There’s something dystopian about waking up from thirst at 3am on a Saturday morning, merely take a drink of water, and then finding out your own country has bombed Venezuela and kidnapped their president.

How can I go back to sleep after that?

I laid in back in bed and closed my eyes. My thoughts swirling and swirling, trying to absorb that absurd bit of news.

My country has just kidnapped the president of another country?

Strange that the US isn’t at war with Venezuela, yet this happened. Strange that the US is saying they after drug traffickers coming from Venezuela, but had just pardoned and released the convicted Honduran ex-president, convicted of drug trafficking.

A few days later there was talk of annexing Greenland by force, a territory of an ally.

US federal troops are still terrorizing US cities.

US citizens being both arrested and murdered by the onslaught of unwanted storm troopers parading around. It seems the murder of an innocent white US citizen has caught the attention of the country. Even though there had been murders before conducted by ICE to Latinos they were pursuing.

All of it seems a bit unreal. A bit like watching a scripted tv show. I don’t agree with what is happening, so tension and anger tends to build up in me. Ignore the news, people say. Worry about your circle of influence, forget what you can’t control, they say. I think a lot of Americans do just that. Maybe too many.

What is the point of getting upset over something I can’t change or control?

I’ve often wondered what it might have been like to have been a German citizen in the 1930’s. Your country is annexing other weaker countries. Violating international treaties. Dropping out of the League of Nations. Your government is creating division at home with the use of both propaganda and brute physical force. A group of radicals at the top, consolidating power, doing as they please with no recourse. A secret domestic federal police force, geared up for combat, disappearing, beating, violating a certain race of people within the borders of your own country.

Everyone in 1930’s Germany was just cool with that?

Of course not everyone was. General strikes were called and enacted throughout Germany as democracy was tossed aside and authoritarianism took over. Some spoke up. Some were arrested. But most kept their heads down and minded their business, much like the Americans who oppose what is going on now (including myself). I’ve read recently both The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer and In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. Both books give vivid descriptions of life in a country heading down the road to authoritarianism, and life in a fascist state.

It all becomes chillingly very familiar to today’s America. The big difference is that those marching on the streets today in America do not support what is happening. In 1930’s Germany, marches were conducted all over the country in support of National Socialism. These marches are where most violence occurred against anyone who didn’t stop to face the parades or roman salute back.

Most recently, a radical top aide to the US president said, when commenting on Trump’s threats to annex Greenland by force:“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time”

Is everyone cool with what’s going on now in America?

This is very much dystopian. Americans are kept in a bubble of contentment, peace, and ‘wealth’, while our leaders and military does whatever it wants. The goal, not even a secret, is for corporations to move in on Venezuela and steal their oil. This would be the plan for Greenland and its minerals. The goal is to get rid of as many Latinos in America as possible and then shutter borders to the brown people.

This is just the beginning. 1933 Germany was different than 1939 Germany. 2026 will be different than 2030 America.

Why don’t Americans who are for peace call for general strikes against this?

The world wonders why. I wonder why.

Why don’t we as a mass protest and occupy DC like millennials did during the Occupy movements?

Deep down I know why. Things are good for Americans. Affordability and inflation are minor speed bumps in contrast to true poverty. Unemployment is down. You flick a switch and the lights turn on. Turn a valve and water comes out. Supermarkets are filled with food. Gas stations full of gas. These are the basics. The bottom of Maslow’s pyramid is fulfilled. Nobody wants to believe that now is the twilight of democracy. That now is the beginning to the end of our freedoms.

ICE agents can kill with immunity. No investigations. ICE can enter your home without warrant, say US courts. ICE can arrest and detain based solely on skin color and race (Noem v Perdomo).

Slowly our rights are being eroded.

First the minorities. Next the political opposition. If you think this can’t happen today in America, I urge you to read about the descent into authoritarianism of other rich democratic cultures and powerful states throughout history.

Americans are those human bodies in the movie The Matrix. We are being fed a dream and we are happy living in that dream, because it is reality. The order of a post 1945 world is disintegrating slowly, soon it will be very fast once it’s too late. The horrors of colonialism and world wars have been forgotten by the masses. If we look back over the span of centuries, superpower countries rarely get along forever. Yes, that can coexist for periods of time, but eventually they clash. I don’t think I’ll see a clash in my lifetime, but it sure looks like we are headed down that road and doomed to repeat and relearn why the world went to war in the early 20th century.

Do we care about the destination if the car ride to hell is pleasant?

The Future Is Here

The overcast skies were dimming with the approach of the coming night. Streetlights flickering on. Red and white lights from east bound I-80 traffic snaked below the overpass we were stopped on. The red light before us giving me the chance to observe the clogged freeways. I was glad not to be stuck in that traffic. Glad to have gotten off from work earlier than usual that day. Sitting beside me was my eight year old daughter. My mind was on how lucky I was not to be a part of the commute below me. My daughter’s mind was somewhere else completely, because she turned and asked me how it was being a kid in the 80’s and 90’s.

I explained away all the cliche, yet fun to discuss, nostalgic things millennials like to bring up; video rental stores, CD’s and cassette tapes, pre-online gaming. Leaving handwritten notes for missed calls or when you are leaving the house. We used to keep a note pad and pen right next to the phone. Keeping a hodgepodge of dirty change in the car for pay phones or parking meters. I told her about phonebooks and folded up maps in the glovebox. All the while smiling to myself because these are the questions I love. It takes me back to my childhood and teenage years, but even more so, I remember asking my own dad about his childhood in the 60’s living in San Francisco.

The wheel of time was continuing to spin…

After describing the above, I reversed the question, and asked how she would describe being a kid in the 20’s to her grandchildren. I gave some ideas and hints, but we had fun talking about how to describe people carrying around phones, charging said phones, gas powered vehicles, YouTube, streaming music, maybe even (hopefully this will be a thing of the past) humans manually driving cars…

It got me thinking about the future. How time is running up on me. In less than a decade I’ll be 50. Will I see the future I’d dreamed up when I was kid? Where are all the robots and moon bases I was promised as a child of the 80’s and 90’s? Were the rainforests ever really saved? And what happened to that big ol’ hole in the ozone layer the size of Australia that was supposedly drifting invisibly overhead?

I can’t help but feel I might have been shortchanged a bit from all my childhood dreams about what the next century held in store for humanity. In the 90’s, when the Cold War ended, so did good funding to NASA, and the led to the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.

Competition, as we all know from our capitalist society, leads to innovation and growth. With the Soviets out of the picture and nobody to compete with for moon and space dominance, government priorities shifted. Instead, it seemed 9/11 wrecked whatever the 21st century could offer up in hopes of government funded space exploration. Bailing out the big banks in the first decade of the 21st century only further eroded any hope (my hope anyway) of seeing some dramatic moves towards more humanity in space.

For space exploration, we are now in the hands of private capital to make in roads into the future I dream of. Companies like Boeing, Space X, Rocket Labs, are all competing to lead the way into outer-space. I’m a particular big fanboy (and stock holder) of Rocket Lab, led by brilliant kiwi, Sir Peter Beck. He didn’t even attend college, yet founded a 40 billion dollar company and is competing with Elon Musk for dominance of the rocket launching market. This is the way forward.

In a way, we do kinda live in a futuristic cyber punk world. Maybe even the dystopian sort, for those of us enduring the current American regime. As William Gibson wrote in his famous Neuromancer novel, “The future is already here–it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Life in the 21st century is pretty damn amazing, I just take for granted all the cool futuristic things I do on a daily basis. It gets me thinking, what will be the big explosive growth companies of the future? The internet companies can’t keep growing and growing–maybe they will but at some point they will become value companies with large dividends, as they mature out.

What are we not thinking about that will lead the next batch of Magnificent 7 to run up the stock markets? AI will only dominate for so long before it becomes old news. Will it be the space stocks? Companies like Rocket Lab? Maybe AST Spacemobile, a company that owns a constellation of satellites to beam phone communications to remote areas? Nuclear energy? Companies like Oklo, developing the Aurora, a small fission nuclear reactor that can “pop” up and power huge energy consuming grids or data centers? Will it be the defense companies of Europe? As Europe breaks away from reliance on the United States, billions will be poured into smaller local defense companies to keep Europe safe.

I took the recommendation of my fellow blogger Freddy, and read Rule Breaker Investing by David Gardner. I’m not a single stock investor (though I now own a handful in a playground part of my portfolio, again), but I did find the read enjoyable, and I learned a bunch about a different way to invest. I never want there to be a point in my investing career where I say: “Ok, I know enough. I’m done learning about it.”

My biggest takeaway from the book was the question: What is my vision of the future? My little playground of stocks, 10 of them, is not a high value of my portfolio. There’s a mix of small cap moonshots and well known large cap, but my little playground reflects where I see the future going. Some of those stocks I mentioned I own.

I guess the point of my speculation about the future is that nobody knows what will happen. The good thing about being a boglehead index fund investor, is that investing in the future is not too huge a worry for me. Market leaders will emerge and my index fund will capture a weighted share of them. For that at least, I can be certain.

I apologize from deviating from the typical finance, investing, early retirement theme of this blog, but writing a post about solely those topics, now feels somehow wrong at this tragic moment in time for my country. I can’t be my true self and hold political opinion in when I have a blog to be able to share the thoughts in my mind at this time in my life. Because that’s what I hope to capture with this blog, not merely investing and saving, but my personal road and thoughts along the way. I get a therapeutic release from putting my thoughts into written word, and then out into the world.

And so I arrive at this uneasy balance of living in a moment that feels both astonishingly advanced and disturbingly familiar. I can marvel at rockets lifting off, markets evolving, and my daughter growing up in a world that would have seemed like science fiction to my younger self, while also feeling the low, constant hum of history’s warning signs in the background. Maybe this is what it means to live through a hinge in time; not knowing whether we’re witnessing the early chapters of progress or the prologue to regret. For now, I drive home under glowing streetlights, invest in the future as best I can, and stay awake just enough to notice when the dream starts to curdle. If nothing else, remembering, and refusing to look away, might be the smallest form of resistance left.