Future Echo

On 10 September 2025 Charlie Kirk was shot dead. I saw it on my news feed and wondered who this Charlie Kirk was. So I Googled, and it appeared to me he was just another American conservative media personality. How wrong I was! The number of posts I saw about his murder kept increasing. I then saw an article on the Sojourners website basically saying that even if one disagreed with his politics the person as a person mattered...  ' however reprehensible a figure he was, however harmful his positions may have been, celebrating his death cannot be justified—certainly not from a Christian perspective. There is nothing to celebrate in the loss of a human life. Every person, even those who harm us, bears an inherent dignity that can never be erased. ' At the time, this appeared to me to be exactly the right tone, so I posted a link to this on my Facebook timeline. I didn't expect much reaction. Immediately, the culture chasm opened up: ' Charlie Kirk was not reprehensible.  ...

I posed a question... It is argued that the British culture that I grew up in was one of honour-and-shame. Cricket was not just a game but an attitude to life, a moral code. Something that ‘wasn’t cricket’ was against the moral code we grew up with. Honour and shame have always been driving forces in my life.  It’s argued that Jewish culture is more righteousness-and-guilt than honour-and-shame. These two cultures are radically different though it could be argued that shame is the result of personal guilt. But what does one feel, guilt or shame?  Both these two systems create a community culture of morality that binds it together, albeit from a radically different basis.  Is working class culture, was it one of those two cultures or something different still? Were you more driven by righteousness-and-guilt or honour-and-shame? But then I realised it was more complex than that and needed an explanation to be able to even ask the question. I knew in my mind what I meant by ...

(FIRST DRAFT - WILL BE REVISED AND APPENDED) In a previous post, I wrote about the Impending Economic Tsunami and laid out some of the history of economic theory and why Doughnut Economics might be the way forward. That post was long and a bit complicated. It also focussed on resource limitation and shortfall, which though critical is not the only potentially existential issue facing a large percentage of the world population in the next generation or possibly two.   Resource limitation/overshoot Resource shortfall Population plateau Termination of world expansionism Initiation of new world order The Road Ahead was a book by Bill Gates. One of the most significant quotes from that book is that  ' people often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in the next ten '. It is too easy to dismiss the challenges facing us globally because we are thinking 'nothing will happen in the next two years' while not addressing those i...