Posted by I don’t know why but for some reason the internet and media think 2016 was an exceptionally crappy year. My Facebook page and news feed has been bombarded lately by post after post declaring what an incredibly shitty year this has been and they are glad it is almost over. One of the main reasons for this is a perception that an unusually large number of famous movie stars and singers died this year. This belief is fed by the popular media such as NBC: “The world lost superstar musicians, stars of stage and screen, some of the greatest athletes of all time and larger-than-life political figures in 2016.”
It is, of course, a bunch of BS.
Fortunately there are people at Snopes that are as cynical as me and yet have enough time to find esoteric data like this (or maybe they get paid for it, which I don’t). It confirms kind of what I already suspected; we are all being brainwashed by a constant 24/7 barrage of pseudo-news on our smartphones and social media feeds and we lap it up like starving kittens at a saucer of cream. It reminds me of when the United States dropped five smart bombs on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 killing three people. The CIA (yes, the same organisation that the liberal media is defending as being infallible in its evidence of Russian hacking during the US elections) said they got the wrong address. The Chinese were incensed; how could the most powerful military and intelligence agency in the world make such a stupid mistake. Conspiracy theories abounded; protesters pelted the US embassy in Beijing. Whenever I was asked what I thought about the issue, my answer was, “smart bombs – dumb people”. Today we have smart phones – but still dumb people.
But 2016 is almost over so things can only get better in 2017 given how universally bad people think this year was. Like a large thundercloud darkening an otherwise warm and sunny day, our friends in the media, especially the CBC, won’t let us be optimistic or happy.
The core of this pessimism towards the future is President Donald Trump. Rolling Stone’s key predictions are:
- Trade war (and possibly shooting war) with China. The first is a real but remote possibility as it has been for every new president since George Bush Senior. The likelihood of it diminishes given how much a lose-lose scenario this course of action clearly results in and the stakes have only gotten bigger since the 1990s. For a real war to erupt though, it would take more than a few miscalculations as US-Sino relations have survived spy planes and fighters crashing into each other and embassy bombings without having a crazy over-reaction.
- Constitutional crisis. The Republicans nearly have control of the 2/3 of state legislatures they need to convene a constitutional convention (they don’t have anywhere close 2/3 of both houses of Congress which is the other way to do it). The fear is Trump will try to change the Constitution to put limits on federal spending and term limits on Supreme Court justices and Congress. First of all, how does this even come close to being a Constitutional crisis? Isn’t this exactly what a democracy is expected to do: reform and change its laws (including the constitution) and setting the bar really high at 2/3 so that you can’t do it on a whim. Personally, I’m not sure either of the two things mentioned are necessarily bad amendments but Rolling Stone make it sound like its the end of the world.
- New threats to press freedom. Full disclosure: I kind of hate the press with their haughty holier-than-thou, condescending belief that they are uniquely charged with a fourth-estate duty to be the moral conscience and check-and-balance to the government. The press is, in fact, filled with people who have their own biases and opinions and, despite their constant bleats to the contrary that they are impartial – these views show through in what they choose to report, selective facts and tone; not just in the op-eds. Unless Rolling Stone thinks that part of their “Constitutional Crisis” involves the repeal of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press, this is probably just a tempest in a teacup. Or, in the words of the great bard William Shakespeare, “the lady doth protest too much”.
- More of climate change. “In October, atmospheric carbon levels exceeded 400 parts per million – the so-called carbon tipping point. That’s a big deal because scientists have long believed that once we hit that threshold, the effects of climate change will be irreversible. That means species loss, deforestation, rising sea levels, warmer oceans, intenser storms, new diseases, more wars.” First of all, if this is true then everything is irrelevant anyway as we have already passed the tipping point so we might as well party like its 1999. Second, seriously WTF? This is just a kitchen sink list of almost every natural problem that can hit mankind. Why not add in pestilence, plague of locusts, earthquakes, volcanoes and four dark hooded men riding on flying horses while you are at it.
- “Antibiotic resistance. According to a report in the New Scientist, the world will reach a tipping point in antibiotic resistance in 2017, which means people could start dying from common illnesses like urinary tract infections, strep throat and pneumonia.” Holy crap, another tipping point and coincidentally in 2017 as well. Might as well lump this in with point number four with Donald Trump as the anti-Christ; except liberals tend to hate Christians who they view as either KKK members or illogical and uneducated evolution deniers who want to block their access to birth control and abortions.
- Dismantling Obamacare. “Republicans in Congress and those soon to be in the White House are already puzzling over the most politically expedient way take away health care coverage from some 16.4 million people nationwide.” To this point, I will defer to Hollywood’s leading liberal, Michael Moore who states, “That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies at a time when the ideal of universal health care needed all the support it could get… But the truth is this, he added: Obamacare is awful.”
I know our society prays at the altar of science and technology and has elevated them to a point where they are the new religion for the intellectual class. But hiding behind the facade of science is a lot of ideology and pseudo-intellectualism masquerading as truth and fact. Evolution was and still is clearly labelled as a theory but those who would deride Christians and the church and their creationist beliefs would also have us believe that evolution is actually an incontrovertible scientific truth. To be clear, I am not religious myself and do believe in evolution but to consider this more than just a belief (no matter how logical it seems) would be as conceited as religions who view themselves as the one and only truth. Two of Rolling Stone’s predictions (I’m not even sure you can consider them predictions as all they’ve done is shotgun a bunch of apocalyptic statements in the vain hope they get lucky) hide behind science. What’s worse is Rolling Stone makes two huge claims of “tipping points” in 2017 where “science” says we are doomed because we have destroyed the earth and disease will claim us all.
I have heard these sorts of Malthusian claims far too often in my life and most end up being either wrong or completely out to lunch. The most famous is, of course, Thomas Malthus who claimed we were going to overpopulate the world and starve. That was in 1798 but it didn’t stop a resurgence in the 1950-70 of neo-Malthusians who basically said the same thing. Well, we are now at around 7.4bn people, well past any Malthusian “tipping point” and the planet is nowhere close to mass starvation even though the population is still rising. Another “tipping point” was the idea of “peak oil” since oil is a non-renewable resource we would hit a point where production would peak and then our civilization would collapse. “The idea that the rate of oil production would peak and irreversibly decline is an old one. In 1919, David White, chief geologist of the United States Geological Survey wrote of US petroleum: … the peak of production will soon be passed, possibly within 3 years.” In other words, the leading scientific minds and experts have been wrong time and time again on many subjects ranging from overpopulation and mass starvation to peak oil and yet liberals screaming that the end of the world from climate change is nigh like to yell even louder that THE SCIENCE IS INCONTROVERTIBLE and anyone who says otherwise is either stupid, uneducated, or brainwashed. Well, sorry to burst your tree-hugging bubble but even the scientists don’t believe that anymore but hey, lets not let facts stop us from propagating our lies, half-truths and ideology.
Just as the often quoted “97% of scientists agree that climate change is man-made and going to destroy the planet” is quite fake.
Let me say straight out I am not a climate change denier. I fully accept that the climate is changing. I also accept that man made activity has a role, maybe even the biggest role in this change. Mind you, the climate has always been changing. Wandering through Italy (Venice, Milan, Florence and Rome) this time last year, I was amazed how cold it was, especially at night when a jacket and even sweater was not optional. Then, I would go on to see fresco’s of Romans walking around in open air marble buildings wearing togas and sandals. Clearly there was something different in the average winter temperature in Rome over the past 2000 years and it wasn’t because Caesar was driving his SUV around the Circus Maximus.
In other words, I don’t know how much of climate change (can’t say global warming anymore because that has proven to be kind of not true so they convenient relabelled global warming as climate change) is due to human activity (i.e. CO2), solar activity or a myriad of other factors. I also don’t know if and when there is a “tipping point” where one additional cow fart will result in complete ecological catastrophe. Given how good scientists have been in the past at predicting these sorts of things, I remain extremely skeptical. To all those who make pithy claims like “so you think you are smarter and know more than the scientists” my answer is: when the scientists can show that they can actually consistently make accurate predictions than I’ll accept their conclusions. Given that the local PhD wielding meteorologist with hundreds of millions in atmospheric monitoring equipment, doppler radar and satellites can’t consistently get the weather forecast right for my golf game the next morning, I’m going to stick with “scientists are human like the rest of us… and to err is to be human”.
The CBC rant is more of the same thing with blame being placed on the doorstep of Donald Trump. All I can say to all the pessimists is this: I am more optimistic today than I have been in more than six years. Personally, I think 2016 was a year of transition while 2017 looks to be a year of change and growth. So I am going to go against the grain here and say clearly that the Trump presidency is going to usher in some major changes in the world; some good, some bad. In other words, there will be winners and losers. All those clean energy firms who have been living off the teat of government subsidies by pandering to fear that the world is going to end tomorrow unless we give them billions today are likely losers. Oil and coal companies who will benefit from a domestic policy that favours “drill baby drill” are likely winners.
If there is a black hole lurking out there in 2017, it is more likely to be in Europe, not America or Asia. All these armchair economists talking about China’s problems aren’t saying anything new. I remember having to constantly debunk a stupid book published in 2001 titled The Coming Collapse of China for worried clients in the West. Wikipedia has this update:
In an article entitled “The Coming Collapse of China: 2012 Edition”, published by the Foreign Policy magazine website, Gordon C. Chang admitted that his prediction was wrong, arguing that he was off only by one year: “Instead of 2011, the mighty communist party of China will fall in 2012. Bet on it.” On May 21 2016, The Nationalist Interest published another article by Chang, “China’s Coming Revolution.”
You can choose to believe what you want but an idiot who has been wrong for two decades and continues to beat the same drum is not the kind of person I find credible. Of course he’ll eventually be right; Empires inexorably rise and fall as do governments, economies and countries.
You can also choose to believe that paragon of unbiased reporting 60 Minutes which did a report on China’s “Ghost Cities” in 2013. This theme has been widely copied by Western media en-masse and in itself is nothing new because I have heard the same reports and analysis about China’s construction boom since the 1990s. As The Economist reports a mere two years later in 2015:
WHEN “60 Minutes”, an American television news programme, visited a new district in the metropolis of Zhengzhou in 2013, it made it the poster-child for China’s property bubble. “We found what they call a ghost city,” said Lesley Stahl, the host. “Uninhabited for miles and miles and miles and miles.” Two years on, she would not be able to say the same. The empty streets where she stood have a steady stream of cars. Workers saunter out of offices at lunchtime. Laundry hangs in the windows of the subdivisions.
Like Gordon Chang’s book, the pessimists will eventually be right. China’s property bubble will collapse one day and there will be a substantial shock to the economy just like what happened in America in 2007. I don’t know if it will happen tomorrow, or next year, or five years or more down the road. I have long given up trying to predict these sorts of things because its a fools errand and those who have made these forecasts (kind of like climate scientists with their “tipping points”) have been wrong every time so far. When I was paid to make these predictions, I always did and made very clear forecasts – not ones couched by wishy-washy weasel words. I was forced to write more than one mea culpa when I was wrong. Today, I don’t get a cent for making forecasts but I will say this: Sorry Gordon, you probably won’t be right in 2017 either.
Happy New Year to everyone.