I’ve been making a lot of little observations lately, so I figured that for today’s article, I would try something with a little more heft.

So what’s up with this crazy spinning ball of dirt hurtling through the icy void of space with us poor confused naked beach apes clinging to the surface and occasionally suffering through illusions of grandeur where we feel like we might just be running the place?

More important, what the hell is up with us apes?

Well, taking a look around the joint, it sure as hell seems like a busy time. The anthill is abuzz with a lot of busy to-ing and fro-ing, and the amount of violence, shouting, and angry gesticulating seems to be at a peak.

In short, it really seems like these are Historical Times.

Of course, this is a very tricky condition to diagnose. It is quite accurate to say that all times seem historical when they are happening. The now always seems more vital, more interesting, and sexier than the before or the later, and it is quite easy to look around and see all the things that have never, technically, happened before, and all the hubbub and activity and people talking in very impressive ways, and abandon all perspective and declare that this moment, of all moments ever, surely must be the most excitingly new and vitally important “crossroads of history” there has ever been.

But it’s all crossroads. In fact, it is the roads themselves which are the illusion. History is really an expansion in all dimensions at once.

And certainly, the news media, with their twenty four hour appetite, do not help matters by manufacturing urgency and confabulating concern and hence completely obscuring the line between what actually matters and what happens to have caught their attention and therefore (they think) could plausibly be made to catch yours for at least as long as it takes to shoot a few commercials at your eyeballs.

Nevertheless, after a good look around the globe, I can’t help but think that these times are just that much more crazy, heated, and in flux than others I have known.

All over the world, the people are suffering from the dire effects of the massive transfer of wealth from the average people into the hands of the already quite rich which has been radically but deliberately mislabeled as an “economic crisis”, as if it was as inevitable and temporary as a spot of bad weather.

We are all feeling the effects of this radical loss of total standard of living, and we are all pretty sure that we and everybody else know who did it, and yet here it is, three years later, and nothing whatsoever seems to have been done to bring these people to justice or even fix the damn problem in the first place.

Apparently, it’s all very complicated, too complicated for us mere suffering peons to understand, and so we should just keep letting the charlatans run the show, and believe them when they say l’etat, c’est nous and we shouldn’t worry our confused little heads about things that effect us.

This, I feel, has created a massive amount of frustrated anger. The people of the world quite rightfully feel that the basic social compact, that as long as you follow the rules and do what you are told, you will be okay, has been seriously and egregiously violated.

They did nothing wrong, and lost their jobs, their homes, and their standard of living anyhow. This, historically, has always been the factor that leads to revolution.

Meanwhile, the globe itself seems to be heating up. Weather grows more extreme, terrible natural disasters strike major nations and caused further destruction of economy, and while the nations of the world fiddle with figures, Australia burns.

And yet, the news is not all bleak. People all over the Middle East are rising up and fighting for the freedom and democracy we in the First world take for granted. Brilliant young idealistic designers are making the foundations of a modern society cheaper, smaller, and easier to deploy to the areas of the world that most desperately need them,

And scientific revolutions in fields like tissue engineering, nanotechnology, genetic science, quantum mechanics, and even self-driving cars continue to generate tomorrow’s consumer revolutions at a feverish pace.

So I think it’s safe to say that the state of the world is best described as “in flux”.

Truly, things are more like they are now than they have ever been before!