Best of Times, Worst of Times

 If you are a racist, sexist, homophobe, climate denier like me you realize that nothing can change until it gets worse. "The worse the better," said Lenin.

Because nothing changes until it's broken. And that is as it should be. We may have the stupidest rulers in the world, but as long as things seem copacetic to the average bear, things ain't gonna change.

Obviously, the Biden administration is changing that. And so is Vladimir Putin in Russia and Ukraine.

The Biden administration, in its agenda that presumably was hammered out when Biden was handed the Democratic nomination in March 2020, has pushed major handouts to "oppressed peoples" and pedal to the metal climate change and termination of fossil fuels.

My guess is that this will turn out to be the great political and economic mistake of the ages.

And just to prove that the world is gonna change we have the Ukraine crisis, which has forced Europe to face up to its stupidities on the climate front.

God knows, of course, what stupidities the politicians will commit on the Russia-Ukraine front.

Victor Davis Hanson pulls out the "irredentist" card to explain Russia's adventure in Ukraine. After the end of a glorious empire, politicians are always trying to get back to the glory. Whether Greeks trying to get back the Byzantine Empire, or Mussolini trying to get back the Roman Empire. Or Putin trying to get back the Soviet Empire. Irredentism usually fails, but not before the rest of us pay a pretty big butcher's bill.

The problem is, of course, that just because the hard left of the Democrat party and the climateers get given their walking papers it doesn't mean that we now decide to do the right thing: get the welfare state down to size and frack baby frack and start to build modular nuclear plants.

Oh and rework the debt economy so that people and corporations can't load themselves up with low down payment loans. Because a highly leveraged society is a very fragile society.

In the past few years I have also paid a lot of attention to what women input into the public square. As in going 100 percent for the COVID lockdown and in sending money to Ukraine to help the refugees.

Really, after a century of the educated elite in power it's time for a change. Not because the educated elite is a particularly bad or foolish ruling class, but because any ruling class tends to look after itself and its supporters and not pay too much attention to how the rest of the world is making out.

Hey, why be surprised? The whole point of the rule of the educated elite is over / under politics, where the rulers mobilize the lower class against the middle class. It works politically when the under class is a majority of the voters. But when the ordinary middle class becomes a majority of the voters, maybe not so much.

I was reading Dominic Cummings on his Substack this morning and he is suggesting parallels with 1914. Only, for him, our rulers and leaders are worse than the rulers and leaders of 1914.