Tag: The Year of The Jackpot

Don’t Cry Baby, Don’t Cry

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Don’t Cry Baby, Don’t Cry

Donald Trump takes office in about two months.  Can we avoid a nuclear confrontation with the Russians until then?

I’m really not sure.

 

Comcast is going to spin off MSNBC.  And Elon Musk has jokingly spoken about buying it and putting Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones on the air.  Is it just a joke?

I’m really not sure.

 

Donald Trump says he’s going to deport thirty million illegal aliens and rip the Deep State out of the federal government by the roots and put RFK Jr. in charge of the HHS and let him dig out the truth about modern medicine and eliminate DEI from the military and the rest of the federal government.  Can he do any of these things?

I’m really not sure.

 

There’s a sense of unreality about a lot of our world.  People claim that misinformation is the reason that so many things that we are told turn out not to be true.  But I don’t think that’s the only reason for this growing uncertainty in our environment.  I think that the system may be coming apart at the seams.  I think the “people in charge” are themselves unsure about which way things are headed and therefore unsure which way they should head.  And without the rich and powerful putting their weight behind a particular outcome, random factors and herd instinct has a greater influence on day-to-day happenings.

Take the first example above.  The United States and England both gave the Ukrainians permission to fire modern medium range missiles into the heartland of Russia.  These are very advanced weapons and in fact, the Russians know that the missiles are being fired by American and British technicians.  And the Russians have responded to these attacks by clarifying that they consider attacks with modern weapons that come from the Ukrainian territory are the same as attacks by nuclear powers and can be answered by striking back at those nuclear nations directly.  And to emphasize their seriousness they launched a new class of medium range multi-warhead ballistic missile into a target in a Ukrainian city.  Now of course this missile was not armed with nuclear warheads.  This was saber-rattling.  But that’s one hell of a saber.  Since that launch the Ukrainians have not used any more American ATACMS or British Storm Shadow missiles.  But the war is not going very well for the Ukrainians and many people say that the State Department and the Pentagon are determined to do everything they can to force the Trump administration into continuing the war.

Well, how far will they go with nuclear brinksmanship?  How well are they calibrating Putin’s willingness to ignore their provocations.  Or are they actually trying to provoke an attack on NATO bases outside of Ukraine?  Are they looking to let things go nuclear?  And who are they?  It’s a cinch that Biden isn’t calling the shots.  He can barely remember his name.  But is it even Blinken and the Joint Chiefs?  With things winding down is it even a lower-level cadre of idiots?  But whoever it is, are we staring down catastrophe because these weirdos lost an election and won’t get to play God in Ukraine anymore?

Once again, I’m really not sure.  And I’m beginning to believe no one else does either.

All the crazy stuff going on seems to be outside of the control of anyone with a lick of sense.  It’s almost as if every attempt to fix the problems elicits an even stronger and more dangerous response from somewhere.  But where?

 

We’re living in strange days.  If you’re the praying sort this might just be the right time to do it.  You could do worse.

 

“These are the days of miracle and wonder.  …   A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires …  and don’t cry baby, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.”

Could This Be the Year of the Jackpot?

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Could This Be the Year of the Jackpot?

Robert Heinlein was an American science fiction writer back in the middle of the last century.  He was considered one of the best writers during what used to be called the “golden age” of science fiction because he wrote sf that kept the science front and center.  If he wrote about interplanetary nuclear-powered rockets, he made sure the physics was legitimate.

But he also wrote less realistic stories that involved more fantastic types of plots.  He wrote one short story called “The Year of the Jackpot” in which a statistician was examining an enormous number of trends such as sunspot activity, bank failures, extreme weather conditions, bankruptcies, crime, war and other more esoteric data.  And what he discovered was that all the various trends were headed for unusual maxima and minima at precisely the same time.  And what he predicted was that every bad thing was about to happen all at once.

And of course, that included nuclear war, invasion, plagues, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes.  So, he ducks into a well-stocked remote cabin with his girlfriend and a conveniently found milk cow that wanders by and survives the year of the jackpot.  Of course, just as the story ends, he realizes the biggest jackpot of all is the sun going nova.  Bummer.

Now this is silly season science fiction.  It’s the kind of story that Rod Serling would have put on the Twilight Zone (if he could have afforded to pay the kind of royalties that Heinlein would have wanted for his story to be adapted for television).  But it’s also true that sometimes when things start going wrong, they synergize even more misfortune until you end up with a real disaster.  Take for instance the Dust Bowl.  The financial conditions of the Great Depression aggravated the need of farmers to overuse their soil to try to keep up on their mortgages and ended up destroying their farms and exacerbating the erosion that was already taking place.  And the dislocation of all these farmers heading to California further damaged the economy.  The weather conditions that increased the problem were probably just random but put together they seemed like some kind of biblical plague.

Now look at our situation.  Back in 2001 we have the 9-11 attacks and that catalyzes the start of two big wars and a bunch of smaller ones.  Then we have the banking crisis of 2008 and that catalyzes an even bigger disaster, namely the presidency of Barack Obama.  And he begins the process of weaponizing the federal government against the citizens of the United States.  And that radicalizing of the Deep State may be responsible for things like the program that created the COVID virus and the mRNA vaccines and definitely the Ukraine war and all the other color revolutions spawned at the CIA and State Department.

And all these consequences seem to be resonating and catalyzing each other and making things worse and worse.  And from there it’s not a big leap to wonder if the whole thing ends up in a Year of the Jackpot climax.  And it wouldn’t be much different from Heinlein’s.  Coincidentally his make-believe world was suffering from transgender couples, bioweapons, horrendous rains and snowfall in California and other climate anomalies such as we’ve been seeing this winter.  And Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken have been working overtime to see if they can add a full nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States just to make sure we don’t miss out on any part of the story.

Now I don’t at all believe that the universe has some built in clock that coordinates all the good and bad “trends” so that a year of the jackpot is some kind of inevitable event.  I’m fully aware that human actions are plenty enough cause for all of the chaos and dysfunction we see around us.  In fact, it’s obvious that a lot of the chaos is intentional and has very discernible motives around consolidating power and accumulating money.

But I’ll tell you one thing.  There is such a thing as luck, good and bad.  And our luck has been running on the very bad side for a good long time.  Maybe a little prayer for divine intercession wouldn’t be out of line.

Back to the Future (Make That Back to Heinlein’s Future History)

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Back in the nineteen-forties and –fifties Robert A Heinlein was writing his “Future History” stories about the time period that currently is the recent past. And on his very impressive chart somewhere between the beginning of space flight and the beginning of a theocratic dictatorship in the United States was a period around the nineteen sixties that he called the “Crazy Years.”  You get a flavor for what he meant in a story called “The Year of the Jackpot.”  In this story social mores were unravelling.  Women would spontaneously strip naked in public without knowing why they were doing it and transvestite men and women would challenge the authorities with prosecution for daring to notice that they were queer.  Whether Heinlein was truly prescient or whether he just detected the beginnings of the curve and extrapolated it to its outlandish extreme is unknown to me.  But obviously he was being cautious.  No kidding, the current events that greet each of us as we survey the contents of our daily purveyor of fake news is well beyond what would have passed for science fiction or parody a few decades ago.  States are suing the federal government to prevent it from ascertaining if a census form is being filled out by an illegal alien.  A “woman” who used to be a man is marrying “man” who used to be a woman and we are supposed to believe that somehow now a man will be giving birth to the child.  A porn actor is suing the President’s lawyer for defamation of character.  Does a porn actor even have a character that can be defamed?  We’ve been laughing at these insanities for decades but none of it has gone away or even slowed the march to the brink of insanity.  Heinlein’s theocratic dictatorship is looking less and less like a nightmare scenario and more and more like a really good idea.  I’m really starting to wonder how much worse Sharia Law would be than the current politically correct straight jacket we currently endure.  At least under it there are easily recognizable roles for the traditional individuals most of us remember as normal.

 

Heinlein later in his career wrote a sort of spy novel with a female replicant heroine called “Friday.” In that universe the United States and Canada had balkanized into a number of smaller states.  Some of the states mentioned are Brit-Can, Quebec, the Alaska Free State, the California Confederacy, the Republic of Texas, the Vegas Free State and the Chicago Imperium.  This later novel is significantly less optimistic than his earlier works.  I definitely don’t claim that Robert Heinlein was particularly more skilled as a prognosticator than any other seers around but I begin to see a rationale for separating from behavior that keeps trending not only farther and farther from normalcy but even begins closing in on suicidal.  I still hope that the path forward is the majority of Americans rejecting the progressivist nightmare that is currently unfolding and at the least restore the conditions needed to allow a functional society.  But I have to admit I’m starting to worry that the Alt-Right may not be just making up their apocalypse.  I better get my passport stamped for the Republic of Texas, or should that be the Vegas Free State?

Reductio ad Absurdum

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Back in the Paleolithic Epoch I read a story by Brother Heinlein called “The Year of the Jackpot.”  In the story a statistician named Potiphar Breen has detected a convergence of all the various human and natural cycles.  Everything from the sunspot cycle to stock market crashes are headed for a simultaneous crescendo that he predicts will shatter normal human patterns.  Proof of his thesis is detectable in a rash of lunatic behavior in every human grouping.  Aberrant behavior like transvestitism is becoming commonplace, ordinary women are spontaneously stripping in public and in general, people are becoming unhinged.  Based on his calculations he believes it will come to a head within a year and will result in cataclysm.  Not to ruin the story, which is actually quite fun, but as predicted, all hell breaks loose when all these metaphorical evil slot machines pay off at once.

As is typical in the age we live in, all Heinlein’s predictions fall short of reality.  His fictional transvestitism is now a feeble half-measure compared to the reality of transgender lunacy that we currently endure.  And all other aberrations he predicted pale in comparison to the actual insanity that currently reigns on our streets and in our homes.

As far as The Year of the Jackpot, well, all the trend lines for disaster have been pegged out as vertical asymptotes for so long that we’ve forgotten that they can slow down, never mind actually reverse direction.  Predicting catastrophe is meaningless.  We’ve been in a perpetual train wreck for decades.  All the stored-up reserves of stability and normalcy are completely depleted.  Every societal structure meant to support our civilization is dry-rotted and hollowed out.  The only real question is what straw will break the camel’s back.  So, in the spirit of Heinlein’s story I’d like to examine our current world and extrapolate where the trends will lead.

Probably most significant of the latest developments is the #metoo phenomenon.  The ongoing media circus is consuming movie, news and political celebrities in Hollywood, New York and Washington at a pretty good clip.  I think I read the current count is about one hundred accused.  The great majority of these are lefties so the entertainment value is undeniable.  But the hoped-for target is the President.  What is the likelihood of it succeeding?  I’d say extremely low.  The current targets all work for liberals (either in corporate leadership or as a constituency).  Trump owes exactly zero allegiance to feminists and their rules.  But will there be any other upshot of the continuing rollout of this phenomenon?  I think there will be.  As the numbers start to increase I predict that even the feminists will see the downside of removing all functionally heterosexual men from the liberal institutions.  What it will do is reinforce that politically correct rules of behavior are not only inherently anti-male but obviously unjust.  Due process and the presumption of innocence have no part in these proceedings.  All men are presumed guilty with no possibility of appeal.

All this will have a two-fold effect.  In the case of leftists their friends will throw them under the bus to toe the line.  Eventually, as the offenses become more and more trivial these men will start hiring lawyers to defend their interests.  The backlash promises to be substantial and equally hilarious as the accusers are made to look rightly ridiculous in their paranoia and pettiness.  In the case of right wing individuals not associated with left wing institutions, they will defend themselves against these charges and begin the process of rolling back some of this extra-judicial overreach.  Hopefully this will have the effect of discouraging exaggerated accusations.  It will also draw attention to the ridiculous state of sexual harassment laws and their irrational double standards of application.

But the much bigger story is the ongoing Trumpocalypse.  The enormity of this phenomenon is almost impossible to exaggerate.  Regardless of whether President Trump can achieve an actual reversal of the in-progress vivisection of the legacy citizenry of the former United States of America, he demonstrates just how desperate the situation actually is.  All the harassed non-protected groups banded together and elected a reality tv comic book character to be their savior.  And against all odds and expectations he has proven to be an heroic figure.  Almost single-handedly he has taken on both parties in Congress, the various tentacles of the Deep State and the entire Hollywood Media Complex.  While doing this he has provided endless entertainment and moral support for every down-trodden man in this troubled land.  So, if he succeeds in reversing the direction we’re headed and begins fixing the worst of the problems the leftists have inflicted on us (mass immigration, affirmative action) then that will be against a might upheaval of the cultural Marxist establishment.  There will be riots in the streets and insane propaganda unheard of since Baghdad Bob was running Saddam Hussein’s public relations office.    But even if he is brought down by the leftists I forsee him providing the spark to finally blow this whole powder keg sky high.  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that there would be a march on Washington that will make the various million-man marches look pathetic.  He has awakened a very large force of really pissed off men.

To get back to my original thesis, the Year of the Jackpot is upon us very soon.  Will things fall apart or improve?  Yes.  Maybe even both.  And it’s actually a relief.  Realizing that things cannot continue along the same trajectory is encouraging.  Something’s gotta give and hopefully it’ll be them.  But even if it’s actual dissolution it is better than the slow collapse.  This way at least something may be saved.  And as more people wake up to just how bad things are it adds to the weight pushing against the locked door of the burning barn.  We may get out alive.  Here’s to the Jackpot.