"Literal Fascism"

 

I'll have more to say on January 6th, Parler, etc., as well as the worst start of a new president's first term in all of US history.

Happy 2021

Nothing exemplifies the American belief in magic like flipping the calendar to a new year. All our problems will simply vanish into the ether like so much smoke. Everyone gets a fresh start. We even get us a new president!

 Uh. Yeah. Me, I'm in the same camp as Tim Rickard, author of Brewster's Rocket: 

[The comic should be here, but GoComics rigs its pages so the image cannot be inserted in anyone else's web page. The bastards.]

Predictions for 2021:

Trump is still trying to contest the election results, but it will be to no avail if for no other reason than the MSM and BigTech have declared Biden the winner. Conservative media is full of theories about various methods Trump could use to overturn the official election results. My prediction is that, if any of them are tried, they will land with the same resounding thump as all the other "Krakens" the feckless Team Trump have tried. So Biden will be POTUS regardless.

Trump's vaccine is slowly being rolled out with a smattering of stories of the elderly dying shortly after receiving the vaccine, or some testing positive for covid after getting "the jab". I'm holding off on getting it and may just skip it altogether. Not so much out of fear of some nasty side effects, but just because of the talk of "vaccine passports" and such shit. Push me hard enough and I push back. Along with nearly half of the US population. There are even rumors of doctors and nurses refusing the vaccine, preferring to take their chances with covid. All of which adds up to covid not going anywhere anytime soon. 

And that all means that none of the economy-crushing restrictions will magically disappear when Biden pops into the Oval Orifice.  There will still be plenty of opportunities for state governors like Michigan's Gretchen "Mussolini" Whitmer to rule by fiat. 

The economy is continuing its spiral into a black hole. The media likes to blame covid because if it is only because of the pandemic, then as soon as the vaccine is widely distributed all the restrictions can be eliminated and everything goes back to normal. First of all, for those in the bottom 80%, normal sucked. Second, the economic collapse was already well underway before anyone ever heard of Wuhan, China. Covid and the lock downs just made what probably would have been a year-long contraction happen in about a week. And the longer the lock downs continue the more small businesses that are "temporarily" closed or are being forced to run at 50% capacity will close permanently, and more wealth gets concentrated into the hands of the elites.

Speaking of elites, thanks to the Federal Reserve printing money like mad, stock indexes set so many records in 2020 including on the final trading day of the year, it stopped being a newsworthy event. We are in an everything-in-a-bubble economy as prices for stocks, bonds and real estate become increasingly divorced from the real world.

Bottom line: 2021 will look a great deal like 2020 only more so.

How badly did 2020 kick the crap out of my predictions last year? Pretty much every which way. The biggie of course is the coronation of Biden by the press. No, I do not believe that he won the election. There is solid evidence all over the place of various types of fraud, from the Omar family's ballot harvesting operation in Minnesota to Republican poll watchers being locked out of ballot counting locations in Detroit to video of ballots being run through ballot counting machines multiple times to there somehow being tens of thousands of negative votes for Trump. The fraud was large scale and systematic. And remember, this was supposed to be a landslide for Biden. All the polls showed that Trump was only going to carry a few Republican strongholds like Montana and North Dakota, and Biden was going to carry in a Blue Wave on his coattails, giving Democrats a super majority in the house and a majority in the senate. This election was never supposed to be a nail-biter. But wrong is wrong, and I suppose that Biden stealing the election is as moral a path to the presidency as any other way in 21st century America.

Funny though, how the press still cannot shut up about Trump while Biden continues to hide in his basement.

I keep saying year after year that at some point, the Fed trick of printing money to keep the stock, bond and real estate markets in the stratosphere would stop working. Hasn't yet. Maybe this year....

Our personal lives got knocked for a loop last year as well. We ended up spending the summer in Michigan living in my parents' cabin mostly so Debbie could do their driving after we took my dad's keys away. Turned out there was a lot of work to do up there after several years of my parents not being able to do much. The current plan (subject to revision without notification) is that we will snow bird with them for a few years, then force them to decide: Florida or Michigan. The greedy corporate bastards at Sun will likely price us out of the park by then. The easiest financially is to just start staying in Michigan year 'round and sell our places down here. But that means dealing with winter and feet of snow every day. Not a fan.

Summer in Michigan turned out to be good for me. All the outdoor work built back some of the muscle that I lost while living in a recliner for a year. That gave me enough of my balance back that I can walk short distances without any assistance (as long as I have my braces on my feet). I'm still prevented from doing most of what needs to be done because I cannot kneel down. Well... to be accurate, I can get down on my knees; it's the getting up part that requires a call to 911. We may have a solution for that in the next week or so. We'll see if it works or if I just wasted $55. And have to call 911.

So that's how things look from here. We'll just have to see how everything shakes out.