Doom! Gloom! Many are predicting something like an apocalypse. WWIII is imminent due to multiple allied nations attacking Israel, drawing in both U.S. and Russia! Many chaotic and badly reported riots in the U.K., some saying it is like civil war! Financial collapse appears to be on the horizon; the Nikkei is down 4,000 (8%), the largest drop since 1987! The DOW and S&P500 were both down sharply last week and who knows how low they will go this morning? It opened over 2% lower.
There are other things that would fuel the doomsaying, of course. For one thing, there is “the very state” of American politics with an election coming up. The left wing of American politics has been radicalized more and more since the 1960s and it has gotten much worse in the last decade. They have proven over and over just how much contempt they have for inner cities. And the right wing? While in their policy positions, rank and file conservatives are more or less the same as they have been for a few decades (that’s the nature of conservatism), they seem increasingly in thrall to what reasonable people might find to be controlled opposition, with a pungent combination of idiots, frauds, anti-Semites, and…checks notes…doomsayers, all manufactured and pushed heavily on my current social dwelling-place online, Twitter. (No, not X, dammit.)
In this backdrop, President Trump is almost assassinated, but the response from the corporate Establishment media is strangely muted—because, of course, they loathe him very much and are very sorry he wasn’t actually killed. The Democrats, desperate for a candidate who can beat Trump, pushed the doddering old sinner Biden onto the debate stage, acting all shocked that he did badly and pretending to discover to their shock that he’s actually senile, as a way of giving themselves a pretext to replace him. And now we blink and the Democratic candidate is Kamala Harris, once rated the very most “liberal” (i.e., illiberal: left-wing authoritarian) Senator in 2019. She is also, in short, an appallingly condescending empty suit, the very mouthpiece of the Establishment; four years of her would be pure torture. So, naturally, of course, the polls have Trump and Harris in a nail-biter.
And don’t get us started on the satanic Paris Olympics. And the aliens. And what AI and robots will do to jobs. And assorted conspiracies.
Do I have any wise words in response to all this?
It’s a good idea to be prepared for bad times. Don’t worry too much. War and hard times come and go, most of us survive, and if there’s a silver lining, coddled younger generations could use a bit of waking up. This is all more or less out of your control; you can control only how you react, i.e., what you do for your family, friends, and for those incapable of caring for themselves. I am less worried about wars and recessions than I am about the potentially disastrous responses to them. Jesus is probably not coming anytime very soon; I’m just sayin’.
Be the voice of reason.
Thumb drive now available for pre-order. I’ll explain more later about ZWIBook, but if you want all of Project Gutenberg on a thumb drive with a bespoke book reader, here it is. Available for pre-order to select countries (for now). I’ll be shipping soonish within two weeks. The very first few dozen I’ll do by hand, and the drives will be signed, as shown in the picture. Later ones probably won’t be.
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