It seems sometimes as if almost every country on the planet, including those that are supposedly allies, are out to see the US destroyed. People cheer anything that seems like it could be a blow to the United States. There are even growing numbers on groups within the United States that seem to hate our way of life and want us to collapse.

Ever wondered why that is?

I have heard some of the, in my opinion, overly simplistic and outright incorrect answers given to us by the mainstream. Here are a few I have heard -

• They hate us for our freedom.
• They are jealous of what we have.
• They just don’t understand us.
• They are backwards.

There are others as well, but they typically seem to fall into one of those four categories for the most part.

Are these true? Do people around the world really hate us because “they are backwards” or “they are jealous?” Or could it be that there are some legitimate reasons why many of the people around the world have a problem with us?

——-
Now, I should stop here and say that there are some cases where the above statements are true. Those who would choose to kill or destroy us in the name of their religion are certainly backwards and misguided. There may also be those who are truly jealous of America (although this doesn’t really seem to be the case). And I don’t think anyone actually hates us for our freedom. They may want to take it away, but it is not because they hate us for it. They just simply hate.
——-

Then Why?

So then, if, for the most part, the people who hate or just generally dislike the US don’t fit into the main categories above, then why? Well, the reality is a little more complicated than we typically hear on the news, but I think it can can narrowed down to one sentence -

Simply put – we have, in many ways, lost our virtue.

Let me say that again – We, as a people and in many ways, have lost our virtue. What do I mean by that exactly? Let me break it down into three categories (although there are more) -

Greed

How is it that we became the largest creditor nation in the world (in other words, everybody owed us money), to the largest debtor nation in the world and of all time? Half of the answer is greed.

Let me ask you this – we all know the economy tanked in 2008, but do you know why? Most people that I talk to don’t. While there were numerous factors, the largest one was this – our banking system, in a convenient partnership with our government, gave out loans to people who they knew could not afford them, mostly home loans, playing on their desire to own their own home (which is not a bad thing).

But, that’s not the worst part. While doing that, they also essentially “bet” against those of you who took out a loan, expecting up front that you wouldn’t be able to pay it. They succumbed to such a level of greed that has never been seen. And what happened – when their little scheme came to an end and it all failed, our government gave them your tax money to pay off their debts on the bad loans. They still foreclosed on everyone’s homes, and got their paychecks.

How did this happen? We live in a society now where greed has become a god and a virtue. It’s all around us – in our music, in our schools, in our businesses, in the halls of our governments.

Here’s the worst part and why this affects how the world sees us. It’s been said that when America sneezes, the rest of the world gets a cold. While many have suffered dearly here due to what has happened, others in the world, who are dependent on the US as we buy many of their exports, were left starving and homeless.It crippled the entire world financial market when we crashed. And it never had to happen.

That being said, from an outside perspective, why would anyone still look up to America?

(And don’t even get me started again on how we are devaluing the dollar! Read more about that here.)

Dependence

(This one is going to get me in trouble with some of my more progressive friends.) There was a time when self-reliance and independence was a virtue of a majority of Americans.

Now, more than 50% of Americans are on some type of government assistance.

What happened to bootstrapping? What happened to finding a way? What happened to individuals, families, and churches helping one another?

When there was a problem, people in the US used to say, “We need to do something about this.” Now, in general, people are more likely to say, “Someone needs to do something about this.” This is a fundamental shift in our thinking reflected by the number of people on the take from the government.

Often during the day, I hear commercials for “free camera phones” and “get a cell phone for $1.49/month!” These are government programs. Why is it that I am paying for a camera phone for someone else? That’s just one simple example.

I understand that we can’t simply rip out our safety net from people who need help and I know that there are people who genuinely need assistance. I am not saying that we should shut down all of these programs tomorrow. I am saying we need to get back to looking within ourselves first and looking around us to see who we can help.

How does this relate to why the world feels differently about us? Because this particular virtue is what, in many ways, made us unique and set us apart from the rest of the world. People could come here and have their freedom and get their own start. Now the tax and regulation burden is so high that many Americans are instead leaving and going elsewhere to start or maintain their businesses.

Violence

(This is the one where I may anger my conservative friends.) We have the largest, strongest military the world has ever seen. I can’t imagine anyone disputing that. And I would agree with those who say that the best offense is a good defense.

However, we aren’t just playing defense anymore. We are on the offensive all over the world.

I have the utmost respect for our troops. In every way. What an awful position they are in – fighting all over the world, many of them going on multiple tours.

The people I do not have respect for are the ones sending them there – our politicians. Unfortunately, we voted for them. In fact, many of you voted for Obama because you believed he would change this. That hasn’t exactly worked out.

Let me ask you a few questions -

• Why are we in Afghanistan still?
• Why do we have troops still in Iraq and people on the ground in Libya and Syria?
• Why do we always end up involved militarily in every single conflict around the world (except the one happening on our own borders)?
• Do you believe the world is a better place now because of the last 11 years of perpetual war?
• Do you believe that we have “won the hearts and minds” and/or “liberated” the people in these places?

Having talked to friends from around the world, very few people see us as “liberators.” They see us more like an empire for all the fighting that we do around the planet. Ron Paul often tries to make this point, and m Republican friends often boo him for it, but he is mostly right – rather than winning hearts and minds, we have lost most of them.

Simply put – we cannot continue to meddle in everyone’s lives around the world and expect them to love us for it. Would you? I won’t even belabor the debate as to whether we should be in these wars or not – just consider the fact that if we have troops on the ground in a foreign country, most of the time, good or bad, right or wrong, we will be considered invaders and not liberators.

This post has already gone longer than I wanted, so I will stop here and continue in the next post on this same subject, including some more evidence to back up all my above claims. But I want to hear your thoughts, your objections, your questions. Hit me up in the comments or via email.

Also, please do me a favor if you like this post (or even if you don’t and want to argue with me) and share it by clicking the like, share, tweet or any of the other buttons over to the side!

First, my apologies in the delay between this post and the last. So much research goes into these posts that I needed to wait until I had the time to get it right. Now on to it -

Do you ever think at all about where your food comes from? Whether you get all of your food at the grocery store or eat out all the time, where did that come from? How did it get to the restaurant or to the shelf from it’s point of origin?

More importantly – what would happen if getting it there cost significantly more than it does now, or worse, couldn’t get there at all?

Many people say that if the trucks stopped rolling to the grocery stores, they would be completely empty within 3 days. However, this is not a good estimate of what really happens in a crisis. Sure you might be able to find some magazines on the rack two days after a crisis hit, but all the food and necessities will be gone with in hours. And, the truth is, you probably won’t be able to get there in time to get anything anyway.

If this happened, how exactly would you eat? Do you have a plan?

Let’s consider a different scenario – gas is now $8/gallon and diesel is $12. This would mean, when coupled with regular inflation and the fear that would go into the market, that food would likely go up by at least 500% from it’s current levels, (which are already up to 40% higher than last year). What will you do when bread is 20 bucks and people are fighting over it?

The more important question than anything above, however, is this -

Could any of that really happen, and if so, why?

Many of the people I know look at me like I am a crazy person for even suggesting that such a thing could happen. But there are two groups of folks who don’t think I am crazy -

1. People who have been through a major disaster
2. People who lived through the Depression

Ask the people in Indiana, Kentucky, and other states that just got slammed by the tornadoes if being prepared disaster is a good thing. I doubt you will find anyone who wants to argue with you on that.

Bad things happen, whether we want to believe it or not.

To determine whether these things could actually occur, let’s look at the current situation in America -

• Gas is currently at it’s highest level in history for this time of year
• Gas continues to rise a few cents per day.
• The situation in the Middle East continues to destabilize.
• War with Iran, despite it being a very, very bad idea, is almost inevitable.
• Extended drought conditions mean that the number of crops available is down
• Corn is up over 4X in the past 5 years (and corn is a staple used in many foods and used to feed livestock – just look at the ingredients of what you buy – how much of it has “corn” something in it?) and keeps going up.
• Our government seems to have no interest in adding to our oil supply or ability to drill more, meaning we will continue to be dependent on energy from arguably the most unstable region of the world.
• Recent droughts throughout the middle of America have made all of the food we buy more scarce.

When you add all of those together, you see that we are in a very, very precarious position.

Does that mean that the cost of food will skyrocket? No. It just means that it is becoming a probability.

What will you do if food is even just twice as expensive next year as it is this year?

I can’t tell you for sure what to do, and I am not telling you build an underground bunker and start killing and eating your own food. I am telling you that you should consider being prepared for the future. If you do prepare, you can be a help to others when something bad happens. If you don’t, you could end up being a burden to others.

I know what side of that I want to be on.

If food does go up even twice as much, then you have some cheaper food in your house if you put some away now. If you lose your job, you and your family have something to eat even if things do not get disastrous. If nothing else, you can stop eating out so much and save some money by eating what you have around.

In a later post, I will go over some of what I am doing to prepare for the future. Our next post may be the most interesting, covering the question, “Why does the rest of the world seem to hate us?” Many of you won’t like my answers. I will have that posted next week now that I am caught up.

Most of us go through our days without a thought to what we use to exchange goods and services. Think about it – if you are like most of us, you do work for either yourself or someone else, and you get paid in something you never see, and you turn around and give it to someone else in a form they never see.

For example, let’s say you get a paycheck at the end of the month. It is probably direct deposited into your bank account, which means that the number on a computer that is in your bank account goes up. Or you might get a check, which is a piece of paper that tells your bank to make the numbers in their computer for your money go up.

Then, you take a piece of plastic (your debit card) and let people scan it for you, and they make that number go down and give you something in return.This is the most typical way of exchanging goods and services these days, and for most of us it has been sufficient to get us what we need.

If you are really “behind the times,” you might deal in cash, but again, you are just exchanging pieces of paper for goods and services. That piece of paper has absolutely zero value in and of itself.

But What Gives It It’s Value?

There is a reason why, for most of human history, people either bartered or exchanged using things such as gold or silver. These things have intrinsic value and usefulness. And even currencies, when they first began, were actually based on something tangible.

Without getting into all the history, even the US dollar was based on gold up until the 1970s. We used what was known as “the gold standard.” Our dollars were valued based on the number of them that existed compared to the amount of gold that we had. In other words, each dollar was worth a certain amount of gold, and you could even exchange it for it’s value in gold.

Then the 1970′s came along, and Richard Nixon took our dollar off the gold standard, and we started printing more money. But why is it now worth anything? If it is not based on gold, what is it based on?

One thing – the faith that the world has in the US government’s ability to pay people back. —-See why this is a problem? As we have already said in my last post, we now have more debt than an country in the history of the world. If we taxed everyone at 100%, it still would not match our real spending. We borrow 40 cents for every dollar we spend, and on top of that, our Federal Reserve continues to add money to the money supply.

The Federal Reserve will and does say that “they are not printing money,” and it is technically true. Why? Because they are just “digitizing” it. Remember what I said above about numbers changing in computers? This is what they are doing. They are adding to the numbers of dollars that exist on the computer, despite the fact that they do not exist in paper.

Take a look at the chart below shows just exactly how much more money has been added to the system -

Pay particular attention to what happened around 2007-2008 and beyond.

We started wildly adding money (Note that this started in President Bush’s administration and continued into President Obama’s.) What does that mean for you? It means inflation, which I will talk about in another post.

But to put it another way, it means that for every extra dollar they print, the ones that you have are worth less. It’s as if they took a dollar out your wallet, tore it in half, gave the halves back to you and said that you now have two dollars. It means that those of you who have been saving money are losing it, not in the numbers of dollars you have, but in the amount that each one is worth.

Let’s use an example – let’s say you had $10,000 in the bank. Then the value of the US dollar was taken down by 11%. In real numbers and value, you now only have $8900 in the bank (despite the number on the computer still saying $10,000). Now, imagine that happened for 10 years in a row. At the end of that ten years, your 10,000 would look like this -

• 2012 – $8900
• 2013 – $7921
• 2014 – $7049.69
• 2015 – $6274.23
• 2016 – $5584.06 (note that after only five years, you have lost half of your money in real value)
• 2017 – $4969.81
• 2018 – $4423.13
• 2019 – $3936.59
• 2020 – $3503.57
• 2021 – $3118.18

So, by 2021, if they keep adding to the money supply at even a modest rate, you lose about 70% of the value of your money. And they are adding at a much faster rate than 11%

Why Would They Do That?

Why would our government and the Federal Reserve add money to the money supply like this? Is this not economic suicide?

Yes, for the average citizen, no for the government. Remember, our government now owes over 15 trillion in debt. So, if they can bring down the value of that 15 trillion, it makes it easier to pay off for them.

However, at the same time, they effectively rob from each of us who use the US dollar.

Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this – why is gas so high now? Is gas more expensive to get out of the ground and refine than it was 10 years ago? No. However, the value of what we buy gas in – the US dollar – has gone down, thus, gas goes up because it takes more dollars to buy it from foreign nations. Now, imagine that the dollar continues to go down in the eyes of the world – how many dollars do you think it will take to buy gas then?

I could go on and on in this post, but I will stop here and pick it up at question 2 later this week – “Where does your food come from?”. However, here is a great video if you want to follow up on the money supply and debt issues and see if I am crazy or not -

In the past, I have kept most of my stuff on my site fairly lighthearted (other than the occasional protest of something stupid our government might be trying to pass, like SOPA). Not today.

There is too much at stake. Too much on the horizon that many people who I know still don’t realize. And I have been preparing for what is coming for the past year. Some of you may remember that I postponed the publishing of my humor book last year, but I never told you why. I did it because the timing was wrong. I couldn’t publish something funny, at least not before I got prepared, educated, and spoke out on some issues of much greater value.

Ok, enough with all that, let me tell you what in the world I am talking about – the impending global collapse.

Oh no, Casey has become one of those crazy conspiracy theorists! Soon he is going to have one of those 3AM AM Radio shows and talk about the Illuminati, aliens, and JFK!

I know, many of you are now afraid that I have become a crazy conspiracy theorist, but that is not the case. I don’t believe in conspiracies. I think our government and others have done what they have done somewhat unwittingly and right in front of our face.

We just stopped paying attention.

Let me start my explanation out by asking you a few questions -

1. What is money? Do you even think about the concept that you exchange work for pieces of paper that you trade around on computers using pieces of plastic? What would you do if that process was ever interrupted somehow?
2. Where does your food come from? Do you have any idea? What would happen if the trucks stopped rolling to the grocery stores?
3. Why does the rest of the world seem to hate us? And why are there bloody violent protests all around the world and here in the US (do a little digging on the violence associated with Occupy Wall Street)?
4. What do all these protestors REALLY want? Who is stirring all that up behind the scenes?
5. What happens if the US dollar collapses?
6. What exactly is inflation? How does it affect us?
7. What can we do about it?
   

Rest assured, there are dark clouds on the horizon. The American dollar is in serious trouble. Real unemployment is almost 20%. Real inflation is around 11% (Don’t listen to the government’s numbers, they are doctored. They actually take food and fuel out of their inflation numbers and people out of work more than 2 years out of their unemployment numbers). And the current track we are on as a country is going to take both numbers even higher.

A note: Don’t think this is some kind of shill piece for the Republican party to win back the presidency. I see basically all of them the same, Republicans and Democrats. I actually would align myself with many of the stated values of the Republican party, but almost no one in the party actually holds to those principles. They both want more control, more power.

The solutions are not coming in the 2012 election. Anyone thinking that Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich would turn things around needs to think again. The answer is not them – it’s us.

Ok, so just what in the world is happening that could be so bad?

To put it in a nutshell – the US dollar is likely to lose a significant portion of its purchasing power because of our massive debt and out of control spending among many other factors (in other words, all that money in your bank account will be mostly worthless and the price of everything will skyrocket).

I don’t know exactly when it will happen, but it will happen. We are already at 11% inflation, which would mean that within ten years, gas would be $7.00/gallon even if we stay at the same level of inflation, and we won’t stay at that level. Inflation will continue to go up, meaning that $7/gallon gas could happen very soon.

Don’t believe me about inflation? Been to the grocery store lately? I dare you to check the prices against this time last year.

We are simply one trigger away from complete disaster. I don’t know what it will be – it could be a terror attack, it could be a default on our massive, crushing debt (we have more debt than any country in the history of the planet – ever). It could be a decision by the Middle East to cut off our oil. It could be a war. It could be a natural disaster. Or it could even be a gradual decline over time (although that seems unlikely).

I don’t know what it will be, but it IS coming. And when it does, will you be ready? I don’t know when it will be, either. It could be tomorrow or it could be 10 years from now (probably sooner rather than later). But it’s coming nonetheless.

Over the next few days, I am going to do my best to answer in detail each of the questions I posed at the beginning of this post along with helping you to prepare. I also have some pretty cool stuff in the works that I will be announcing.  Check back as you can, and please ask anything or argue with me or agree with me in the comments.

PS – Sorry for being a downer. I don’t write this stuff to depress you, and I promise I will have some fun here still too. I am writing to inform and prepare you, to give you hope and a chance to prepare, and if enough people understand, we might even be able to turn this thing around. We are NOT hopeless, and we are NOT alone (Jeremiah 29:11). More to come…

Just to give you an example of the draconian nature of these laws, the only other somewhat industrialized nations to have laws on the books similar to these are China, Iran, and North Korea. Not a group we want to be associated with when it comes to freedoms.

Instead of trying to explain SOPA and PIPA to you in detail, I will let this video do the describing for me, as it does a great job -

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

To help stop these awful pieces of legislation – sign the petition here – http://sopastrike.com/modal/strike-modal/index.html

UPDATE: I regularly monitor my site to see how people get here, and many people are searching something along the lines of “the Christian response to SOPA and PIPA” and ending up on this post. While I couldn’t possibly claim to speak for the whole of the Christian community on this issue, here is the way I see it -

1. First, I do not claim to endorse piracy on the web, and opposing these bills is not at all an endorsement or even acceptance of any sort of theft. There are other ways to fight piracy besides destroying the internet and the freedoms we all have. In fact, we already have fairly strong anti-piracy laws in place.

2. Second, SOPA and PIPA, if passed, will almost certainly at some point be used at some point to censor messages that the government does not like. As a Christian who knows a bit about history, I know that those of us who are believers often end up the ones discriminated against. Why would I support something that would potentially lead to squashing free speech, including freedom of religion.

3. Finally, it is ok for Christians to speak out against their government if what they are doing is immoral. Some believers are afraid that speaking out might be a violation of Romans 13, in which Paul told the Romans to obey the government. However, remember the story of John the Baptist – he felt it was his obligation to speak out against his government when Herod was acting in an immoral manner. Therefore we see that there is certainly a Biblical case to be made for Christians to take a stand and speak out when government is acting in an immoral manner. Is SOPA/PIPA immoral? I believe so, because it attempts to take our God-given rights away.

Even though I have been doing this for a year now, I still get scared when things that I was counting on fall through. However, I find that God always brings some new opportunity to my door whenever things don’t go like I expect.

This week has been one of those weeks. I had my sites hacked, two big clients either dropped out or scaled back their work for me, and I threw my back out and couldn’t get around like I wanted to. But, right on schedule, new doors opened up to make up for the revenue lost, and the site hacking has helped push me to move to newer and better servers, something I have really needed to do for a long time. And my back is getting better too.

For those of you out there trying to carve out your own path like me, expect setbacks. Don’t count on anything until it actually comes through. But, don’t be afraid, either. God has continually amazed me with new opportunities when things don’t go as expected. Over and over again, He opens new doors for me right when I am actually ready to go through them. Thank You, Father, for that.

When people say to me, “Safety first,” I usually tell them that it’s not first, and not even in my top five. And certainly not anymore. However, our culture now seems to bow at the altar of safety. And it could eventually destroy us.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Benjamin Franklin

Many people use the quote above, often misquoted to say something along the lines of “Those who give up liberty for safety deserve neither,” but the concept is the same even when misquoted. However, we have given up so many of our liberties in the name of “being safe.”

For example, without making this into a heated political discussion, have you tried to fly recently in the US? Seriously, it is a nightmare. And why? Because we want to be safe. Many people want to blame the government for giving us the TSA and all of their silliness, but the truth is that people demanded it after 9/11. Instead of seeing 9/11 as a tragic situation that was meant to make us afraid (hence the word “terror” embedded in the word terrorist), and then consequently responding by being unafraid, we happily gave up our liberties.

The same is true with jobs. So many people I know want to do something other than what they are doing, but they somehow believe that working for someone else is more “safe” than working for themselves. Ask the now (as of the time of this writing) 25 million Americans who are now unemployed if working for someone else is really job security. At least for me, I can change course at any time if things are not working, and I can’t get fired or laid off. No wonder we see a decline in entrepreneurship in a culture that is too afraid to take a chance.

You see this in families as well. I understand the desire to keep children safe, but having worked on a college campus for several years, I can tell those of you who still make every decision for your child when they are 20 are doing them a real disservice (and you will probably have them still living with you when they are 40).

The truth is, every bit of this safety is a complete illusion. Someone could attack our nation tomorrow despite our precautions. You could get laid off or fired this week. Your child could end up being so afraid of making a decision on their own that they do nothing with their lives (a common scenario for this generation).

Safety is certainly a concern. Jumping off a cliff just because you say you are a risk-taker is stupid. However, not being willing to try something new because you are afraid you might fail is also stupid.

Our liberties are eroding daily. Our government closes in on us, more and more trying to tell us what to do in every aspect of our lives. And many people welcome it. I don’t. I have realized that much of the Occupy Wall Street crowd actually wants MORE government intervention in our lives. That is insane. You want to give up more freedom to the group that you freely admit has stolen from you? And you expect a different outcome?

At the same time we have that happening, less and less people are willing to take risks,and compounding that is the fact that the government continues to make it harder to do so.

This is also, I believe, a misunderstanding of human nature. As a Christian, I believe that all of us are prone to sin and evil. Thus, I never want anyone to have control over my decisions, because I know that they are just as selfish by nature as I am. The typical humanist, however, believes that people are basically good, and if we could just get everyone together, we would all take care of each other and look out for the good of one another (Hint:it’s also called communism/socialism). I just can’t believe that because I know my own heart as well as the heart of man and what is contained within. That’s why I want as little forced intervention in my life by other people (also known as government) as possible, democracy or otherwise.

If we don’t watch out, the “Fallacy of Safety” is going to cage us in and leave us with nothing but other people taking from us and telling us what to do.