Wolves

 

Realism / Valentin Serov/ The Wolf and the Crane

Still snowed in, the ice crust is thicker and it is still below freezing.  Gonna hang around inside the pod a bit and see just how lazy I can be. 

Right now I am staring out at snow covered roofs and ice covered branches and trying to figure out where my writing will go next.  Thankfully the reign of Fuckwad is now completely over and I am praying that dull old Joe will remain so and we can get onto the more important tasks we have ahead of us.

Maybe sitting in the house waiting for the weather to change is the metaphor that I need.  Things are actually looking pretty good.  Now that he-who-must-not-be-named is gone we can maybe can poke around to see what has been happening outside that particular charade.

I am thinking that folks will finally get to the point where they realize that we are going to have to live with the Rona.  They will need some time to realize and digest the data and realize just how bad the response was.  What will be interesting is that the response was primarily drafted by the medical industry and their response was at best suboptimal.  When the adenovirus-based vaccines are released and we get to fighting Rona the same way that we fight the flu (with about a 50% success rate) and a modified herd immunity, we can move on with our lives.

The economy will be the next big pickle.  The Rona did us zero favors.  The Fed and congress pulled out some pretty big guns to keep people happy (hell, I spent their money just dandy thank you) but I can’t imagine for a minute that the economy is going to magically improve anytime soon.  Things just might be getting seriously hinkey in the future.  Now, I don’t want y’all to think that I am predicting a economic meltdown.  In my dotage, and with the experience of incorrectly forecasting the end of the economic world as we know it, I have developed a 1-10 scale and give a range of possible outcomes.  In this scale 1=complete economic collapse with people eating their housepets and 10= full employment with a $15 minimum wage and medicare for all with a mandatory 32 hour work week.  For the year coming up I see us in the 3 to 5 range.

Politics will now see who can shut the other side up.  Expect witch hunts and continuation of cancel culture by both sides of the fray.  I think that it is gonna be interesting to see who is better at this game.  Both sides have some mad skills and with a divided government, things could tend toward the weird.

The environment is the slowpoke of the problems.  CO2 is at 417.  Plastics are out of control and the economy is based on the idea that making shit worse is the way to profit.  Luckily, the simple fact that the most-excellent, fungible, high-value energy source that is the concurrent cause of the environmental damage and the economic expansion is looking shaky (and yes Virginia, peak oil is a thing) will allow the problem to be solved about the same time that my great-grandchildren take up their places.

What I am saying first and foremost is that the big distraction is gone.  Lots of things that have been left can now begin to be addressed.  I tend to think that they won’t be addressed, because the whole house of cards is built upon contradictions, but at least we can maybe, just maybe begin to ask why the problems are still getting worse without foaming at the mouth and blaming an incompetent for the problems we created ourselves over the past fifty years.