Some Thoughts

I have observed a few things over the last few weeks which I will briefly write about.

The whole Kyle Rittenhouse situation demonstrates that the acceleration of the decline of American society, which began in 2000, has not slowed up despite the results of the last US federal election. I have stated in this space before that it took many decades for the decline of the Roman Empire to reach a point of no return but the US has done it in about two. There is no coming back. The decline will continue until some external pressure, such as the rise of China, climate change hitting critical mass, automation hitting critical mass or a combination of all three leads to the inevitable fall. I do not know what that fall will look like but I believe I will live long enough to find out.

The COP26 talks pissed off both the climate change deniers and the climate change extremists, which probably means that they got it right. I know that the extremists would like to see revolutionary change but that kind of change always leads to a backlash, which always leads to a loss of momentum towards the goal they want to achieve. And that is what we should be trying to achieve. Maintain and increase the momentum towards change without generating a serious backlash. As well, I have noticed some deniers have changed tack and stated that we need to focus on adapting to climate change instead of trying to prevent it. This is a convenient but self defeating argument. It is true that we do need to adapt to climate change because we were too slow to prevent it. However, that does not mean we can just focus on that while continuing to spew GHGs into the atmosphere. The simple fact is the climate will change faster than we will be able to adapt if that happens. We need to do both.

Inflation has reared it ugly head again but it is not nearly as bad as some would have us believe. It was always going to increase because it was always going to be part of the bounce back of economic activity once the worst of the economic impacts of COVID-19 were behind us. Many experts, who do not have any skin in a political game, have stated it will be transitory until a new equilibrium is attained in the economy. That will not stop some politicians to hype it up for political gain.

COVID-19 is here to stay. We will not eliminate it from the world. The only way that is going to happen is for it to mutate itself out of existence. That is possible but it is also possible that it could mutate itself into some much worse than what we have seen in the last couple of years. We are going to have to live with it. Many of the changes in our lifestyle that we have implemented in that last two years will be permanent and I believe that the COVID vaccine will become like the flu shot, a regular occurrence. The health care systems of the industrialized world are going to have to make the necessary adjustments to being able to handle this new reality without being paralyzed. The idea that all other medicine has to stop to deal with COVID outbreaks is preposterous. The only positive in this is COVID will probably become less deadly to most of us because most of us are fully vaccinated and we will take the boosters when they are available and when medical experts indicate we should. The same cannot be said for anti-vaxxers but I just cannot muster up any concern about that. If they want to take that risk then sobeit, they can live with the consequences.