2023 Prediction Wrap Up

I only made one major Prediction to bring in 2023, and it looks like I got that wrong.

As I noted last year:

But the truth is that both nations are exhausting themselves in this war, but Ukraine is the one far closer to the edge, and mere aid isn’t going to be enough to replace manpower and an economy.  So, it’s either NATO enters the war directly, or the Russians and Ukrainians are going to have to meet at the table and start the painful process of negotiations.

And that’s my prediction: By the end of the year, Russia and Ukraine will have begun the process of a cease fire and talks to end the war.

Or NATO enters the war and we get World War III!

Luckily we didn’t get World War III although unfortunately that still seems to be on the table, now more than ever. 

However I did come close…

“WASHINGTON — U.S. and European officials have begun quietly talking to the Ukrainian government about what possible peace negotiations with Russia might entail to end the war, according to one current senior U.S. official and one former senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions.

The conversations have included very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal, the officials said. Some of the talks, which officials described as delicate, took place last month during a meeting of representatives from more than 50 nations supporting Ukraine, including NATO members, known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the officials said.

The discussions are an acknowledgment of the dynamics militarily on the ground in Ukraine and politically in the U.S. and Europe, officials said.”

So, talks are being started about having talks.  This prediction could happen this year, or the next.  Reality is starting to penetrate the thick heads of the Western elites who have been cheerleading this war from the beginning, however “the dynamics militarily on the ground” are now obvious enough that even an American general can see there is no winning this one.

Enemy of the State not just a Movie

Since I declared traditional American democracy dead back in August, the government has gone out of its way to prove my point.

Exclusive: Donald Trump Followers Targeted by FBI as 2024 Election Nears

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.

The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations—even though the vast majority of its current “anti-government” investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.

Just a couple of observations on that.  You need a brand-new category of extremist?  The old ones weren’t cutting it anymore?  See that sounds almost like you are making it up.

But given that, I’m not surprised that the most anti-government investigations are on Trump supporters.  I grew up in a time when leftists were fighting The Man, the establishment, and multiple varieties of isms.  Now, leftists are The Man and the establishment. So, who do you rebel against now?  Why the people who are NOT The Man and the establishment.

Continuing…

Right after January 6, the FBI co-authored a restricted report (“Domestic Violent Extremists Emboldened in Aftermath of Capitol Breach, Elevated Domestic Terrorism Threat of Violence Likely Amid Political Transitions and Beyond”) in which it shifted the definition of AGAAVE (“anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism”) from “furtherance of ideological agendas” to “furtherance of political and/or social agendas.” For the first time, such groups could be so labeled because of their politics.

This seems to boil down to, if you don’t think Joe Biden is the bestest President ever, then you are a dangerous extremist and need to be watched by the government.

Of course, the recent attacks on Trump’s eligibility to run in various States have extended.

Democrats Want Over 130 Republicans Banned From Holding Office

More than 130 Republicans have faced challenges to their eligibility to serve in office based on their alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in recent years.

Critics also say those involved in the riot should be barred from holding office, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It states that those who took an oath to defend the Constitution and went on to engage in “insurrection or rebellion” should not be permitted to hold “any office, civil or military, under the United States.”

Since the 2020 election, at least 134 Republicans, including Trump, have faced legal challenges questioning whether they are qualified to hold office. None of these challenges have been successful.

Putin must be so jealous! 

Meanwhile our system is trying to institute its own version of a one-party oligarchy; gradually, and then suddenly as Hemingway might say.  I’m not going to bother making too much in the way of predictions for this coming year since the wild swings that our political system is taking are getting wilder and crazier.  I feel confident though in saying that Trump won’t be President, no matter how the “election” goes.  Nor do I think the House has much chance to remain with the Republicans.  But who wins what office is almost a minor consideration at this point.  One thing that I’m confident predicting is that the one-party oligarchy is likely to win.

Huh, I Guess We Did Choose War

A few weeks before the start of the Ukrainian war, I posted:

“…this seems to go entirely unnoticed by our national security “experts” is that diplomatically, the US holds most of the cards, and Putin only has one club, his military, and not much else.  The tension boils down to this: Putin wants a promise that Ukraine will not become a NATO member, a promise the US categorically refuses to give. However, the dirty little secret is that we don’t want Ukraine in NATO.  Another corrupt, second world kleptocracy, not even on the “North Atlantic.”  It’s a benefit for the Ukraine sure, but zero benefit for the rest of the alliance.

So, Russia wants something really badly, no NATO membership for Ukraine.  The alliance also doesn’t want (or shouldn’t) NATO membership for Ukraine, so how come we can’t come to a deal massively in our favor?  Where are our “experts?”

Biden should propose to Putin that we would grant a conditional promise not to induct Ukraine into NATO as long as he sticks to the deal.  And what would the deal be?  I don’t have a full list of everything we might want from the Russians, but we should ask for everything on that list.  A couple of things do come to mind however, such as vow to stop all hacking of US institutions from Russian territory, and re-introduce the US dollar to its national wealth fund and stop promoting policies to replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.   Maybe some arms control concessions?  Basically, we should ask for everything.  Each side gets to walk away with a success and it deescalates a military confrontation. It’s a win/win.

Or we could just have a major European war that could escalate into a nuclear one.”

Of course, at the time, I had no idea how literally true that was.  I was talking about the US, and by extension NATO, making an offer to halt any plans for entry of Ukraine into NATO.  What I didn’t know at the time was that Putin had already offered that.

A few weeks ago, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg addressed the European Union committee on Foreign Affairs. During this address, he admitted that Putin had made that exact offer.

“Then lastly on Sweden. First of all, it is historic that now Finland is member of the Alliance. And we have to remember the background. The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.”

No of course not.

Of course, Putin had a lot of other demands as well, but when you are negotiating, you put all your asks on the table and work from there.  But we didn’t even get that far.  We never had talks or negotiations.  NATO (and by NATO really, we mean the US) turned them down.

The consequences of that are plain for all to see.  Hundreds of thousands of dead, and more to come.  I’ve no idea what NATO and the US State Department think they are doing, and what their goals are, but the time is long past to consider that “the experts” are anything but experts.  At best they are idiots, and at worse they are evil idiots.  If there is another option, I’ve not seen it.

Blue Collar Kings: How AI could alter the Workforce

With as fitting a post for Labor Day as I could imagine, a few years ago, I wrote a post about automation called, The Shrinking Need for a Workforce, based on what, in 2014, seemed to be the trend in automation; low skilled jobs, with some high skilled jobs, could be at risk, putting millions out of work.  What to do?  Well almost a decade later we can update those predictions a bit and for once, it doesn’t look all bad.

The rise of ChatGPT, seemed to spring out of nowhere, but actually, chat programs on customer service websites have been ubiquitous for years.  Various tech companies have been working on various chatbots, but they’ve had…problems.  Both the Microsoft and Meta versions had to be shut down and terminated after becoming Nazi racists.  Of all the potential risks I saw with AI, becoming a racist Nazi computer program was not on my Skynet Bingo card.

ChatGPT and its siblings are already demonstrating that they can do some pretty amazing things, even in these admittedly early stages.  Remember when journalists used to mock unemployed miners and other working class types whose jobs were being strip-mined overseas to “learn to code?” And remember how someone would get banned if they told unemployed journalists the same? Now, AI can code, better and quicker than humans.  It can write term papers, proposals, news articles, and loads of other, what was formerly considered human only work products.

Nowhere did I see what turned into the biggest surprise (for me anyway); AI’s dalliance into the creative arts. Something that I didn’t even know existed 8 months ago but is now common online are AI art generators.  Just give a text description of what you want to see and voila! There it is!  One of my few memories of a college Art Appreciation class was the definition of art being something man-made.  A painting of a landscape is art, the actual landscape isn’t.  But now what does art mean when it’s created by a non-human intelligence?  Is it still art?

Well, that’s something that others will have to figure out, but surely in any practical sense, it is art.  But that impacts a lot more career fields than automation or macros on an office bound workforce, this effects the very people who always though they would be immune from the advancements of AI; our creative class.  Think how a field like marketing would be affected if the suits could simply tell an AI program what they want to promote their, oh I don’t know, beer, let’s say.  Not only could the AI generate the copy for a commercial, but could (eventually) generate the commercial, with smiling artificial actors all guzzling the AI generated beers.

No humans required.

And as for TV and movie production…imagine someday in the not-so-distant future in which I sit down on the couch after a long day of retirement and tell my TV/Computer, “Mr. Computer, I would like to see a 90-minute movie starting John Wayne as a World War II GI fighting lizard like aliens as these aliens decide to invade the earth on D-Day.”

OK not my best movie pitch but let’s see what the AI comes up with.

As a consumer, this sounds great.  However, if you are in the TV & Movie business…

TV and film writers are fighting to save their jobs from AI. They won’t be the last

By any standard, John August is a successful screenwriter. He’s written such films as “Big Fish,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Go.” But even he is concerned about the impact AI could have on his work.

A powerful new crop of AI tools, trained on vast troves of data online, can now generate essays, song lyrics and other written work in response to user prompts. While there are clearly limits for how well AI tools can produce compelling creative stories, these tools are only getting more advanced, putting writers like August on guard.

“On guard” indeed.

One can easily see why Hollywood actors and writers are worried they could be next up on the “learn to code” chopping block. So, between the creative classes, the professional classes, and the administrative classes all looking at a future shrinking job market, what’s left?

The trades.  In fact, any job that requires both manual labor and problem-solving behavior seems relatively safe for the time being.  That could be a carpenter, plumber, electrician, A/C guy…any of the still skilled and semi-skilled labor jobs that no chat bot, no matter how clever, is going to be able to replace. Our future could very well resemble our past, with the percentage of jobs belonging to working-class, blue-collar type jobs could be similar to what they were a century ago.

How that could alter society as a whole is anyone’s guess, but with a workforce looking more like the turn of the last century, that could have a lot of downstream societal effects.  With a dearth of office type cubical jobs, could women reevaluate career or family conundrum that’s impacted the idea of feminism since the fifties?  It’s one thing to view a future of girl boss singledom when there are plenty of professional and administrative jobs, but it’s quite another when the choices are more practically working on an oil rig or construction.  Although I don’t think the 2040’s will be a copy of the 1940’s, there could be more similarities than to our own age.

With the Latest Trump Indictments, I’ve come Full Circle

Last year, after the Mar-A-Lago raid, I predicted that Trump would be indicted.  Of course, since then, he’s been indicted…a lot.  Prosecutors from all over the country were trying to get into the act, and I’m sure will see more of them down the line, but this week’s indictments were the ones I was really looking for.  Not even the absurd “classified documents” case were the real indictments.  No, this week’s indictments were all about J6, and all about trying to save, “Our Democracy™” which has zero to do with actual democracy. 

Like the other indictments, these indictments are full of crap too.  Consider the charges:

 -conspiring to defraud the United States government

-conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding

-conspiring against rights

-obstruction and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding

If there was ever any doubt that these charges were not on the up and up, was the fact that rather than list specific crimes, they wrap things up under the twin rubrics of “conspiracy” and “obstruction.”  In other words, they will try to string perfectly legal actions together and declare them crimes.

This is becoming a rather common and disturbing tactic of the Justice Department. I had previously written about the “Ricky Vaughn” case, in which a meme maker was convicted of “voter suppression” because of anti-Hillary Clinton memes and before that, the Julian Assange indictment, in which the Department of Justice figured out a way to do an end run around the First Amendment.  These are all dangerous precedents that at this point, look like they will be allowed to stand, giving the DoJ even more incentive to come out with novel ways invalidate the Bill of Rights.

But losing our rights seems almost minor in comparison to losing representative government. Charging your primary political opponent for the next election with multiple bullshit “crimes” is strictly third world banana republic stuff, but that’s where we are.  I’ve been concerned about our democratic end state for many years in the sense that, I know it’s all going to end in tears, but how exactly is it going to end?

Well now I think I have a much better idea. What Curtis Yarvin calls the “cathedral,” and others call the deep state or administrative state, but I think of it as “Our Democracy™” due to the annoying incessant use of that phrase by MSNBC types since the dawn of the Trump era; that’s the true ruling power. Like a school of fish or a flock of birds, our legal system, Intelligence & law enforcement agencies, news media, pop culture entertainment, corporations, academia… in other words every major institution in the country, all technically independent, but are all moving as one.  They establish and enforce the orthodoxies, and punish dissidents. They rule, regardless of voting and elections.

It just wasn’t relevant until Trump won in 2016 and the insane reaction that caused led to “Our Democracy™” becoming bolder and bolder.  I would say they’re scarcely hiding it anymore, but they are going through the motions outwardly.  Instead of simply tossing Trump in the gulag, they’ve manufactured absurd fake charges and are going to take him out with the dried-up husk of our judicial system.

In a way, I’ve been on the look out for this for years, but I thought it would still be years away and more gradual.  And maybe it would have been if the Trumpian Black Swan had not flown down the escalator in 2015.  In what I think of as a normal course of events, Hillary would have won in 2016 and Jeb! would have given the greatest concession speech of all time, and Hillary would simply have continued the gradual Obama trajectory.

Now we’re in for a much rougher ride, as some of the J6 grandmas in solitary can already attest. 

So, I’m officially calling it.  American democracy is dead, long live Our Democracy™!

Hybrid Beers

In my beer travels, I’ve come across quite a few beers that seemed almost as if they’re hybrid drinks; not quite a beer, and not quite something else.  I would put these down as interesting brewery experiments. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.

Schofferhofer Hefeweizen Pomegranate Bier is a German import that took me by surprise.  I love Hefeweizen’s but couldn’t get over the dark red coloring of the Pomegranate.  Wait a minute; I thought the Reinheitsgebot, the German laws governing the ingredients of German beers, would prevent such frivolity?  However, it turns out the beer is actually more of a Shandy than a beer.  Each bottle is 50% beer and 50% juice. Taste wise, it was more like a pomegranate flavored malt drink than a beer.  So, the taste wise was OK, but I can’t really consider this a beer.  There should at least be some beer flavor to a beer.  So, I can’t recommend.

Funky Buddha’s Mixology Series: The Funky Buddha Brewery has come up with a unique idea, beer brewed with the flavors of popular mixed drinks.  Of the three I’ve tried, Margarita Gose, Paloma, and Coquito, I can’t really recommend any of them, although for different reasons.  The Margarita Gose at first sip tastes like other Agave flavored beers; in other words, beer tequila at varying strengths.  However, on second and third sips is an extremely complicated mix of flavors.  On the one hand there is the Agave/Tequila taste (boo) and on the other hand there is a rich detailed wheat beer taste (yah!), making this one of the most complicated and multiflavored beers I’ve ever drunk.  And although I wouldn’t order another, I appreciate the palate of flavors that went into it.

The Coquito is less complicated and I was put off by the coconut flavoring.  Of course, I’m not a fan of coconut so that explains that, but for a person who is a fan of coconuts or coquito’s, this really might be the beer for you.  Even though none of these beers won me over, I was intrigued enough to want to try the rest of the mixology series if I can get them.

The Paloma is based on a Tequila cocktail, and like the Margarita Gose, has a tequila-like aftertaste.  However, unlike the Margarita Gose, there is no secondary, rich wheat beer flavor to go with it. I have to say though, it was an interesting experiment.

The Old Fashioned tastes like…an Old Fashion only not as much.  An actual Old Fashioned “is made by pouring whiskey over muddled sugar, water, and bitters, then garnishing with an orange peel. These days, the water is often replaced with ice.”  Truth be told, I’ve had just a few Old Fashioned so my comparative skills with the actual drink are slim, however the beer version is quite good.  I’ve had several whiskey barrel varieties of beer and didn’t care for them; the whiskey taste was too off-putting. Not with this.  The whiskey flavor is, if I may say, appropriate and full bodied in this beer. This is a beer I didn’t expect to like, and did.

As an aside, I also tried the Anderson Valley Old Fashioned.  And like the Funky Buddha version, it also tasted, just like an Old Fashioned.  Although I’m impressed with the brew skills to replicate the flavor, I conclude that if you want an Old Fashioned, just order that instead of a beer taste-alike.

Tampa based Hidden Springs Ale Works has their Humble Pie, which the can describes as, “Breakfast Muffin Berliner Weisse with Boysenberry, Almond, Cinnamon, Milk Sugar & Vanilla.”  The first sip will convince you that is an accurate description.  I’m not usually a fan of sour beers, given the extremely tart surprises I’ve gotten in the past, but this one kept the promise of its ingredients without the pinch-faced tartness. In other words, it’s quite good, and if you are no fan of Mimosa’s or other brunch related alcoholic drinks, I would nominate the Humble Pie as a steady substitute.  The problem, if it is one, is that it just doesn’t taste like a beer to me.  Its good yes, but not what my taste buds would recognize as beer-based although maybe that’s just me and my tangled relationsip with sour beers. Would I have another?  Absolutely, it is tasty, but as something else other than beer.

Considering and Reconsidering the Iraq War

I’ve had a lot of thoughts on Iraq, on this 20^th anniversary of the start of the invasion.  In fact I started the draft of this post in 2008, well before we could see the results of the war.  But even before then I opposed it.  If I’m honest with myself however, I admit it wasn’t on strictly policy grounds.  This was a personal issue for me.  I was mobilized in 2001 after 9/11 on one-year orders.  It was a hardship being away from family that long, but I figured I would barrel through it and go home.  That didn’t turn out as I’d planned as three weeks before we were to go home, we (some of us anyway) were told that we would be extended on another set of one-year orders.

Man plans, Big Army laughs.

So that’s how 20 years ago today, I spent the day, and night, and day, and night, in an operations center “working the problem” as they say.  No, I wasn’t in Iraq, I was safely in the boundaries of the United States, doing my part for the war effort.  Of course, by that point I had already concluded that we should never have gone into Iraq.  In fact, my epiphany on this occurred several months prior.  A Warrant Officer friend and I were out on break coincidently at the same time, and the looming war came up.  One of us (I don’t remember who) finally broke the ice and said, “why are we doing this?”  It was a relief to have a fellow skeptic out himself.  Being in uniform, our job wasn’t to question policy, but to implement it, and I didn’t see any contradiction between doing my duty and privately disagreeing with the policy.  That’s not uncommon.  But I took duty seriously and wanted to do the best job possible.  American lives could be at stake.

But eventually I took the uniform off and returned home, and could think more seriously about policy.  The whole reason I put the uniform on in the first place wasn’t because of Saddam Hussain, but Usama Bin Ladin, and the Global War on Terror (GWOT). While policy makers were saying that we could fight a two-front war, one in Afghanistan, and one in Iraq, I knew that was nonsense.  You would have had to have a draft to build an Army big enough to properly handle both theaters, and there was no taste in Washington for anything like that.  Afghanistan, as long as Bin Ladin was on the loose, to me seemed the bigger problem.  Saddam Hussain and his constant trolling of the US was a problem, but not the major problem.

Of course I wasn’t on board with any of the leftie critics of the war, “Bush lied, people died” was as much an absurdity as the purpose of the war being for Cheney to get contracts for Halliburton.  The problem was, after a year of public discussion on the threat of WMD’s we didn’t do a good job of discussing if that was an active or inactive threat.  The truth was, Saddam had a nuclear weapons program, but the catch was that it was inactive due to the crush of sanctions.  After the war, when we had free reign of the country, we found a lot of evidence of Iraqi programs, just not active ones.

US reveals Iraq nuclear operation

Gas shell findings a concern for Iraq arms inspector

At last! Have they finally found a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in Iraq?

Syria said to have Iraq arms

Secret U.S. mission hauls uranium from Iraq

…and so on.

But the weapons program ultimately didn’t matter except as a pretext.  Is Iraq better off post invasion than pre-invasion? 

In Commentary, Eli Lake makes the argument that Iraq is better off.

“Despite massive corruption and the reverberations of a political crisis that began in 2019 with widespread protest, Iraq is better off today than it was 20 years ago.

In 2003, the World Bank estimated that Iraq’s GDP was a paltry $21.9 billion. In 2021, Iraq’s GDP was nearly $208 billion. During Saddam’s reign, only a small number of Iraqis had cellphone subscriptions. As of 2021, 86 percent of the country had a wireless telecom plan. Several measures of quality of life, from literacy rates to life expectancy, have gone up. Just one example: Before the advent of Covid, life expectancy in Iraq had risen to 72 years. In 2001, it was 67.”

By the numbers, Iraq probably is better off, although Iraqis who lost family members in the war and the multiple insurgencies that spawned as a result of the war may disagree, but was the war worth it to us?  That’s something that slips by Lake’s analysis.  We dropped a lot of blood and treasure in that war, and if anything, the war was a negative for the US.

And of course there are a hundred crap countries all over the world who might be better off after a US invasion (minus the casualties of the invasion of course), but my ultimate conclusion on Iraq is, to paraphrase Bismarck, not worth a single life of an 11B (infantry soldier to you non Army pukes).

But the current administration and establishment has apparently forgotten all that, just like that fish Dory, which has a short-term memory of just a few seconds, now we’re staring greedily at a new war, that has even less to do with US national interest than Iraq did.  So, like an episode of Seinfeld, no lessons are ever learned.

Russia and Ukraine will have to come to the Table

Usually, I do a comprehensive list of predictions for the year and then grade myself at the end of the year and congratulate myself how well I’ve done.  Although I’ve certainly had some off years, I’ve more often than not have done rather well in the prediction biz. But this year I decided to try something new and do predictions piecemeal as the topics come to me.  I think that will make them more relevant.  So, for this year we’ll see how that goes.

And in that regard, I stumbled across an editorial in The Washington Post by two old Republican neocon warhorses, Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, opining on the Russian Ukrainian war.

Time is not on Ukraine’s side

“Both of us have dealt with Putin on a number of occasions, and we are convinced he believes time is on his side: that he can wear down the Ukrainians and that U.S. and European unity and support for Ukraine will eventually erode and fracture. To be sure, the Russian economy and people will suffer as the war continues, but Russians have endured far worse.

For Putin, defeat is not an option. He cannot cede to Ukraine the four eastern provinces he has declared part of Russia. If he cannot be militarily successful this year, he must retain control of positions in eastern and southern Ukraine that provide future jumping-off points for renewed offensives to take the rest of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, control the entire Donbas region and then move west. Eight years separated Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its invasion nearly a year ago. Count on Putin to be patient to achieve his destiny.

Meanwhile, although Ukraine’s response to the invasion has been heroic and its military has performed brilliantly, the country’s economy is in a shambles, millions of its people have fled, its infrastructure is being destroyed, and much of its mineral wealth, industrial capacity and considerable agricultural land are under Russian control. Ukraine’s military capability and economy are now dependent almost entirely on lifelines from the West — primarily, the United States. Absent another major Ukrainian breakthrough and success against Russian forces, Western pressures on Ukraine to negotiate a cease-fire will grow as months of military stalemate pass. Under current circumstances, any negotiated cease-fire would leave Russian forces in a strong position to resume their invasion whenever they are ready.”

This is worth reading, so I would recommend to read the whole thing. The gist of it is, that Ukraine is not on the verge of driving the Russkies back over the border imminently, and they aren’t winning, they’re losing. The only reason they are still in the fight is because of Western aid.  The average Washington Post reader might find that a shock since US news coverage has been all about how the Ukrainians are on the verge of getting to the gates of Moscow, executing Putin on the spot and putting Russia under the control of Kiev or Kyiv, depending on what dictionary you’re using.

OK that’s a little hyperbolic, but still, the level of propaganda versus reality is a little unreal.  Take this story from last June.

Russia will soon exhaust its combat capabilities, Western assessments predict

The entire article is an obituary to the Russian effort but this really stuck out to me:

“But conditions for Ukrainian troops are only likely to improve as more sophisticated Western weapons arrive, while those of Russian forces can be expected to deteriorate as they dig deeper into their stocks of old, outdated equipment, said retired Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. forces in Europe who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis. At some point in the coming months, the Ukrainians will have received enough Western weaponry that it is likely they will be able to go on the counteroffensive and reverse the tide of the war, he said.

“I remain very optimistic that Ukraine is going to win, and that by the end of this year Russia will be driven back to the Feb. 24 line,” he said, referring to the boundaries of Russian-occupied areas in Crimea and Donbas captured during fighting in 2014 and 2015.”

Needless to say, that prediction was way off; ridiculously so.  In fact, it sounded ridiculous at the time to me.  Once again, the experts beclown themselves.

Given that’s been the state of Ukrainian war coverage in the US for the past year, Gate’s and Rice’s Op-ed is surprisingly frank about the real desperate conditions facing Ukraine.  Of course, their solution is even more aid; let’s pour as much gas on this fire as possible! But the truth is that both nations are exhausting themselves in this war, but Ukraine is the one far closer to the edge, and mere aid isn’t going to be enough to replace manpower and an economy.  So, it’s either NATO enters the war directly, or the Russians and Ukrainians are going to have to meet at the table and start the painful process of negotiations.

And that’s my prediction: By the end of the year, Russia and Ukraine will have begun the process of a cease fire and talks to end the war.

Or NATO enters the war and we get World War III!

2022 Predictions Wrap Up

Another year, and another look back at my predictions for the year.  So compared to the predictions I made last January, how did I do?

There will be a Supreme Court vacancy this year.

I got this one correct right out of the gate as Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement

However…

There will be no major invasion by Russia of Ukraine this year.

This one I got wrong soon after; so, sue me.  I really thought this could have been negotiated ahead of time to prevent an invasion.  It didn’t occur to me at the time that the Biden Administration wanted this war.                      

The FED will raise interest rates more than once this year.

Batta batta…

From strike 1,  Fed raises interest rates for the first time since 2018, and strike fill in the blank. We’ve gotten multiple rate hikes

this year so this is a winner.

Twitter and Facebook will ban some GOP House and Senate candidates; no Democratic ones.

Well yeah, I got this one right, however the damage is not as nearly severe as I thought it would be thanks to the chaos that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter brought to the system.

GOP Senate Candidate’s ‘RINO Hunting’ Video Already Banned by Facebook

Florida Republican Candidate Permanently Suspended From Twitter

Black Republican Congressional Candidate Banned from Twitter on Eve of Primary

Arizona GOP Candidate’s Twitter Account Restored

Marjorie Taylor Green Personal Account Permanently Banned from Twitter

The Republican Party will win back control of the House of Representatives.

This was one of the few times that I agreed with the conventional wisdom.  Notice I didn’t call the Senate race however…  Interestingly in October I had made a more targeted prediction rate for the 2022 race at the request of a family member in which I did call all of the Senate seats in contention and got them all right except for one, the Georgia race between Warnock and Walker.  Getting one wrong from that makes me practically a Superforcaster!

I think JD Vance will win the Ohio Senate race.

The one Senate race I did call as part of my annual predictions.  I was hoping the combination of a good candidate, Peter Theil money, and an industrially depressed state would equal victory.

The US economy will begin to enter a recession by the end of the year.

This is a technical win, in that we did have two quarters of negative growth this year, which is the definition of a recession, but the Biden Administration took a chance in ignoring it and not publicly acknowledging it, and that paid off since growth resumed in the next quarter.

US inflation will stay above 5% through the year.

Given that it’s currently 8.3 percent, that’s a good call.

China will also begin an economic downturn by the end of the year.

China’s problems started much earlier, and like many economic downturns, much of it was self-inflicted.

Housing prices will began to decline in Blue States by the end of the year.

Well sooner than that actually.  I underestimated the impact of the interest rate rise on the housing market.  So that’s on me, but still this is a win.

In fact, getting 9 out of 10 predictions right is pretty good.  I think I’m still in the prediction game!

Pitch for a new Stargate Show

Amazon’s purchase of MGM kindled interest in a revival of the Stargate franchise, which next to the Trek shows, kept the TV fires burning for televised Science Fiction.  However, per Brad Wright, one of the producers of the last series of Stargate shows, his proposed script treatment, a continuation, rather than a reboot, was shelved.  Amazon-MGM seems like it’s interested in rebooting the show, rather than doing a sequel launched from the multiple Stargate shows.

I get it.  If I were a fancy cigar chomping studio exec, I might prefer that route too.  It’s easier, and provides limitless story opportunities without being hemmed in by several years and hundreds of episodes of canon.  On the other hand, fans like canon, and like that the knowledge accumulated from loyalty to the series actually means something.

However, I think I’ve come up with a compromise show pitch, one that is within canon yet allows a new audience to discover it a bit at a time.

Working Title: Stargate Reborn

Genre:  Military Science Fiction

Hot Take: Stargate: The Next Generation

Cast:  Two main characters who were minor ones in Stargate SG-1, but due to their young ages are in their adult prime for the current iteration of the show (everyone else from the show are either dead or in retirement).

Character One: Young Jack (Jonathan) O’Neill.  This character was seen in the season 7 Episode Fragile Balance.  A renegade Asgard kidnaps O’Neill, creates a teenaged clone with O’Neill’s memories copied into him, and after considerable hijinks the Stargate crew pull off a capture of the renegade Asgard.  That still leaves the problem of an extra Jack O’Neill; a teenaged one at that.  The Air Force basically gives him a new identity, drops him off at High School, and that’s the last we see of him.

Character Two:  Cassandra Fraser.  Cassandra was a pre-teen human, although native to the planet Hanka.  After the G’ould wiped out her planet’s human inhabitants, she was the only survivor and was taken back to Earth and adopted by Doctor Fraser.

So, both of these child characters are knowledgeable of the Stargate program and the wider universe.

Backstory of the show:  Sometime after the end of Stargate SG-1, the nations involved in the Stargate program, afraid of the constant near misses of incurring the wrath of advanced aliens, decide to shut the program down and simply concentrate on developing the vast amount of alien tech acquired.  So, in the present, there is no active Stargate program and only a few intelligence, military, and scientific personnel read in on the program to even know there are aliens.

Premise: Cassandra Frasier, an archeology professor is on a Peruvian dig when her grad students find a cave system with a Stargate, although one that looks different from the typical Ancient type Stargate.  She recognizes it for what it is, warns her students to stay away from it, and calls her old Air Force contacts to let them know what she found.  By the time an Air Force team get there no one is found

The Pentagon looks for someone with tactical knowledge and prior knowledge of the Stargate program, which narrows the search down to one person, Johnathan O’Neill, the clone of Jack O’Neil, former Stargate SG-1 and Homeworld Security commander.  This O’Neill, although initially trying to carve a separate path, eventually winds up in the military, and becomes a Navy Seal.  So he’s the perfect choice to send in while they try to put together a larger support team.

An arriving to the new Stargate, O’Neill quickly discovers it’s activated by the Ancient marker gene, a DNA signature that activates Ancient technology, so O’Neill (who is a carrier) is whisked away to wherever Cassandra and her grad students go.  O’Neill and Fraser are the only ones who know anything so they can provide exposition as they go along to explain to the grad students (and new viewers) what’s going on as they try to figure out a way back to Earth.

Sounds like that’s a pretty good starting point for adventure.

Don’t like this?  How about another canon option 2?

In the current day, the Stargate team comes across a “Quantum Mirror,” and device for traveling to alternate universes.  The Stargate team came across one in season one and General Hammond had it destroyed.  However, with a new one, they make a plan, as a test run, to see if they can use the time traveling puddle jumper to use the Quantum mirror to see if they can alter time in one of the many alternate universes in which the Goa’uld conquered Earth… aww forget it.  As I write this, I can see too much knowledge of canon is required to understand the pilot!

OK just reboot the damn thing.