Hunter Biden.
Let's just start there.
Mind, that's just a placeholder for the tl:dr version, which I now kind of have to explain. So.
There's always a handful of ominous clouds on the new year horizon, every year, things we know are in view but have no way of knowing how they will affect us or even whether they will affect us..
But this one's both a surety and a misery; the GQP's takeover of the federal House of Representatives, which I'll just go ahead and call "Hunter Biden" for short because the coming ridiculous fucking clown show is sure to include massive amounts of the sonofabitch.
(And in case you haven't been following this goat rodeo, the central fact of our next two Congressional years is that the fucking monkeys will be running the House zoo. The steering wheel will be in the clutch of the whackjobs - the Greenes, the Gaetzs, the Gym Jordans...the people who make Louie Gohmert look like a sage.)
As we've discussed here (over and over, because it's the central reality of our current U.S. politics) the modern "conservative" movement has only a handful of actual policies, all of which are loathsome to anyone who can't check all the "rich, "white", "male", "god-botherer", "ammosexual", and "bigoted" boxes.
Popular support for policies like "tax cuts for rich fucks!", "let's make American society socially, politically, and financially more like 1929!", and "let's hand over more political power to big business!" ranges from nonexistent to miniscule to at-least-less-then-two/fifths-of-the-public.
In a genuinely popularly-elected government flogging those sorts of political goals would get you locked out of the corridors of power for generations if not forever; there's just not enough plutocrats, plutocrat-fluffers, and morons to get you elected.
Since that's all the "conservatives" have, though, they have to spend - and will spend - the vast bulk of their time fapping over ridiculous QANut conspiracy bullshit that is red meat to their lunatic base.
So when Margie Taylor Greene gets her little dickbeaters on the House Judiciary Committee gavel you know damn well she's gonna drag Tony Fauci in front of her to explain why...ummm...well, that's a good question, actually, given that it was Greene's outfit - starting with her Orange Crush - that fucked up the COVID response and managed to kill something like half a million people and all Fauci did was what he could to stop the suicidal morons from killing others along with themselves
Over at wherever Matt Gaetz lands he'll gin up a dozen Hunter Biden "investigations" generating a shit-ton of FAUX "News" content while trying to make Hunter a scandal on Daddy Joe...as if Jared Kusher didn't even fucking exist or if anyone outside the looney wingnut Right gives a shit.
All the while these chucklefucks will deliberately impede every other goddamn thing the federal government is there to do.
Because the bottom line is that these fucking people are 1) dumb as a box of rocks, 2) mean as weasels and 3) convinced that "government is bad" so they're bad a governance.
Which, in a republic where the fucking people are supposed to BE the fucking government, is a nonsensical and dangerous conviction.
Which isn't going to stop these nitwits.
They'll tie the House, and to the extent they can, the entire federal government and everything that government has a hand in (which means damn near everything, the modern U.S. being an immense industrial nation that cannot continue as an entity without constant and continuous governance in everything ranging from foreign defense to meat-packing inspections...) with their "Hunter Biden"-level foolery.
Which means that the true disaster of our age...
Climate Change
...will roll unchecked.
We've talked about this, too. We're headed straight into the Perfect Storm of the Holocene Thermal Maximum and the Sixth Extinction without the slightest idea what that will mean.
Except not good; we can take that as read.
Will 2023 be The End of All Things?
No, of course not.
But it'll be incrementally worse than 2022 was. More extreme weather. Probably another bad western fire season. Trouble with supply chains. Difficulties in crop yields, and changes in, especially, water budgets that will affect everything from drinking water to fish runs.
It's difficult enough to get even the left side of the political spectrum to pay attention - let alone doing anything genuinely useful - about this stuff. It's complicated (meaning that the vast majority of Americans neither understand it nor appreciate how potentially devastating it will become...) and expensive (meaning taxes, which nobody likes, particularly the rich fucks who have their hand up the typical elected sock-puppet's ass...).
The Right?
Probably 80% still think the whole climate change thing is a Red Chinese hoax.
Yes, they ARE that fucking stupid.
I'm old. I'm not going to live to see how bad this could and probably - at the rate we're going - will get. But my kids will, and I'd just as soon not hand then the mess that it looks like we're going to get.
There's a lot of other shit that we're going to see in 2023 that ranges from "gee, that's kinda fucked up" ro "WTAF!!??"; increasing plutocracy and the New Gilded Age, more COVID (including new strains that we're incubating now because we've effectively given up on trying to run the Smallpox Program and vaccinate the fucker out or existence), and more trouble around the periphery of the former Soviet Union.
Because...
Wars and Rumors of Wars
...are likely to continue to roil eastern Europe and north Asia as well as all the usual (ahemMiddleEastahem) places.
Ruth Deyermond has a useful Clif's Notes discussion of the problems of Russia and the West, but the tl:dr is Ukraine has made clear if nothing else that the Western (including the U.S.) assumption that the post-Soviet status quo - a chastened Russia unwilling and unlikely to act aggressively outside its post-Soviet borders - is gone so long as the current Putin-led leadership remains in place.
Okay, let me make this clear - I am NOT writing a new Long Telegram for 2023.
Putin Russia is a problem. That doesn't automatically make it OUR problem, or automatically make it a geopolitical-military problem. I'm not arguing for a new Cold War.
I'm agreeing with Deyermond, though, that we need to:
1. Accept that the old energy relationship with Russia cannot be recovered. Communicate this, and the reasons for it, clearly to readers/viewers/voters.
2. Acknowledge that the need to pay attention to Russia isn’t going to go away and that this requires reorganisation and investment.
Deyermond has a long sub-thread that expounds on how institutional neglect of post-Soviet Russia has gone a long way towards putting us (and Russia!) in a vastly more risky position.
This is a new bud on the troublesome U.S. foreign policy tree, but there's a lot of poison fruit still hanging on the old branches.
Unquestioning support of Israel even now that it has become an openly theocratic apartheid state.
Ignorance, or, worse, ignorant meddling in internal troubles in subSaharan Africa and the Middle East.
The uncertainty about the PRC's intentions towards it's own "near abroad", especially Taiwan.
Problems in Central America - a lot of this is related to the climate issues mentioned above - and the instability of Mexico in particular brought about by a combination of demographics, economics, the institutional political dysfunction baked into Mexico by its colonial master Spain, and the collision of the Mexican underworld and U.S. drug policies.
Ugh. I won't even want to think about what will happen with all this shit if Trump gets back into the White House in 2024.
But 2023's gonna be bad enough as it is.
Homelessness in Portland
With the defeat of Joanne Hardesty there's no Portland commissioner who will push back against Mayor Wheeler's "might, power, and beatings" plan to sweep the poor people in these squalid camps out of Portland.
So we'll go on with the whack-a-hobo "policy" that's been all the City can come up with to try and figure out what to do with poor people who either can't afford Portland's astronomical rents, or who are struggling with everything from addiction to mental and physical health problems.
And we'll hear the usual bullshit from people like Betsy Johnson about how this is going to "solve" the problem, which is the equivalent of pissing on your head and telling you how lucky you are that the rain is warm.
All the while the City will he shoveling money at the worthless fucking Police Bureau.
Plus there's all the usual bullshit. Payday lenders. Non-alcoholic beer. Bathroom ceiling fans (I'll have a post about that in a bit...) The Fucking Big Bang Theory.
Is there going to be more good than bad?
Christ, I hope so.
But whatever we're going to get, it's too late now. We're gonna get it good and hard.
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