90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #874

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #867 New Year's Eve Edition

13 Big Predictions for 2023

The year ahead will provide lots of intrigue, controversy, volatility, and danger. You read it here first.

Hold on to your seat. But, please, don’t take any of this so literally that you bank on it or sell all of your possessions and move to the top of a mountain to wait in vain for some finale.

Truth is, I am not Nostradamus and I have no crystal ball. I did, however, get paid big bucks heading up consulting at Wharton Econometrics, where I was asked to “invent the future” for corporate strategy clients.

So, I thought I would conjure up a special set of predictions for American Greatness readers about what might be coming in 2023. You won’t get this from the three-letter government agencies who are so one-sided nowadays, or from any of our proliferating enemies or frenemies, for that matter.

These predictions are based on analysis and perspective guided by trends. The context is late-stage secularism and decadent crony capitalism, where wokeism is the default ideology.

The year ahead will provide plenty of intrigue, controversy, volatility, and danger. The pundits are all focused on the fall of Trump—which won’t exactly happen—but there are lots of other traps and challenges galore.

Here then, from my strategist-scholar-diplomat perch, is a list of the things that I predict for the year ahead. Some are commonsensical and others . . . well, quite out of this world.

13) Sadly, Hunter Biden will not be locked up. The Big Guy should be impeached on a raft of charges, but it won’t happen because of the complicity of the conspiracists. Big Tech, the press, the uniparty, and the deep state don’t want this result, as is all too apparent now. They will do everything to thwart justice and to both keep it out of the news and unprosecuted. Daddy would pardon him anyway, since he is “the smartest person he knows,” and that’s how he pays all his bills. Bring on all the investigations and congressional hearings—to no avail.

12) Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX Ponzi scheme will be exposed for what it is. A Democrat racket to win the election and maintain their power. Sure, a million people lost their shirts but that’s small potatoes in the grand scheme of power. SBF will be locked up after making bail and crashing at his unprecedented home arrest, and will be made the stupid fall guy (kid) for a totally corrupt system. They say he will go to Epstein’s cell on Rikers Island, and we all know what happened there. He deserves it. But really . . . crime pays if you want to rig an election, get momentarily rich, or fleece lots of people.

11) Both U.S. political parties will see contested leadership races. We already see this in Harmeet Dhillon’s legitimate challenge to the incumbent RINOs at the Republican National Committee. The Democrats are no longer a liberal bastion. They are split between democratic socialists and communists. The presidential primaries on both sides are going to be a blood fest. Biden will run based on his fake bio and he will have a half-dozen challengers, all trying to unseat him, as senile and inept. In the end, he will fold, and the Cackler, Kamala Harris, will be crowned queen as a happy compromise. Obama backs her, remember?

On the Republican side, Trump is fading faster than Santa after Christmas. The base may still, wink, wink, “support” him. But they have had enough, NFT trading cards and all. There are probably just short of a dozen challengers gearing up to take him on this year—some of whom were his lieutenants. Ron DeSantis will win the primaries and be the Republican nominee in 2024.

10) Aliens will invade us. Well, they already have at the southern border. But with fully open borders and no Title 42 or “remain in Mexico” policy, the Texas and Arizona border— especially along the Rio Grande—will allow 10 million more illegal aliens into the country, swelling cities and harming infrastructure, costing billions, while enriching the Mexican drug cartels and human traffickers. America will be a changed place demographically, as is Biden’s intent. The UFO thing will also get a buzz, and the in-crowd will also object to referring to them as “aliens.”

9) The culture will become more debased, evil, and plain pornographic. Just watch the HBO series “White Lotus” if you want to peer at where we are. It is all on display, and we shrug it off, saying, “so what?” Nearing the stage of Rome in its final days, we watch as the foundations of civilization are burned to the ground, desecrated, and Nero, or in this case his distant relative, Biden, fiddles. There is no such thing as truth. Beauty is a figment of subjective imagination. And goodness, rooted in reason, is relative. As Gollum, in Lord of the Rings insightfully reminded us, “They cursed us. Murderer they called us. They cursed us and drove us away. And we wept, Precious, we wept to be so alone.”

8) We will see the continuation of innovations and developments in transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), cloud computing, blockchain, and super-fast network protocols, like 5G. According to an International Data Corporation (IDC) report, the AI industry is predicted to reach $7.8 billion, rising at a compound annual growth rate of 20.2 percent. By the end of 2025, the AI software category will have dominated the market, growing at a CAGR of 18.1 percent from $2.8 billion in just 2020. AI will be integrated all over—from marketing to branding and from voting to censorship and healthcare. Get your implant in 2023! It will be even better than the mRNA vaccines!

7) Nuclear war will be...

Just days after Christmas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention republished a “self-assessment tool” urging teachers, administrators, school health staff, and others to become an “awesome ally” by advocating for LGBT causes in school.

The document cites multiple LGBT activist groups, including a division of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The CDC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about the document, which it originally published in October 2020.

“School administrators: Our LGBTQ inclusivity self-assessment tool can help you quickly gauge inclusivity at your school,” the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health posted on Twitter on Tuesday. “See your score today and learn ways to increase inclusivity.”

The document, “LGBTQ Inclusivity in Schools: A Self-Assessment Tool,” appears on the CDC’s youth website in a section “For Schools” and under the drop-down “Tools for Supporting LGBTQ Youth.”

“Schools play a critical role in supporting the health and academic development of all youth, including the success of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth,” the document states. “Creating and sustaining inclusive school environments, policies, programs, and practices that include LGBTQ youth is one strategy for improving the health and academic success of all youth.”

The document notes that it includes resources from nongovernmental organizations “focused on improving school inclusivity” and that the resources do not represent the CDC’s official opinion. The document further notes that the self-assessment tool is optional, not required, but it touts the document as “a focused, reasonable, and user-friendly approach to identify strategies to increase LGBTQ inclusivity in schools.”

The tool includes four assessments, one each for all users, administrators, educators, and school health services staff. The tool includes three scores: “Commit to Change,” “Beginning to Break Through,” and “Awesome Ally.”

LGBTQ inclusivity continuum, screenshot from “LGBTQ Inclusivity in Schools: A Self-Assessment Tool”

The general self-assessment encourages education leaders to adopt certain mindsets, such as “I cannot assume a student’s gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation,” and urges them to adopt “inclusive” terminology, such as “using individuals’ chosen names/pronouns” and rejecting terms like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” for “neutral terms” like...

Visage à trois #692

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

An MH-60 helicopter refuels from a warship in bad weather.

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #868

House GOP locates emails, texts showing Pelosi office directly involved in failed Jan. 6 security

Democrat leadership blamed for "knee-jerk reaction" and failing to equip police in security staffer's email after tragedy.

House Republicans gathered a trove of text and email messages showing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was directly involved in the creation and editing of the Capitol security plan that failed during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot and that security officials later declared they had been “denied again and again” the resources needed to protect one of the nation’s most important homes of democracy.

The internal communications were made public Wednesday in a report compiled by Republican Reps. Rodney Davis, Jim Banks, Troy Nehls, Jim Jordan and Kelly Armstrong that encompasses the results of months of investigation they did of evidence that had been ignored by the Democrat-led Jan. 6 committee. The lawmakers were authorized by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to do their own probe.

The report concludes the Capitol was left vulnerable on Jan. 6 as a result of failures by the Democratic leadership in the House and law enforcement leaders in the Capitol Police who allowed concerns about the “optics” of having armed officers and National Guardsmen visible to the public to override the need for enhanced security.

“Leadership and law enforcement failures within the U.S. Capitol left the complex vulnerable on January 6, 2021. The Democrat-led investigation in the House of Representatives, however, has disregarded those institutional failings that exposed the Capitol to violence that day,” it concluded.

It also corroborated prior reporting by Just the News that Capitol Police began receiving specific warnings in mid-December that there could be significant violence planned against the Capitol and lawmakers by protesters planning to attend the certification of the 2020 election results.

“Prior to that day, the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) had obtained sufficient information from an array of channels to anticipate and prepare for the violence that occurred,” the report noted.

You can read the full report here:
File: FINAL Report of Investigation.pdf

Banks said the GOP report helps counter a Democrat narrative that ignored security failures by police and...