Results of the Election

Breaking News! President Obama wins re-election!

Well, I guess you already know that.

What does the re-election of President Obama mean?

Well, for one thing, if things go very much worse for the United States in the next four years as a result of the policies of the last four years under President Obama, the Democrats can't blame a Republican president for what goes wrong. Imagine that Mr. Romney won the presidency, then shortly thereafter the roof began to cave in because of the policies of President Obama and the Democrats, especially high deficit spending - the dollar collapses, gas prices surge, millions lose jobs, inflation explodes. Do you think people would understand that what happens happens because of government policies for the last several years? Or would they blame Mitt Romney and the Republicans?

But that won't happen. President Obama will live with and be accountable for the effects, or much of the effects, of what he has done in office the last four years. He won't be able to so easily blame things on former President Bush as he has in the past. The "fruits", at least some of the fruits, of what he has already done will become more visible in the next four years. Health care is one example. Many of the provisions of the new health care law did not take effect right away but will over the next four years. It is as if President Obama realized that those effects will make his health care plan unpopular and he wanted to delay those effects until after he ran for re-election.

Also, the fact that the election is over means that uncertainty about who the president will be is over, and that could cause the pace of world events to increase.

Up till now, there has been a degree of uncertainty about who would be president of the most powerful nation in the world. That uncertainty is over.

While natural disasters are not under the control of man, men in power can and do make decisions that can create or prevent man-made disasters. Great events in the world are often produced by major human decisions. And if anyone has been waiting to see who will be president before making a decision or taking an action on the world scene, they need wait no longer. If anyone has been waiting to see if a new president who is more or less favorable to their cause would take office, that wait is over.

So decision-driven events may speed up.

For example, suppose Israel has been waiting to see who would be president before taking military action against Iran. They may have thought that a new American administration would work with them more favorably in dealing with Iran. Now they know that President Obama has been re-elected for another four-year term. And they know it will not take Iran four years to finish their development of the atomic bomb. So what advantage is it for them to wait longer?

Iran apparently is enriching enough Uranium for five atomic bombs. If I remember correctly, Vice-president Biden said in his debate that Iran was at least six months away from enriching this Uranium sufficiently to build atomic bombs. He also said, in trying to minimize the urgency of the problem, that Iran doesn't have a bomb mechanism yet to put the enriched Uranium into. But making an atomic bomb with enriched Uranium is not difficult once you have the enriched Uranium.

There are two designs for an atomic bomb and two materials you can use to fuel the explosion. The two designs are the "gun" design and the implosion design. The two materials are bomb-grade enriched Uranium (Uranium 235) and Plutonium. You can use either enriched Uranium or Plutonium in an implosion device, but you can only use enriched Uranium in a gun design bomb. Plutonium won't work with the gun design.

The gun design bomb is easy to make and does not require testing. You have two pieces of enriched Uranium, each of which is less than critical mass and thus incapable of fueling a self-sustaining chain reaction because most of the neutrons coming out of atoms as they split fly out of the piece of Uranium before hitting another atomic nucleus. The gun design is basically a small cannon that fires one piece of sub-critical mass Uranium into another, and when they are together, their combined mass is more than critical mass and the chain reaction occurs. This is a simple design, not hard for any nation to make.

The implosion design is more difficult technically. One sphere of Uranium or Plutonium is compressed by a surrounding layer of high explosives until it achieves critical mass because it is in a smaller volume, and then a chain reaction occurs. It is difficult to make an implosion bomb because of the difficulty of getting a perfectly symmetrical explosion to compress the core evenly. It requires precision electronics to simultaneously set off detonators all around the outside of the explosives layer, and it requires precision designed explosive "lenses", pieces of high explosives that have a certain shape and explode at a different speed than the main explosives to even out the explosive wave before it hits the core, or the core will not compress properly. This is a difficult design to achieve.

Excuse me for going off on a tangent. My point is, Iran can quickly and easily make a gun design bomb once they have the enriched Uranium - almost any nation could do it, probably in a few weeks. So for all practical purposes, Iran will have a bomb as soon as they finish enriching the Uranium. And the vice president said they were six months away from having that enriched Uranium. Six months is not a long time.

If Israel has been waiting till now because they hoped a Romney administration will give them more help and support, that wait is over.

Also, if terrorists have held back to a degree from attacking targets in the United States because they were afraid of the effect of such attacks on the outcome of our election, they no longer have that reason to hold back.

Those are just examples. Another might be the dollar. Whether the dollar remains the chief trading and reserve currency of the world depends largely on market forces as well as decisions by leaders of governments. There has been pressure on the dollar because of our government's deficit. The government spends much more money than it collects in taxes, and our government's debt is increasing. At some point, if the deficit is not brought under control, the government must inflate the dollar, and when and if that happens, world business and governments are likely to abandon the dollar as a reserve and trading currency and turn to an alternative, probably the Euro. When that happens, prices of every internationally traded commodity or type of goods, whether produced here or in foreign countries - oil, food, autos, everything traded internationally - will become vastly more expensive for Americans, and that could send our economy into a very deep recession or even a depression. Yet, even with our deficit spending, the dollar has not yet collapsed. Why? It may be that international concern about the dollar has been moderated by the expectation that a new government might bring spending under control.

Now everyone knows there will not be a new government for some time. The president is the same, the Senate is still controlled by the Democrats, and the House of Representatives is still controlled by the Republicans.

So I am speculating that the pace of prophecy-fulfilling events in the world may tend to speed up over the next six months or year.

Many of us will be affected by these things and they may produce trials for us, and we will need more than ever to have faith in God.