Happy New Year 2024

Happy New Year everyone, we’re now officially 54 years into the future by my reckoning.

How so? In the first science fiction book I read as a kid set in a definite year, “The Door Into Summer” by Robert Heinlein the first-person narrator mentioned it was 1970.

In Heinlein’s 1970 we had survived a nuclear war, had household robots, and services that would freeze you to be thawed out at some date in the future.

Ah the perils of prediction! We were supposed to be exploring deep space in 2024.

Well we are, just not in person. We didn’t anticipate we’d be using robots to explore the solar system.

So keeping in mind that things never turn out just as you expect, here are some of my New Years predictions.

Ukraine, nothing good I’m afraid.

Ukraine cannot win unless Russia decides to pack up and go home. The disparity in manpower is just too great. They can inflict terrible damage on Russia, for which Russia will take a terrible revenge when and if they take Ukraine.

The world will howl with outrage. Russia will give the answer of the Athenians to the Melosians before they wiped out the adult male population of the island.

“The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.”

Best outcome, stalemate in the eastern part of Ukraine with something like a North/South Korea long-term cease fire.

In America a manufacturing boom in the munitions industry as we replace the ammunition we gave Ukraine.

However that was about due anyway. We gave them a lot of stuff nearing the end of its shelf life we’d otherwise have had to dispose of in an expensive process the Greens are sure to have protested.

The Middle East, crazy as usual. No permanent cease fire, Hamas has crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed. Israel cannot grit their teeth and write off their murdered and raped women and children as a cost-of-living expense.
It’ll be worse when the remaining hostages are returned, or their bodies found.

Israel will reverse its policy on civilian gun ownership (stricter than most Americans imagine since a mass shooting event years ago) and become a heavily armed society again.

Any resolution short of the total destruction of Hamas and we might see a revival of something like the underground organization Irgun as Israelis seek personal vengeance for their families.

The American economy, makes no sense. We have a debt and unfunded mandates that amount to a sum economists call without a trace of hyperbole, “all the money in the world.”

Yet it keeps piling up. Paid for by pumping more funny money into the economy. Something like forty percent of all US currency ever issued was created out of thin air within the past three years.

Yet the effect has been surprisingly small. Prices rise, but not at the rate of expansion of the money supply, for which we should count our blessings.

Keep in mind Stein’s Law, “That which cannot go on forever, will stop.” Something is going to happen. Exactly what, not even I will venture to guess.

Annnnnnd the 2024 election, in many ways unique in our history. A significant number of Republicans believe the last election was stolen, more than will talk about it readily I assure you.

Democrats are running scared and trying to keep Trump off the ballot in an effort the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Civil War.

It’s going to be chaotic and it’s not going to end on election day.

Sorry I couldn’t be more cheerful, maybe next year.