{"id":22735,"date":"2023-03-14T22:34:51","date_gmt":"2023-03-15T02:34:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=22735"},"modified":"2023-03-15T09:50:58","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T13:50:58","slug":"could-this-be-the-year-of-the-jackpot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/14\/could-this-be-the-year-of-the-jackpot\/","title":{"rendered":"Could This Be the Year of the Jackpot?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Could This Be the Year of the Jackpot?<\/p>\n

Robert Heinlein<\/a> was an American science fiction writer back in the middle of the last century.\u00a0 He was considered one of the best writers during what used to be called the \u201cgolden age\u201d of science fiction because he wrote sf that kept the science front and center.\u00a0 If he wrote about interplanetary nuclear-powered rockets, he made sure the physics was legitimate.<\/p>\n

But he also wrote less realistic stories that involved more fantastic types of plots.\u00a0 He wrote one short story called \u201cThe Year of the Jackpot<\/a>\u201d 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.\u00a0 And what he discovered was that all the various trends were headed for unusual maxima and minima at precisely the same time.\u00a0 And what he predicted was that every bad thing was about to happen all at once.<\/p>\n

And of course, that included nuclear war, invasion, plagues, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Of course, just as the story ends, he realizes the biggest jackpot of all is the sun going nova.\u00a0 Bummer.<\/p>\n

Now this is silly season science fiction.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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).\u00a0 But it\u2019s also true that sometimes when things start going wrong, they synergize even more misfortune until you end up with a real disaster.\u00a0 Take for instance the Dust Bowl.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And the dislocation of all these farmers heading to California further damaged the economy.\u00a0 The weather conditions that increased the problem were probably just random but put together they seemed like some kind of biblical plague.<\/p>\n

Now look at our situation.\u00a0 Back in 2001 we have the 9-11 attacks and that catalyzes the start of two big wars and a bunch of smaller ones.\u00a0 Then we have the banking crisis of 2008 and that catalyzes an even bigger disaster, namely the presidency of Barack Obama.\u00a0 And he begins the process of weaponizing the federal government against the citizens of the United States.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

And all these consequences seem to be resonating and catalyzing each other and making things worse and worse.\u00a0 And from there it\u2019s not a big leap to wonder if the whole thing ends up in a Year of the Jackpot climax.\u00a0 And it wouldn\u2019t be much different from Heinlein\u2019s.\u00a0 Coincidentally his make-believe world was suffering from transgender couples, bioweapons, horrendous rains and snowfall in California and other climate anomalies such as we\u2019ve been seeing this winter.\u00a0 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\u2019t miss out on any part of the story.<\/p>\n

Now I don\u2019t at all believe that the universe has some built in clock that coordinates all the good and bad \u201ctrends\u201d so that a year of the jackpot is some kind of inevitable event.\u00a0 I\u2019m fully aware that human actions are plenty enough cause for all of the chaos and dysfunction we see around us.\u00a0 In fact, it\u2019s obvious that a lot of the chaos is intentional and has very discernible motives around consolidating power and accumulating money.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll tell you one thing.\u00a0 There is such a thing as luck, good and bad.\u00a0 And our luck has been running on the very bad side for a good long time.\u00a0 Maybe a little prayer for divine intercession wouldn\u2019t be out of line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Could This Be the Year of the Jackpot? Robert Heinlein was an American science fiction writer back in the middle of the last century.\u00a0 He<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,5,237,4,242],"tags":[711,603],"class_list":["post-22735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-current-events","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-robert-a-heinlein","tag-the-year-of-the-jackpot"],"yoast_head":"\nCould This Be the Year of the Jackpot? - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/14\/could-this-be-the-year-of-the-jackpot\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Could This Be the Year of the Jackpot? - Orion's Cold Fire\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Could This Be the Year of the Jackpot? 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