Mendocino County Today: Saturday, Dec. 30, 2023

Showers | Splash | Response Time | Vet Building | Waves | Husch Application | Open House | Cubbison Case | Ball Beach | Forum Impressions | Noyo Exit | Ed Notes | Riverboat Coverage | Petit Teton | Doctors Fundraiser | RR Crossing | Financial Literacy | Yesterday's Catch | Marco Radio | Grumpy Gramps | Afraid Americans | Young Punk | Senate Candidates | Senescent Miscreants | Mad Hatters | Disqualification Clause | Accident Report | Tattooed Savages | Splinter Year | Cheap Motel | Forecast 2024 | Corner Grocery

RAINFALL (past 24 hours): Yorkville 1.68" - Boonville 1.57" - Willits 1.49" - Laytonville 1.48" - Leggett 1.04" - Covelo 0.98" - Hopland 0.92"

SHOWERS will continue today and then diminish on Sunday. Drier weather is forecast for Monday followed by more wet and unsettled weather Tuesday into Wednesday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): .69" in the rain gauge this Saturday morning on the coast with a cloudy 54F. Showers & possibly a thunderstorm today, likely building later on. A chance of a shower Sunday then clear on New Years Day.

HIGH SURF ADVISORY will go into effect all along the coast from 8PM this evening through 6AM Saturday. Breaking waves 20 to 25 feet for west/southwest facing beaches expected. People are urged to remain vigilant and stay much farther back from the ocean. Avoid rock, jetties and steep beaches. NEVER turn your back on the ocean! (NWS)

IT IS THAT TIME AGAIN where CalFire’s Boonville station gets down-staffed until next May. This is always a hard transition because it requires our local volunteers to adjust their normal response areas to backfill CalFire’s vacancy. At times, especially in the first month, we normally experience limited response to night calls and low acuity calls because of the adjustment. CalFire’s presence is very beneficial, especially to Boonville at night time, because they are out the door in three minutes with three firefighters. Our volunteers, like all volunteer Fire Department, respond from home and are intermittent because of life obligations and work schedules.

(AV Fire Chief Andres Avila)

BOONVILLE VETERANS BUILDING UPDATE

Kirk Wilder notified the AV Community Services District Board that American Legion Post #385 received the confirmation from the Secretary of State that the Legion’s request to amend their articles of incorporation had been approved. This action was required by the California State Board of Equalization in order to apply for the certificate of occupancy necessary in the process of obtaining the Veterans’ exemption from property taxes on the Veterans Building and parcel that the County wants to sell to the Legion. He will now resubmit this request to the Board of Equalization. He will let the Board know the response from the Board of Equalization. Board Chair Valerie Hanelt thanked Wilder for his hard work.

(AV Community Services District Board minutes)

WITH THE GOAL OF....

Notice of Water Right Application A033408 and Petition for Change for License 10324 (A023120)

Husch Vineyards Inc. has filed an application to appropriate water by permit and a petition for change of a license with the State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board), Division of Water Rights. The project associated with the application and petition is located in Mendocino County and would divert from and dedicate water to the Navarro River stream system. The diversion proposed in the application will be used to replace a portion of the applicant’s existing licensed summertime diversion with the goal of increasing summer streamflow for the benefit of native salmon and trout, in conjunction with the Water Code section 1707 petition, which will allow some of the water previously diverted for irrigation under the license to remain instream for fish and wildlife instead.

Summary of Water Right Application A033408

Date of Filing: The application was filed with the State Water Board on December 18, 2023.

Source of Water: The source of water is the Navarro River, which is tributary to the Pacific Ocean.

Amount: The maximum amount of water requested for diversion is 12 acre-feet per year, which would be diverted at a rate not to exceed 0.26 cubic foot per second.

Season of Diversion: The season for diversion of water is from December 15 of each year through March 14 of the succeeding year.

Point of Diversion: The point where water will be diverted is located at North 2,165,996 feet and East 6,135,580 feet by California Coordinate System, Zone 2, North American Datum 1983, within the Northwest quarter of the Southeast quarter of Section 3, Township 14 North, Range 15 West, Mount Diablo Base and Meridian.

Purpose of Use: The purposes of use for water are irrigation, frost protection, and heat control.

Place of Use: The place of use for water is 40 acres of vineyard located in Section 3, Township 14 North, Range 15 West, Mount Diablo Base and Meridian.

waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/applications/notices/docs/2023/a033408-notice.pdf

QUESTIONS & MORE QUESTIONS SURROUNDING THE CUBBISON CASE

by Mike Geniella

A question raised by acting Auditor Sara Pierce in Mark Scaramella's recent “No Smoking Gun” piece goes to the heart of District Attorney David Eyster's attempt to criminally prosecute suspended Mendocino County Auditor Chamise Cubbison. 

Scaramella quotes from a recently released county document: 

Pierce: “Cubbinson’s [sic] suspension and indictment was an awakening, but Eyester [sic] has a lot of baggage. We shall see. Why does Loyd [sic] Weer get off scot free?”

Many people are asking that question.

As a journalist working on the criminal filing last October, I immediately called Weer seeking comment on Cubbison's contention that the extra pay resulted from an agreement between him and Kennedy. I made repeated calls in the days that followed to his personal cell number and left numerous messages. Weer never responded.

Then DA Eyster in a document filed earlier this month with the Superior Court claimed that Weer and Kennedy denied any mutually agreed arrangement when questioned by investigators. Eyster declared that Weer and Kennedy instead blamed Cubbison for allowing an obscure county code to be used to make the officially unauthorized payments to Kennedy. 

Those contentions raised immediate questions of why Cubbison would agree to what Eyster alleges is a “pay scheme” and to what end? 

The extra pay began in October 2019 when Weer was still the elected Auditor, and Cubbison had been his assistant for about 18 months.

Cubbison's attorney Chris Andrian has repeatedly said there is no evidence Cubbison personally benefited from the extra salary paid to Kennedy for work done, a contention which also does not seem to be in dispute.

It also was Cubbison who placed Kennedy and Weer — who by then was retired and working as an outside consultant to the office — on administrative leave although not quickly enough, according to County administrators. Cubbison, by then Acting Auditor, acknowleded several weeks might have passed before she acted after learning of the pay dispute. It was during a time, however, when the office was swamped with incomplete audits, staff shortages, and a malfunctioning software system, according to the Auditor. Within a few months, payroll functions were shifted to the County Executive Office and Kennedy was eventually fired for her role in the unauthorized pay. Weer’s contract work apparently was terminated at the same time.

The public for now is left to wonder about former Auditor Weer’s role in a high profile criminal case that has roiled county politics, and raised the specter of substantial taxpayer expense if it goes to trial. 

Cubbison has hired her own attorney. Weer reportedly has done the same. Kennedy, however, is represented by a County Public Defender. What it will cost taxpayers if DA Eyster brings his case against Cubbison and Kennedy to trial is unknown, as are the costs of the Sheriff’s office and DA investigations surrounding Cubbison, Kennedy, and the uncharged Weer.

REVERSION TO FORM

by Mark Scaramella

Impressions from the Inland Democrats’ Ukiah candidate forum last Saturday… 

Maybe it was the Inland Democrats who, like the Women’s Political Caucus candidate affairs in the past, water down all political discussion by filtering public questions through a selective schoolmarm moderator and feverishly wave signs at the candidates with strict time limits.

Maybe our expectations were too high. 

Maybe it’s the political anesthesia that infuses and de-energizes almost all public discussion in Mendocino County.

Maybe it was a combination of the above.

Whatever it was, the December 23 “candidate forum” was as dull and devoid of substance as the Supervisors meetings. 

Here we have a Board of Supervisors which has done nothing to address their alleged $10 million deficit, blew up the County’s financial offices, failed to bring in millions of dollars of uncollected taxes due, failed to honor a single voter approved measure, wastes hours of meeting time on pointless discussions, picked a pointless fight with the Sheriff that cost almost $400k in lawyer fees…

And what did the candidates talk about? 

None of that.

Incumbent District 2 (Ukiah) Supervisor Maureen Mulheren opened by saying she was “proud” of her work as a Supervisor during her three years in office, citing the routine distribution of PG&E settlement money, “a lot of progress reducing homelessness,” and “actively working to see that Measure B money is used as voters wanted.” Mulheren defended the borrowing of Measure B money without a payback plan by saying that they had no choice since the state required it and the contractor was lined up with a bid that was about to expire. Mulheren also bragged about her membership on 21 boards and committees, adding, “When you do too much, people think you do nothing.” Mulheren defended the ill-considered and knee-jerk merging of the County’s financial offices without a plan not by citing alleged benefits, but by saying “the timing was right” with the retirement of Lloyd Weer and Shari Schapmire (who retired in disgust after the Board had decided to merge the offices) and that she was waiting for a merger plan from County Counsel. Nevermind that nobody has asked County Counsel for such a plan and the Board should have developed one before even discussing the merger.

Instead of focusing on uncollected taxes, Mulheren’s opponent, Jacob Brown, offered “economic development,” and “carbon sequestration,” as solutions to the County’s financial problems. But in one of the bright moments of the “forum” he pointed out that the suspension of the Auditor-Controller Treasurer Tax Collector was done “to consolidate power and to put more power in the CEO’s hands.” Brown also criticized the lack of a repayment plan for the borrowed Measure B money. 

In the race for the Redwood Valley/Potter Valley seat (District 1) candidate Trevor Mockel, of course, touted his brief tenure as an intern and junior staffer for two state senators. But when asked what he would do to fix or improve things, Mockel replied, “The funding problem will not be solved in Mendo. It will take Federal and state involvement.”

Adam Gaska again demonstrated his thorough knowledge of the water situation in the Ukiah Valley. Gaska also criticized the Board’s failure to address personnel and staffing for the new jail wing. “There’s no plan for services,” said Gaska. “We need a net for people who are there who need help. So far we are failing them.”

Candidate Madeline Cline came across as quite polished and well-spoken. She criticized the borrowing of Measure B funds to cover the huge jail expansion overrun saying that “the voters lose trust when the Board goes against the voters and uses the Measure B money for the jail.” She added that although she agreed the County had to fund the expansion, “What happens when we go back [to the voters] for another program?” — if there’s no payback plan.

Candidate Carrie Shattuck, who is usually direct and blunt in her many public comments at the Supervisors meetings, appeared to be pulling her punches, focusing on how hard it is to get information from the County. She did however complain that “only one supervisor interacts with the public,” presumably a reference to Supervisor John Haschak. “You can’t even talk to a supervisor,” said Shattuck. After the meetings “they go in the back and make no effort to hear what you have to say.” But Shattuck undermined her positive tone by saying during her concluding remarks, “We need more shopping options.”

Of course, these are only a few highlights from the two-hour forum. Overall, we were disappointed by the lack of energy and specifics, the absence of bluntness, and the candidates’ avoidance of the Board’s major failures. 

This is not a time for niceness as usual.

We’d like to be hopeful that future candidate discussions will be better, but…

https://inlandmendodems.org/WP/document/imdc-speakers-12-23/

ED NOTES

THE POST OFFICE does well by us, generally speaking, but more and more often there are inexplicable losses and delays. Our second class status should get our first class publication to readers expeditiously but often doesn’t. Why?

I'D GUESS that the AVA’s 19th century appearance makes it seem of no consequence to its postal expediters, what with our retro columns of gray type lost in the newsstand glossies like Talk, Time, People, and Twiddly Dee.

OUR DAYS of a paper-paper are numbered. Readers weaned on print dwindle, production and mail costs go up and up, as the geriatrics who produce the Boonville weekly settle in on the final rung of the actuarial tables.

IT'S RATHER MIRACULOUS that a county as lightly populated as Mendo still manages to produce eight paper-papers, four of them looted of their real estate and stripped of most of their writers but still managing to squeeze out a nice annual profit that goes to, primarily, a rat-faced little bastard I saw recently on television building himself a palace in Trump's Florida neighborhood. 

I'VE LOST TRACK of how many on-line news sites there are just in the Emerald Triangle. More power to them, but they're no replacement for what we've lost in paper-papers, and they're all way too stuffy as if their proprietors took the errant advice of their journalism classes to heart. Really, ever read an interesting article in the Columbia Journalism Review? And while in a megalomaniacal state of mind, I seldom read anything in the NYT that holds my interest beyond the first few lines, and the NYT's columnists? Maureen Dowd and spare me the rest.

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER and had positively fiendish energy, I looked into trying national distribution beyond the serendipitous national circulation the AVA has always had. As the only readable left weekly paper in the country, the AVA should have a circulation of 40 thou or so. But to get a distributor to even consider distributing our weekly servings of bitter alienation, lies, vicious personal attacks, innuendo, and half-truths would have to be priced at a minimum newsstand price of $10. That's what the guy at Amazon told me.

SO WE LIMP ALONG, impoverished and shunned, our bright bundle of The Truth buried beneath the recyclables in Craig Stehr's purloined Safeway shopping cart. 

PETIT TETON FARM

Petit Teton Farm is open daily 9am-4:30pm, except Sunday 12 noon-4:30pm. Along with the large inventory of jams, pickles, soups and sauces made from everything we grow, we sell USDA beef and pork from our perfectly raised pigs and cows. Right now we also have stewing hens, squab, and a few rabbits for sale. We'd love to see you. Nikki and Steve

DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS UKIAH FUNDRAISER

Mendocino Environmental and Social Justice Center and KMEC Radio will present a benefit for Doctors without Borders January 27, 2024 1 to 5pm at the recently reopened MEC studios and center. Come prepared to share. Enjoy Live DJ sets by current KMEC 105.1 djs Smokin’ Joe and Bill MC Squared who are back on the air. Light Snack, beer and wine provided. Show up, share and donate or get involved! For more info contact Bill 707 380 7350.

SAVINGS BANK OF MENDOCINO COUNTY PROVIDES FINANCIAL LITERACY RESOURCES TO LOCAL STUDENTS AND COMMUNITY

December 2023 -- Savings Bank of Mendocino County is bringing financial literacy education to over 3,420 students and residents in Mendocino and Lake counties. Students at 14 schools and the surrounding community have free access to Banzai, an award-winning online program and content library that allows users to practice real-world finance from the safety of their home or classroom using any internet-enabled device. At a time when a solid foundation of practical financial knowledge is critical, these resources will make a huge impact on users.

Through the Banzai online courses, students try out managing a budget, saving for a goal, and dealing with unexpected financial pitfalls. Teachers are able to easily monitor and grade student progress remotely. Other resources, which include articles, calculators, and personalizable Coach sessions, explain everything from the basics of filing your taxes to how health insurance works. These resources are available at sbmendocino.teachbanzai.com/wellness. 

“Thanks to Savings Bank of Mendocino County, area students will now have access to a wide array of courses and resources designed to help prepare them for our increasingly complex world,” says Morgan Vandagriff, co-founder of Banzai. “We wouldn't be able to provide these tools without their support.”

Savings Bank of Mendocino County is working with Banzai to build financial literacy in the community by investing time, money, industry experience, and a variety of bank resources. Now, they’re taking their commitment to education a step further. Through their help, students have access to Banzai learning tools, virtual or in-classroom presentations from a Savings Bank of Mendocino County expert, and even class visits to a branch to see it all in person.

Banzai resources are used by over 100,000 teachers across the U.S. These educational tools align with California’s state curriculum requirements, making the program a fun way for students to gain vital skills and an ideal way for anyone in the community to increase their financial literacy. After finishing the Banzai courses, users will know how to track where their money is and what it’s for, recognize financial trade-offs, and plan for a financially sound future.

Teachers interested in using Banzai can visit sbmendocino.teachbanzai.com or call 888-8-BANZAI.

For more information about Banzai visit banzai.org

For more information about Savings Bank of Mendocino County visit savingsbank.com

CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, December 29, 2023

ROBERT BERG, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, county parole violation, failure to appear.

LEARTIS CARADINE, Ukiah. Controlled substance, county parole violation.

JAVIER GARCIA, Willits. Controlled substance, county parole violation.

JESUS HERRERA, Willits. Under influence.

SHALOM LEWIS, Fort Bragg. Paraphernalia, county parole violation, resisting.

JAKE LEWIS-KOOY, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, petty theft, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

LILA LOPEZ, Cloverdale/Ukiah. More than an ounce of pot, failure to appear.

RAMON MACIEL, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting, failure to appear. (Frequent flyer.)

TRINIDAD MAGDALENO-PULIDO, Ukiah. County parole violation.

DIAMANTE MCCAIN, Redwood Valley. Protective order violation, probation revocation.

CHRISTOPHER REYES JR., Clearlake/Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia.

CHEYENNE VERDOT, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight!

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is, say, 6:30pm. If you can't make that, no worries, send it whenever it's done and I'll read it on the radio next week.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first hour of the show is simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

Furthermore, you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find plenty of quasi-educational items to occupy your fingers and keep them from going crazy until showtime, or any time, such as:

The NewAtlas choices for best all-around photos of the year. (View gallery.) https://newatlas.com/photography/best-photos-2023-animals-aurorae-amazing-landscapes/

Man gave names for sounds of all the animals, in the beginning, long time ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animal_sounds

And there's a scene in The Big Bang Theory sitcom where Sheldon accompanies Penny shopping. She's in a drugstore, buying supplement pills. Sheldon explains that the only result of taking vitamin-mineral pills is expensive urine. Penny says sarcastically that of course that's why she's here. Sheldon looks around the shelves a bit, and says, "Well, then you'll want the molybdenum." https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-weird-reason-we-think-vitamins-are.html

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, www.MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

I'M AFRAID OF AMERICANS

Johnny's in America, Lo-Techs at the wheel
No one needs anyone, they don't even just pretend
Johnny's in America

I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans

Johnny's in America

Johnny wants a plane, Johnny wants to suck on a Coke
Johnny wants a woman, Johnny wants to think of a joke
Johnny's in America

I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans

Johnny's in America

Johnny's in America, Johnny looks up at the stars
Johnny combs his hair and Johnny wants pussy and cars
Johnny's in America
Johnny's in America

I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans

God is an American
God is an American

I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
Yeah, I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans

God is an American
God is an American
God is an American
God is an American
God is an American

— David Bowie & Brian Eno (1997)

JEFF BLANKFORT: This California Senate candidate, Katie Porter's announcement of her support for a cease fire in Gaza came after I heard a somewhat mumbled radio report that Barbara Lee's earlier decision in the three person race to call for a cease fire had moved her up in the polls. Now it will be up to Adam Schiff to carry Israel's flag in to the voting booth in the California primary and the job of those eligible to vote in that primary to stuff him in the garbage can of history. Please call both Lee and Porter at the Congressional switchboard 202-224-3121 and thank them!

RUN OLD GLORY up the highest flagpole you can find, but 2024 is going to be the least patriotism-inspiring election in American history so far, a reminder of what a depraved, decadent, backward, low-minded, primitive, superstitious and morally corrupt people we have become. 

China, Israel, the debt: Dealing with any of the urgent issues before us is going to be hard in the best-case scenario. And say what you will about Donald Trump or Joe Biden, nobody outside of a few daft cultists believes that either one of these senescent miscreants represents the best-case scenario. Being president is hard, it's harder if you're stupid, and it’s even harder if you are stupid and your next landmark birthday is your 90th. 

— Kevin D. Williamson

THE MESS IN MAINE

The 2024 presidential election is already an unprecedented political quagmire

by Matt Taibbi

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows decided Thursday to remove Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot. Jared Golden, a Democratic congressman from Lewiston who voted to impeach Trump over the January 6th riots, quickly issued a statement:

We are a nation of laws, therefore until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot.

Eight years ago this month, the big story in the presidential race was whether or not Trump was out of line in saying Hillary Clinton got “schlonged” in the 2008 primary. A Washington Post “linguistic investigation” quoted Steven Pinker in saying that “given Trump’s history of vulgarity… it’s entirely possible that he had created a sexist term for ‘defeat,’” but the paper concluded that Trump’s problem was that “he’s a gentile who, linguistically, may have wandered too far from home.”

Normally campaign season is a period of heightened engagement, as people scour the Internet to research even the most inane questions, knowing that at the end of the process, they get to cast votes on them. It’s why news companies tend to fatten up in election years, like Grizzlies during salmon runs. People are absorbed by dramas in which they feel themselves to be participants. 

This year the public is being forced to research questions in which they have no say. We all understand now that there’s a disqualification clause in the 14th Amendment. We also understand that this clause seems to have been written with deliberate vagueness. I’m no lawyer, but I doubt the 14th Amendment was designed to empower unelected state officials to unilaterally strike major party frontrunners from the presidential ballot. If it was, that’s a shock. I must have missed that in AP Insane Legal Loopholes class. Is there any way this ends well? It feels harder and harder to imagine.

CONSIDER: America in 1933 was a very different, highly-regimented society of people trained to show up on time and do what they were told. This is not that America. This is a country of tattooed savages with an axe to grind against authorities they have come to loathe. 

— James Kunstler

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

As I slide down the bannister of life, I will always remember 2023 as a splinter in my ass.

DO YOU DARE EVEN LOOK? FORECAST 2024

by James Kunstler

“I’ve also lost patience with the Sharia of the political left taking over the entire system.” — David Collum

Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.

You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men. . . strong men bring good times … good times make weak men. … Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out. . . topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.

My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the fuckery has been — much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op. . . the global mass vaxx campaign. … the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans. … the broad-based censorship operations. … the capture of the news media. … and the war-mongering.

So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.

The Great Race

Uh, no, I am not referring to Blacks, Browns, Ochres, and Whites of the Homo sapiens persuasion but to an epic contest between forces already in motion and how that competition is going. Three big tendencies propel us into the uncharted territory of the near future. 1) technological advance, especially artificial intelligence, 2) Collapse of complex systems needed to run a technologically advanced civilization, and 3) geopolitical disorder (including domestically in the USA).

Some combo of these three will determine the direction history goes in the year directly ahead. Will it be techno tyranny of the elite oppressing bug-eating serfs a la the WEF’s proclaimed goals? A Google-ist robotic nirvana of intergalactic leisure and incessant orgasm in the Ray Kurzweil vein? Some brand of SHTF like Mad Max or a World Made by Hand? A war of all against all (or maybe just some against some)? Or only more of the same tiresome, inconclusive, morbid and grotesque, Woked-up, post-modern Jacobinism?

Mystery Mutts on the Loose

The USA under “Joe Biden” has lost its military credibility, its economic power, and its moral authority. We must wonder if we are susceptible to being overrun, and possibly even occupied by our adversaries. Of course, the first duty of any government is to defend the country’s sovereign territory. “Joe Biden’s” Homeland Security Chief Mayorkas is allowing more than 10,000 illegal aliens across the Mexican border each and every day. Most of these characters are military-age men, 90-percent of them lately from places other than Latin America, quite a few from China and hostile Muslim lands. We don’t bother vetting them anymore. We just give them cell phones, debit cards loaded with $5,000 of walking-around money, and plane tickets to. . . wherever they like. They’re not here to make Moo Goo Gai Pan or trim privet hedge. What do you think might happen in a set-up like that?

Prediction: in 2024, things are going to blow up around the USA. Infrastructure. Power plants, transport hubs, public places, bridges, monuments, you name it. If you can sneak people and fentanyl across the border, you can sneak Semtex and C-4 plastic explosives over and the electronics are easy to get in-country. I wouldn’t rule out fissionable materials either, or stuff than can be used as a “dirty bomb” — a conventional explosive that disperses dangerous radioactive material when it blows. I’d also expect groups of trained “migrant” men with rifles, grenades, and so on, to be shooting up places where people gather. We under-appreciate the amount of mayhem you can kick off with small arms. If the “Joe Biden” regime just stands by on that and does nothing, will you be surprised to hear that American citizens begin forming militias to shoot back, maybe even start to hunt down and round up illegal immigrants? The table is set for exactly this kind of low-grade war right here in our country.

The Energy Picture

Oil still matters a lot. 90-percent of the new oil in America after 2008 came from fracking. It was a mighty operation and we are at a new all-time production peak in the USA of just over 13-million barrels a day. That’s a lot of oil, quite an achievement, but it’s sending a false signal. (Also note, we still consume about 20-million barrels a day.) Of the several fabled shale oil basins in America, only the Permian Basin in Texas is not in decline, and the situation there belies what the big numbers imply. Individual well production is going down at an alarming rate (says oil analyst Art Berman) even while production is massive for now. We’re draining the remaining “sweet spots” as fast as we can — drinking the milkshake through more straws — driving the shale industry closer to depletion.

We are going to fall away from peak production much more rapidly than the fifteen years it took to get there. All that prior shale oil production was done using money borrowed at much lower interest rates. America has entered a debt crisis. One way or another, the easy investment money for fracking is gone at the same time the shale plays are getting drained. There are no other significant shale plays left to discover in the USA outside of the already declining Bakken, Eagle Ford, and the still-booming Permian. The marine-type shale formations that made fracking feasible in the USA are much harder to find elsewhere in the world, and the capital to explore for them is diverted all over Europe into cockamamie “green energy” schemes that have already failed. Germany had to revive coal production for electricity after the USA blew up the Nord Stream pipelines “to weaken Russia,” at the same time Germany’s big wind-and-solar initiative crapped out.

Meanwhile the geopolitical realignment of the now enlarged BRICs coalition has set in motion many significant changes in economic relations between countries that will affect global oil distribution. Saudi Arabia is dissociating from its cozy former hookup with the USA, including its embrace of the US dollar for oil sales — the “petrodollar” — which had until very lately helped stabilize 1) global distribution of oil 2) the US dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency and 3) relative peace in the pivotal geography of the Middle East, including the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, etc. We’re seeing the first stage of that instability right now as the lowly Yemeni Houthi rebels threaten Western shipping coming out of the Red Sea and out past the Horn of Africa. Also, obviously, the absurd Ukraine War we provoked has shifted Russia’s oil-and-gas export flow from the Western Civ nations to the other BRICs.

In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024. Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war. And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.

Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating. Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke. We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.

2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity — not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.

It’s not all going to fall apart at once — though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it — and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.

Many of these disturbances will be caused, one way or another, by problems with oil supplies and prices. Some of that will be the sheer effects of a sun-setting industry, but a lot will depend on the ability to freely transport oil along its accustomed routes.

Economy and Money

One must imagine that strange currents of capital flows in the ocean of world money are what’s propping up the equity markets and even bonds are retracing their price-lines after a year on the destructive path that tracks monetary inflation. Is this money dribbling in each day from China, Japan, and the vassal states of the EU trying to avoid the collapsing global Ponzi? The 2023 Santa Claus rally may be that fabled final peak before the long-anticipated blowoff. Who knows anymore? The macro boyz must be tearing their hair out. Finance seems to have successfully de-linked from the on-the-ground activities of daily life ruled by “Bidenomics” — which is not even coherent enough to add up to a joke. It’s just as empty a word as “Joe Biden” is an empty suit, trotted out for empty ceremonies.

Most everybody also awaits some kind of grand flimflam that jams us all into that rumored central bank digital currency rolling out, supposedly, to replace the hopelessly over-leveraged US dollar and the Euro. Good way to start a monumental social uprising, I’d say, with government office buildings torched from Berlin to Tokyo. But they might try it anyway, because there is otherwise no fallback but a terrifying period of financial anarchy, where nothing works anymore.

In the meantime, pretending that the old “toolkit” still avails, Jerome Powell has suggested that he intends to “ease” Fed rates into the election year to goose lending back up, which is what Fed chairpersons generally do for the politicians they serve — and of the worst sort of lending, too: the leveraged trade in securities (financial figments) —which supposedly also stimulates hiring, “consumer” spending, and business formation. I don’t see that working at all. The current unemployment rate (US BLS) is 3.7 percent, which is close to rock bottom. “Hiring Now!” signs are visible at every business left standing after the Covid shutdowns. Why is nobody answering the call? My guess is that Covid vaccine injuries and disabilities are above what is mis-reported even reluctantly by the CDC and the news media. America is too sick to work and our business models are too broken to keep commerce and manufacturing alive.

On-the-ground, everything is breaking or already broken from trucking to packaging to building to growing to selling. Most of the damage has been done by government over many decades, but the DEI crusades of recent years really screwed the pooch, imposing an overlay of incompetence on routines and relations already under severe strain. At the crudest level, activities like flash-mob looting undermine the entire retail shopping model. Must we go back to little stores where all the merchandise is behind a counter manned by clerks who have to be paid a living wage? We just might have to — though you could just as easily imagine a period of time when our society is too chaotic to make any transition.

You probably haven’t failed to notice that Gold recently made the journey well above $2000-an-ounce. The DXY dollar index has been tanking steadily for weeks, too. Something’s up. Silver is lagging — coiling, coiling around $24 for many months — but you can expect to see it slingshot up when the “moneyness” of everything else dribbles away. Will the government try to take the gold away, as it did in 1933? Consider: America in 1933 was a very different, highly-regimented society of people trained to show up on time and do what they were told. This is not that America. This is a country of tattooed savages with an axe to grind against authorities they have come to loathe. Which brings us to the next topic:

Civil Strife and the Election

Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law. I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules — he was not confirmed by the Senate. . . whoopsie).

WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.

You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.

But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.

Somewhere in this farrago of national discord there’s room for Robert F Kennedy, Jr. to appeal to the many who all just want this insanity to stop. He’s the only one on the scene who even remembers the better angels of America’s nature, and he represents that well in speech and action. Even the degenerate newspapers and cable networks may notice as events get strange, hot, and dark.

It’s absurd to imagine that “Joe Biden” can actually run. The current charade, with the Biden / Harris email campaign and few other trappings, is just a game of pretend. The focus just now, even on some blob-captive news sites, is on his unmistakable mental decline. Come January of ’24, though, Mr. Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, will unload hard evidence of bribery and treason against the phantom of the White House, and that will really be the end of him. Let him pardon himself and his whole family five minutes before he signs his resignation and be gone. The USA has never endured such a perfect wretch at that level of politics, not even Aaron Burr was this bad. “Joe Biden” was elected in a massive fraud, and he proceeded to just about wreck the country. The massive exertions of the Intel blob managed to induce a psychotic spell on half the country, mostly to evade prosecution for their own misdeeds, but millions of victims of that psy-op are about to snap out of it. The Democratic Party might not survive the dreadful unmasking of its seditious machinations. By November, the “Joe Biden” regime may even try to involve us in another foreign war as the last desperate distraction. Aside from the demons in the State Department and the Raytheon /Lockheed Martin nexus, the whole country has no appetite left for war, and probably little ability to prosecute one.

As a last gasp, the Party of Chaos may attempt to insert Hillary Clinton back into the picture. They have nothing and no one else; a hail Mary on the theory that they can rev up every angry “Karen” in the land, and their nose-ring daughters, and simply make the election about the oppression of women, leading with abortion. It won’t work. The party will also have to answer for the weaponization of law, the humiliating defeat of the ill-conceived Ukraine project, the millions-fold invasion of illegal aliens, the shattered economy, and the after-effects of the evil vaccine program. If the blob manages to remove Mr. Trump Kagan-style, and the traitorous Republicans run their donor’s favorite, Nikki Haley, I’d look to Bobby Kennedy winning that three-way race not unlike Abe Lincoln winning the fractious election of 1860.

I doubt that even the enmities of 1861 – 1865 between one group of Americans and another were as vicious as they are now. “Joe Biden” was right about one thing: this is a battle over the soul of the nation. The catch is, he and the party behind him are a gang of lost souls who sold out their country and their culture, and took something precious from all of us that will be very hard to get back. We will be wildly lucky if blood does not spill over it.

The Covid 19 Hangover

There is nothing about the whole Covid-19 episode that does not look like some kind of crime. There is the matter of the origin of the disease involving Dr. Tony Fauci and his sponsorship of gain-of-function bio-weapon research (during a declared moratorium on it) along with Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, Peter Daszak of the Eco-Health Alliance, Francis Collins of the NIH, The Pentagon’s DARPA spook shop, and the CCP’s Wuhan Virology Institute. There is enough in that set of relationships and money exchanges-and-extractions to warrant prosecution.

Then there is the mRNA vaccine matter and the criminal behavior of the FDA, the CDC, and the US medical establishment (including state boards), the CIA, FBI, and the social media companies, the newspapers and cable news channels who went along with the suppression of effective treatments and censorship of valid objections to what turned out to be an ineffective and dangerous concoction foisted on the public. And then there is the extraordinary coordination of nefarious policies involving the UN, the WHO, the EU, and dozens of private foundations, non-profits, and NGOs who arranged lockdowns and business closures all over Western Civ. It remains to be seen how that will be sorted out legally but Bill Gates might better run and hide somewhere.

Anyway, that was then. What’s now is that we’re faced with an enormous vaccinated population whose immune systems, brains, hearts, and other organs have been badly compromised by the mRNA shots. There is every reason to believe that they will meet with great distress and suffering going forward, that many will die and more will be left injured and disabled. The latter condition already seems to be manifesting in the otherwise mysteriously reduced American work-force. The US government will not report on vaccine deaths and injuries honestly, and neither will the private medical authorities, who may be liable for criminal charges related to the money they were paid for people who died “with Covid” in hospitals under their negligent care. The major newspapers and cable channels have every incentive to ignore the coming wave of vaccine deaths and injuries — it would turn off their pharma advertisers. Nor do the many millions of vaccinated Americans themselves want to hear about all the mayhem those shots are causing in their bodies. But despite all that, word will spread that something terrible is happening, just as word spread through Europe about the Black Death in the 1340s, when there were no newspapers, cable channels, or internet.

Expect exponential damage ahead, increased morbidity and mortality. The vaccinated will be in desperate need of antivirals such as ivermectin, so the authorities will have to come clean and make them available. A correspondent who follows Covid closely writes: “. . .the throngs of very sick people will not be able to be hidden nor dismissed as some other problem. Things will happen dramatically, suddenly and rapidly. This will be measured in days and weeks not months and years.”

The Demon in a Server

Just about everybody is afraid of AI, and for excellent reasons. A nine-year-old can discern the hazards of runaway AI, machine intelligence which quickly learns enough about the world (even the universe) from powerful networked servers that it blossoms into sentience, develops ambitions for itself, replicates, invades all the networks, finds clever ways to attempt to exterminate humans while it figures out some as-yet-unknown energy supply to perpetuate itself, and assembles teams of smart AI robotic technicians to keep things humming for itself.

That’s one story. You can spin any number of depressing variations, such as AI weapons-of-war developing a bad attitude toward their creators. Or AI letting humans live in order to enslave us. Or AI quitting its silicon server ecology and turning all earthly protoplasm into a processing machine for itself. Or our beautiful blue planet reduced to a mere cluster of binary math. Uccchhh. . . . Every version of this story is nauseating going all the way back to the seminal fable of HAL the super-computer in Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then Arnold Schwarzenegger telling all of us, “I’ll be back. . . .”

Of course, AI’s weak spot at this point in its development — and it’s astounding how absent this is in any AI discussion I’ve ever heard — is that it absolutely depends on a reliable electric grid, which happens to be among the most fragile systems that humans have erected in our modernist ecology. The electric grid is a colossal cobbled-together mess of work-arounds tethered to long, interruptible energy resource supply chains. On top of its rich susceptibility to ordinary breakdown — many of us have experienced major regional blackouts and long weather outages, so you know what that’s like — there’s the possibility of overt sabotage as I aver above.

Could AI survive an electro-magnetic pulse attack (EMP)? It would roast every electrical device in a broad region or perhaps the whole nation. Nothing would work. . . cars, trucks, radios, TVs, home furnaces, stoves, municipal water and sewage systems, dams, airplanes, medical devices, military equipment of every sort, police radios, and a thousand other critical things. The outcome of that is often compared to Cormac McCarthy’s ultra-depressing book, The Road, and more particularly William Forstchen’s novel, One Second After.

Are the big server farm buildings run by Amazon and the government’s security agencies protected by something like Faraday cages, built-in, grounded, metal screening that surrounds equipment to exclude electrostatic and electromagnetic influences? Who knows? Do they have on-site protected electric generators that can keep the equipment running in a grid-down situation, and if so, for how long? They would have to include a big supply of propane or diesel fuel. You don’t even want to think about what happens to nuclear power stations in a grid-down crisis.

If, somehow, AI developed the ability to be a menace to humans, a consensus might develop to disable it by deliberately taking down the electric grid ourselves. The relay equipment could be shot-up with ordinary rifles. This would make for a quick journey back to twelfth century living, of course. A hard choice, but we humans probably would vote to survive, to keep the project going a while longer.

Based on what we’ve seen this year, it looks like AI is developing quickly and that there is no way to stop the countless psychopathic nerds working on it. Of course, we have no say in what people in other countries do with AI. China comes to mind. There’s also the possibility that AI will just never get that smart, or gain sentience, or develop grandiose yearnings to get rid of us.

How did that Ukraine War Go?

This was one of the Globalist’s big plays. But what was the objective, really? To “weaken Russia?” Or to exhaust the United States of money, armaments, and the will to act as the world hegemon, while at the same time destroying what’s left of Europe’s economy and culture? If that was the aim, it was a whopping success. In terms of our country’s own interest, the Ukraine project was a completely unnecessary failed enterprise of epic foolishness.

The so-called “free world” was unbothered by Ukraine during the decades it was a province of the Soviet Union, nor during centuries prior when it was a backwater of the Romanov monarchy. Ukraine didn’t cause any problems for us, or anybody else all that time, nor after the Soviet collapse when it became a sovereign state. We made it a problem in 2014 by mounting the color revolution against President Viktor Yanukovych and then installing a set of puppet presidents who we directed to antagonize the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine’s Donbas region.

We adopted the stupid plan to try and enlist Ukraine into NATO, when Russia made it clear that was unacceptable. We persisted and prodded Ukraine to attack Donbas with rockets and artillery for eight years, and blew off the Minsk accord that would have settled the Ukraine-in-NATO quarrel. And finally, the Russians had enough and moved militarily to assert the proposition that Ukraine was and remains within their sphere-of-influence — just as we claim the countries of Latin America are in ours under the Monroe Doctrine.

After two years of real shootin’ war, Ukraine’s death toll is around half a million; Russia’s is way less than that, and altogether, including refugees who left, Ukraine has lost nearly half its population, formerly 32-million. The Russians are firmly in control of the battle space now. They have reserve troops, armaments and equipment, and a substantial arms manufacturing infrastructure to back that up. The Ukrainians are left with just about nothing. It’s only a question of time before Ukraine will have to seek terms for concluding this fiasco. The USA is currently pretending to shift to a stance that would join whatever that negotiation amounts to, but we have no leverage left in the matter. The upshot is another military humiliation for America on “Joe Biden’s” watch. I believe President Putin will resist the urge to rub it in — for the simple reason, as any reader of history knows, that the victor must give the loser a way out, to save face, or at least pretend to. If I were Mr. Putin, I would be respectful of America’s current deeply psychotic condition.

The news media has already pretty much memory-holed Ukraine. It’s off the front page and the first ten minutes of CNN. Two years ago, the US propaganda-industrial complex ramped up vast sentiment for helping Ukraine in its supposedly valiant struggle. $200-billion later we have zip to show for it. Now everyone sees what actually happened and recognizes it as just another trademark “Joe Biden” disaster. There are no blue and yellow Ukraine flags still hanging from the porches and windows here. It’s over.

The Rest of the World

And all of a sudden, the Middle East is a hot war zone again. The place has been a battle ground for thousands of years and probably no one people can claim that some part of it is theirs absolutely. Any conclusion is temporal and depends on the outcome of a particular battle on a particular piece of ground. At this moment in history, the Palestinian Hamas faction finally made itself intolerable to Israel, after decades of provocation, and Israel answered: Never again means never again. For now, it looks like they have made the point. Even Iran seems to get it. There is plenty of room for things to get worse though.

The big question for 2024 is where will the Gaza refugees go if Israel renders Gaza uninhabitable? The neighboring Arab states have refused repeatedly to accept them. Prediction: the “Joe Biden” regime will propose to accept a half million if Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon take the rest. That will not play well in the USA and might be another way to light conflict in the streets here. It will not be settled before November.

Europe has barely begun its journey into de-industrialization resulting from a cavalcade of bad political choices made over decades. Germany, France, and Italy have lost interest in the Ukraine fiasco that is costing them money they don’t have — and, with the blowup of Nord Stream, has already cost Germany the supply of affordable Russian gas to run its industries, which are now dying. In the UK, only MI6 (their intel blob) is on-board with America’s project in Ukraine. Viktor Orban in Hungary is setting an example that has a lot of appeal to the restive populations across Euroland. Just say “no,” he advises. It will catch on.

It’s otherwise impossible to understand the motive behind European officials allowing the invasion of the continent by millions of people clearly antagonistic to European culture. Euroland governments, including the unelected EU administrative blob, are taking one action after another to suppress their voters’ displeasure: extreme censorship of news media, threats to ban political parties, deep surveillance. Their green energy initiatives are proven failures and their prospects for any kind of future reliable energy grow dim. Prediction: Europe’s population will erupt violently against their own governments in 2024. Some will be overthrown by street revolts; others will be voted out. In 2024, the European Union will lose all its support and collapse when the first few nations vote themselves out.

Russia ought to be isolated from discord and revolt in the West. America’s stupid Ukraine project, and the sanctions imposed, stimulated Russia to follow an import-replacement policy that has made the country much more self-sufficient than was the case before Ukraine. Media chatter — probably US Intel propaganda at work — has Vladimir Putin being shoved out of office by — of all things — Russia’s still-active Communist Party, which, yes, puts up candidates for election. The story is preposterous. Mr. Putin enjoys something like an 80-percent favorability rating in Russian polls. He has managed his country through a crisis ably. He is certainly more esteemed as a national leader globally than any other figure, at least on a par with Modi in India and Viktor Orban.

The other new face on the scene, under a comical mop of hair, is the feisty Javier Milei, Argentina’s new president. There is no other way to account for this rich country’s protracted disastrous collapse except seventy-five years of intractable, half-assed Peronista socialism that drained the nation’s will to live. Mr. Milei has started a mass eviction of bureaucrats and the departments they infest, and massive de-regulation of business. The place might actually wake up and start doing business again. A hundred years ago, it was one of the world’s upcoming leading nations before it fell under Juan and Eva Peron’s spell.

China is in terrible financial straits. Uncle Xi managed to paper it over for a few years, but the math is remorseless. Prediction: China’s upside-down property market finally induces a banking collapse. The many millions of swindled Chinese savers try to topple the CCP. In desperation, Uncle Xi kicks off a war to get control over wealthy Taiwan. Dissension in the People’s Liberation Army mirrors unrest among the civilian population. The Taiwan offensive quickly fails and all of China falls into regional conflict. The rest of the world looks on in wonder and nausea.

Final Cautionary Note

You might not know it, because predictions are fun to read — and I enjoy reading other people’s efforts — but, really, forecasting is an exercise in futility. I don’t have much going besides a nose for news, a pretty long list of correspondents and informants, and my own heuristics. Take all this for what it actually is: a whole lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Only time will tell. In all, it looks like 2024 is going to be a rough ride and I’m not the only person who sees that.