California is in deep fiscal doodoo (technical term). Gavin Newsom’s plan is to use the “rainy day fund” and cover up the rest of the problem until he is no longer governor in less than three years (or maybe this year if Joe gets replaced). But there is a way to fix it. And it doesn’t even involve cutting any bloated spending or raising taxes.

We, on the right, are all about winning elections and policy disputes. Meanwhile, the left has spent decades changing the culture of America. It is universally understood that culture is upstream from politics. Win the culture, and you will eventually win the elections. We have been losing the culture and are in danger of having lost it. This missive is longer than usual, but I hope you will stick with it. This is important stuff that is not discussed enough.

This will be the last in my series of 2024 forecasts. We have covered the election, the economy, society, and culture. Now it is time to look across the oceans and gaze into the fog of the future. I will also make a foreign policy suggestion which is far out of the consensus of political thinking at the moment. Chaos, which is the premise of this blog, abounds overseas every bit as much or more than it does in the United States.

I am going to suspend the forecasts until next week so I can comment on the presidential race since many of you have been asking. I am old enough to remember when Monday Night Football started. Imagine, football on a weekday! Everybody watched. The broadcast team was Howard Cosell and “Dandy” Don Meredith. Each game, when Meredith thought that one team was ahead by enough that the other team could no longer win, he would sing “Turn out the lights. The party’s over.” He was off key and did not have a good voice, but we all waited for when he would declare the game was effectively over.

Bob Dylan was right. The answers are indeed blowing in the wind. Or, as Winston Churchill once declared, “the future is unknowable”. Nonetheless, we want to know what the future holds before the hand of God shows it to us. To that end, here are my forecasts for the economy in 2024, including a peek at 2025.

Last week, I gave you my best predictions (guesses) as to the election outcome in November. I’m very sure about the Senate going R, moderately confident about the House going D, and not at all sure about who the next president will be. But, there are certain conditions in 2025 that I believe I can predict regardless of the election results. Here follows the political landscape I see in 2025.

This is the first of four missives that will contain my forecasts for different aspects of politics, the economy and culture in 2024 and in some cases into 2025. These are my best calculations of what I think will happen. These are not what I want to happen nor are they influenced by my own preferences. We must live and prosper in the world as it is, not as we might want it to be. With that, here are my prognostications for the upcoming November election:

These missives can often be quite negative. There is a lot of bad going on out there and evil is far from being eradicated from the earth. Our differences are probably greater than before, but social media and other technologies have certainly amplified them.

That said, there is much to be thankful for. Much more, in fact, than there is to lament.

Here’s another missive with multiple topics. Based on the feedback y’all give me, you seem to like these anyway. Besides, it’s hard in today’s world to talk about just one thing because so much is interconnected. There may be a few items here about which you have not heard.

As the chaos that defines this blog accelerates around us, there is no shortage of topics to discuss. Hence, this missive will comment on a number of issues. These issues are unrelated except for how they are all a part of the tumult building in our world.

It used to be so simple. Democrats were liberals. Republicans were conservatives. There were moderates in both parties who were either less doctrinaire than average or agreed with the other side on a few things. Third parties were either de minimis in appeal or they were single issue based so they came and went quickly.

It’s not so simple anymore.

The current status of U.S. Federal debt is bad. Very bad. And it is getting worse every day and with every bill Biden signs. Very few in Washington want to deal with it. That’s because the only cures available now are all painful and unpopular. The budget is like a patient with a totally gangrenous leg. The only cure is amputation, which the patient doesn’t want. But if you do nothing, the patient dies.

We’ll largely take a break from World War III this week, as it has been a very consequential last few days in the political arena. After all, how the U.S. manages through the current and expanding wars very much depends on who is at the helms of the ships of state over the next months and years. Here follows a quick analysis of seven recent political events:

We all know what is happening in the hot wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and the cold war with China. There is a lot going on in the rest of the world as well. Some of it is related to the wars. Some is not. Here follows a roundup of just a few things you may or may not know.

There are many things going on out there in our broken world upon which I would like to opine. But for at least one more week, I feel compelled to revisit the status of the chaos in the House and the chaos in the middle east. Not that either of these issues will be resolved by next week, next month, or next year as I will explain below.