If 2024 had been the plot for a novel no one would have believed it.\u00a0 The former president is running for the Republican nomination while under indictment in four separate cases in three separate jurisdictions.\u00a0 He is found guilty in two of them even before the end of the primaries and every time a court case goes against him his popularity grows.\u00a0 The incumbent Democratic candidate wins the primaries handily but drops out a hundred days before the election because he sounded like a talking turnip during the only debate.\u00a0 The Democratic candidacy is handed over to the vice president because only she can legally use the multi-billion-dollar war chest but she also sounds like a talking turnip, albeit a slightly higher pitched one.\u00a0 During the campaign the Republican candidate is put on open display by the secret service to not one but two snipers, one of whom misses a kill shot by fractions of an inch.<\/p>\n
The media and the US government conspire to hide the incumbent president\u2019s advanced dementia for his whole term in office, going so far as to claim he is actually some kind of political four-dimensional chess master while video evidence proves he\u2019s forgotten how a door knob works.\u00a0 When the election can\u2019t even be stolen through massive blue city fraud the media claims that racism and misogyny are responsible despite the large gains the Republicans make among women and minority voters.\u00a0 And as a parting absurdity the people in charge of the White House start rattling off thousands of blanket pardons including the president\u2019s bag-man son who was already found guilty for various offenses large and small and whom the president had sworn he would never pardon.<\/p>\n
And on the other side, the once and future Republican president has allied himself with a whole retinue of unlikely allies and future cabinet picks including the richest man in the world, a scion of the Kennedy clan and other heterodox individuals who would normally be anathema to a Republican administration.\u00a0 And finally, the greatest absurdity of all is that this president-elect is someone like Donald Trump.\u00a0 An almost cartoon character.\u00a0 A caricature of the American huckster.\u00a0 A modern-day P T Barnum.\u00a0 But the only Republican to be honest about how the American political system is totally rigged against normal Americans.<\/p>\n
And none of that even mentions incipient strains of World War III filtering out of the neo-con madness in Ukraine and with the Middle East in virtual flames as Gaza, Syria and Iran boil over in open war.\u00a0 Just the other day the explosion of a weapons depot was so huge that some observers mistook it for a tactical nuclear weapon detonation.\u00a0 And so, with just twenty days left before the end of the Biden presidency there seems to be no pause in the frenetic madness that has engulfed the world stage.<\/p>\n
Looking back on this, stuns the mind.\u00a0 To me this is the result of massive overreach.\u00a0 When the Democrats unleashed George Floyd, COVID and election fraud in 2020 they pulled out all the stops and ran Washington like some private fiefdom.\u00a0 And they brought in a collection of misfits and weirdos that couldn\u2019t get out of their own way.\u00a0 And so, they blew up the economy and unleashed actual stagflation.\u00a0 They hid the stagnation part by putting everyone and his brother in government no-show jobs.\u00a0 But the inflation was right out there for all to see and feel.\u00a0 They tried to tell people that they shouldn\u2019t believe their own lying eyes when looking at their empty wallets but instead bask in the glow of Bidenomics that was making them rich.\u00a0 Of course, unless you\u2019re an investment banker, tech entrepreneur or tenured Ivy League professor you probably don\u2019t have a seven-figure 401K plan to offset the order of magnitude growth in the cost of housing and eggs but then again poor people should just shut up and vote Democrat.\u00a0 Right?<\/p>\n
So, as it turned out reality really is real.\u00a0 And now the good(?) guys have their turn at bat.<\/p>\n
I think I begin to understand how things speed up during these end of civilization events.\u00a0 Once instability sets in, unbalanced parts of the system start to randomly knock into each other and catastrophic collapse is more or less inevitable.\u00a0 Well, I guess this thing has to play out.\u00a0 Perhaps 2025 will be a chance to do maintenance on the system and get it at least firing on an even number of cylinders.\u00a0 Who knows?\u00a0 Maybe Trump will turn out to be a Diocletian-like historical character who comes up with a patchwork solution to allow the empire to limp along for another century or two before complete collapse.<\/p>\n
Well, there\u2019s my annual pep talk.\u00a0 Happy New Years and I\u2019ll put together a look forward for tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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