natural boundaries in reality because they believe they can remake themselves everyday. They believe in a magical view of the universe and that anything is possible, whether the work of God, the gods, or wizardry.
I pity the world that such great power has devolved upon such a stupid people.
I will continue to plug away on this website with the boring details of the cycles of nature and the academic questions – whether theological or philosophical – of our existence.
And hope that we escape a little longer the scepter of Death.
— JWS, 7/14/24
