Out with the Old, in with the New: 2024 Here We Come!

2023 has been quite a year. There are two wars raging in the world, a third one that might start in 2024, a hostile and badly led power now has missiles capable of reaching the United States, American politics is in chaos and the weather is very damn peculiar!

In too many ways, 2024 looks like 1914. The world situation is just too complex for comfort, and the political situation too unpredictable. And then there is the climate, which seems ready to surprise us in some disturbing ways.

Where will this lead? There are a number of players in the great game of international affairs that appear to me to be less skillful than would be preferred. I do not think that North Korea and China are all that well led. With its new intercontinental range missile, North Korea has thrust itself into the highest level of international power politics. The danger is that its leadership is insulated from reality by advisors afraid (with good reason) to speak truth to power. Will Kim Jong Un listen to President Biden’s blunt warning of what will happen if he fires a missile at the United States? Hopefully. China’s Xi Jinping got away with annexing Hong Kong in violation of China’s treaty with the UK. The US under Donald Trump hardly batted an eye. The UK made formal protests, but could not act alone. Will this encourage Xi to attack Taiwan? His decision will be based on the outcome of the US election. Biden has already made it clear that the US will defend Taiwan. Donald Trump’s previous indifference to the Chinese annexation of Hong Kong may well lead Xi to attempt the same thing with Taiwan.

As to the UAP/visitor situation, it boils along, with the defense industry and the administration (like all administrations before it) opposing disclosure while (and this is new) more and more members of congress support it. After what happened the the Schumer Amendment to the annual defense budget, it’s easy to blame the Republicans for putting the lid back on, but the fact is that both parties have advocates for disclosure and both have opponents to it.

Will the visitors ever make an open appearance and engage with us on a large scale on a physical level? As I understand it, and they remain very much engaged with me in my own life, they will not do this until and unless it is absolutely certain that we are going to go extinct without their intervention. As to what they might do under those circumstances, I have been involved with them for too long ever to try to predict something like that. I can say this: the intervention would be the absolute minimum necessary to produce the desired result.

What will happen in 2024 in regard to the environment? In this regard, we are making significant progress, but is it enough to stop the planetary ecosystem from falling into terminal decline? That I don’t know. But progress is being made. Britain, it was reported at the recent G20 climate summit, had cut its carbon emissions in half in the past 25 years. It leads the world, but is far from the only developed country to be cutting emissions. In the developed world as a whole, the average household has cut its energy use by 30% in roughly the same period. Carbon emissions are still rising globally–which is in great part due to a surprisingly wonderful reason: poverty is in decline.

Over the past 10 years, the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined from 850 million to 610 million. That is to say, 65,000 people have been drawn out of poverty per day over this time. With this increase in prosperity has come an increase in hope, with the result that a great wave of aspirational migration has developed. This is not like the drought-drive migration westward out of central Asia that eventually overwhelmed the Roman Empire. This is, in significant part, a migration driven by people who have become aware, through universally accessible media, of how different life in the developed world actually is. Of course they want to better themselves, and their own rising prosperity has given them the means to pay often thousands of dollars for guides who promise them illegal entry into Western Europe or the US and Canada. But the rapidity of the flow and the difficult fact that at least some of this migration is indeed desperate, have created in the developed world an inability to make consistent policy, resulting in universally broken migration systems and all the chaos that this entails. In Europe, there has been some progress in imposing organization. In the US, the divided congress has meant that effective policy cannot be achieved, at least no so far.

What would effective policy be? We would do what the UK has been trying to do, which is to create  infrastructure that returns illegal migrants with no prior contact with immigration authorities to their home country, or houses them outside of the developed world. To achieve this, we need to greatly increase our ability to process would be migrants in their home countries, so that the great majority who show up without any previous contact with immigration authorities can be sent back at once, and not allowed to wait at the border, or even cross it, while their asylum cases are decided.

In the world of technology, 2024 is going to bring a series of advances. First, it is possible that we will take significant steps toward stable fusion reactions, which would lead to a vast and clean new source of energy. Second, if quantum computers actually go online and can be melded with artificial intelligence, an effectively infinite boost in computer power will result. As we cannot define consciousness, we also will not know whether or not such extraordinary systems are conscious, but it is certain that they will be able to emulate it so perfectly that it will not be possible to tell where they really stand.

At any time, an environmental outlier could develop that causes an unexpected world crisis. The greatest danger is wide-scale crop damage in major growing regions such as Southern Russia, Argentina and the United States. A crop failure in any of these areas will lead to greater or lesser world famines. The heat dome that spread over the central US last summer was certainly a warning sign, but this year’s el Nino is likely to prevent that from happening 2 years in a row. If it doesn’t, and another heat dome appears, that would be a very serious danger sign.

So, as always, a mixed bag. But it could be 1915, when tens of thousands were dying every day in the trenches of the European battlefield, or 1939 when totalitarianism of the most vile sort conquered Europe. These are better years. In fact, in some ways, they are the best years in human history.

It is up to us to save our planet and save ourselves. We have the intelligence, certainly, and the statistics suggest that we have the will. Waiting in the wings, we also have the visitors. If we get onto a stable footing and our leadership finally admits that they are here, then the best outcome will enter the realm of possibility: we will be able to initiate the development of a relationship with them. I know that this is possible. I live it. It is tremendously challenging and passing strange, but it is also emotionally, intellectually and spiritually enriching (although you don’t want to anger them, as I have discovered and which I discuss in “Them.”)

Right now, the powers that be are afraid of them. Many people in the military and defense industry believe that they are de-facto demons. They also fear the close encounter witnesses and this one in particular, because they don’t want to cede leadership to people who are not part of the official system. So we are more or less ignored, and I am assiduously isolated from contact with general media.

None of this matters much to me. I have read enough history to know that the affairs of the human world are governed basically by three things: climate, population and innovation. No government is sufficiently powerful to command any of these great forces. Climate will change as it wishes, population will continue to grow, and innovation will continue to be disruptive–and in this I include the extraordinary innovation of contact.

Beyond contact there lies another possibility, which is understanding what powers UAPs. We have made progress in understanding how to generate a gravity field, but not in how to make it go anywhere. During the Gimbal incident, one object descended from 50,000 feet to sea level in under a second.

Once we find out how that was done, a new destiny is going to disclose itself. We will be able to reach for the stars.

So, let’s raise a glass to 2024 and hope we beat the four horsemen of the apocalypse down the stretch.

Happy New Year!