The obligatory musings on the year just past, and the year that is to come.
The Dumpster Fire rages on....
The week between Christmas and New Years is typically when very little gets accomplished except returning gifts and writing about what happened in the old year/what to expect in the new. This year, the writing part can be summed up in one sentence.
If you thought 2022 was bad, just wait until 2023.
It seems trite, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Look at the pattern: 2019 was pretty good overall. 2020 was a dumpster fire. 2021 threw old tires into the burning dumpster. 2022 added more tires, diesel fuel and a truckload of road kill (for the fragrance) to the flames. If this pattern holds—and there’s no indication it won’t—2023 will be much, much worse.
I don’t claim to be an expert at any kind of divination (although I’m perfectly willing to take a stab at haruspicy for a good cause, and I promise to put your entrails back after I’ve read them) but it doesn’t take a seer or prophet to connect the dots into an ugly picture of what lies ahead.
Those dots are everywhere, especially on the internet. Some of the best ones are right here on Substack, as I’m sure everyone reading this already knows. In particular, three recent pieces caught my eye as being especially large dots that make a very disturbing image.
The first, Omnibus shows Congress’s Priorities: Authoritarianism and War1 by Dr. Ron Paul, briefly summarizes the 4,000 page, $1.7 trillion dollar omnibus appropriations bill that just passed Congress.
That’s $1,700,000,000,000 if you’re counting zeros. I like to do that from time to time, just to remind myself about how big the spending numbers really are. It just seems like saying ‘billion’ or ‘trillion’ is cheating, in a way.
This monster includes another $40 billion for Ukraine (bringing the total to more than $100 billion this far for our proxy war with Russia), more than $500 million ‘extra’ above Biden’s request for the FBI to fight “extremism” (like parents who object to what school boards are allowing children to be taught, or working hand-in-glove with social media platforms to suppress stories about Hunter’s laptop, or objecting to masks or vaccine mandates or…well, you know), and provide border security everywhere except our OWN border.
As Dr. Paul so eloquently puts it:
“The fiscal year 2022 omnibus appropriations bill expands government, reduces liberty, and increases government debt…leading to more price inflation. Our political elites prioritize militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home over addressing the problems facing the American people…. This will fuel growing discontent with the political system. As the economy continues to worsen and the attempt to run the world continues to result in failures, the discontent will grow….”
Dr. Paul being who he is, he very firmly points the finger at the Fed’s “destructive” monetary policy, and I certainly can’t disagree. However, I think before too long the Fed will have other things to worry about. Namely, the collapse of the petrodollar.
In a recent Substack Predictions and Prophecies for 2023,2 Tree of Woe lays out the case for the soon-to-occur end of the petrodollar. As a follow up to the Running on Empty3 series (which I also recommend), Tree of Woe reminds us that the collapse of the petrodollar has been years in the making. Since 2017, when Russia and China created the petroyuan, the petrodollar has largely depended on Saudi Arabia’s insistence on trading for oil only in dollars and China’s dependence on US trade dollars to keep its economy afloat. Now, without “Emperor Trump” around keeping China reluctant re: rocking the boat and the Saudis being noticeably miffed with the Biden regime…things have changed.
Russia, China and the other BRICS (Brazil, India, South Africa) were working towards establishing a global banking system separate from the SWIFT system (that’s allowed US and allied central banks to basically do whatever they wanted for decades) even before the Ukrainian kerfuffle broke out. SWIFT-enforced sanctions on Russia may have hurt Moscow’s economy, especially at first. Recently, though, Putin has shown the world, and especially Europe, that in the 2020’s it’s not so much ‘he who has the gold makes the rules’ but ‘he who supplies the hydrocarbons’. With winter already here, Russian gas and oil policy has Europe by the tender parts, and Vladimir doesn’t seem reluctant to squeeze them.
I find it curious that Ms. Thunberg has been curiously absent from my TV screen as of late. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, and not that her asinine greenie-weenie dogma has left millions of Europeans with the stark choice of either freezing or doing what Putin says.
Tree of Woe goes on to predict, within the next one to two years, the disruption and collapse of the petrodollar, with a number of catastrophic consequences for the West in general and America in particular. Basically, inflation will go through the roof, the bond, stock and housing markets will collapse, the debt will become (even more) unsustainable…and our Oligarchs will start a hot(ter) war to try to paper over the cracks.
The piece ends by comparing our current situation to that of Great Britain before and during WWII, and predicts roughly the same outcome: a couple of decades of austerity, miserable growth, and lean times all ‘round.
The third, and most chilling, is an article by Michael Rectenwald, The Great Leap Backward.4
The only slightly tongue-in-cheek title refers to Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and compares it with the Great Reset we’ve heard so much about lately from Mr. Schwab and others of the Davos set.
Being a chapter from a much larger book (linked in the article) there’s a good deal of Mao’s history that led to him having the power to decree his Great Leap. When the focus turns to the Great Leap itself, it really caught my attention. I vaguely remember learning a bit about the Great Leap decades ago in school—peasants were forced into collective farms, a massive industrialization push was made, effective agriculture and manufacturing practices were replaced by Party-generated platitudes, tens of millions of Chinese starved and the country nearly collapsed.
It was all that, and more. Even more disturbing, Rectenberg sees definite parallels between the Great Leap and the Great Reset:
“…the Great Leap Forward and the Great Reset share one essential feature: the arbitrary imposition of a collectivist unscientific ideology on all human activity and nature…”
Ultimately, “the Great Reset is a de-civilizational project” with climate catastrophism being adapted on the same unscientific, ideological grounds as Mao decreed for China’s agriculture. Mao insisted that fields be horribly over seeded because “seeds are happiest when growing together” (instead of sprout-level class solidarity, young shoots chocked each other out and most died), we’re told by Greta that CO2 is pollution, we have to a abandon modern farming techniques, and adapt our industries and economies to inadequate, unreliable, ‘sustainable’ power—all in the name of Carbon Neutrality.
We might as well mandate using pixie dust and unicorn farts. They’re about as reasonable as carbon neutrality and about as real as anthropogenic climate change.
Rectenberg describes the oft-stated goal of carbon neutrality by 2050 as “insanely impossible”. He then goes on to say that “we risk returning to the pre-industrial era of drudgery and intermittent starvation if the planners of the Great Reset have their way.”
He’s also right about this, which I think is actually part of the plan. Everything I’ve seen come out of Davos and the WEF suggests they’re Malthusians on steroids. Their devotion to climate change is quite cultish in many ways—the fanaticism, the strident attacks against all who question their dogma, and the curious Indulgences for the high priests and priestesses of the Inner Circles.
For the rest of us? We’ve already been told that we’ll own nothing and be happy, meat will be a special treat, and bugs will be on the menu regularity…but not, I suspect, at WEF banquets. Not that I’ll ever be invited to any of their meetings to find out….
Taken together, these three articles don’t exactly fill me with optimism for 2023. Lavish spending on global causes and expanding the Security State while issues affecting ordinary Americans are ignored. The prospect of even higher rates of inflation and depression, with yet another war to ‘fix’ the economy. An administration headed by an obviously demented, doddering political hack whose family corruption is only just now coming to light, partnering with globalist depopulators who see themselves as our natural rulers. A throttling of economic activity and food production, with easily predictable consequences, all to keep the planet from getting a fever, or a chill, or something.
This will not end well.
I encourage everyone to read these articles for yourselves, and draw your own conclusions—my summaries can’t match the originals, despite my best efforts. I hope that my analysis is terribly wrong, but I’m afraid it’s not too far off what’s coming.
I wish I could offer up happy thoughts and a vision of a bright, peaceful, happy and prosperous New Year ahead of us. Sadly, I just ground up my last pixie and the unicorn just flew out of the corral on a rainbow of flatulence.
I’m afraid we’ve let the dumpster fire burn so long we can’t close the lid, and I only see more tires, diesel fuel and road kill coming for 2023.
But as they say: Happy New Year!
Pixie dust processing image created by me from various other images.
Hilarious, awesome Unicorn farting rainbow image by sinamonsperling at https://www.deviantart.com/sinamonsperling/art/unicorns-fart-rainbows-381339815
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/december/26/omnibus-shows-congress-s-priorities-authoritarianism-and-war/
https://mises.org/wire/great-leap-backward