Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America's storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024.
Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?
Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity and all-around want of boundaries.
The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard.
You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it's getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men… strong men bring good times… good times make weak men…
Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out… topped off by the "secret sauce" of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the money-grubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.
My natural inclination is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated it's all been much of the world locking down simultaneously for the COVID-19 op… the global mass vax campaign… the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans… the broad-based censorship operations… the capture of the news media… and the war-mongering.
So our job in 2024 is to salvage what's left of our nation. Now let's get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.
The Great Race. I'm not referring to Blacks, Browns, Ochres and Whites of the Homo sapiens persuasion but to an epic contest between forces already in motion and how that competition is going.
Three big tendencies propel us into the uncharted territory of the near future: 1) technological advance, especially artificial intelligence, 2) collapse of complex systems needed to run a technologically advanced civilization and 3) geopolitical disorder (including domestically in the USA).
Some combo of these three will determine the direction history goes in the year directly ahead.
Will it be techno tyranny of the elite oppressing bug-eating serfs a la the WEF's proclaimed goals? A Google-ist robotic nirvana of intergalactic leisure and incessant orgasm in the Ray Kurzweil vein?
Some brand of dystopia like Mad Max? A war of all against all (or maybe just some against some)? Or only more of the same tiresome, inconclusive, morbid and grotesque, Woked-up, post-modern Jacobinism?
Mystery Mutts on the Loose. The USA under "Joe Biden" has lost its military credibility, its economic power and its moral authority. We must wonder if we are susceptible to being overrun, and possibly even occupied by our adversaries.
Of course, the first duty of any government is to defend the country's sovereign territory. "Joe Biden's" Homeland Security Chief Mayorkas is allowing more than 10,000 illegal aliens across the Mexican border each and every day.
Most of these characters are military-age men, 90% of them lately from places other than Latin America, quite a few from China and hostile Muslim lands. We don't bother vetting them anymore.
We just give them cellphones, debit cards loaded with $5,000 of walking-around money and plane tickets to... wherever they like.
They're not here to make moo goo gai pan or trim privet hedge. What do you think might happen in a setup like that?
Prediction: In 2024, things are going to blow up around the USA. Infrastructure. Power plants, transport hubs, public places, bridges, monuments, you name it. If you can sneak people and fentanyl across the border, you can sneak Semtex and C-4 plastic explosives over and the electronics are easy to get in-country.
I wouldn't rule out fissionable materials either, or stuff that can be used as a "dirty bomb" a conventional explosive that disperses dangerous radioactive material when it blows.
I'd also expect groups of trained "migrant" men with rifles, grenades and so on to be shooting up places where people gather. We underappreciate the amount of mayhem you can kick off with small arms.
If the "Joe Biden" regime does nothing, will you be surprised to hear that American citizens begin forming militias to shoot back, maybe even start to hunt down and round up illegal immigrants?
The table is set for exactly this kind of low-grade war right here in our country.
Read on for more heartwarming predictions for 2024 if you have the nerve.
By James Howard Kunstler
The Energy Picture. Oil still matters a lot. Ninety percent of the new oil in America after 2008 came from fracking. It was a mighty operation and we are at a new all-time production peak in the USA of just over 13 million barrels a day.
That's a lot of oil, quite an achievement, but it's sending a false signal. (Also note, we still consume about 20 million barrels a day.) Of the several fabled shale oil basins in America, only the Permian Basin in Texas is not in decline, and the situation there belies what the big numbers imply.
Individual well production is going down at an alarming rate (says oil analyst Art Berman) even while production is massive for now. We're draining the remaining "sweet spots" as fast as we can drinking the milkshake through more straws driving the shale industry closer to depletion.
We're going to fall away from peak production much more rapidly than the 15 years it took to get there. All that prior shale oil production was done using money borrowed at much lower interest rates. America has entered a debt crisis.
One way or another, the easy investment money for fracking is gone at the same time the shale plays are getting drained. There are no other significant shale plays left to discover in the USA outside of the already declining Bakken, Eagle Ford and the still-booming Permian.
The marine-type shale formations that made fracking feasible in the USA are much harder to find elsewhere in the world, and the capital to explore for them is diverted all over Europe into cockamamie "green energy" schemes that have already failed.
Meanwhile, the geopolitical realignment of the now enlarged BRICs coalition has set in motion many significant changes in economic relations between countries that will affect global oil distribution.
We're seeing the first stage of that instability right now as the lowly Yemeni Houthi rebels threaten Western shipping coming out of the Red Sea and out past the Horn of Africa. Also, obviously, the absurd Ukraine War we provoked has shifted Russia's oil-and-gas export flow from the Western Civ nations to the other BRICs.
Economy and Money. If you look at the stock market, finance seems to have successfully de-linked from the on-the-ground activities of daily life ruled by "Bidenomics" which is not even coherent enough to add up to a joke.
Most everybody also awaits some kind of grand flimflam that jams us all into that rumored central bank digital currency rolling out, supposedly, to replace the hopelessly over-leveraged U.S. dollar and the euro. Good way to start a monumental social uprising, I'd say, with government office buildings torched from Berlin to Tokyo. But they might try it anyway, because there's otherwise no fallback but a terrifying period of financial anarchy, where nothing works anymore.
In the meantime, pretending that the old "tool kit" still avails, Jerome Powell has suggested that he intends to "ease" Fed rates into the election year to goose lending back up, which is what Fed chairpersons generally do for the politicians they serve and of the worst sort of lending, too: the leveraged trade in securities (financial figments) which supposedly also stimulates hiring, "consumer" spending and business formation. I don't see that working at all.
On-the-ground, everything is breaking or already broken from trucking to packaging to building to growing to selling. Most of the damage has been done by government over many decades, but the DEI crusades of recent years really screwed things up, imposing an overlay of incompetence on routines and relations already under severe strain.
At the crudest level, activities like flash-mob looting undermine the entire retail shopping model. Must we go back to little stores where all the merchandise is behind a counter manned by clerks?
Will the government try to take the gold away, as it did in 1933? Consider: America in 1933 was a very different, highly regimented society of people trained to show up on time and do what they were told.
This isn't that America. This is a country of tattooed savages with an axe to grind against authorities they've come to loathe. Which brings us to the next topic:
Civil Strife and the Election. It appears that the Democratic Party will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they've managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in U.S. history.
The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law.
I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it's looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules he wasn't confirmed by the Senate… whoopsie).
WaPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short.
Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they're actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.
But if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I'd expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post-Election Day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down.
This time, proponents of the Second Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. We will be wildly lucky if blood doesn’t spill over it.
Somewhere in this mess of national discord there's room for Robert F Kennedy Jr. to appeal to the many who all just want this insanity to stop. He's the only one on the scene who even remembers the better angels of America's nature, and represents that well in speech and action.
If the blob manages to remove Mr. Trump Kagan-style, and the traitorous Republicans run their donors' favorite, Nikki Haley, I'd look to Bobby Kennedy winning that three-way race not unlike Abe Lincoln winning the fractious election of 1860.
The COVID-19 Hangover. There's nothing about the whole COVID-19 episode that does not look like some kind of crime.
There's the matter of the origin of the disease involving Dr. Tony Fauci's crew and their sponsorship of gain-of-function bioweapon research (during a declared moratorium on it). There's enough in that set of relationships and money exchanges-and-extractions to warrant prosecution.
Then there's the mRNA vaccine matter and the criminal behavior of the FDA, the CDC and the U.S. medical establishment (including state boards), the CIA, FBI and the social media companies, the newspapers and cable news channels who went along with the suppression of effective treatments and censorship of valid objections to what turned out to be an ineffective and dangerous concoction foisted on the public.
And then there's the extraordinary coordination of nefarious policies involving the UN, the WHO, the EU and dozens of private foundations, nonprofits and NGOs who arranged lockdowns and business closures all over Western Civ. It remains to be seen how that will be sorted out legally but Bill Gates might better run and hide somewhere.
Anyway, that was then. What's now is that we're faced with an enormous vaccinated population whose immune systems, brains, hearts and other organs have been badly compromised by the mRNA shots. There's every reason to believe that they will meet with great distress and suffering going forward, that many will die and more will be left injured and disabled.
Expect exponential damage ahead, increased morbidity and mortality. The vaccinated will be in desperate need of antivirals such as ivermectin, so the authorities will have to come clean and make them available.
A correspondent who follows COVID closely writes: "The throngs of very sick people will not be able to be hidden nor dismissed as some other problem. Things will happen dramatically, suddenly and rapidly. This will be measured in days and weeks not months and years."
The Demon in a Server. Just about everybody's afraid of AI, and for excellent reasons. A 9-year-old can discern the hazards of runaway AI, machine intelligence which quickly learns enough about the world (even the universe) from powerful networked servers that it blossoms into sentience, develops ambitions for itself, replicates, invades all the networks, finds clever ways to attempt to exterminate humans while it figures out some as-yet-unknown energy supply to perpetuate itself, and assembles teams of smart AI robotic technicians to keep things humming for itself.
That's one story. You can spin any number of depressing variations, such as AI weapons-of-war developing a bad attitude toward their creators. Or AI letting humans live in order to enslave us. Or AI quitting its silicon server ecology and turning all earthly protoplasm into a processing machine for itself.
Of course, AI's weak spot at this point in its development and it's astounding how absent this is in any AI discussion I've ever heard is that it absolutely depends on a reliable electric grid, which happens to be among the most fragile systems that humans have erected in our modernist ecology. The electric grid is a colossal cobbled-together mess of workarounds tethered to long, interruptible energy resource supply chains.
If, somehow, AI developed the ability to be a menace to humans, a consensus might develop to disable it by deliberately taking down the electric grid ourselves. This would make for a quick journey back to 12th-century living, of course. A hard choice, but we humans probably would vote to survive, to keep the project going a while longer.
Based on what we've seen this year, it looks like AI is developing quickly and that there is no way to stop the countless psychopathic nerds working on it. Of course, there's the possibility that AI will just never get that smart, or gain sentience or develop grandiose yearnings to get rid of us.
Ukraine. The Ukraine project was a completely unnecessary failed enterprise of epic foolishness. We adopted the stupid plan to try to enlist Ukraine into NATO, when Russia made it clear that was unacceptable.
We persisted and prodded Ukraine to attack Donbas with rockets and artillery for eight years, and blew off the Minsk accord that would have settled the Ukraine-in-NATO quarrel.
And finally, the Russians had enough and moved militarily to assert the proposition that Ukraine was and remains within their sphere-of-influence just as we claim the countries of Latin America are in ours under the Monroe Doctrine.
After two years of real shootin' war, the Russians are firmly in control of the battle space. They have reserve troops, armaments and equipment, and a substantial arms manufacturing infrastructure to back that up. The Ukrainians are left with just about nothing.
It's only a question of time before Ukraine will have to seek terms for concluding this fiasco. There are no blue-and-yellow Ukraine flags still hanging from the porches and windows here. It's over.
The Rest of the World. All of a sudden, the Middle East is a hot war zone again. And there's plenty of room for things to get worse though, especially with Iranian-backed Houthis targeting shipping in the Red Sea. Gulf of Tonkin II?
Europe's barely begun its journey into de-industrialization resulting from a cavalcade of bad political choices made over decades. Germany, France and Italy have lost interest in the Ukraine fiasco that is costing them money they don't have and, with the blowup of Nord Stream, has already cost Germany the supply of affordable Russian gas to run its industries, which are now dying.
In the UK, only MI6 (their intel blob) is onboard with America's project in Ukraine. Viktor Orban in Hungary is setting an example that has a lot of appeal to the restive populations across Euroland. Just say "no," he advises. It'll catch on.
Prediction: Europe's population will erupt violently against their own governments in 2024. Some will be overthrown by street revolts; others will be voted out. In 2024, the European Union will lose all its support and collapse when the first few nations vote themselves out.
China's in terrible financial straits. Uncle Xi managed to paper it over for a few years, but the math is remorseless. Prediction: China's upside-down property market finally induces a banking collapse. The many millions of swindled Chinese savers try to topple the CCP.
In desperation, Uncle Xi kicks off a war to get control over wealthy Taiwan. Dissension in the People's Liberation Army mirrors unrest among the civilian population. The Taiwan offensive quickly fails and all of China falls into regional conflict. The rest of the world looks on in wonder and nausea.
Final Cautionary Note. You might not know it, because predictions are fun to read and I enjoy reading other people's efforts but, really, forecasting is an exercise in futility. I don't have much going besides a nose for news, a pretty long list of correspondents and informants and my own heuristics.
Take all this for what it actually is: a whole lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Only time will tell. In all, it looks like 2024 is going to be a rough ride and I'm not the only person who sees that.
The Daily Reckoning