A year ago, I never thought....

...we would ever elect a president who literally didn't really want the job. But I was wrong.

...I would fall in love again. And even though I was wrong, I'm glad I was wrong, even if I couldn't make it work.

...that Colorado would win the Pac-12 South, Idaho would win nine games, Wyoming the MWC Mountain, and North Dakota would go 8-0 in the Big Sky. Good year in the Intermountain West football world.
...that Michigan State, Oregon, Texas, UCLA, and Notre Dame would all have losing records...and teams like Eastern Michigan and Old Dominion didn't.

...we would lose so many great and famous musicians back-to-back: Prince, David Bowie, Maurice White,...
...or so many legendary athletes: Arnold Palmer, Muhammed Ali, and even Darryl Dawkins (no, he may not have been the best in his sport, but he was "legendary"!).

A year ago, I never thought I'd move from my large house to a small one, but I'm glad I have. It's allowing me to stay stronger longer, and do more writing for you.

A year ago, I never thought I'd say this: I'm satisfied with the large number of bowl games in college football. Watching how ecstatic teams like New Mexico and Boston College and yes, Idaho are to win that final game...listening to coaches celebrate the "reward" of up to fifteen extra practices, and for seniors to get that one last game, and for new guys to set up their success for the next season? I'm newly converted. So, hooray for the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, the Belk Bowl, the Popeye's Bahama Bowl, and bring back the Cereal Bowl, the Salad Bowl, and whatever else you want to bring back so that all the 6-win teams get that reward. The 10-win teams get better bowls, the 12-win teams get the CFP. I'm satisfied.

(And a year ago, I'd never thought I'd say this: Thanks to Florida and LSU having to reschedule their SEC conference game, South Alabama got to go to a bowl game yesterday. I'll tell you why at the bottom...)

A year ago, I never thought the concept of "fact-checking" would be separated so dramatically from the concept of "news reporting". When I was learning the trade, you checked the validity of your reporting BEFORE you reported. Now? It seems like even the reputable news sources choose to print what furthers their own political preferences, left AND right. 

A year ago, I never thought that we would get SO separated between the "red" and "blue" America. We literally do NOT have the same "truth" we're dealing with. It was bad when the very PURPOSE of the two parties in Congress was to stop the other one from succeeding. Now? We literally had a nation of "reds" actively hating the classiest man to hold the office of President, and a nation of "blues" who document (but again, what does THAT mean in a "post-truth" society?) crime after crime of the next President to no avail?

It doesn't matter what reality is in a nation where we elect celebrities. I think the world of Mr. Obama, but he didn't have Presidential credentials when he was elected - he was simply a hot rising star because of his 2004 convention speech. And just as Mr. Kennedy was the first president to use television to his advantage, Mr. Trump was the first president to use his television celebrity to his advantage. He knew, long before the rest of us, that we live in a nation where we craved a celebrity leader. We craved the idea of having someone famous in the White House - not a politician, not a statesman.

Will he be a good president? There is no such thing anymore.The purpose of our governing body is to entertain us, silly! The only leader that can truly help us is Christ. As long as we remember Who is truly in control, and Who our true Leader is, our choice as POTUS is immaterial. 

Whatever happens in 2017 is God's Will. 
Just like it was in 2016. 
And the thousands and thousands of years before that...

No worries. And a year ago,... well, yeah, I thought that then, too.

Happy New Year, friends. God bless you all. 
                                                                                      -gps




(PS - When the schedule came out, South Alabama was planning on going to LSU on November 19th, and Presbyterian had a date at Florida. However, a month earlier, the UF/LSU game was hurricaned out. So the negotiations started, and the two SEC powers paid off the two lower teams to play each other, leaving USA and Presbyterian to play each other. Suddenly, the Jaguars went from an automatic loss to LSU on the road to an easy win hosting the FBS 2-9 Presbyterian Blue Hose. That means instead of being 5-7, they finished 6-6....and bowl eligible. What a weird world.)

Here's a smidgen more from my new book, "DAY 0001"!

Prologue: Context

            The futurist Ray Kurzweil essentially predicted some of the events of June 11^th, 2037, several decades earlier. He called the moment when we would no longer be the ones in charge of technological evolution as “the Singularity”, because like the physical event astronomers use the term to describe – a black hole – it is impossible to know what lies beyond that point.

            He actually coined the term at least a half-century in advance, knowing through the process of exponential extrapolation that it was coming faster than most people, even most computer people, believed was possible – and even he had underestimated the speed of its arrival by several years. But as the decades wore on, the basics of his argument were impossible to refute…

            “Narrow AI”, a very task-specific example of artificial intelligence being superior to man’s, began appearing in the 1990’s. Most famously, IBM’s “Deep Blue” defeated the human world chess champion in 1997, and within fifteen years, personal computers could run applications which were superior chess players to any human who ever lived. The last ‘hold-out’ among board games, the oriental strategy game ‘GO’, was finally conquered by the Japanese computer “K-Com” in 2019, and similar apps to those playing chess were on the market for GO within four years.

            Once human beings began habitually carrying miniature computers everywhere, ironically called ‘smartphones’, it was inevitable that the vast satellite-based Global Positioning System would soon be guiding their entire lives more efficiently than they themselves could. Satellite-based wireless fidelity covered the entire planet by the year 2020. Indeed, by the early 2020s, first-world citizens could scarcely do anything without consulting ‘Siri’, ‘Cortana’, ‘Alexa’, ‘Helen’, or ‘Leandra’ for guidance.

            Driving an automobile became a novelty in much of Europe, Japan, and the urbanized portions of the United American States and the Russian Federation of Republics by the year 2031, when the DPHA and its equivalent legislations around the world became law. The “Drivers Prohibited Highways Act” declared well over half of the 78,000 miles of UAS interstate highway, plus another 31,000 miles of similarly high-speed federal and state roadways, to be off-limits to human drivers, as the machine-driven vehicles built over the previous decade were far more proficient and far safer, even when travelling at much higher speeds than human drivers could be trusted with. Even the freeways that allowed drivers usually had at least one lane designated for self-driving cars, where the typical speed often reached double that of the conventional lanes. There were no gas-powered self-driven autos produced in America after the 2022 Congressional session, and the solar-powered RECHARGE strips which run the length of every lane of traffic covered by the DPHA meant the vehicles never needed to stop to recharge batteries. 

            The average lifespan of first-world humans rose steadily, and their later years were generally filled with significantly improved health as genetic treatments, robot surgeons (far superior to human ones), increasingly well-targeted medicines, and nanobots all worked to improve the quality of life as well as its quantity for everyone with access to them. For example, in the United States, the average life expectancy nationwide passed seventy in 1968, and didn’t reach eighty until the year 2022; but suddenly, in the last fifteen years, average life expectancy leaped to 92.7 years of age, with those last ten years more likely to be filled with ease of mobility and full mental capacity than ever before. 

[Before charges of elitism leap to mind, understand that the changes were even more pronounced in third-world countries. On the African continent in 1925, a typical citizen lived to be only twenty-five, just as his ancient ancestors did. But by 1990, that typical lifespan had doubled, to 52.9 – far short of the 70-72 experienced by their European brethren, true, but growing at a faster rate. African life expectancy passed sixty in the year 2015 and seventy in 2029; by 2037, the gap between continents had shrunk to just twelve years (78.1), and much of the remaining discrepancy can be attributed to war casualties, something technological advances only streamlined.]

            Two of the most obvious fields in which the paths humans and machines were colliding and merging were communication and entertainment. Video gaming, for example, had progressed steadily from the hypnotic game of “Pong” grandparents played in the 1970s to the hyper-realistic graphics of 2019 that were almost indistinguishable from reality. VR headsets and sensurround micro-speakers had made participation in not only gaming but movies and telecommunication so immersive that the only step forward would have been direct communication into the brain.

            Enter the Silicon Valley startup firm of HuskieDu. In the year 2020, they took the brain-to-brain interface research of its Duke/U of Washington creators and created the template for a decade-long explosion of wireless “think-it” technologies. These ranged from gaming set-ups, where the player’s thoughts control the action, to the Skype-descendant telecommunication called Vype that used VR without headsets to more important advances, like providing the ultimate freedom for ALS, CP, and quadriplegic victims, who could finally communicate without the restrictions their bodies impose. The technology, pioneered at Johns Hopkins, allowed people like the late Stephen Hawking to finally communicate at the speed of his thoughts after decades of imprisonment in the shell of his body – he was able to spend the last three years of his life doing tremendous work far beyond what he could possibly have done before. Unfortunately, his condition was too far advanced to stop even with the technology of 2025; the hope was that once the human brain could be modeled completely, Hawking could actually be resurrected and reproduced in robotic form.

            HuskerDu’s technology brought about a predictable transformation in the Internet; with increased ease of use came increased use, and abuse. There were some people who simply never emerged from it – “web ghosts” – but most people managed to live with one foot in reality and one foot in virtuality at all times. Someone having a public conversation in 2037 would very likely have one eye looking at the person speaking and the other one moving almost independently, following the “screen” in their mind displaying the news, a conversation via Vype, or experiencing virtual porn in ways his dad could have only fantasized about. Modern man had learned to actually multitask the way his parents claimed to.

            Of course, technological advances of this sort were taken full advantage of by a society searching to fill more and more of its free time: many of the high-paying mechanical jobs were gone, filled by narrow-AI robots, but there were plenty of (lower-paying) positions in both the service and the information fields. And with the ever-decreasing cost of computing speed, the luxuries of the virtual world were available to citizens of all incomes: even the homeless had their wireless portals to the infinite invisible universe. In 2037, the ancient Roman rulers’ maxim of governing via “bread and circuses” has finally returned.

            With the growing worship of technology came a simultaneous and drastic reduction in forms of traditional worship around the globe. In 2018, there was a huge movement in the variousProtestant Christian denominations in particular that believed the End of Days was coming, a year which marked the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the modern nation of Israel. (The four consecutive ‘blood moons’ in 2014-15 contributed to this theory, which lent the derisive nickname ‘Blood Moon Hoax’ to the hyperbole.) When the End didn’t come, there was a tremendous backlash from a world that already considered religion a ‘counter-scientific cult’ and a divisive force in both politics and society. Most of the smaller religions were killed off entirely; some strains tried to fight back, often taking aggressive stands against the iniquities the new technology brought, and were driven underground (or worse); the rest quietly went about their business, sometimes adding the culture’s ‘advances’ into their conversations and teaching, for better or worse. After all, many reasoned, God apparently allowed nanobots and the like to exist, and nothing in Scripture specifically prohibited them, so what’s the problem?

 

            There were two exceptions. One was Islam. To varying degrees depending on the sect, Muslim caliphates were defiant regarding the world’s cultural expectations on religion: some simply refused to acknowledge any changes, others fought back against technological hotbeds as best they could. Outnumbered by a world who passively preferred to tag all religions as divisive in a modern, web-united world, the swath of Islamic nations from Egypt to Indonesia united into a loosely-bound collection of ‘emirates’ under the ironically-acronymed umbrella of the Islamic Emirate Domain. While Sunnis and Shiites separated into distinct regions, for the most part, Muslims hunkered down as one and separated themselves from the rest of humanity, declaring their borders sacrosanct in 2028. 

Israel, therefore, was completely surrounded on all sides by the IED, yet it was generally ignored because the radical Islamic wings were pre-occupied with matters of their own economic and political survival. The Russian Federation of Republics had made a confederation pact three years ago with China, and was aggressively confronting the IED on its northern borders. This allowed Israel to continue more or less as it had: under Jewish control but not particularly committed to its prophesied role in history. Its ongoing Palestinian presence was coming to a head, and now, on the eve of the 70^th anniversary of the Six-Day (or “Yom Kippur”) War, a treaty was finally being brokered to provide grounds for peace between the two diametrically opposed factions. The leaders of both parties spent much of the spring of 2037 hammering out details in marathon bargaining sessions, not only in Tel Aviv but also in Baghdad (with the help of the IED, whose interests in the region were obvious), and in Brussels (with the help of the EU, whose interests in the region may be less obvious). After multiple delays, the document signing was imminent for a treaty which would finally give Israel at least a sense of safety within the full-time shadow of the IED.

            Meanwhile, the European Union became the dominant political force in the world when three consecutive isolationist American presidents pulled the UAS out of the police-the-world business. (The 50^th American president, Willard C. Smith, Jr., had been elected in the fall of 2036 on a platform of “more of the same”.) While the Russian Federation of Republics had strengthened its political and military might by allying itself with China (and its technological arm as well: the RFR had fallen hopelessly behind the curve in the direct-to-brain communication market), they were dealing with such significant economic difficulties that it prevented them from truly challenging the EU dominance on the world stage. This came in large part from their ever-present conflicts along its southern border with the IED, which had precisely the same economic issues for precisely the same reasons.

And so the Catholic Church under Pope Francis II – the second exception – reasserted its role in the political realm after a half-millennia absence by incorporating itself more and more symbiotically with the government of the EU. With the selection of a Catholic Italian as President of the European Council in 2035, the Vatican’s alignment with the planet’s most powerful government strengthened the church beyond any level since the Inquisition. In Europe, at least, it became imperative to be Catholic if you wanted power. 

And just like during the Inquisition, the Catholic church flexed its muscle against its fellow Christian denominations far more than any other group. Many of the more fundamental or evangelical churches had to go underground, at least to the extent that their members did not expose themselves as being Baptist or Pentecostal or such. Other churches like the Episcopals and Methodists simply watered down their services farther, to the point of being both inoffensive and ineffective, often aligning their own doctrines with those of the ‘new’ Catholicism. (Following the trend started almost a century before, Catholicism continued to move more and more towards the ‘cultural norms’ – abortion, post-coital birth control, homosexuality, and recently even polygamy and ‘multi-species relationships’ – and away from Scriptural accuracy.) The non-trinitarian churches – the ones who didn’t look like the Catholics, who didn’t believe in the “trinity” of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit – vanished as far as the public knew. Millions of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, had to publicly disavow ties with their church. (What they did privately, they made sure the Catholics in power didn’t know about.) 

True believers were going to believe in the actual teachings of God the Father, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and the lordship of Jesus Christ, no matter what anyone else tried to say or do to them. 

But those whose belief never ran more than skin deep? They saved their skin from being buried six feet deep, by running from beliefs that they saw as being more trouble than they were apparently worth.

Ω

             So, when the Rapture actually happened, there were less than a few million true Christians to leave with Christ.

Ω

What is it YOU want to be? Who were you CREATED to be?

It's "bowl week" in my house - especially with the kids over with their mom across town this week, although my youngest boy would gladly be watching football with me. And amidst the "meaningless" bowl games this week, there have been some pretty interesting games. (Moment of braggadocio - I'm up in the top one percent in ESPN's 'Bowl Mania' competition picking winners. THAT is completely pointless.)

After their win in the Pinstripe Bowl yesterday (excuse me: the "New Era Pinstripe Bowl"!), Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald - one of the really interesting people in CFB, by the way - made a huge point of saying that the reason his team "turned things around" mid-season was that they "remembered who they are", and then he implored OTHER college football staffs to define WHO THEY ARE, meaning what their core principles are as football coaches, and stick to them. And that seems to be a refrain I've heard several times this season: be who you are and love who you be. (Um. So to speak.)

It's an interesting thought that extends beyond coaching philosophies. 

Here's an article by ESPN's Brett McMurphy about a movement within the "have-nots" of the FBS, the so called "Group of Five" conferences who are NOT part of the College Football Playoff bowl coalition, the conferences who are so unlikely to be participants in the playoff that they are thrown the bone of being guaranteed a spot in the twelve possible teams names to the "New Year's Six" for the best of their teams. It seems that some of the schools are thinking about calling a spade a spade and holding their OWN playoff for the "JV" title, as some of the dissenters are calling it. The argument boils down to those who look at the nomenclature and say that they should have just as much chance to be national champs as anyone else, versus those who look at the reality of the set-up and want to deal with that reality instead. As I said on Wednesday, the problem stems from the cross-pollenation of the Group of Five and the "Power Five", and the fact that every once in a while, the underdogs win. That's true of the FCS teams, too, but you don't see North Dakota State clamoring to play against Western Michigan for the right to go to the Cotton Bowl.

In an issue that's not nearly as unrelated as you may think, Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher makes the point that the CFP is in danger of diminishing the importance of the other bowl games to the point of their death. Ryan McGee makes some great examples of how much it matters to the New Mexicos, the Idahos, the Old Dominions, the Eastern Michigans of the world, for whom THIS is the highest level to which they can aspire. Living in Idaho, I can testify to the importance of that bowl victory for the Idaho Vandals, who hadn't even qualified for a bowl in many years. Aspire to YOUR levels of greatness. 

(And even when you're in a lower bowl than you "aspired" to, like Florida State? Well, read that article and see how meaningless it is to them.)

How does this apply to US?

I'm working on my next book today, having just finished editing "Day 0001: the Singularity and the Six-Day War" yesterday. Will it be a best seller? No. It may not even get published by anyone other than my own self-publishing set-up. But I'm proud of it, and I'm hopeful that folks like you will read it and enjoy it for a while, and just maybe it will have a small effect in your thinking. Am I a failure for not having written a brand new "Left Behind"? Lord, I hope not!

What were YOU created to be? Are you a "Power Five" team? Do you wheel and deal with the "big boys"? Good for you! Make the best possible use of your circumstances that you can. Otherwise, you've WASTED the gifts you were given. Are you a "Division III" team - no scholarships, twelve fans in the stands, never heard from outside your own community? There is NOTHING wrong with that! Make the best possible use of your circumstances that you can. Otherwise, you've WASTED your gifts as surely as the Power Five case.

There are MANY more of us "nobodys" than there are "somebodys". And there's power in those numbers. We need to each live up to our potential and our skill set. 

Imagine what Christians could accomplish if we ALL lived up to our potential! It doesn't matter what that potential IS. God gave us ENOUGH to accomplish EVERYTHING He wanted us to achieve. We only have to do what we can.

I've just completed my new book!

IT'S CALLED "DAY 0001 - The Singularity And The Six-Day War", and it combines the idea of the Rapture, the 70th anniversary of the Israel/Egyptian Six Day War, and the Singularity, which is the moment when artificial intelligence first exceeds human intelligence.

Here's a taste of it...this is the Introduction...

Introduction

            In 1965, a British mathematician named I.J. Good, “Jack” to his friends, said the most prescient thing a human being ever uttered:

            “Let an ‘Ultra-Intelligent Machine’, or ‘UIM’, be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man, however clever.

            “Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, a UIM could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion’, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.

            “Thus, the first UIM is the last invention that man need ever make.”

α

            On June 5^th, 2037, mankind created its last invention.

α

            Yes, they were called ‘super-intelligent machines’ instead, probably because ‘SIMs’ rolled off our tongue better than ‘UIMs’ did. But more importantly, mankind did not immediately realize he had created the first SIM.

Ω

            “Once the machine thinking method had started,” posited the computer pioneer Alan Turing back in 1951, “it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers.

            “There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to ‘sharpen their wits’. At some stage, therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.”

            On June 11^th, 2037, the SIMs came to the same conclusion.

            There was no June 12^th, 2037.

            There was only Day 0001.

            More precisely, it was “Day 00 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001”, because when counting in binary as SIMs do, thirty-four digits of ones and zeroes represent 2³⁴ days, or 4, 398, 046, 511, 104 days; this would be approximately twelve billion years, which was their upper limit expectation of the remaining lifespan of the universe.

            (None of this “Y2K” garbage for SIMs. That was only a problem for lesser species.)

Ω