Ramblings in the Early Morning

I do not claim infallibility, but I do try to have a reasoned basis for opinions.  The economic perspective is looking even worse than I thought, driven largely by an incompetent administration.  Interest rates have soared beyond what even I expected last year.  Mortgage rates have more than doubled in a few months.  Many, many people aren’t even trying to work, due largely to government hand-outs, limiting the labor supply.  But the most important thing driving inflation is energy prices.  Energy costs factor into every product and service.  Inflation will not ameliorate until energy prices are dealt with.  And the only real way to have that occur without doing immense damage to the economy is by increasing supply.  And supply won’t increase as long as we have an administration overtly hostile to the primary source of energy in the country–fossil fuels.  Demented Joe’s first act was to cancel the Keystone pipeline.  He isn’t in charge of anything, but his staff are all radical environmentalists who are delusional about climate change and about what renewables can achieve.

The incompetence and ideology of this administration means that energy costs will stay high and the economy will continue to be hampered.  Things won’t get better any time soon.  And the inflation and accompanying high interest rates will inevitably affect home sales, car sales, and dampen a wide range of economic activities.  It also lessens investment in capital projects, due to higher financing costs.  So the economy is going to go into limp-along mode, at best, and most of the population is going to suffer a decrement to their quality of life.

The country is more divided than ever, with woke bullshit and identify politics run completely amok.  Instead of promoting unity and tolerance, these policies generate competition on the basis of race, gender, age, ethnic background, religion, sexual orientation and any other basis the whacko progressives can come up.  It is literally driving people crazy and creating a tendency toward violence among groups.   And what we are doing to children is literally abusive, exposing them to adult ideological struggles and screwing with their gender at an early age.  I am stunned that the medical and psychiatric community does not strongly fight back against these trends, but then I realize that they are all being educated in whacked universities.  We are well and truly screwed.

In foreign affairs, I think many people do not appreciate what is at stake in the need to actually defeat Russia in the Ukraine war.  It is a shocking disruption to the post-World War II environment to see one country wantonly invading another independent country for no reason other than, as Putin himself recently bragged, because it could and it thought it had some historical claim to territory.  And the level of destruction of cities, villages, farms, infrastructure and the murder of civilians is a level of barbarity you would hope we were past.  Not in Putin’s Russia.  A failure to defeat this conduct means it is acceptable to the civilized world, which at this point clearly doesn’t include Russia.

There is a cost to be paid for this but there always is to protect civilization’s gains, which really means to protect the improved quality of life of individuals.  Putin will die eventually.  Hopefully soon.  What follows is unclear, but hard for it to be worse.  While Russia seems to be struggling along now economically, it the next five years it will be close to collapse.  Not only will Europe not buy its energy, but the Mideast producers will defend their market share in India and Asia.  Russia is losing its best and brightest young people.  Its military is slowly but surely losing massive amounts of equipment and more importantly, qualified personnel.  The population will begin to grumble and eventually revolt.  We must stay the course; this is a unique opportunity to destroy a clear villain.

Never in my life have I been more anxious and fearful for the future of our society.  Destructive ideologies are embedded deep within our institutions.  It will be a long-term effort to root those out and tremendous courage to take on that task and the blowback from the whack-job progressives, who have no self-awareness and no appreciation for the damage they are doing.