Joe Rogan Interviews Peter Zeihan (Part 1: Russo-Ukrainian War)

January 9th, 2023

“Joe Rogan interviews Peter Zeihan” is obviously irresistible catnip for me, as any regular readers recognize. It’s like Rogan is reading my blog! (Joe, you should totally interview me! I’m a great speaker, I’m local, I can bring my dogs over to play with Marshall, and I can tell you what doing standup comedy was like in Houston in the 80s…)

I don’t have the entire interview, because Spotify, but there are some big, interesting chunks I found on YouTube. Many cover ground familiar to BattleSwarm readers.

First up: Zeihan explains his theory on why the Russo-Ukrainian War was inevitable because they had to get across Ukraine to plug defensive gaps, and that Russia had to do it in advance of a demographic death spiral.

Caveat: I’m not sure the “plugging the gaps” theory explains the invasion any better than old fashioned Russian chauvinism; how dare those lowly Ukrainians resist being incorporated into glorious Russia?

Next up: Will Russia use nukes? Zeihan thinks it unlikely.

  • “We’re not just providing the Ukrainians with the weaponry and the ammo, we’re providing them with the intelligence and most of the steps of the kill chain. Without that, the weapons are of limited usefulness, especially at long range, and the Ukrainians have no desire to rupture that relationship.”
  • “The Russians are relatively casualty immune. They fight in an area where they fight with numbers. They’ve never been technologically advanced versus their peers, they’ve always just thrown bodies at it. So there has never been a conflict in Russian history where they have backed out without first losing a half a million men. We’re at about a hundred thousand now. We have a long way to go before the Russian military breaks.” (I think he’s forgetting the Russo-Japanese War, where they got their asses kicked but lost a whole lot less than half a million men. Maybe he implied European war, and ignored a lot of minor ones following the Russian revolution, and ignored anything before the Russian Empire…)
  • We don’t how many Ukrainian civilians the Russians have slaughtered; maybe 250,000. “If you think of things like Bucha and Izyum, German radio intercepts told us as far back as May that there were at least 70 places behind Russian lines that had suffered massacres [like] Bucha, and when we’ve had additional liberations since then, it corroborates that general assessment.”
  • “The Russians are fighting so badly, they’re doing much worse than the Iraqis did in 1992.”
  • “Russia has always been poorly managed and authoritarian, but under Putin it’s taken a much darker turn because of the nature of the end of the Cold War.” Yeah, no. Putin is not a “darker” authoritarian than Stalin.
  • On Putin’s paranoia, isolation, and possible illness. Plus a bit about gay demons.

  • “We’re now in an environment that between the terminal demographic structureof the Soviet/Russian system, and Putin’s personal paranoia. So he’s gone through and purged what was left of the KGB, FSB, of anyone who has personal ambitions to succeed him. We’re left with an entire political elite of only about 130 people, and Putin has removed anyone who has leadership ambitions.”
  • “Any sort of leadership talent has left, or been killed.”
  • “When it came to the Kherson offensive, and it became clear that there was more going on than just NATO weapons, the Ukrainians actually knew what they were doing, they changed the the line from that these are all Nazis to these are actually gay demons.” (Rogan: “What???”)
  • “This is the official line right now that ‘We have homosexual demons fighting us in Ukraine.'” (I’m going to guess that it’s not the line, but just the latest in a firehose stream of ever-more-risible excuses for failure that no one pays any serious attention to, just like whatever Baghdad Bob spit out in 2003.
  • “The guy who’s in charge of the Orthodox Church is a Putin crony.”
  • “We’ve got a Jewish Nazi gay demon.”
  • On Putin having cancer and/or Parkinson’s: “He’s clearly on steroids, but that could mean a whole lot of things…He looks very, not just flushed, but puffy, and that’s that’s kind of a classic too many steroids in your system issue.”
  • “There was this great piece that came out that I saw last week, where it was all the propaganda shots that he’s taken with, like, the soldiers mothers, and on the front, and with the tech people, and in the, intelligence and it was like the same twelve people were in every single shot, just in different outfits and even with those people he’s wearing his ballistic vest.”
  • “He’s clearly unhealthy.”
  • “He’s got the shakes, that’s one of the reasons [for the] Parkinson’s analysis.”
  • “The Ukrainian propaganda guy has been saying that there’s a coup underway since March…I wouldn’t put too much into that.”
  • Rogan: “What a fucked-up situation.” Zeihan: “For the Europeans who have been dealing with the Russians for three centuries, this is kind of par for the course.”
  • I’ve got at least four more videos to go, so let’s break this post into two parts.

    A Failure Of The Victim Selection Process

    January 8th, 2023

    Another criminal finds out the hard way that it is unwise to try and rob people in Texas.

    A customer at Ranchito Taqueria shot and killed a man who robbed the restaurant in southwest Houston late Thursday night, according to the Houston Police Department.

    It happened just before 11:30 p.m. Thursday at the restaurant on S. Gessner near Bellaire Boulevard.

    Bellaire at Gessner is right where working classic Hispanic Houston meets Asian Houston, with a Hispanic Fiesta supermarket, Strake Jesuit (one of Houston’s premiere private Catholic high schools), and a Chinatown all within a few blocks.

    Houston police said the armed man in a mask came inside the restaurant, demanding money and wallets from customers. However, as he was leaving, one of those customers shot the suspect.

    The incident was caught on surveillance video.

    Houston police also released surveillance photos of the customer who shot the robber in the video. Investigators said he is wanted for questioning for his role in the shooting. He has not been identified and is not charged at this time.

    Seeing as how Houston’s legal system as started getting infected with social justice, I don’t see how turning himself in for questioning would be in the shooter’s best interest.

    The shooter collected the stolen money from the robber and returned it to the other patrons, police said. Then the rest of the people in the restaurant left the scene before the police arrived.

    Colion Noir has a reaction video, and why he thinks it’s a righteous shoot:

  • “When you look up the definition of Texas in a dictionary, it literally says everyone and their mama has a gun.”
  • “There are over 300 million guns in this country, and 90% of them are in Texas The rest are in Florida. Why would you possibly think you can walk into a taqueria in southwest Houston, Texas and think no one in there has a gun?”
  • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes…

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

    A Tale Of Two Governors

    January 7th, 2023

    If you want to know why Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a leading presidential contender in 2024, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott is not, this story about DeSantis shaking up a college board of trustees provides a big hint.

    Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the New College of Florida’s Board of Trustees on Friday, directing the new conservative majority to reorient a public university that has been led astray by progressive ideologues in recent years.

    In 2001, the New College of Florida (NCF) was designated the state’s honors college by the Florida legislature. Since then, the school has increasingly embraced progressive ideological causes, such as expanding DEI initiatives, all while missing its 2022 enrollment goal by 45 percent.

    DeSantis’s six appointees are Christopher Rufo, Mark Bauerlein, Matthew Spalding, Charles Kesler, Debra Jenks, and Jason “Eddie” Speir. Several are well-known conservatives.

    Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and is best known for his activism against critical race theory in K–12 education, corporations, and higher education. Kesler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and editor of the Claremont Review of Books, a quarterly conservative publication of political philosophy, history, and literature. Spalding is vice president of the graduate school of government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C., and has published books on the Constitution and the Founding.

    “Governor DeSantis is leading the nation in educational reform and post-secondary responsibility,” Spalding said in a statement to National Review. “I am honored by the appointment and look forward to advancing educational excellence and focusing New College on its distinctive mission as the liberal arts honors college of the State of Florida. A good liberal arts education is truly liberating and opens the minds and forms the character of good students and good citizens.”

    While they must first be confirmed by the GOP-controlled state senate, the selections are on board with the governor’s plan to refocus NCF. DeSantis chief of staff James Uthmeier says the administration intends to convert the college to a classical model akin to that of Hillsdale College. The Michigan conservative bulwark rejects the neo-Marxist school of thought, including critical race theory and its contention that white supremacy is intrinsic to America’s national fabric and that positive discrimination is necessary to rectify historical racial injustice.

    “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” he told National Review.

    I have no doubt that Rufo and the other new regents will do their best to purge New College of Florida of the poison of Critical Race Theory and other radical social justice teachings.

    Has the Texas Governor ever appointed a true conservative reformer to a college school board? One: Wallace Hall, appointed to the University of Texas System Board of Regents, who dug deep into the scandal of the offspring of the well-connected receiving preferential treatment for admission into college administration programs.

    The problem is, Hall was appointed by Rick Perry, and Abbott essentially hung him out to dry, failing to take any action on the scandals he uncovered and failing to reappoint him when his six-year term was up.

    From the outside, Abbott seems like a fairly conservative governor, and he is when compared to the likes of Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom. But at heart, Abbott seems to be a cautious, consensus-driven politician who is reluctant to rock the boat. When it comes to real efforts to sand-blast the social justice rot out of higher education, the contrast between him and DeSantis is night and day.

    LinkSwarm for January 6, 2023

    January 6th, 2023

    Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! By the time you read this, Kevin McCarthy will have lost more elections than Pat Paulsen.

  • Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “More U-Haul Trucks Left California Than Any Other State In 2022, Texas Top Destination.”

    More moving trucks left from California than any other state in 2022 for the third year in a row, while more Americans are flocking to Republican-led states like Texas and Florida, a new study published on Jan. 3 has found.

    The study was conducted by the moving truck rental company, U-Haul, and found that Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas were the preferred destinations for one-way moving trucks in 2022, with those states ranking as the top growth states on the annual U-Haul Growth Index.

    U-Haul’s Growth Index is compiled according to the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks arriving in a state or city, versus those departing from that state or city each calendar year across the U.S. and Canada and is a strong indicator of what kind of job states and cities are attracting and maintaining residents, according to the company.

    Texas is the top destination for U-Haul trucks for the second consecutive year and the fifth time since 2016, according to the study. That is followed by Florida, which has been a top-three growth state for seven years in a row. South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and Idaho also saw strong growth rates in 2022, the study found.

    I think I’ve posted a variation on this story just about every year I’ve published this blog…

  • Speaking of people fleeing high taxes, New York is hemorrhaging taxpayers as well.

    From July 2021 to July 2022, 300,000 more people moved out of the state than moved in. New York had the largest population loss—in both percentage and absolute terms—experienced by any state during that period.

    Sadly, this was both predictable and preventable.

    In March 2021, a study of New York found that its already staggeringly high tax burden had worsened due to an increase in the top marginal tax rate to almost 15% for those in New York City. The study projected that the flood of people leaving would only accelerate—and it did.

    Even before that study, the Empire State lost so many people that it cost New York a seat in Congress after the 2020 census. This exodus is a direct response to New York’s obscenely high taxes.

    Just how bad is it? Compared with other states, New Yorkers:

    • Pay the highest total tax burden and highest share of personal income (14%) in taxes.
    • Endure the second-worst overall business-tax climate.
    • Face the highest individual income-tax rate and income-tax collections per capita.
    • Pay the second-highest state and local corporate income tax collections per capita.
    • Have the fourth-highest property taxes and local sales-tax rate (on average).
    • Pay the highest cigarette taxes and ninth-highest gasoline taxes.
    • Pay the sixth-highest capital-stock tax rate.
    • Are tied for third-highest estate-tax rate.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of California: “California Officially Becomes a Sanctuary State for Child Mutilation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Things that make you go “Hmmm“: “Virgin Islands AG Fired Three Days After Suing JPMorgan Over Jeffrey Epstein.”
  • Three Biden tax hikes that took place January 1. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Remember how I’ve noted that semiconductor memory manufacturers make money hand-over-fist in boom times and barely break even during busts? “Samsung Profits Plunge 69% As Global Chip Demand In ‘Full-Fledged Ice Age.'”
    

  • Turnabout is fair play: “U. Houston Prof Tells Students to Report Teachers Berating ‘White People or Christians to DEI Office.'”
  • Denver Mayor Michael Hancock takes pride in virtue signaling his city as a refuge for illegal aliens. Guess what?
  • Former Pope Benedict XVI dies at age 95.
  • Thanks to green energy policies and the Russo-Ukrainian War, it’s now too expensive to break bread in Europe. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • U.S. passes Qatar as world’s largest LNG exporter.
  • “How is it like being homeless in Portland?” “It’s a piece of cake really.”
  •  Jordan B. Peterson: “People camouflage themselves against the herd.”
  • This story should piss you off. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Drone swarm vs. carrier group simulation.
  • Ouch!
  • Some pretty amazing skiing.
  • Cereal experiments lame.
  • Limousine Liberals vs. Poor Boatniks

    January 5th, 2023

    This is an interesting video on the conflict between some poor boatniks known as “Anchor-Outs” for anchoring in Richardson Bay, just off Sausalito, California, and a government entity known as the “Richardson Bay Regional Agency.”

    What’s the conflict? RBRA wants them gone, because they pay neither rent nor taxes, and their ramshackle boat view spoil the views of limousine liberals.

    So they just seize and destroy people’s boats.

    Some quotes:

  • “The RBRA. It’s the Richardson Bay Regional Agency. I call it the ‘Rich Boy Reach Around’.”
  • “They want to get rid of us all and gentrify the whole waterfront, eliminate the historical waterfront atmosphere, and put mooring balls for yachts.
    They just want millionaire yachts.”

  • “Richardson Bay is in one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S. and is a scenic vista for million dollar homes. Basically, this is the most desirable place to live in all California. And ironically, it’s run by limousine liberals, you know? Rich people don’t want to look at poor people. A lot of them are people that were born here that have been out here a long time, and they just kind of got priced out.”
  • “There aren’t many housing options for someone on a fixed income of $1,200 a month.” Funny how Democratic Party-run locales always seem to price the poor out of the market.
  • “For the past few years the RBRA has taken the extreme step of confiscating and crushing boats in their effort to clear out the anchorage. Leaving many boat owners homeless. ‘It’s to push out the poor. They want to get rid of the junkier boats. They literally would like to get rid of all the boats.'”
  • A detailed discussion of various local ordinances follows, some of which appear to be at odds with national maritime law.
  • “This is a federal anchorage so they don’t have authority to actually come out here and police us. People telling you laws, regulations, 72 hour anchoring, harbormaster. All that is just lies. It’s smoke and mirrors.”
  • Are there parallels between the Anchor-Outs and the homeless plaguing Austin? A few. But there doesn’t appear to be a large crime problem, the people in the boats don’t appear to be dealing drugs, and if they’re on boats, they’re not panhandling or breaking into people’s houses, so the parallels to Adlers seem minimal. Also, if they haul their own garbage (as the video states), they’re not leaving the needles on public streets (or floating in the bay), so there also seems to be little parallel with Seattle’s dystopian RV drug culture.

    Sausalito’s limousine liberals do truly seem to have become The Man, using their power to oppress the little guy.

    Zeihan: The Dollar’s Demise As The Global Currency Is Greatly Exaggerated

    January 4th, 2023

    “Every few months to couple of years, a new conventional wisdom takes hold that the United States is in its final years, if not final months, and some big political thing is going to happen that is going to dethrone the US dollar as the global currency, and all American power will unwind with that. There is no part of that logic chain that has ever been correct.”

    Some takeaways:

  • U.S power is not a result of its position as the global currency, it’s the other way around. The global currency has to be able to impose, by force if necessary, some sort of tax pax on the trading system to allow trade to happen in the first place. And right now the U.S Navy is more powerful than that of all other navies combined by about a factor of seven. And if you consider that the world’s second and third most powerful expeditionary navies are the Japanese fleet and the British fleet, and you throw them in as American for this Force projection factor, you’re now talking in excess of 12 to 1.

  • “Honestly, there’s there’s never been any math there and there’s no danger to the U.S. position from a strategic point of view.”
  • “BRICs is a group of four large developing economies: Brazil, Russia, India and China. It’s a grouping that was put together by some finance guy back in the 2000s, and all he meant by it was ‘Hey, look, these are four big countries with big bond markets we might want to consider trading these as a group.’ That’s all he ever thought about it.”
  • “The leaders of the BRICs countries do get together from time to time. [No]
    meaningful policy has ever come out of it, because these countries don’t really trade. I mean they all trade with China, of course, but they don’t trade with one another, so there’s a reason to caucus with Beijing, but the rest of it is just kind of fluff. Always has been.”

  • “When I see stories about other countries such as South Africa, or Argentina, or now Saudi Arabia starting to join, I’m like ‘Oh, this is really boring.’ Because these countries really have nothing in common.”
  • “The conspiratorial logic goes: If they stop using the U.S. dollar, then the US is doomed. Well they’d have to start using something else, and none of them, none of them, want to use each other’s currencies, because that would give that country a leg up.”
  • “The Russians have always said that the ruble should be the global currency, which makes everyone, everyone laugh, because nobody wants rubles, especially Russians.”
  • Same for the Yuan and the Rand.
  • “If you want to have a Global Currency it has to be huge. It has to be able enough to lubricate the global exchange mechanisms, which at last check was in the tens of trillions. And that doesn’t mean that your currency has to be in the tens of trillions, that means you have to be able to lubricate the exchange of tens of trillions, your currency needs to be even bigger.”
  • Which gets us to probably the single biggest constraint on being a global currency: you have to not care what happens to the value of your currency in any given day, because if there’s a trade surge and demand of your currency goes up, then all of a sudden supply of your currency is plummeted, and you’re dealing with very real economic distortions at home. So your currency has to be so huge that you don’t care that global exchange in it is moving around every day. And that means you also need to be able to run a persistent trade deficit, because you have to be able to provide currency for everyone who wants to trade everywhere at any time, and you cannot sign off on each individual transaction.

  • “That makes the list down to one already.”
  • “Europeans couldn’t do it, because they have to run a trade surplus because their demographics are so aged they will never be net importers again.”
  • “It can’t be the Chinese. The Chinese are the most manipulated currency in human history. They print two to five times as much currency every month as the U.S Fed did at the height of our monetization programs in 2007 to 2008, and then again during Covid. It’s everything that everyone says is wrong with the US dollar is actually wrong with the Yuan by a factor of 10.”
  • “Every time the Chinese start to loosen up their capital controls in an attempt to have a bigger role for their currency internationally, a half a trillion to a trillion dollars of private savings floods out of the country in a matter of months, and they have to slam that window shut again.”
  • Even in times of war, countries tend to use the dominate global currency for international trade, even if issued by their current enemy.
  • “The Russians are under financial constraints right now, sanctions put on them by the Americans the Europeans and others, and so they tried to pull a lot of their petroleum earnings, which comes in in euros and dollars, and they tried to push it into Chinese yuan as kind of like a stick it to the West. Well, a few months later they tried to then pull it out, and the Chinese went like ‘Well, no, we really don’t want these Yuan back.’ And so the Russians just lost tens of billions of dollars.”
  • In a post-globalist economy, American dollars provide a handy hedge against regional hegemons.
  • “There’s no shortage of people who don’t like Americans, who have no sense of math or history, who are always going to trot this up every few months, and it means as little today as it did then.”
  • That means you too, Zerohedge…

    Dear Restaurants: Shove Your Damn QR Codes

    January 3rd, 2023

    Here’s a Louis Rossmann rant that hits home for me: How online menu apps for restaurants suck compared to ordinary paper menus.

    I hate having to scan QR codes on my phone just to get a menu so badly that I will avoid eating at any restaurant that wants to make me do that. ToastTab is especially infuriating.

    And while I’m ranting about things that infuriate me, having you rate your transaction when ordering at the counter, before you’ve even received your food, is so unacceptable that I always give them the lowest rating possible when they make me do that.

    Ahem. Back to the topic at hand.

    Everyone but a small minority of perpetual covid paranoids have gotten over the stupidities of 2020. It’s time for every restaurant to go back to printed menus as the default.

    Texas Border Control Update for January 2, 2023

    January 2nd, 2023

    Some updates on Texas’ attempt to secure the border that the Biden Administration has intentionally left unsecured.

    First, Texas Governor Greg Abbott started building a shipping container wall along the border.

    Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that on Tuesday shipping containers were added to the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, serving as a blockade, as the city declared a state of emergency earlier in December to deal with the surge of illegal immigrants crossing into the US.

    Abbott tweeted on Wednesday, “Texas is adding shipping containers to the US-Mexico border in El Paso. This is in addition to the razor wire and National Guard. Together, the strategies are causing illegal immigration at that location to plummet.” 

    As The Post Millennial reported on December 14, El Paso has seen an average of 2,460 illegal immigrants cross into the US daily. That figure surged in the preliminary lead up to the expiration of Title 42,, which gave officials the ability to expel illegal immigrants over health concerns. 

    On December 19, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a stay on the lifting of Title 42, originally scheduled to expire on December 21, and the pause has stalled the surge of border crossers entering the US.

    Shipping containers may provide a decent stop-gap solution in highly trafficked areas, but fall far short of a comprehensive border wall solution.

    Second, numerous counties in Texas have declared that an invasion is taking place.

    At least 40 counties in Texas reportedly passed or considered resolutions last year claiming illegal immigration is an “invasion” amid a debate over how aggressively Gov. Greg Abbott should confront the federal government over border security.

    The Center Square indicated that the following counties are included on the list: Atascosa, Burnet, Chambers, Clay, Collin, Ector, Edwards, Ellis, Fannin, Goliad, Hamilton, Hardin, Hood, Hunt, Jack, Jasper, Johnson, Kinney, Lavaca, Leon, Liberty, Live Oak, Madison, McMullen, Montague, Navarro, Orange, Parker, Presidio, Shackelford, Somervell, Terrell, Throckmorton, Tyler, Van Zandt, Waller, Wharton, Wichita, Wilson, and Wise.

    Of those, only Terrell and Presidio are actually on the border.

    Many of the resolutions were written to back Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, secure grant funding from the State of Texas, and pressure the federal government to take more aggressive steps to deter illegal immigration. Part of the funding, which was included in an appropriations bill passed in September 2021, is to help counties pay for additional law enforcement to respond to the increased criminal activity that accompanies illegal immigration.

    Those who support border security measures focused on deterrence often say “every county is a border county.” Counties have cited fatal drug overdoses and concerns about human trafficking as part of the basis for passing these documents, even if many of the jurisdictions in question are hundreds of miles away from the border.

    Gov. Greg Abbott embraced the characterization of illegal immigration as an “invasion,” but his approach to the strategy has been complicated.

    In November, Abbott tweeted that he had invoked the “invasion” clauses of the federal and state constitutions and outlined border security measures that he had taken. Many news outlets reported the development as breaking news, but Abbott had instituted most of the measures he listed months earlier.

    The U.S. Constitution requires the federal government to protect states against invasions. In addition, Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution authorizes states to protect themselves against the same.

    “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay,” the provision reads.

    Article IV, Section 7 of the Texas Constitution addresses how the governor is to respond if the state is invaded.

    “He shall be Commander-in-Chief of the military forces of the State, except when they are called into actual service of the United States. He shall have power to call forth the militia to execute the laws of the State, to suppress insurrections, and to repel invasions,” the section reads.

    All of these may help stem the giant Democrat-encouraged flow of illegal aliens into the country, but not as much as the federal government living up to its constitutional obligations to defend the border.

    Dave Barry’s 2022 Year In Review

    January 1st, 2023

    Happy New Year, everyone!

    As is now tradition, we turn over our 2022 review duties to the capable hands of Dave Barry.

    January

    The national mood is gloomy, and it’s taking a heavy political toll on President Biden, as voters increasingly question whether he is up to the job of leading the nation, or for that matter finishing his sentences.

    According to the polls, the two biggest concerns of the public, by far, are the pandemic and the economy. Consequently Congress is focused, laserlike, on: the Senate filibuster rule. This is a legislative tactic that is evil when the other side uses it but good when your side uses it. At the moment the Democrats want to change the rule, so of course the Republicans, led by Sen. Mitch “I am smiling, damn it” McConnell, are opposed to changing it, which means Washington is consumed by a bitter, vicious, nasty, name-calling battle pitting the Democrats against Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are also Democrats.

    In the end, as is so often the case with these burning issues that consume the nation’s capital, nothing happens, which is the whole point of the constitutional system of checks and balances put into place by the Founding Fathers, all of whom — and this is a testament to their wisdom and foresight — are dead.

    Meanwhile the national debt, for the first time ever, creeps over $30 trillion, which is more than the entire U.S. economy is worth. Fortunately this is nothing to worry about. Forget we even brought it up.

    February

    There is trouble in, of all places, Canada. The news up there is that the capital city, Ottawa (from the Algonquin word “adawe,” meaning “Washington”) is besieged by a massive protest convoy of trucks, clogging the streets, honking horns, blocking traffic and making it impossible for anybody to get anywhere. Granted, this is the situation pretty much every day in, for example, New York City, but apparently in Canada it is a big deal. As tensions mount, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in a controversial move, invokes emergency powers enabling the government to freeze the protesters’ access to beaver pelts.

    Ha-ha! We are poking some good-natured fun at Canada, which is actually a modern nation and an important trading partner that we depend on to supply us with many vital things. Celine Dion is only one example. In all seriousness, the Canadian trucker strike is a significant event that raises some important issues, which everyone immediately stops caring about because of the situation in Ukraine.

    Ukraine is a nation that, through poor planning, is located right next to Russia. This is unfortunate because Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man who relaxes by putting kittens into a food processor, has long wanted to establish closer ties with Ukraine, in the same sense that a grizzly bear wants to establish closer ties with a salmon.

    On Feb. 24 the Russian army invades Ukraine. Everyone assumes the Russians will easily prevail, but the Ukrainians put up a surprisingly strong resistance (we are using the term “resistance” in the sense of “physically fighting back,” as opposed to “tweeting defiant hashtags”). Most of the world rallies around the underdog Ukrainians and their charismatic president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who is basically the opposite of Vladimir Putin. (Although to be fair, if Putin did comedy, he would kill.)

    March

    In economic news, inflation continues to worsen despite intensive efforts by the Biden administration to explain that it is caused by Vladimir Putin, corporate greed, covid, supply-chain issues, global climate change, the filibuster rule, the murder hornets and various other factors totally unrelated to any policies of the Biden administration.

    April

    Elon Musk says he wants to buy Twitter for $44 billion, which works out to one dollar for every apocalyptic tweet emitted about the sale by alarmed verified Twitter users who are deeply concerned about the precedent of allowing billionaires to buy major media platforms, which have traditionally been small mom-and-pop operations like The Washington Post and Facebook. Another verified concern is that Musk favors “free speech,” which we are putting in quotation marks because although it sounds good — Free speech! — if everyone is allowed to have it willy-nilly, the public could be exposed to misinformation that has not been verified by the verifiers, as opposed to the current situation, in which everything on Twitter is 100 percent accurate.

    Meanwhile, for a few exciting hours, a trending topic on political Twitter, which we swear we are not making up, is “testicle tanning.” Don’t even ask.

    May

    Meanwhile parents scramble desperately to find baby formula amid a shortage that has left U.S. store shelves bare, although there are plentiful supplies abroad. In an emergency effort reminiscent of the legendary Berlin Airlift, the U.S. government provides temporary relief by using an Air Force transport plane to fly 35 tons of American babies to Germany. The operation is deemed a success, although, as an official noted, “afterward we had to burn the plane.”

    The war in Ukraine continues but receives less and less coverage in the United States as Americans turn their attention to the historic Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation trial. At issue is Heard’s 2018 Washington Post op-ed alleging that Depp, once the embodiment of cool in the role of dashing pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, has developed a case of face bloat and currently looks, quote, “like the owner of a struggling water-bed store.”

    June

    Johnny Depp wins his historic defamation lawsuit, with the jury ordering Amber Heard to repay the 783 billion person-hours the American public wasted watching the trial. The verdict unleashes a wave of thoughtful media think pieces the likes of which the nation has not seen since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock.

    In economic news, Americans grow increasingly alarmed as the price of a gallon of gasoline and the value of the average 401(k) plan rapidly converge from opposite directions. For its part, the White House is growing increasingly irritated by the way people keep whining about soaring inflation and the collapsing stock market and the possibility of a recession while ignoring all the positive economic accomplishments that the Biden administration has achieved despite the efforts of Vladimir Putin, who — WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP FORGETTING THIS — is the cause of everything bad.

    July

    In financial news, Elon Musk announces that he no longer wants to purchase Twitter and will instead use the $44 billion to buy two Springsteen tickets.

    Snip.

    As the month comes to a close, the economy dominates the news with the Commerce Department reporting that the U.S. gross domestic product shrank for the second consecutive quarter. Traditionally this has meant that we are in a recession, but President Biden reassures the nation that it actually is not a recession, for reasons clearly stated on the teleprompter.

    September

    As Russian forces suffer mounting losses in Ukraine, an increasingly desperate Vladimir Putin, in what observers say is a clear violation of international law, annexes Connecticut.

    In a legal development that causes widespread swooning on MSNBC, New York Attorney General Letitia James files a lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of falsifying business records, issuing false financial statements and failure to pay $327 million worth of parking tickets. Just for fun, Trump declares that he’s guilty, while the Democrats call the lawsuit a politically motivated witch hunt. Everyone enjoys a hearty laugh before order is restored.

    On a sadder note, the world mourns the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the beloved monarch who reigned over the United Kingdom during its transition from the center of a vast global empire to a popular tourist destination roughly the size of a pickleball court. She is succeeded by her 143-year-old son, King Charles the Uncomfortable, who will be officially crowned next year in a traditional British ceremony-gasm featuring numerous horses.

    In response to yet another viral TikTok “challenge” video, the Food and Drug Administration issues an urgent bulletin stating that people who eat chicken that has been marinated in NyQuil “probably deserve to die.”

    October

    The national debt creeps up by yet another trillion and now exceeds $31 trillion, but again this is nothing to worry about because it has absolutely no economic consequences. We don’t know why we even bother keeping track.

    Speaking of money: Elon Musk announces that he has decided to buy Twitter after all, because the only Springsteen tickets he could get for $44 billion were “way the hell up in the balcony.”

    Snip.

    Abroad, Liz Truss resigns as prime minister of the United Kingdom after a turbulent term lasting a little under 14 minutes. She is replaced by Rishi Sunak, whose name can be rearranged to spell “Is A Hunk, Sir.” In China, President Xi Jinping wins an unprecedented third term when delegates to the Communist Party congress unanimously elect, after careful consideration, not to die.

    November

    As the historic midterm elections approach, with the fate of democracy hanging in the balance, verified blue check mark media personalities on Twitter focus with a ferocious intensity on the single most critical issue facing the nation, if not the world: the status of verified blue check mark media personalities on Twitter.

    The problem is that Elon Musk intends to charge people $8 a month for a blue check mark, which would mean any nonelite rando could get one, which would be a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Twitter Verification Clause. Some verified users go so far as to declare, on Twitter, that they are seriously considering leaving Twitter, although it is not immediately clear what they would do with the extra 14 hours per day.

    Read the whole thing.

    Firefox Bungles Windows List In Update

    December 31st, 2022

    I use Firefox as my browser, and the latest version (108.0.1 (64-bit) for MacOS) has managed to screw up the windows list system. (I use windows for individual web pages when hooked up to my large monitor, but tabs when I’m using my MacBook Pro by itself.) Firefox has managed to screw up two different things with this release:

    1. For just about every version back to the dawn of time, Firefox lists windows in the order you open them. For the way I work, I usually have Gmail as my first opened window, my Books Wanted List in the second, and Bookfinder in the third, then a whole bunch of other windows, depending on what I’m working on. Well, now Firefox lists them alphabetically. Worse still, I see no way to change this behavior in preferences.
    2. Before, when you accessed the window list, it was the same no matter which Firefox window you opened it from, and it showed all your windows. Now, Firefox only shows you the windows that were open when you opened this window. That means older windows will only bring up a much smaller windows list that excludes the windows opened subsequently. And honestly, I’m not 100% it works that way for every window, as there seem to be exceptions. So they only way to see a list of all your open browser windows is to find the most recently opened window. Which is no longer listed at the bottom of the list. (You can also get a list of all open Firefox windows in the Firefox Task Manager, which I always have open,as its useful for tracking down memory hog windows.)

    Maybe some people asked for the ability to alphabetize windows in the list, but I doubt anyone wanted that as an unchangeable default, and I’m pretty sure no one asked for the inconsistent listing.

    If anyone know how to revert this behavior to the previous default settings, let me know…