Some Final Absurdities for 2022
As 2022 grinds to a somewhat depressing end, America is clearly a nation in decline. Some of that is thanks to the feckless presidency of a demented old man who doesn’t know where he is half the time, and who partied in the U.S. Virgin Islands has hundreds of Americans froze to death in the dark due to the increasingly unstable power grid he and his fellow Democrats have gifted the country as part of their climate alarm-driven hysteria.
Our economy, burdened by 6 trillion dollars in new debt approved by congress during the final year of the Trump presidency and first two years of Biden’s regime, is breathing its last gasps before collapsing into what will almost certainly become a severe recession at some point in 2023. And we should all hope it only becomes a recession and not something worse than that.
America’s influence is declining all around the world as this thuggish administration goes about intentionally alienating former allies in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Israel, among others) and waging a hugely costly proxy war with Russia using a devastated Ukraine as the battleground.
This story from Thursday serves to illustrate the consequences of America’s decline in world influence:
Aw, Dave, you think, it’s just a shipment of corn - what’s the big deal? The big deal is that it’s just one example that demonstrates the rising influence of the BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which is already starting to surpass the G7 in global trade influence. With Saudi Arabia poised to be added to the alliance’s membership as soon as 2023, BRICS will then include the world’s 2nd and 3rd largest economies (China and India), Africa’s biggest economy (South Africa), South America’s biggest economy (Brazil) and the world’s 2nd and 3rd largest producers of crude oil (Saudi Arabia and Russia).
The G7, of course, consists of the world’s biggest, though debt-ridden, economy (the U.S.), Japan, Canada (which is rapidly devolving into an autocracy), and a bunch of European countries (the UK, France, Italy, Germany) whose continent is in the early stages of a huge energy crisis and economic collapse that will make America’s decline look like a day in the park.
The U.S. is partying with the wrong crowd. Or maybe the other G7 members are.
In addition to its increasingly unstable electric grids, America finds itself beset by a rising array of what its citizens used to think of as third world problems.
Yesterday brought this news as an example:
That’s right: Parents can’t find simple over-the-counter medicines for their children, but they can damn sure find all the COVID tests and vaccines and boosters their little hearts desire. This is piled atop the reality that the same parents still can’t find adequate supplies of baby formula to feed their newborns after a full year since that problem arose.
This is America under Joe Biden.
The wealth gap in the U.S. continues to grow as the Federal Reserve ramps up its efforts to devalue the currency, which of course is an inevitable outcome of that endeavor. But the Fed has little choice but to go that route given the profligate spending habits of the last two congresses.
Academic performance in our nation’s public schools is crumbling at an ever faster pace, sped along by the heinous school closings using COVID as the excuse, some of which lasted for as long as two solid years. Millions of American kids simply forgot what little they knew about how to study and learn while sitting home glued to their devices, and that skill is never coming back for many of them.
We are verging on the creation of a largely lost generation now, right on the heels of the raising of the Gen-Z bunch that has no idea how to interact with each other or its elders on a personal basis.
I was in a burger joint Thursday night with my family in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, and we watched as a group of 12 came into the place, which had no tables to seat a party larger than 8. They split themselves into one table with the 5 adults and another with the 7 kids, who looked to range between the ages of about 8 to maybe 18.
The adults had a grand old time, talking and laughing and enjoying a drink or two with their burgers. The 7 kids sat quietly at their table, texting and TikToking on their devices for a solid hour. Think about how that American scene has changed just since the invention of the IPhone. It has turned 180 degrees, and that ain’t good for our society.
20 years from now, the current groups of elementary-age kids is going to look at Millennials as their own version of the Greatest Generation. It’s inevitable at this point.
This widening gap in wealth and vanishing ability to interact with one another on a civil and personal basis is resulting in an increasingly polarized and bitter society, another inevitable outcome of a country that is engaging in profligate spending and devaluation of its currency.
The predominance of impersonal social media as our new main mode of communication only serves to hasten the decline. The dominance of every one of the Big Tech firms by a class of ideologically-motivated radicals at one end of the spectrum has only served to speed things up. That’s how we ended up with the elite class installing a doddering, easy-to-control old geezer in the White House in the first place.
America is in decline, and the worst part of it is that, if the vote counts are to be believed - which they probably shouldn’t be - the voters just gave the people who put us into that decline a vote of confidence in the mid-term elections.
History tells us that some sort of a revolution inevitably becomes the next step in this progression for nations in decline. It is a sequence that has happened over and over and over again, just an aspect of human nature.
In rare instances, such revolutions have been peaceful in nature, handled via negotiations and some form of splitting of the larger nation or empire. In far and away the most instances, though, those revolutions have come about violently.
America is headed for one or the other outcome, probably sooner than anyone thinks right now, and it is increasingly hard to see a way out of this progression. The only good news I can see is the reality that America has been at this crossroads before - in the early 1930s - and somehow managed not only to survive but to emerge from WWII as the world’s most powerful country.
Hope against hope that maybe we can do it all over again.
God Bless you all, watch out for yourselves and your loved ones, and:
Happy New Year!
That is all.
As sobbering as the blog was I think the good news is America has always found a way to self correct and I believe it will again. Happy New Year David.
The most important happening in 2022 was the asserted effort by Musk to bring free speech back to America. An effort that has hardly been mentioned on the local news. Hand in hand with the right to defend one’s self, to be able to freely speak (or print) one’s opinion, political or otherwise, is absolutely the most important aspect of a free society. The left, corporations, and Government have merged together to strip that from us. We are losing this fast and the only saving may be the courts until they are taken over.