14) The New Millennium

The new millennium began with a change of leadership in Russia. Boris Yeltsin, who had succeeded Mikhail Gorbachev, resigned and Vladimir Putin took the helm.

We can look at it as Russia undergoing a zig-zag. Gorbachev tried to reform Communism but only opened the door for the end of Communism in Russia. Yeltsin represented a swing to the free market. But results were disappointing. The way it looked to me, in the 1990s a few people in Russia got very rich, mostly in energy, but the rest of the country was worse off.

Now, Putin represented a swing back in the other direction. Putin's Russia was to be a more authoritarian society, although certainly not back to Communism. This has turned out to be the best position and now Russia is doing very well. the Yeltsin years were important for the lesson that they provided. Going too far right is as bad as going too far left.

That's one of the problems with Republicans in America. They think that all there is is Capitalism and Communism. Anything that is not pure Capitalism must be Communism.

This is, of course, wrong. The truth is that both Capitalism and Communism have valid points, although neither has all the answers. The best thing to do is not to pick one or the other, but to seek a middle road with the best of both and the worst of neither.

I have noticed that Capitalism and Communism can be compared to a zoo and a jungle. The caged animals in the zoo see the animals running free outside in the jungle and they long for their freedom too. One day the zoo is thrown open and it's animals are set free.

At first, the former residents of the zoo are elated to finally have their freedom. But then they begin to see that while the jungle is free, it is also harsh and competitive. There is nothing to stop the strong from dominating the weak. There is no guarantee of the basic necessities of life.

After a while they begin to think that maybe the zoo was not such a bad place after all.

The zoo represents Communism while the Jungle represents Capitalism. The best way is neither the zoo or the jungle, but a middle way between them.

Many Russians bought properties in other countries. There was a new wave of Russians in New York City and London gained the nickname of "Londongrad" for it's many Russians.

Just a few words about freedom.

The price that people have to pay for freedom is to acknowledge that those around them are also free. This means having people around us who choose to be different from us. The basic meaning of democracy is that no one is special.

The trouble is that everyone wants to be special. Freedom does not mean everyone in agreement, it means agreeing to disagree. It means that all we have to agree on is the basic principles of the freedom that we have.

Freedom is like a peak, if we take it too far we pass the peak. Put another way, freedom is like a road than ends in a loop. If we go too far down the road to freedom, to the point where the strong are allowed to suppress the weak or the privileged are allowed to set things up to suit themselves, we go through the loop and end up going back in the opposite direction.

Freedom requires a considerable degree of individualism. The individual has to be at least as important as the group. A group in a free society must be a relatively loose collection of individuals. The challenge is that this goes against thousands of years of human history.

The way for a society to make progress and to find better ways of doing things is to question the way things are done now. A society will be held back if there is too much emphasis on going with the group and reverence for the way things have always been done and will fall behind countries that are more individualistic.

But on the other hand, it requires some special people to handle freedom. Freedom is only valuable if it produces a better society than non-freedom. When freedom loosens the bonds on people, it frees the worst in them, as well as the best.

The usual route to a free society involves the drafting of a constitution, a written plan of government. Humans need leadership or we will just have the law of the jungle. The object is to replace a dictator with a fair "written dictator", which a majority agrees on and which can be amended if necessary by going through an established process.

Freedom, through democracy defined by a constitution, is one of those things that is more difficult in the short-term but usually produces better results in the long-term.

The one advantage which a dictatorship or monarchy retains is that of simplicity. Countries almost never become successful democracies without going through a period of autocratic control first. America went through this period under British kings before gaining independence.

Anyway, I got a job with a large direct sales company. I started selling AT&T phone service and then credit card processing to businesses. The next three years would really be an adventure but becoming a successful salesman represented my final victory over stuttering. If you stutter, don't think it can't be overcome because it can.

Working on commission, with bills to pay, also gave me more of a reason to seek some help from God. Doing sales work, I also saw many towns and villages in western New York that I had never been to before. These included Olean and Salamanca as well as the many villages across the southern tier and eastward toward and around Rochester. I really got to know Jamestown, NY and Erie, PA well.

I reviewed my exercise program and made changes. I had lost most of my interest in heavy weight-lifting. I would concentrate on calisthenics, push-ups, chin-ups, knee bends, twists, etc., like I did when I first began exercising. I would work out less time per workout than when I was weight-lifting, but I would exercise every day, unlike weight-lifting which is usually done every other day.

The next step was a review of my diet. I wasn't fanatical about it but by this time my diet was pretty good and I made it even better. In particular, I realized the importance of water. Most people eat before they are hungry, but wait until they are thirsty to drink. They should do just the opposite. A lot of water is very good.

It can safely be said that I have gotten in more exercise this decade than in any previous decade, including my youth. The most pushups in one set that I had ever done was 78, back when I was nineteen years old. I had equalled it in my early thirties, but couldn't get past it to 80.

I decided to celebrate my 40th birthday, in 2000, by getting 80 pushups. I got to 75, which wasn't too bad. But I had the feeling that someday, it would be 80. In 2006, I first managed to get 80 and then got to 82 in 2008. This is thanks to a better diet.

For some time, I had not been listening to music very much. It was established that I would not actively listen to music anymore at all. Although I would not avoid music in public, such as at work. It was definitely a bad influence. All of those years listening to all of those songs was at an end.

It was not even necessary to resolve not to watch television. I cannot even remember the last time I purposely watched an ordinary television program, other than news or documentaries.

I just had a strong sense of improvement and wanted to go into the new millennium right.

Computers were everywhere by this point. Whereas the Eighties and Nineties revolved around books for me, the new millennium was all about computers. I figured out how to send mass emails all over the place to spread my message of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible prophecies.

I really enjoyed the satellite imagery of the world that was online. It was like looking all through a world atlas when I was a child, but now there was actual photographs of everything from above. One day during my first trip back to my native Forest of Dean, I was at a bridge but did not know where I was. But I noticed the bridge when looking over the imagery of the area and I know where it is now.

Email made it much easier to write to pen pals across the world.

In the news, there were changes south of the border. Mexico had been led by one political party, the PRI, for more than seventy years. But that changed with the election of Vincente Fox, from the opposition.

Maybe this can be considered as the Third Mexican Revolution. The first revolution was for the country to gain independence. The second was to remove leader Porfirio Diaz, who had become a dictator. But then the PRI had managed to control the country for so long.

I was driving a Pontiac Sunbird. It was the most attractive car I ever had and was a nice shade of turquoise, the color I used to like when I was a child on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. But it was also the most troublesome car I ever had.

I next got a Chevrolet Blazer. It was amazing how little trouble I have had with it.

The sales work I was doing was always changing. In 2001, we were selling alternate home natural gas and electric suppliers. It was nice walking around in the summer and it was easy to make money at.

Suddenly and unexpectedly came that day. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I had not yet gotten my blazer and was waiting for my ride to work. The news was on television at a couple of minutes after 9 AM. There was a large fire in one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The news announcer was saying something about an errant plane having hit the tower.

Just then another plane came in and hit the other tower, resulting in a huge fireball. The strike on the first tower, clearly had not been an accident. Just then, my ride to work arrived.

When we got to work, no one knew for sure what was happening except that the country was under attack. The Pentagon, the central military headquarters of the U.S. in Washington, had also been hit by a hijacked plane. There were reports on the internet that there were other planes on the way to targets but the only one that turned out to be true is the one on the way to the Capitol building, which crashed in Pennsylvania before getting that far.

After heading out of the office to get started on our sales work for the day, we had stopped at the Burger King just north of Buffalo State College. It was after we had gotten back in the car and turned the news back on that I learned that both towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed. It was soon announced that many people had gotten to the roofs of the towers, expecting to be rescued from there, and that there were literally hundreds of police officers and firemen inside the towers at the time of collapse.

The North Tower, which had been the first to be hit, had been hit higher than was the South Tower and it was the South Tower which collapsed first.

Al Qaeda had been behind an attack on a U.S. Navy ship in the Middle East the year before, the U.S.S. Cole, and it did not take long to determine that they were behind this attack.

We were working on the West Side of Buffalo that day selling the alternate home energy supplies. The day was spent switching between working and listening to the news on the radio. There are many Spanish-speaking persons, mostly from Puerto Rico, in the area and when going into homes, we saw the footage of what was happening on the Spanish-language television station.

The thought that crossed my mind is that the attackers want us to throw away our principles. They probably want to shut down globalization so that their homelands can remain as they have always been, without foreign influence. And to show that democracy is really shallow in that once America has actually been attacked, it will not really adhere to the high democratic principles that it preaches to the world.

Sadly, the Bush Administration obliged them with the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the unprecedented authorizations of wiretapping and otherwise spying on private citizens. This was actually what Osama Bin Laden wanted. Democracy had peaked in the autumn of 1989 but had hit a low point after 9/11.

On the other hand, George Bush must be familiar with the prophecies in the Bible about the end of the world and the establishment of Jesus' Kingdom on earth. Considering all of his actions during his term, I seriously wondered if he was using his time as president to help this along.

The attackers wanted America to get out of the Middle East and to stay out and were hoping that this one shocking attack would accomplish that.

They certainly wanted to provoke a backlash against those Moslems who go to live in western countries.

Notice that it was easy to find out the identities and backgrounds of all nineteen hijackers. This was part of the plan also. The hijackers were not from Moslem countries which are usually associated with terrorism or are rivals or enemies of the U.S.

The hijackers were Saudis, Egyptians and, a Kuwaiti. These countries are three of America's closest allies. In my opinion, this was calculated to anger Americans against their allies in the Middle East, and to further keep America and it's cultural influences away from the region.

Look at the timing of the attack. More Americans would have been killed if both towers had been hit at about the same time. As it was, many people evacuated the South Tower after the first impact during the more than twenty minutes before the South Tower was also hit.

But this was planned for the visual impact. Those more than twenty minutes allowed time for hundreds of cameras and the city's attention to be focused on the towers when the second strike came along.

The average Moslem has no more to do with these hijackers than the average Christian has to do with Jim Jones or David Koresh, or any other destructive cults. As a Christian, I cannot imagine how I would feel if people flew planes into buildings in the name of Christianity.

It is a great mistake to lump people together. When something like this happens, people on both sides tend to think with their emotions. When we lump people together, it tends to be self-fulfilling and we have more people against us than we would have otherwise.

Take Iran, for example. It and the U.S. have their own issues. But the majority of the population of Iran is Persian Shiites and not Sunni Arabs. Not only did Iran fight an eight year war with Iraq, but it had a number of border clashes with the Taliban, along the Iran-Afghanistan border, while they were in power.

While Hezbollah was at war with Israel, Al Qaeda released a propaganda video. But the video did not even mention Hezbollah or it's struggle with Israel. Al Qaeda is Sunni and Hezbollah is Shiite and there clearly is no link between the two.

I don't see how Saddam Hussein could have had anything to do with Osama Bin Laden. I have an old copy of Newsweek stating that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Osama spoke of gathering a force to help liberate Kuwait.

By the way, just the fact that I am writing things here that questions the government's actions demonstrates that America is a democracy. If there is a country where everyone praises their government and their wonderful leader, it is probably because they do not have much choice.

Another problem is how sensitive so many people are in the world to what others think of them or how they portray them. Suppose you are sitting on a bench and an ant walks by. You know that the ant hates you, hates your country and, hates your religion.

But so what, it is just an ant. Who cares what it thinks? It's thoughts are utterly inconsequential. The same goes for ignorant people. Just consider them as no more than ants. This is not being nasty, it is only being realistic.

Anyway, I had always heard and read of people who had been around when some historic event had happened. Like people who remember what they were doing when they learned that Pearl Harbor had been attacked or John Kennedy had been shot. Well, now I guess I had my historic event.

In the sales job, I would go to many places beyong the area. Two weeks in Philadelphia. A couple of trips for meetings to New York City (I have not been there since 9/11). One week in Boston and another in Minneapolis. Several trips to eastern New York State.

During the trip to Philadelphia, I was at a sales meeting in Washington. It was not long after 9/11 and I saw the side of the Pentagon caved in. I spent an afternoon walking around the mall and looking at the Vietnam War Memorial.

I often wondered what Heaven is actually like. There is no way we can know at this point. But I wondered if there were places on earth that had at least a pale resemblence to Heaven.

What about Gage Park in Hamilton, Ontario on a nice summer day? Maybe the bandstand in the park could represent God's Throne and the benches amidst the roses would represent the elders around the throne as depicted in the Book of Revelation, chapter four.

I made a resolution which I knew would require some commitment. From now on, I would read the New Testament of the Bible every week. The only exception might be when I would occasionally go back and read the Old Testament.

I have kept to this commitment ever since and usually read the Gospels over twice a week and the rest of the New Testament once. It is one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Of course, it is not always easy to read the New Testamant every week. It means little chance for frivolous wastes of time like watching television. But making a commitment to something difficult builds character. Doing a set amount of Bible reading should in no way be taken as a ritual that will build points with God in itself, but it is a chance to show God one's commitment.

Eventually, the sales office closed down and I went to work in a call center doing other sales work. Call centers had replaced factories as major employers in the area. I had become a really proficient salesman and felt that I could pretty much sell anything to anybody. There is an adrenaline element to making a successful sale, but it can also be draining.

The really important thing about this call center job is that I could think all day, since the job itself did not require a lot of thinking and there was often a gap between the automatic dialing of calls. A lot of people would be doing crossword puzzles and things like that.

I thought a lot about science and read more about it after work. I will not soon forget the date of March 15, 2004,. I was working selling business lines of credit. I was wondering about what time actually is. With all of this science, no one seems to have a plausible explanation of what time is.

A simple model of the structure of the universe flashed into my head. It easily explained not only what time was but all the whys of Einstein's Relativity and Newton's Laws Of Motion. It would become known as The Theory Of Stationary Space. Answers to all the great unanswered questions about the universe seemed to fit right into the theory.

String theory had too much going for it to be completely wrong but conventional cosmology had some really unsatisfactory solutions.

First, we are told that nothing can ever travel faster than the speed of light. But then we are told that well, the universe must have actually expanded faster than the speed of light for a period of time because that is the only way to explain why the universe is as homogenous as it is. This idea is known as Inflation.

Most astronomers agree that the universe began with the cataclysmic explosion known as the Big Bang, but no one seems to be able to explain what caused it to happen. All of Special Relativity revolves around the speed of light but there is no real explanation available as to why light travels at this speed and not some other speed.

The calculations of the mass and gravity of our galaxy indicate that it should not exist. The centrifugal force of it's rotation should overcome it's mutual gravity and cause it to fly apart. Yet, it doesn't.

Astronomers reacted by theorizing that a kind of "dark matter" must exist, which we cannot see and which contributes to gravity. The problem is that they have been looking for dark matter for about seventy years now and have not found a trace of it.

Then there is "dark energy", which has not been found either but is necessary to explain why the expansion of the universe is increasing.

My model of the universe explained everything in a neat and simple model and has no need of "inflation", "dark matter" or, "dark energy".

I got the idea of starting a blog. The internet was obviously replacing books and although I would not earn money from a blog, I could tell more people about my religion than I ever could if I had it published in a book. I chose a green background because it is reminiscent of a pleasant field of grass.

My blog brought out the best in me like nothing else ever has. If so many people are reading it, then I really have to deliver something that is worthwhile to read.

I had always been interested in science. At times, I thought of things or reasoned solutions to scientific issues but I thought that this must be obvious to others and that I have not discovered anything new. But then when the internet became widespread, I could easily check an idea that I had to see if anyone else had thought of it.

Some of the things I had thought of had indeed already been noticed, but there were quite a few others that had not. I also feel that my commitment to read the New Testament had led God to help me notice new things in terms of science.

A flood of new ideas and discoveries came to me and I wrote them online. The real fruit of knowledge is to bring about new knowledge. There is a difference between having knowledge and having the knack of noticing things that others have not noticed.

The internet opens the possibility of a whole new era in scientific discovery. Anyone in the world has access to most of the information available to any scientist. If someone notices something that could be a new discovery, or at least a new way of looking at things, it is relatively easy to do an online search to see if anyone else has already noticed it.

If anyone can become an actor or actress by posting a video online or become a journalist by writing a blog, then why can't anyone become a scientist? Einstein was not a scientist when he thought of his first theory of relativity, he was a patent clerk in Switzerland. Neither was the idea of the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, thought of by professional scientists, it was introduced by a Belgian priest, Georges Lemaitre.

There are many other examples, just in the field of astronomy. Milton Humason did not even graduate from high school. He got a job as a janitor in the Mount Wilson Observatory on a hill above Los Angeles. He took an interest in what the astronomers were doing and became one of the most important names in astronomy himself.

It is believed that Humason just missed being the discoverer of the planet Pluto due to a faulty photographic plate. He took a photograph of the as yet undiscovered planet, but it happened to fall on a slight flaw in the plate.

I would like to express a brief opinion on aging. This first decade of the new millennium has been my forties. I could not have dreamed of finding the things and doing the writing that I have done on these blogs when I was in my twenties or thirties. It would have been impossible. I have the focus now that I did not have then.

No one is going to know everything. I think the goal should be to get to where you can reason the things that you do not actually know. Many times, I did not know something but I reasoned what the answer must be and then when I checked online, I saw that it had been correct. Also keep in mind that there are things which are currently "known" that will turn out to be wrong.

I really enjoyed walking. I did so much thinking in the first decade of the new millennium while walking. I also gained a different attitude toward winter. With all of the news about global warming, snow suddenly seemed precious and I often went for walks in the winter. One of the most beautiful sights there can be is a quiet northern landscape with evergreen trees amidst the snow.