Ask Pharaoh

I found an answer to my question regarding a way to store my spare magazines. If you enter “sunglasses pouch” in the Google Products form, you get microfiber drawstring pouches for 78 cents. That is pretty hard to beat. I would get them locally, but I have no idea who has them, and I would blow four dollars in gas just to find out. Then I’d have to pay tax.

I think the oil problem is going to crush bricks-and-mortar retailers. In the past, when you shopped online, you got better information, lower prices, and no tax. Now you get to save significant gas money. Tell me why I should ever leave the house again.

Very bad news, if you ask me. People will lose businesses and jobs. And what happens in the future when a hostile power effortlessly destroys our communications satellites and cables? Instant disruption of electronic shopping and transactions. Economic chaos.

In the meantime, good deals abound.

My great hope is that the oil mess is like the housing mess. Greatly inflamed by deranged speculators. Exacerbated deliberately by Muslims angry over our support of the only civilized nation in the Middle East. Temporary. People are saying it’s going to get worse, forever. I don’t see how that’s possible. It’s not like world demand for oil instantly increased to a degree that justifies current prices. Things are getting tighter, but we–the human race–could still pump and refine enough oil to meet demand, if we tried. And eventually, we will have to acknowledge that nuclear power is clean, safe, cheap, and abundant. A lie can’t persist for eternity. Some people say nukes are no good because it takes 20 years to build a plant. I say it takes that long because we’re not motivated. Kick the greenies out of the way, stop humoring the hysterical, and it probably takes more like three years. It didn’t take us 20 years to build the first plant at Hanford, when we were trying to create the first atom bomb. I very much doubt the construction of safe modern plants takes other countries 20 years.

I like to think our current hardships are a labor pain, to remind us of the horrors that lie ahead as the second coming approaches. Human beings increasingly accept the conceit that they run the world and that they can solve their own problems. In reality, God runs everything. If we have good harvests, if we have oil, if we have economic strength, it isn’t because Americans are superior. It’s because God chose to give these things to us. And He can take them away in a heartbeat. Maybe God is giving us a little prod to remind us that we can’t celebrate sexual perversion and let Israel down and indulge in idolatry and generally offend Him without losing our blessings. Lately we’ve been becoming more like Godless Europe. So it’s only natural that we should get a taste of their economic inferiority.

Could be worse. We could be on our way to slavery in Babylon, in chains. What has happened to us so far is pretty mild.

The global warming myth is probably the most ridiculous example of man’s belief that he is a god. Aside from the bad science, who could possibly believe in God and also think man could control the weather? Remember the book of Genesis. Who gave the Egyptians lean years and fat years? It wasn’t Halliburton.

I think our behavior has gotten so bad, we’re teetering on the line between “blessed” and “cursed.” The bad things that threaten to occur now are so ridiculous and avoidable, yet so possible, that they can’t be anything but the result of divine action. Who could be dumb enough to believe in ethanol, knowing it has to cause starvation and that it won’t help with our energy problems? Nobody with any common sense. Yet here we are, with food prices skyrocketing because we invested in this absurd, suicidal project. What nation could be dumb enough to refrain from using its own vast energy reserves, or from developing adequate refining capacity? Yet here we are, with gasoline threatening to hit twelve dollars per gallon and our own oil and uranium still in the ground.

Seems to me that one sign that a misfortune is due to a curse is that it happens even though it appears to be something that could be easily avoided. If man is so powerful and so smart, these things should not be happening. But they are.

In Exodus, God sent ten plagues to Egypt, and some scholars believe each one was intended to humiliate a particular Egyptian false deity, by destroying the particular blessings that false deity was believed to provide. Maybe what’s happening to us now is intended to humiliate the worst false deity of all. Man.

The other day I saw Dagen McDowell and Ben Stein on Fox, claiming we needed eleven-dollar gasoline. NEEDED. These are supposed to be experts. Imagine what life would be like if their prayers were answered. Bedroom communities all over America would be destroyed, because no one would be able to get to work. The wealth contained in the real estate in those communities would be annihilated; it would be as though it had never existed. Retail sales would shrivel. Food prices would climb out of sight, and production would plummet. Factories would close. Manufacturers would shut down. Goods would be unavailable. McDowell says mass transit is the answer. Tell that to people who live where mass transit does not exist, and where it’s not practical. And how do you build new mass transit with an economy destroyed by expensive energy? Where does the money to build it come from? Let me guess. Higher taxes. On people who no longer earn enough to contribute anything significant. You can’t starve the golden goose and then jack up the egg quota.

Economic prosperity comes from consumption. No sales? No prosperity. It’s that simple. And obvious. Yet intelligent people somehow believe the opposite. How can that happen, if something beyond the natural is not at work?

Some people say conservation is the answer. Some say increased production is the answer. Fundamentally, refraining from offending God is the answer. The world is too complicated for man to run. Without help from above, we can expect nothing but defeat. One of the big lessons I’ve learned over the last few years is that when things go badly for me, the way to start fixing them is to examine my own behavior and attitudes. Generally, that’s where the cause lies. And the same applies to Americans as a whole.