Truth is Deadlier than Fiction

All our science, measured against reality, is primative and chidlike, yet it is
the most precious thing we have. --Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

This is a story based entirely on facts. It is so alarming in what it portends for the near-future, it immediately compels some of us to draw logical conclusions that venture into the realm of horrible outcomes that we hope were fiction.

In the past I have beaten and battered readers with the projection that shows what the compounding effect of wealth means to us all in reality. It shows a very scary future that is rumbling on the horizon and waiting to engulf us all with a sufficatingly new state of being. A state where dictators make the rules, and scientists are jailed for reaching conclusions that upset the dictators.

Well, guess what? That future that is sharply bifurcated between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is just one slice of the much more sinister future that awaits us all. If you are not scared by having a Donald Trump in power (with the nuclear codes always nearby), think of what three more irrational actors might try out there on the real stage of life. The possibilities are strong and strange enough to awaken all our ancestors.

There is definitely a very wide wealth gap between rich and poor here at home that will soon be opening to show a chasm too wide to close without a revolution. That is not fear-mongering, friends. That is as factual as facts can make it. If you think that our do-nothing Congress is bad today, don’t be shocked when our quaint group of misfits start emailing their confused thoughts from home to us via AI.

If you don’t yet grasp what excessive wealth means to politicians, and to courts, and to justice, you haven’t been paying attention to Donald Trump and his Shenanigans—or to history, real and imagined. But lets add Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping to that small list of dictators. They are all billionaires, they have their own nuclear codes, and they love to hate humanity. Granted, they could all be dead in 10 years. But history tells us that old dictators are replaced by young dictators. In fact, one dead dictator does not change the world scene much at all.

Now let’s roll the dice and see what happens. The odds of bad things happening with 4 dictators rolling the dice are high, when human extinction is one of the outcomes. But, I won’t venture down the pathway of the odds-maker. Instead, let’s look at who is rational, cool-headed, and who is not.

My tally sheet tells me that China’s Xi is the cool-headed one. The other 3 all need watching. And why not? Wanting to become a dictator is not a rational pursuit according to coherent brain cell logic and the entire psychiatric profession.

Mathematicians tell us that the odds of setting off a nuclear exchange rises logarithmically with each new country having solved the deadly mystery inside the world of atoms. In addition, to our bad-ass 4, the world must deal with 5 others. That’s right. We have 9 code-carriers out and about, testing the waters, and strutting their stuff. A nuclear-free world is not what it used to be.

My intuition gauge puts the end of democracy out there in 20 to 50 years. That prediction comes from the intolerably huge wealth gap, that is getting $4 billion dollars wider with every passing day here at home. In the immortal words of the late Sen. Dirksen, “a billion here and a billion there, and soon we’re talking real money.” It’s even worse, Senator. It also brings about MAD thinking, aka mutually assured destruction.

The world doesn’t know a lot about its dictators. Some like to throw their opponents from tall buildings, or put them in airplanes that can’t fly. Others just cause their trouble makers to disappear, while still others just deny, and deny, and deny.

But none wants to die alone. To them, if they can’t have the world, nobody can. And so they like to keep their stubby little fingers close to their nuclear codes. Who can say that all 9 nuclear nations are led by men of integrity? And so, I put the question to my artificial intelligence team. I asked if all 9 of our nuclear nations were led by men who were sound of mind, honest, and with noble intentions.

Here is the answer that came back: “it’s possible for leaders of nuclear nations to be sound of mind, clear in their thinking, and honest about their intentions, it’s not a guarantee and can vary greatly based on numerous factors.” In other words, artificial intelligence is not yet advanced enough to answer a simple question that anyone walking down the street could at least try to answer. Do you think AI might be able to answer this: “How many bombs can we build today?”