Tag: Black Swan

Here’s How I Predict Things Will Go Down

America, Elections, Law and Order, Politics

Primary season has officially begun. Let me begin with the caveat: BARRING ANY CATACLYSMIC/BLACK SWAN EVENT, the 2024 Election will be the nastiest, bloodiest, most disgraceful, embarrassing and most controversial one yet.

It’s always “the most important election in our lifetime”. That’s like saying, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” or “If you get to that fork in the road, take it!”.

I still believe a Black Swan or worse, and “Unknown Unknown” event will take place between now and the election. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term Black Swan, the Wikipedia description isn’t bad: “an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on an ancient saying that presumed black swans did not exist, until they were discovered in Australia in 1697, and it then became reinterpreted to mean an unforeseen and consequential event.

Given the chaos that we are now experiencing, I also wouldn’t rule out the “Unknown Unknown”. In 2002 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained, “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

So, I think either a Black Swan or an Unknown Unknown event (I distinguish between the two only by degree of surprise and impact) will take place before the election.

But barring one of these:

  1. Trump will win the GOP nomination by March.
  2. Biden will win the Dem nomination by March.
  3. In August or latest September 2024 Biden will announce he will not stand for re-election thereby, per the Dem rules, the DNC will appoint a candidate, either Newsome, Michelle or someone who is being groomed right now and will come out of the woodwork.
  4. The nastiness and skullduggery of the DNC as they continue to try to take down Trump will reach unprecedented heights and civil war will ensue in checkout lines and across breakfast and dinner tables.
  5. If the GOP can get their forces aligned and their messaging right, and if they will do WHATEVER IT TAKES TO ENSURE THAT ONLY LEGITIMATE VOTES ARE COUNTED, i.e. DEMAND observation access to the key polling sites around the country where we got screwed in 2020…
  6. Trump will win the election decisively. The GOP will win the Senate and barely retain the House.
  7. The Left will go nuts. There will be civil unrest/demonstrations/riots/destruction that will make the Occupy Wall Street, Hands Up Don’t Shoot, George Floyd, CHAZ, CHOP and January 6th riots look like playground squabbles.
  8. Martial law will be declared.
  9. There will be numerous attempts on Trump’s life. All will be foiled. He will be sworn in January 2025 and will immediately begin to clean up the Swamp, with mixed results.
  10. The REAL insurrection of the Left will continue and the four most tumultuous years in U.S. history will begin (you don’t think the Left is going to stand down do you???!!!)

So much can and will happen between now and January 2025 that I know I’m going to have to modify this prediction, but as I see it right now, that’s what’s going to happen.

We’ll see. Keep your seatbelts fastened.

The Topics Are Being Covered

America, Faith, Government, Headlines, Media, Politics, Reason, Religion, Society & Culture, Values

I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks. It’s not because I don’t have anything to say. It’s because there has been a groundswell of commentary by others far more articulate than I who cover just about everything on which I might opine! Authors like Victor Davis Hanson, Brian C. Joondeph, Matt Vespa, Derek Hunter, Katie Pavlich, and so many others write superbly, say it like it is, and often take the words right out of my mouth, and before I can form them!

And it’s not just the conservative websites and blogs that carry their thoughts. Increasingly, and finally (!) even leftist media outlets are starting to react to the never-ending stream of BS that emanates from the mouths of the government and their lackies.

Actually, it’s the other way around. The lackies are running the government. The leftist demagogues in big tech, the media, academia, the Marxist implants in the judicial system, the use(less) idiots seeking their fifteen minutes of fame…all are formed into an assault on traditional values. Think the scene from the Battle of Helms Deep in Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers.

The topics are at this point, familiar. There is, like clockwork, an idiocy or atrocity or two or three stemming from the Left each and every day. It truly is like the scene shown above. The forces of good and evil are arrayed against one another, and for the moment, it’s as if evil has the upper hand.

Here’s the problem:

On the Right we have free thinking, self-governing, independent, solo practitioners of Life.

On the Left, we have lemmings, sheep, sycophants, utopian-fantasy, “can’t we all just get along”, head-in-the-sand, dumbed-down, addled and brainwashed followers led by power-and-wealth-hungry demagogues.

It’s extremely difficult for individuals to stand up to the crowd. Especially when the crowd has megaphones and billboards the size of jumbotrons!

It’s not a matter of the Right “waking up”. We’re fully awake. It’s that INDIVIDUALS cannot beat the COLLECTIVE without HELP.

Where does that HELP come from? Is it a charismatic, righteous leader? Is it a conservative institution that rises above all others? Is it a Black Swan/Monumental event that draws us together by forcing us to concentrate on the traditional things that matter? Is it Divine Intervention?

I think nothing short of a catastrophic or tipping point event that compels the weak-minded Left to set aside their foolishness and return to level-headed basics together with the aggregate pleadings of millions upon millions of God-fearing individuals imploring Divine Intervention will break the back of the cancer that has affected our nation and the rest of the Western World.

Another 9-11. China invading Taiwan. The Israelis nuking Tehran. NORKO bombing Japan. Russia using tactical nukes in Ukraine or invading Poland or Finland. Or less likely: a CME (coronal mass ejection) wiping out our electrical grid or Ebola/Marburg exploding in Africa and spreading throughout the world.

These are all what we’d call “known unknowns”. Then there are the “unknown unknowns”. By definition, we can’t see it/them coming.

The situation is beyond “out of control” at this point. We can hope and pray that the consequences of “wokeness” keep materializing. Corporations (Disney, Anheuser Busch) and Schools (school board attendance/protests) are just a couple of examples of the swinging of the pendulum. Late-night comedians (Maher, Gutfeld) are picking up on it. Legislatures are putting their feet down in various red-districts. Churches are sheepishly (.sic) returning to traditional dogma.

Voices more powerful than mine are becoming more bold, more heard, more acknowledged and maybe, just maybe, the ground is being prepared for the final battle. We must win or perish.

A Black Swan May Be The Only Thing That Will Stop This Madness

America, Economy, Emergency Preparedness, History, Society & Culture

In my previous post I concluded that it may take a cataclysmic event to restore sanity to our nation. I’m not talking about the price of eggs or gas skyrocketing, or store shelves being empty for a few days. I’m talking about something that will cause even the most dumbed-down, brain-addled, handheld-screen-addicted person to pick his or her head up and say, “Wow, maybe some things are more important than what the Kardashians are up to this week!”

I’ve long said that Economics is the dismal science, an academic exercise in futility, and while it may be fun and may earn a whole raft of propeller-heads an income, even wealth, it’s really only mental masturbation of the highest order.

Why do I say this? Because economics deals with building “models” that describe what the panoply of pulled levers have caused in the past with the hope that those models will help us predict the future. The fundamental problem with these models, however, is that they depend on two flawed assumptions: 1) the “rational man” and 2) the “absence of an outside shock”.

In case you haven’t been paying attention let me state the obvious:

First, there is no such thing as a rational man (or woman). All human beings are driven, at least in part if not entirely, by feelings, perceptions, etc., what I’d characterize as “squishy stuff”, NOT rational, analytical thought.

And, as we have all seen, “outside shocks” OCCUR ALL THE TIME! They differ in magnitude, of course, but they destroy models’ explanations of the past and their usefulness as predictors of the future.

Nevertheless, thousands of economists and bureaucrats pontificate endlessly on the overarching topics that impact our daily lives and GET PAID TO DO SO! Sometimes they’re right, more often they’re wrong, but they persevere.

In his famous book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a Black Swan as an improbable event with three basic characteristics: it is unpredictable, it has massive impact, and after the fact, explanations are concocted to make it appear less random.

Examples of past Black Swan events include: the 2000 Do-Com Crash, 9-11, the Fall of Lehman Brothers, the Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear Disasters, BREXIT, and most recently, COVID.

None of these were severe enough to wake people up. The effects, though severe, were not of such duration that people got serious about paying attention to things that matter.

Now we’re sufficiently far down the slippery slope, there is sufficient chaos, there is enough “information” flak in the air, that only a really BIG Black Swan of significant duration will, in my opinion, bring us back to REAL Reality!

So, what might such a Black Swan consist of?

China invading Taiwan
Israel nuking Tehran
The North Koreans launching a nuke at Japan
The San Andreas fault creating Nevada beach-front property
Tactical nukes get used in Ukraine
NATO deploys troops to Ukraine
The Stock Market crashes
The Yellowstone Volcano erupts
Biden resigns and Harris becomes President and Michele Obama becomes Vice President (threw this one in because it is such a frightening nightmare!)
A terrorist attack on the 9 key substations takes down the electrical grid for from 3 months to a year
Another, more deadly virus gets out of a lab
A coronal mass ejection REALLY hits Earth and wipes out much of what is electronic

I could conjure up more… These are just some “known unknowns”. A Black Swan is by definition an “unknown unknown”!

That one about a protracted blackout is the one that worries me the most. Three weeks without electricity and we’re in trouble. Three months without electricity and we’re in a shit-hit-the-fan, possibly even TEOTWAKI (The End of the World As We Know It) situation. I urge my readers to think about this stuff. The time to prepare for a Black Swan walking up your driveway isn’t after it’s already at your front door. It’s not as if we haven’t been forewarned and as if we don’t see how vulnerable our country and society is.

No Silver Bullets, No Easy Answers

America, Emergency Preparedness, Government, Headlines, Reason, Society & Culture, Values

Since the election, through the Holidays, now well into the New Year, I’ve been thinking about the answer to the question, “What now?”.

Sorting through the “news” each day, I can’t help but see more and more confusion over what is true, what is falsehood, what is sensationalism, what is understatement. The one word to describe our state of affairs is: CHAOS.

I don’t see any cohesive strategy, any clear direction, any comprehensible plan to either ‘make our country great again’ or ‘take it back’ or ‘drain the swamp’ or ‘root out corruption’. I see little to no consequences for malfeasance, for lying, for theft, for waste, for self-abusive destruction of what has since its inception been the greatest country in the world.

‘Common sense’ is no longer common.

Demagoguery,, self-delusion, obsequiousness and self-centeredness are common.

Psychologists call it ‘other-directed’. Fewer and fewer people think critically much less skeptically. Individualism has given way to herd instinct. Emotions rule – no one spends the time to think rationally.

What was fringe is now mainstream. Pushbacks against what would in other time be considered lunacy are met with overwhelming, crushing condemnation. It’s as if the one reasonable person standing in the middle of a valley is being charged by thousands of buffalo. Just read the responses on Twitter or any other social medium to a ‘traditional’ statement or viewpoint.

I’ve long thought that the way to change the course of our national ship is with good leadership, with the development of new Hollywood heroes who successfully fight and win against the encroaching and increasingly pervasive evil infecting our society, with ‘reality’ hitting Gen X and Gen Z such that they awaken from their folly.

It ain’t happening! The megaphone afforded by the Internet puts power in the hands of the deleterious, the destructive, the Evil. On one hand it improves lives. On the other hand, it destroys them.

It’s not just artificial intelligence that has supplanted real intelligence. Social media and the ubiquitous handheld phone/tablet/computer combined is now an addiction.

Pew Research tells us:

  • 46% of teens say they use the internet “almost constantly”
  • 48% of teens say they go online several times a day
  • 48% of teenage girls say they’re online “almost constantly”
  • 43% of teenage boys say they’re online “almost constantly”

Look around you. It’s not just teenagers. So long as our society continues to descend into an artificial reality, fundamental human priorities will be back-burnered, what’s important neglected, what’s moral diminished, what’s good scoffed at.

No hero, no charismatic leader, no game of whack-a-mole is going to turn this around. Artificial reality has become Real Reality!

Thus I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it will take some kind of cataclysmic event to wake up society and get people serious again. A Black Swan. Something that completely shatters what I will call Artificial Delusion and return us to basics.

It’s long past time to prepare for that Black Swan event.

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