Here are the five top things to worry about this week if you are concerned with the continued existence of humanity.

America’s Political Crisis. America’s political crisis began during the 2016 Presidential campaign and has since morphed into a variety of troubling aspects that threaten the whole world. The three most important right now are the lack of accountability for those in the ruling class for their incompetence and illegal activity, the fight for election integrity, and the likelihood that the President of the United States is a cognitively-impaired dotard. The problem here is that when America is weak, the bad guys come out to test its resolve. Look no further than Putin’s adventure in Ukraine, the stepped-up Communist Chinese rhetoric regarding Taiwan, and North Korea ramping up missile testing for examples.

World War III. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought us to a place we have not been for a long time, which is staring into our collective grave while the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations wag their nukes like two gangbangers flashing their Glocks in a dispute over the drug sales rights on a local street corner. This one has been building for a long time and the fault is mainly that of Clinton, Bush, and particularly Obama and their horrible foreign policy regarding Russia over the years. President Biden hasn’t helped with his incompetent handling of the crisis. While Putin has casus belli, invading another country is so 20th century. Putin could have accomplished so much more with just the invasion threat, and at little risk. It makes you wonder what’s really going on. In any case, if the Ukrainians keep kicking the Russian’s butts, this crisis may resolve itself.

Control of Personal Information. Two threats are involved here. The first is what has been termed “Surveillance Capitalism”. When you interact with the internet, information is collected about you and your activities. You leave tracks that show who you are, what you like and dislike, what sorts of websites you visit, what do you look for on search engines, and a lot of other things. For example, often I have searched for a product on a website and then later noticed that ads on other sites relate to that same product? The data collected is a commodity that has tremendous value to companies and marketers, and it is used to alter your behavior. In the past, (it is assumed), this has been a rather benign, even beneficial thing that helps connect us with things we need or want. Now we are not so sure that the data is not being used for more insidious purposes. It’s clear personal data is used for suppressing unpopular opinions, social engineering, and for manipulating elections. The second threat is the dissemination of personal medical information. The most nefarious example of this was a report by CBS News about China collecting the DNA data of Americans. The link is here. Why would the Chinese want our DNA? Maybe it is just a way to boost their pharmaceutical industry, or maybe it can be used to genetically tailor bioweapons.

Response to the so-called “Climate Change Crisis” Is there climate change, or not? The answer to that is yes because the climate has always changed. In Charles Mann’s book, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”, a book I highly recommend, he discusses the effects of climate on Pre-Columbian civilizations over the 12,000 years since Asians migrated and settled in the Western hemisphere. The fact is that civilizations have long risen and fallen because of the weather and that is just life on the beautiful blue ball we live on. The current “crisis” is a fat brouhaha over .6 degrees C of temperature rise over 150 years, which is how long we have been keeping records. Is that a big deal? Probably not. The measurement margin of error is higher than .6 degrees, so who knows. Unfortunately, a crisis is a path to power and money and I believe that is really what is driving it. The existential threat from this is that there are a lot of people who have a great deal of certainty about things they can’t know. Some of them, like Bill Gates, are proposing solutions, such as geoengineering projects, that have the potential to be disastrous.

The Loss of a Judeo/Christian consensus in the West. I can assure you that I am under no illusion that Christians or anyone for that matter is perfect. I am a Calvinist and firmly believe that the notion that human depravity is universal and pervasive is exhaustively supported by empirical data. However, when the Judeo/Christian consensus reigned in the West, the world made sense and most people were to varying degrees self-regulating in the way they behaved. We are now in the so-called post-Christian era and the world has stopped being rational, and people no longer seem to understand the concept of good and evil. Humans are no longer viewed as autonomous individuals with free will, made in the image of God. In a deterministic/materialistic world, man is viewed as a skin sack of biochemicals, a commodity to be bought and sold, manipulated, and controlled. In a materialistic world, the mass extermination of humans is no longer a moral problem in the twisted logic of tyrants. We saw this in the last century and this century in China. It is also not just megalomaniac tyrants that are the problem. This insane attitude has become ingrained in society as a whole. Just look at the way we treated one another during the pandemic.

I guess we will see how all of this plays out. Don’t worry too much. God is still on the throne.