Tag: future predictions

Sometimes Good Enough is Good Enough

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Human beings are terrible at governing each other.  Admittedly, there have been short periods of time when men have managed to flourish for even a few centuries at a time.  But over the long stretch things inevitably break down and human society returns to ugly oppression.  The Athenians managed maybe fifty years of decent self-rule under Pericles and his successors.  The Romans lost their republic to the greed of their oligarchs and had to settle for the rule of the emperors.  But they were a pretty awful lot.  Even the five “good emperors” managed about eighty-four years (96 AD to 180 AD) of decent rule.  But even during this period most Roman subjects were slaves employed as field hands on the industrial scale agriculture that the rich controlled.

As for ourselves, we’ve done rather better than worse.  The last two hundred and fifty years have been less oppressive and freer than almost any time and place in human history.  But there were very special circumstances.  The rich were so preoccupied with benefitting from the populating of an entire continent that they didn’t have a chance to thoroughly exploit the human beings under their control.  And then the industrial revolution made it incredibly lucrative to turn us into mass consumers and so they tolerated the idea of allowing us to be middle class while that process was ongoing.  So far, so good.

But both of those conditions have ceased to be ameliorating factors.  North America has been parceled out.  The money to be made by selling Americans consumer lifestyle improvements like automobiles and washing machines has sort of petered out.  Paying Americans to build washing machines has become horribly outdated since Asian labor became a thing.  The oligarchs really don’t see much profit in trying to maintain a middle class here anymore.  So, I think we’re reaching the end of our exceptionalism.  What now?

The way I figure, the usual ending to this story is feudalism.  The rich band together and the poor become slaves of one stripe or another.  Or worse, our overlords dispense with us altogether.  Robots are just so much more efficient and cost effective.  Sure, a few human slaves to take care of anything that robots can’t do as well as people but definitely a very small number of living beings.  I think that’s what they’re working toward.  But can we find a way around that?

Well, one way around it would be to burn it all down.  If all the information age infrastructure was destroyed and even the knowledge of it thrown away, well, then we could buy ourselves quite a bit of time.  Let’s say we made the integrated circuit a forbidden fruit.  Basically 1940s technology only.  We’d have to have a law enforcement department whose only job was to maintain the prohibition.  And it would have to be worldwide.  But for the sake of argument let’s say that the revolution is global in scale.  So, mankind decides to throw away automation.  Then what?  After all, slavery preceded computers by thousands of years.  It’s human nature that we’re up against.  Well, there you are.  Whether we’re eliminated in favor of robotic slaves or just made into slaves ourselves, it is human nature to oppress our fellow men.  It’s just who we are.

Of course, there is the old “The Day the Earth Stood Still” angle.  Instead of getting rid of computers we could put all-powerful and incorruptible robots in charge of us and allow them to fairly maintain a government for us.  Gort would make sure each of us was given a salary to live on and also makes sure we do our assigned work.  And with his staggering intellect he’ll make sure that society is arranged so that the whole range of human capabilities is optimally utilized so that everyone is stimulated and no one is abused by the system.

Sounds great, right?  Sure, it does, it’s the ideal of socialism but powered by artificial intelligence.  Could it be done?  I don’t know.  But I think we may be about to find out soon.  This is what I suspect is lurking around the corner.  And in a way, I hope it works.  After all, humans don’t want perfection.  They just want a solution that is good enough.  And maybe our present capability is an AI that’s good enough.  We’ll see.

Actual Progress

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Over the last decade or so Peter Thiel has made a point of claiming that other than computer automation, technological progress has been at a standstill.  And he’s essentially correct.  From about 1900 to 1960 we went from horse power to nuclear power.

From 1960 to 2020 we went from nuclear power to wind power.  This is not technological progress.  It’s surrender.

And this is mostly a psychological problem we’re facing.  We haven’t hit any quantum barrier that forbids us from improving almost every aspect of our technology.  Even the make-believe problems we create have solutions that are neglected by the dim-witted “technologists” that preside over our decline.  A good example is the farce called recycling.  Currently we are all forced to dutifully separate “recyclables” in a separate pail from the rest of our trash as if this was a magical process that allowed these paper and plastic waste products to somehow become usable materials.

But in reality, the majority of this material is landfilled along with the non-recyclable garbage that we collect in the other pail.  And the reason is simple.  Crude oil is a cheaper and better raw material for making plastic than plastic scrap.  Maybe in the far future when petroleum runs out, our landfills will become plastic mines that we’ll tap for a feed stream in our manufacturing process.

Of course, another thing it’s good for is as fuel.  Paper and plastic are mostly hydrogen and carbon and as such they make incredibly good combustion fuels.  Buring these materials in a garbage incinerator associated with a turbine generator would be the most efficient use of these waste materials.  But, you know, Gaia.

But let’s assume that at some point in the next twenty years, first world people are going to get tired of being forced into third world squalor.  At that point I’m guessing that the first direction selected for energy production will be nuclear fission steam turbine generation plants.  Sure, maybe they’ll have to pay lip service to global warming pieties.  Maybe they’ll even build solar powered carbon sequestration projects to please Gaia.  But at some point, people will demand to have the amenities they’ve become accustomed to; reliable electrical distribution and convenient transportation.  In the long run what the source of that power will be is yet to be determined.  My theory is that geothermal energy will supplement and maybe replace nuclear in the long run.

One thing I’m not sure of is what will be the fuel for transportation.  Many people have said that hydrogen is too hazardous.  Maybe they’re right.  It does tend to go boom when trapped in an enclosure.  Well, it’s cheaper and easier to make than octane but with unlimited electrical energy from something like widespread nuclear or geothermal I don’t see a problem with an octane synthesizing plant.  Carbon dioxide and water are available in endless supply so all that’s needed is cheap power.  And there’s a lot to be said for a really well-built internal combustion engine car.

But this is all just getting back to where we were in 1960.  What will real technological progress look like?  Ironically, I think that there will be an emphasis on Gaia!

I think quality of life innovation will be the future.  Research into the detrimental effects of all the chemicals that we add to our foods and come in contact with our bodies will begin shaping the products our industries produce.

And likewise with containers.  Maybe bottles will start being made of glass and metal again.  Some of the older materials were safer and newer alloys and other materials can be tested and whatever the healthiest choices can be substituted for things that may be harming us.

So better living through chemistry may become something more than just an empty slogan.

With all the talk of AI I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the progress, we can expect from the ongoing computer automation revolution.  Eventually all automobiles will be subject to traffic control in densely crowded traffic.  Despite our strongest resistance, this will happen in many jurisdictions.  The nanny-state is just too strong in places like California and New York.  For many people this will be welcomed.  It will relieve them of the responsibility of driving.

Artificial intelligence will eventually make large scale industrial economic planning much more efficient.  Supply chain coordination for a whole network of companies producing a multitude of products will be optimized and trends and changes tracked and compensated for.  How this will effect capitalism remains to be seen.

Maybe the greatest use of AI will be in bioresearch and medicine.  The enormous complexity of living systems and the almost infinite number of chemicals that need to be tested for toxic and other detrimental effects cries out for the brute force that artificial intelligence can bring to bear on bioresearch and development.  I can see a future where the oncologist is a computer that scans the DNA of a cancer cell and chooses a custom antibody coded precisely to attach to and kill only the cancer cells and nothing else.

And the final area of progress is a sentimental one for me and one I’ll never see.  Mankind should send an unmanned probe to Proxima Centauri.  I guess HAL 9000 will be in charge of this mission.  It will require an enormous tank of water that will be used as rocket mass.  A fission reactor will be used to boil the water as a jet to provide acceleration.  Maybe it can get up to .3c and so the round trip will be something less than a century.  It can take readings and photos and see if there are any little green men there and come back and let us know.  Now that’s progress.

The Ghost of America Yet to Come – Part 1

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In “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens introduced a plot device of having his protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge “educated” by three spirits; the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come.  Each of these entities showed Scrooge the reality of these time periods in his life and how his descent into brutal miserliness and heartlessness had negatively impacted both himself and those around him spiritually and physically.  And since over time the damage done by and to Scrooge was cumulative the future was of course the bleakest picture and promised the complete destruction of Scrooge’s immortal soul.

Well, A Christmas Carol has nothing to do with the future of America except inasmuch as both concern a once promising entity straying from the path of reason and virtue and slowly degenerating into an evil shadow of its former self.  But hey, it’s 9pm and I have to go with what comes to the surface.  So, let’s give this a rattle.

How about we look at what will happen if we continue on the path we’re currently on.  Well then, let’s start with the 2024 election.  Let’s assume that either because the current voting population prefers the Democrats or because voter fraud is used effectively by them, Joe Biden or someone else from the Evil Party is elected to the presidency.

That will effectively seal the end of the Constitutional rule of law at the federal level.  Undoubtedly, by 2028 the administrative state will dismantle all of the Bill of Rights as they apply to federal rule.

We will see the increased use of kangaroo courts and juries to punish Republican voters and congressional representatives whenever they get in the way.  And I would not be surprised if by then they pack the Supreme Court to curtail things like Freedom of Speech and Religion and the Right to Bear Arms.  All these things are already being put forward as part of the Democrat agenda.

I’m also assuming they will continue to expand the “green agenda” and fossil fuel for home heating and transportation will be increasingly difficult to afford or even obtain.  This will effectively limit the amount of freedom of movement that the average American will have.  Instead of jumping in your car and taking the family a couple of states over for a camping trip or sightseeing holiday, everything will be mediated through mass transit.  Travel by bus or train will become common.  If the crackdown on fossil fuels has moved far enough along airplanes may no longer be a common means of transportation except for the truly wealthy.

By 2028 the effect of uncontrolled immigration will have had a truly profound effect on the American landscape.  All large cities will resemble the third world with homeless encampments and shanty towns making them chaotic, crime ridden and subject to outbreaks of various dangerous communicable diseases.  Policing of these jurisdictions will be under the authority of federal law enforcement and no local law enforcement will be allowed to prosecute non-citizens without permission.

Digital currency will replace paper.  Which will probably be a necessity since inflation would make carrying paper money difficult.  And speaking of inflation, it will be brutal.  Price controls will be introduced but the quality of products will become problematic and a great premium will be placed on things that actually work and commodities like food products that aren’t greatly adulterated.

Foreign relations will not be too good.  I foresee a sort of 1984-like relationship between several large antagonistic alliance systems.  Between wars, guerilla wars and insurgencies peace will be a scarce commodity.  And military service will be mandatory.

Population growth, other than immigration will disappear.  The share of native-born Americans will decrease rapidly due to the very high cost of living and anti-family propaganda.  American culture will become increasingly debased and what passes for mass entertainment will be geared toward morons.

The government will apply greater and greater resources to propaganda and pharmaceuticals that encourage euthanasia for anyone who isn’t happy.  And short-term incentives will be used to encourage this process, like a sumptuous last meal.

So, like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come I have a very bleak vision for us of the future.  Now granted this is a worst-case scenario but I don’t think I extrapolated very much at all.  All these things are already happening.  I’ve just brought them to their inevitable conclusions.

So sorry for the downer.  Tomorrow, I give an alternative that is based on a less drastic but still possible future.  Ho, ho, ho.

The Shape of Things to Come – 2023 Edition

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I was reading an article about shoplifting and the author said something like, the way things are going having food on open display in a grocery store may soon be too expensive to allow because of shoplifting.  And that struck me.  Imagine if you couldn’t walk down the aisles of a supermarket and pick out your fruit and meat or even a can of beans or a box of spaghetti.  Imagine if you couldn’t go to a big box store and get some nails or screws or a saw because the store couldn’t afford to leave these things on shelves.

So that’s what they mean about a society going from high trust to low trust.  The stores can’t trust the public not to steal everything in sight.  That got me thinking, where else has trust disappeared.?

Well, off the top of my head, you can’t trust that your public school isn’t trying to groom your kids for homosexuality or even stranger things like trans -gender dysphoria.  And you certainly can’t trust the Republicans to be conservative.  You can’t trust anything about the government.  You can’t trust scientists to tell the truth about the climate or the drug companies with your health.  You can’t trust the tech companies with your information and you absolutely can’t believe a word that the news organizations say.  And we used to depend on the police and the courts to keep us safe from criminals but that’s gone too.

If you think about it, the world we knew was based on a bunch of relationships of trust that no longer exist.

Based on this, I think it would make sense to try to imagine what the world will be like in a few years when all of these changes have reworked our relationships with each other and the larger institutions around us.  The first thing that came to me was that where you lived would become increasingly important to determine how you would live.  Currently the larger cities run by Democrats with large poor minority populations are becoming more and more like third world locales with businesses moving out and increasing rates of violence.  It would make sense that around these disaster areas will develop concentric rings of suburban areas where the levels of crime and other dysfunction will gradually decrease as you move outward in much the same way as a topographic map records rings of decreasing elevation in circles around mountain peaks.

Proximity to these danger zones will also determine things like the existence of stores selling luxury merchandise and levels of safety precautions like bars on windows and security systems in homes.  Of course, the definition of “luxury” will be completely relative to the wealth of the area.  In some places toothpaste may be a luxury item.

Security problems like these may explain the real basis for the “fifteen-minute city.”  What these enclaves are really designed for is excluding strangers from the area.  The kind of surveillance that will be possible in the future will make the non-local with no business in an area stand out like a sore thumb.  After all, if you have nothing to hide why worry if the government knows everything about you?  So, only people that the government thinks should be somewhere will be able to get there.  No freedom, no crime.  Pretty slick.

But out among the peasants, not so slick.  It appears that there is an intentional destruction of the old world going on.  People living together in free association, voluntarily following sensible rules and laws, will be overwhelmed by the encouragement of criminal behavior in dysfunctional communities that won’t be constrained by police forces and the old legal system.  The new world of the elites will be separated and insulated from these areas by diminishing transportation options, advanced electronic surveillance systems and a social credit system that will control what you can do and how you will live.

This seems to be the direction things are going.  Whether this plan will be successful in all or some places and how long it will take to implement is yet to be seen.  But that is what seems to be happening.  Otherwise, how do you explain what’s going on in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Philadelphia?  These cities are being made unlivable by the people in charge and so far, nothing has been done to stop the change.

I hope it is within reason that some areas of the country will successfully prevent this program of sabotage from succeeding.  If they can restore law and order to their jurisdictions, I think the existence of these oases of normalcy will eventually destabilize the new system.  Maybe colonies from the normal areas will eventually establish themselves in the depopulated wastelands and eventually return them to civilization.  But maybe I’m being overly optimistic.

Okay H.G, Wells, how’s that for some extrapolation into the future?  In your face Herbert.

We’ve Got a Ways to Go

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New Year’s is the time to prognosticate.  Everyone and his brother know the future.  It’s the favorite pastime of pundits.  Well, relax.  I have no clue what to expect in 2023.  All I know is that the bad guys won and the good guys are out of power in Washington.  In a few places like Florida, state government is in the hands of normal people.  That’s about all I know.

But what I tell myself is that we can expect more of the same and worse for the foreseeable future.  Biden and his handlers have been emboldened by the mid-terms and they will continue to loot the country by executive order and through the Congressional appropriations grift that both parties have perfected since the Obama administration abolished the budget process.

The famous statement that there is a lot of ruin in a nation is being demonstrated on a titanic scale with all the multi-trillion-dollar boondoggles being rammed through Congress right up to the last day of this Congress.  The pain that is being felt by the working and middle classes will continue and intensify as the policies this regime favors continue to distort the energy markets and discourage the generation of jobs in manufacturing.  The wreckage of the cities by runaway criminality will continue and accelerate as the police forces in these cities evaporate.  These are not predictions.  These are the conditions already in place playing out in real time.

So let me extrapolate what’s going on and describe what that is.  The Left will continue with their program of de-industrializing the United States, eliminating affordable energy sources and importing poor people to destroy the opportunities of the native population to make a decent living.  And this will go on for a good long time before it completely destabilizes the socio-economic foundations of this country.

Now it may be that some local leaders decide to pre-empt this intentional destruction of the United States.  And they may even succeed in saving areas of the country from this program.  And I’ve speculated in the past on how a state policy of nullification of unconstitutional federal laws that threaten the welfare of a state’s citizens might be a way to achieve this.  But that’s strictly speculation.  It implies that local leaders would be willing to risk their careers and maybe their lives by defying the United States government.  But speculation is all that is.  No one has defied the feds since the Civil War.  It ranges into fantasy imagining how it would happen

So, what that leaves is a landscape where the Left steadily and without any effective opposition “fundamentally transforms” this country into a police state under the control of a partnership of the intelligence agencies of the federal government and cooperative woke corporations.

Saying this is extremely depressing for me but at the same time pretending anything else is even worse.  Continuing to wait for a rescue by a “silent majority” that doesn’t exist is even more painful.  My plan is to do my best to insulate myself and my family from the damage caused by this regime.  Strategies for doing that will be my focus going forward.  And of course, that will only ever be partially successful.  But I think that’s a realistic approach.

And I will keep my eyes open to see if a miracle occurs.

What would a miracle look like?  Two things come to mind.  One would be for the regime to succeed in their demolition plan too thoroughly and cause a critical failure of the economy.  Something on the order of the Great Depression but worse.  That might galvanize the population to renounce the Left and demand a return to sanity.

Another miracle would be one of those state governments actually succeeding in a nullification program.  If it happened it would have a tremendous effect on the other states and would change the whole power dynamic between the federal government and the states.  And it would be like an emancipation proclamation for the normal people.

But these are indeed miracles and we haven’t seen any miracles in a very long time.  So, most of my time will be devoted to looking for ways to cope with a government that hates me and wants me to disappear.  So, there is my look forward into 2023.  Not very inspiring but realistic, I think.

What Happens After the Mid-Terms?

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Prognostication, predicting the future.  Oh, what a foolish thing to do.  But let’s talk about after the mid-terms.  But what happens afterward depends on how they end up to some extent.  Let’s look at the possibilities and then the follow-up for each case.

Suppose the Democrats somehow get through the elections and maintain their majorities in both Houses.   Based on the current projections this is the most unlikely outcome but let’s say for the sake of argument that SCOTUS overturns Roe and the Media manages to enflame the female half of America to go on the warpath and vote out every Republican they can.  So, let’s say the Democrats gain seats in the Senate and House.  This would have the effect of emboldening Biden and would mean there would be even more radicalization of the actions being taken by the feds and that would also translate at the state and local levels in Democrat locales.  That would make things increasingly worse for us and would also indicate that the Dems would hold the White House in 2024.

But as I said this is an almost absurdly unlikely election outcome.  Voter sentiment is lopsidedly negative on Biden’s performance in office.  And this has translated effectively against the Democrats in Congress and in state and local governments.  So, let’s look at a more likely outcome.

Currently the polls indicate that the Republicans are likely to take back the House of Representatives with a shift of somewhere between thirty and sixty seats.  The Senate is predicted to return to Republican control with a shift of two to five seats.  What happens then?

The Republicans capturing Congress will put an end to Biden appointing anymore Supreme Court justices or any other judges if the Senate is in that mood.  It will also limit the kinds of cabinet changes that Biden will be able to make during his last two years in office. And finally, it will put an end to any laws he is hoping to pass.  And those are all good things.  In addition, the House and Senate can go about investigating and probably impeaching Biden for the multitude of shady deeds that have been leaking out of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.  There won’t be enough votes to convict him in the Senate but plenty to get the impeachment going in the House.  And the investigations will uncover enough dirt to make the 2024 election a mud-slinging extravaganza.

But all these good things won’t change the fact that Biden will still have two years to continue his destruction of the working and middle classes in this country.  We will have to endure his open borders nightmare and the punishing inflation that his terrible policies have inflicted on us.

Now let’s look at the other unlikely possibility.  Suppose by November that the country crashes spectacularly.  A bad recession strikes but inflation goes on raging.  If this were bad enough the country might get truly desperate and even Democrats might throw out their own senators and representatives.  This would give the Republicans enough votes in the Senate to convict Biden and Harris.  And that would force the Speaker of the House into the presidency.  Now this would have the added benefits over the last options of ending all of Biden’s awful programs.  And it would give the incoming president a clear powerful majority in Congress and a clear mandate for change.

But the chaos inherent in this kind of violent change would require extremely smart handling to prevent it from devolving into chaos.  Think about it.  Kevin McCarthy would be President of the United States.  How exactly is that supposed to work?  Sure, there might be ways of making someone else president but the mind boggles trying to figure out how it doesn’t all go wrong.  And as I said it’s a very unlikely scenario.

So, the short answer to this whole question is that after the mid-terms we will be looking at a weakened but not neutralized Joe Biden.  It’s possible that if he’s serious about running 2024 he may try to triangulate to less unpopular actions and policies but that’s unlikely.  Other people are pulling his strings and they’ll use his last two years to keep the damage coming.  I think they know at this point that 2024 will most likely go to a Republican.

So, that’s my read.  Don’t assume that because Joe Biden has loused up the country that the mid-terms will fix everything.  What it tells me is I need to figure out a way to survive the damage of the next two and a half years and hope and pray that we find someone who can break us out of the death trap we find ourselves in.

How Many Possible Paths-Forward Are There?

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Science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp has been quoted as having said “It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.”  He was right.  Seeing into the future is a fool’s errand.  But it is also what we have to do every day of our lives.  And the farther into the future you can see the more successful you will be.

Here at Orion’s Cold Fire, prognostication is a scientific endeavor utilizing all the latest technology and the most powerful data crunching systems to make our forecasts the envy of Nostradamus.  Sure.

We live on the knife’s edge.  Everything we’ve seen in the last few years shows us that the fate of the United States and indeed the world is balanced on a teetering point and the smallest breath of wind has the capacity to save us, at least temporarily, or tumble us into the abyss.  Sucks to be us.

Lately I have been trying to figure out what are the most likely directions the future may take.  Let me number them here.

  • The clearest and in fact, the most likely future is the complete victory of progressivism. Under this scenario, political control of the Unites States and also the rest of Western civilization shifts irreversibly to the Left.  All the tenets of progressivism, feminism, LGBTQ orthodoxy, anti-white quota legislation and socialist economics prevail.  Free speech, gun rights and freedom of religion are abolished.  An all-powerful, all pervasive state control settles over the lives of the citizenry.  Basically slavery.  I think this has a very good likelihood of occurring.  And the method will be a gradual tightening of all the policies that will lead to this endpoint.  It won’t be necessary to legislate any of these things abruptly.  Gradual is better.  How’s that for grim?
  • Another possibility I can think of is a branch off of the first scenario. The progressives win a big election.  They start initiating their agenda and someone does something.  Let’s call it a revolt.  Some kind of resistance that incorporates individuals taking action that becomes a rallying point for local or state government action.  This grows into a larger movement and this requires a response by the Federal government.  To make this a distinct case from scenario 1, we have to assume that it isn’t suppressed and leads to a split in the country.  At least two distinct geographic entities would occupy what is now the United States.  For this scenario let us pick the case that a successful path forward is arranged and both (or more) daughter states move forward along independent paths with more or less cooperation between them.
  • The third possibility and the least likely scenario is that the progressives lose. Somehow President Trump successfully manages to turn the American project back into the direction of freedom and sanity and reasonable men follow him in reversing the outrages of the last half century and putting us back on the path of freedom and healthy social relations.  This is my idea of the happy ending.
  • The fourth scenario is a full-scale civil war of the type seen in Yugoslavia. If this occurs, I assume the likeliest outcome is a divided country with an eventual armistice and population shifts to allow people to choose between two very polarized and hostile camps.  This would be an extreme version of Option 2.
  • In option 5 our enemies around the world see our weakness and division and nuke us into oblivion. This is also a slightly less likely scenario but far from improbable.

I’m sure there are several other cases that I’ve neglected.  If you have your own idea for a different version feel free to leave it in the attached poll or comments.

 

[socialpoll id=”2527608″]

Where Do We Go from Here? – Part 1

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In an earlier post, I defined my position in the spectrum of the political right by saying that I recognized the uselessness of the establishment republicans but was not ready to accept the balkanization of the United States as predicted by the Alt-Right. That’s how I defined it but I didn’t specify what I believed was the actual trajectory America would trace in the near future.  And I didn’t specify it for a very good reason.  I have no idea what will befall us.  By which I mean that unlike some others I think we have several possible paths and I can’t decide if any are close to certainty.  In fact, I can’t even say which I think the likeliest.

Up until Donald Trump’s unexpected end-run around both the GOP Establishment (GOPE) and Hillary Clinton, I was pretty sure that America as a free republic was over and we were headed for the kind of corporatist socialism that Europe has descended into. I anticipated the stripping of first and second amendment rights and the continuing importation of a new third world population to strip the sovereignty from the legitimate citizens of the United States.  Let’s call this the default option for our future.  That’s the trajectory that President Trump is trying to deflect us from.  In my gloomier moments I believe we will continue on this course.

Another possibility is what I call the Hays Code version or “Happily Ever After.” That’s where we come to our senses and start reversing all the damage done since the 1960s.  This requires a Supreme Court to strike down large swaths of the affirmative action legislation of the sixties and seventies (and beyond), and a Congress to reverse the unsustainable immigration policies of the 1960s and an agenda that returns to policies that encourage strong families, safe communities and prosperity.  This is the fondest hope of my sunniest moments.

And then there are the other less peaceful scenarios.

A mild version would be an insurgency in one or more states during a Democratic presidency. Something that is too large to be handled by the FBI or ATF.  Say a revolt based on gun rights being violated by the Supreme Court or Presidential executive order.  Once the events escalated past civilians shooting federal agents and they shooting back it would be very hard to put the pieces back together again.  In a particularly right-wing state like Texas I would guess there would be little popularity with state officials for rounding up their citizens for resisting unconstitutional actions by the feds.  Resistance by the state governments could lead to a breakdown in federal credibility.  And that could lead to a re-examination of how out of whack the government is becoming.  That might cause a change for the better and possibly constructive changes in the way our country works.  Or it could break the whole thing apart.

The Alt-Right vision is of some kind of ethno-nationalist revolt with an insurgency that leads to a division of the country into separate states. This is a possibility but honestly, the outcomes are completely unpredictable.  So many factors, including unfriendly foreign states, rogue military actions with weaponry varying from small arms to nukes, disruption of food and fuel supplies leading to everything from starvation to bloody insurrection and worse.  Can you imagine a Yugoslavia style civil war with multiple sides?  I’m just not smart enough to imagine a scenario in this that I look forward to.

There’s the possibility of a military coup by the right, or the left. The latter never seemed an option before but after Obama has peppered the ranks with leftists it’s a possibility, if a slight one.  The former case is completely possible.  A right wing coup might unilaterally impose secession of all but the Northeast and West Coast.  If this coup managed to monopolize the nuclear armament it would de-facto create a reality that couldn’t be easily resisted.

Here’s a weird one. California has been talking about secession.  But what if the “sanctuary state” in California is interpreted as a rebellion against the Federal government and Congress and the President declare California in rebellion and strips it of voting rights and installs a military governor to restore order.  Can you imagine a Federal program to repatriate all of California’s illegal aliens?  That is almost science fiction.  But how different is it from the Japanese internment camps?

And the possibilities become weirder from there.

Suffice it to say that I am much more comfortable with a more normal path forward. But I fully realize that we must push back against the leftists.  They are confident that no one will push back the clock to undo whatever they have captured today.  This must be changed.  First up is a new Supreme Court to reverse the worst aspects of the new society.  If Kennedy does not find for the cake baker in the gay wedding case then we have to wait until he leaves or one of the older democrats is forced to vacate by reason of health problems.  Or maybe we get enough congressional seats to vote in a larger Supreme Court.  But without a doubt we have to push things back in every way we can.

One thing that has become completely clear is that leftists can’t be negotiated with. They must be defeated at the ballot box and in every other venue.  They won’t be satisfied until they have removed everything in life that is wholesome and good.  They say they don’t believe in evil.  But everything they are fighting for is evil.  That seems clear.  We can’t wait for them to come to their senses.  We must push for the change that is needed to preserve the good that once existed in this country.  And there’s no time to waste.  In late installments I’ll try to figure out how we can avoid everything but the “Happily Ever After” scenario.  Wish me luck!