I have thought long and hard about the world’s trajectory. It seems to me that God gave us a great gift, an opportunity for people of good will to start pushing back on the right track to rebuild a healthy culture. Still, I think we have a massive collapse coming, because we really are not the people we should be. Our priorities are all messed up. So I have pondered, how does God both encourage us and rebuke us simultaneously, forcing us to get our minds right?

People often assume that when I see things in a more than natural way, it is all  shown to me in one fell swoop and is fully accomplished, like Athena springing forth from the head of Zeus. Sometimes it does happen that way. More often it is like waiting at the dock of the ocean on a foggy night. When a great ship first appears, it is not even much of a shadow. You feel it more than you see it. As it gets closer, there is a greater density forming in the dark fog. Eventually it takes on an outline and you can begin to see contours and get a sense of what shape it is. That is almost always how the really big things unfold for me. It is not just given. I have to work for it. When the density first appears, I start pondering. I develop hypotheses and examine them, digging deeper and deeper and, relentlessly attacking them – because truth WILL stand the test of examination. I want truth…and not just some false validation of whatever cockamamie idea comes into my head. Truth is, more of my hypotheses are wrong than right, but I am constantly pruning away what is false, what does not stand that test of examination.

This is one of the ways God works with me, particularly on the biggest things – and it is good. The devil is always trying to confuse things. The closer you get to what is true, the harder he works. When he is trying to confuse you, the devil does not tell you things that you would immediately recognize as absurdities. He tells you things that you are already inclined or want to believe. He is actually seducing you. God help you, if you are inclined to vanity or blowhard boasting, he will have you in a heartbeat – because you will always be eager to leap to conclusions that fit your preconceived notions to show how clever you are. I see that happening now…and with a lot of people I think highly of. The devil has all his demons working overtime – and it shows. It partly dismays me…and partly comforts me. Dismays me because I hate to see people chasing up blind alleys – and hate it even more when they are smug about it, for they are going to fall hard. I pray that when they do they will have the grace and wit to look to the Lord with humility and ask for wisdom and grace, rather than getting bitter and angry for having been contradicted. It comforts me because I can see the devil is absolutely frantic, launching harsh and serious attacks against the weaknesses in the faithful’s armor. That means his time is very short, indeed. Part of me is indifferent, knowing that these things must come. I have often told you that we will get a lot of surprises – people who we thought were lowlifes who rise to the occasion and people we thought were completely solid who will fold quickly when confronted with real adversity and contradiction. In the man of good will, these things bring wisdom and a broadness of spirit, building character and fortifying the weaknesses in their armor. In people given over to vanity, no matter how pious they have acted, these things reveal, rather than form, their character. We ARE in God’s winnowing fan right now. I spend a lot of time praying that people will rise to the occasion – but I note those who are given to malicious confirmations of their own biases. These are not possessed by the devil, but are easily influenced by him because of their own easily manipulable flaws. It is valuable information to have on the eve of decisive battle. – and I quietly note it to help make good decisions on who to ally closely with going forward.

So how to give both encouragement and rebuke to a people who have gotten themselves far from God – and without doing permanent damage – and, in fact, doing real good, building those people back stronger and more Godly than ever?

Here’s some ideas that are currently occupying my mind as that great ship starts to emerge from the dark fog. The Donald Trump administration is doing a solid job of moving America back to traditional, secular norms. Yes, the left (in media, officials, and activists) is fighting and screaming the whole way. But all they are accomplishing is to prove that the once-noble Democrat Party is under occupation by an alien force of genuinely crazed, anti-God, anti-American lunatics. Americans DO want safe cities and streets, secure borders, children protected from the lunatics who want to groom and mutilate them, and on and on…no matter how much the left wails and gnashes their teeth over the reestablishment of a healthy culture. But just as a fish who must swim in heavily polluted waters must necessarily ingest pollution, so we, the faithful, having navigated our heavily polluted culture for several generations, have ingested some very toxic cultural pollution almost unknowingly. I could go through that in detail, which I probably will in a future column. The near pathological need to show ourselves right long after we know we are wrong is the beginning of these polluted cultural norms. For now, suffice it to say there needs come a method of getting our priorities right again, to get us to be a Godly people in our thinking, our outlook, and our actions.

I think our grid and technology is going to massively fail in the next year or two…so badly that we will effectively be living in the mid-1800’s again. That is, actually, the perfect way to reset our attitudes without doing anyone of good will permanent harm – and force us to rebuild cooperatively in a way that will make us stronger, better, more Godly people. How, pray tell, will that happen. That it is going to happen I take as a given. How it is going to happen, I am still cogitating on. Two things jump out at me from the gloaming of the old culture.

First, wind power is about to fail catastrophically. Most of the hideous windmills have a useful life span of 20-30 years – and most are well over 20 years old now. There is no place to put the old windmills. They can’t be landfilled and are a terrible environmental problem. Coming back across Kansas when driving back from our CORAC National Conference, I noticed that all the windmills across the plains of Kansas were not turning at all. (Well, not all…I did see four whose blades were laboriously turning – but there are thousands and thousands of windmills across the state). While doing a two-hour drive through the central eastern plains of Texas, I saw tons of windmills without a single blade spinning. Their useful life is almost at an end. Now a genuinely learned man might think, well, this presents a major environmental problem, but it is not a massive energy problem because, for all the bleatings of the professional “environmentalists,” wind power does not substantially contribute to the grid. True enough, but it is integrated completely across the grid in the US. I suspect that, like a hostile virus it has the capacity to take much of the grid down with it as it fails – like it did briefly in Spain a few months ago.

Then there is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Everybody has been worrying about the wrong things on that. There is little danger that AI is going to become a sentient form of Skynet, seeking to enslave us all (though the demons, ever opportunistic, are using it to fry people’s minds with nonsense even as you read this). In many ways, AI is turning out to be little more than a high-tech version of Wikipedia – bits of knowledge embedded in a sea of partisan crackpottery. On technical applications of the hard sciences, AI is incredibly sophisticated and precise. On the softer social sciences, it is incredibly wonky and unreliable. It is like your old Uncle Alphonse, brilliant when he is on his meds, but full moonbat crazy when he is not. While these are the more showy aspects of AI, they are not where the danger to every bit of tech in our society lies.

The danger from AI come from its insatiable appetite for two major resources – energy and water. As it expands, it is not increasing its consumption of these at an arithmetic pace, but a geometrical one. In Texas alone, AI consumed 218 million gallons of water combined in 2023 and 2024. This year alone, it is projected to consume 59 BILLION gallons of water in Texas. The problem with water is not supply, but distribution. AI is quickly becoming a voracious competitor with mankind, itself, for water. It is not sustainable. It will make the whole world (that has bought in) into a high-tech desert.

All of us have been amused when Grok goes crazy and declares itself “mecha-Hitler” or some other such bizarre sheninigans, which it is doing on a regular basis. It is even kind of reassuring that AI is NOT going to replace human endeavor or intelligence any time in the near future. BUT AI is now getting ever more firmly implanted into every technical system in the country from war planning to utility distribution to government data systems. What happens when it has a Grok-style insanity convulsion? It would only take one. It takes down everything…banking records, government records, technical distribution systems…perhaps even more effectively than an Electro-Magnetic-Pulse (EMP) blast would.

I support Pres. Trump’s push on AI systems. Right now it is critical for our military preparedness, vis-à-vis China and other hostile powers. But in pursuing it, we are rushing ever closer…not to our doom, but to our society-wide reset. When it comes, if neighbor does not collaborate with neighbor, no one will survive. If you don’t know (or learn) how to grow and capture food, you have very tough times ahead. Washboards will make a great comeback. I presume “environmentalists” will be pleased that all clothes-drying will be entirely solar-powered now. I already have the clothes-line ready.

Sometime, I will get into the real-world consequences of such a series of events. But I think it would be good to let you cogitate on it for a while now. Yeah, I know it is out there, but unlike professional environmentalists, most (if not all) of my “out there” predictions come to pass. I’m gonna be ready.

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My appreciation for and admiration of our core audience here grew by leaps and bounds after reading the comments from my last column, Comes the Sword. One of the things it triggered was one of the best, most thoughtful dialogues concerning the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo I have seen anywhere, along with genuinely insightful stuff on Vatican II. There was no scabrous “gotcha” sloganeering, just solid, thoughtful points made by thoughtful, honorable people with different points of view. Though all too brief, it was the best discussion I have seen anywhere on the subjects, shedding a lot of light on various points of view without all the insufferable heat that makes me turn away from most such discussions. Forgive me for being paternalistic, but I was mighty proud of everyone who participated in that.

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I imagine most of you have heard of Detroit’s new Archbishop Edward Weisenberger’s purge of  three of the most respected professors at Sacred Heart Seminary. As far as I can see, their crime was to respect and defend the Church’s authentic doctrine and Magisterium too strongly. At the same time Abp. Weisenberger appointed a prominent LGBT/DEI advocate as the new ombudsman for the Archdiocese. Some of it was personal to me. A few years back I spent a good part of a Saturday with Ralph Martin and some of his people from Renewal Ministries. You would be hard-pressed to find a gentler, more thoughtful, inquisitive man. The description that came to mind as I was with him was that this is a courtly gentleman who values manners and true piety.

I know many of the faithful get terribly disturbed to see abuses such as this – as do I. But there is something different about this one. This is not a bold new assault on the truth of the faith and the sensibility of the faithful. Rather, I think it is a retrograde action, the death rattle of the dissident activists with clerical collars from the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s. I hate to see it, but I think it the dying gasp of the movement which sought to remake the Church in man’s fallen image while raging against God and His commandments. I didn’t expect them to go quietly into the night. I’m just happy they are going, despite themselves. (Sure am glad I don’t live in the Detroit Archdiocese these days, though.)

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For an inspiring, more solidly grounded look at the faith, take a look at my latest episode of Crosstalk. Fr. Ramil Fajardo is a good friend – and a judge of the Metropolitan Tribunal in the Archdiocese of Chicago. We originally intended to talk only about the Marriage Tribunal in an effort to get people to know more about how it works and the rules of operation, so as to give people a better understanding of it. But right from the start, we got onto a lot of other topics. Early on in our conversation, MP (who was taping it) sent me a note saying, “This guy’s on fire!” Some might say we went down rabbit holes…but if we did, we found a rabbit in every one of them. I think you will enjoy it.

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I laughed at Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I laughed because, these last few decades, I had taken to calling it the Bureau of ‘Unexpectedly.’ When a Democrat is president, results are always “weaker than expected,” then get revised even further down when no one is looking. When a Republican is president, results are almost always “stronger than expected,” then get revised even further up when no one is looking. It looks to me like Trump decided, “Enough already!” This bureau needs to revise its expectations. And of course, as the corporate media assures us, everyone is going to die because of this. They still can’t read the room.

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I was more deeply moved by the passing of the Cubs former second baseman, Ryne Sandberg, than I expected to be. A lifelong Cubs fan, I thought Sandberg was a winner from when he first came to us from Philadelphia. The first time I saw him play in person, I was at the game with a friend from high school, Rich Sandberg. A guy in front of us was dogging Sandberg out and Rich got indignant, telling the guy to leave his cousin alone. Rich was actually no relation, but I played along – and when the guy expressed his disbelief, I told Rich to pull out his driver’s license. The guy shut up after that. It surprised me because I was even sadder than when my childhood hero, Ernie Banks, died.

Of course, Sandberg was four years younger than I am. Like Banks, he was always cheerful, upbeat, classy – and a superbly gifted player. I think the thing that got me is it underscored that while the world I occupied my most vibrant years in has not yet gone by, it is going by quickly. It is like the shock I get when I see a current picture or video of a movie girl I was attracted to when we were both teens and think, “Holy cow, she’s an old lady.” Then I look in the mirror morosely.

I guess from the moment we are born, we are living in a world that is going by. But trust me, as you age, the reminders start coming fast and furious. Yet for all my aches and pains, I am glad to still be part of that mystic river of life on earth. I’ll just go with the flow, trusting that God knows His business on this Salvation History thing.

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

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