Sunday, December 07, 2008

Teetering on the brink of a great depression

The American government, in particulary, by early December 2008 was terrified that they were at the beginning of what would become another great depression. Like Roosevelt in the 1930's, the government was frantically acting to prevent a deep collapse. Looking back at the schemes offered by Roosevelt, we can imagine the total panic that the president and his government felt at their situation. The world economy, in December 2008 was in no way in as much trouble as the economy was in 1933. There seemed to still be time to prevent a depression.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Late November 2008

We know now that after the Muslim attack in Mumbai (Bombay) in late November 2008, that people expected either attacks over the Christmas holidays or near Barack Obama's inauguration. No seriously thought that the inauguration itself could be successfully attacked. The Mumbai attack, however, showed just how bold the radical Muslims were. When they were able to launch a well-planned attack, they were difficult to stop.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Collapse

The world economic situation was at the brink of collapse following the American election. Perceptive people wondered if there were some cause and effect, but given that Barack Obama was elected with the aid of the American mainstream press, most people might have realized the possibility. Barack Obama surprised many people by naming so many people to his administration with ties to the Clintons. We can say with hindsight that Obama's supporters on the extreme left were aghast at how the pre-inauguration staffing moves proceeded.

Sunday, November 09, 2008

Embarking on an adventure

After the 2008 American election, the country was about to embark on a voyage into the unknown. Barack Obama's reputation was of being both a Chicago machine politician and an associate of radical-leftist terrorists. Obama's activities while a student at Columbia in the early 1980's were clouded in secrecy, presumably because knowledge of them would damage his political standing.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Towards the election of 2008

Much more negative information about Barack Obama was becoming known by mid-October 2008. The major shock was the revelation of his connection with the Weathermen in the early 1980's, when Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia University. The activities of the group ACORN that seemed to be conducting a concerted effort to fraudulently register voters. The otherwise left-leaning news network CNN even was running an interview with a young black man who had registered over seventy times for ACORN in Ohio. None of that mattered, though. The television news and newspapers had successfully sold the Republicans in an extremely negative story line. They had established in the American populace that Republicans were all fundamentalist Christians who were trying to force their religion on other Americans. Republicans were also incompetent and corrupt. Barack Obama's lack of credentials and association with anti-American figures and domestic terrorists was irrelevant in comparison. John McCain was the only Republican who might overcome the negatives, but as October progressed, his chances of success seemed very slight.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

"End Times"?

By mid-September 2008, there a great deal of talk about the world being in the "End Times". The reasoning was that there were the increasing storms, the cessation of the solar wind and sun spots, there was a charismatic figure running for president of the United States who might be Muslim and seemed rather like the Anti-Christ, and the economic turmoil that could no longer be ignored. The country, and possibly the world, seemed on the brink of another "Great Depression". How many more signs could there be?

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Sarah Palin changed the dynamic in the American election of 2008

Looking back, the nomination of Sarah Palin to be John McCain's Vice-Presidential candidate radically changed the dynamic of the American 2008 election. From Barack Obama being an almost automatic success, he now seemed likely to lose. This was at a time when the media outlets had all but inaugurated Barack Obama as president. The nomination of Sarah Palin excited American voters as much as Barack Obama had originally excited progressive voters. By early September 2008, he had disillusioned the progressives and middle-American voters had learned enough about him that Barack Obama was thrown on the defensive. The nomination of Joe Biden seemed safe enough, but compared to Sarah Palin, he seemed inept. Joe Biden had the affect on the election about like if the Republicans had nominated Tom Ridge as the Vice-Presidential nominee. It still seemed inevitable that the Democrats would win the House and Senate, but at the time, John McCain and Sarah Palin seemed destined to win.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Just to make matters interesting...

Looking back, the resurgence of Russia as an active menace should not have been surprising. The country had a long history of autocratic rulers and the people in some ways preferred them. They liked the status and power that came with rulers like Putin. Putin was really an unreconstructed Communist. He would have liked to reconstitute the Soviet Union, at least the borders and the status as world power. All that was percolating alongside the American presidential campaign in the late summer of 2008.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Compromise was possible

In the summer leading up to the 2008 election, the Democrats resorted to reciting their talking points and stopping all new oil exploration in Alaska or offshore. Their environmentalist base demanded that they do just that. Barack Obama, alone among the Democrats was ready to compromise on just that point. He knew very well that the party policy was a losing proposition and that the "will of the people," if there was such a thing, thought that drilling was an obvious step. Anyone who stood in the way would be shunned. Barack Obama intended to be elected, so by early August, he showed willingness to allow drilling, or to at least pretend to be willing to drill. Since Barack Obama was unencumbered by principle, this was an easy step.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Reeling towards disaster?

As the summer of 2008 neared an end, the United States seemed reeling towards potential disaster from a variety of dangers. Barack Obama seemed to be the ultimate "empty suit", but was picking out the new wallpaper patterns and curtains for the Whitehouse. The world had a near encounter with $150 a barrel or higher oil. The stock market seemed on the verge of collapse as was the banking system. Pessimists had decided that Barack Obama and Democratic control of all aspects of the government was just something that people needed to experience and that all that could be done was to grit their teeth and bear it. In excess of 90% of the people only noticed things that directly impacted their lives, such as the price of gasoline. The question was: "how will it play out?".

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Two bad candidates

The 2008 American presidential election had taken a strange turn. Both presumed candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain were looking progressively worse to their partisan supporters. Barack Obama was alienating his progressive base by shifting his positions towards the center. John McCain had previously alienated conservative Republicans by his shenanigans with campaign finance reform and other deals with the Democrats. By July 2008, McCain's campaign was perceived as being totally inept. What was a country to do with such choices?

Sunday, July 06, 2008

America seemed to be heading for big trouble

By July 4th, 2008, America seemed to have big problems. The price for a gallon of gas was heading higher. How soon would a gallon cost $10? A liberal from southwestern Michigan boldly asserted that when gas reached $10 a gallon that people would "riot in the streets". The Democrats were set on stopping all new oil drilling in coastal regions and Alaska. They seemed to be on the wrong side of the issue, but would they pay a political price? The Democratic plan seemed to be to nationalize the oil industry after Barack Obama was elected and to blame the oil companies for the oil and gasoline prices. By the Fourth of July, the price of gasoline had become the top issue, overtaking the issues that the Democrats were using to win the 2008 election. Again, they seemed to be on the losing side of the gas price.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The United States in chaos


By mid-June 2008, the general election campaign was in its early stages in the United States. The two major parties had their presumptive nominees: Barack Obama and John McCain. The stock market was in turmoil and the price of oil and gasoline were rising, seemingly without a ceiling. The Democrats were making noises that seemed to indicate that they hoped to nationalize the oil industry after Obama was inaugurated president. The other first act would be to raise taxes on people who had money. Cancelling the Bush tax cuts was a convenient mechanism.



The Democratic candidate was a strange fellow. He had been subsidized by an Iraqi billionaire in London, as well as other Middle Eastern sources for almost 15 years. He also was a closet smoker, which is amusing, as many of his supporters would have been horrified to learn that news. He also gave all the signs of being a Black racist, who was working hard at hiding the fact. The fact remained that he and his wife had been members of a church and regularly attended, where anti-white rhetoric was the usual fare. His main source of money was also in jail and being tried for funneling money to the Illinois governor, much as he had funneled money to the Obama family.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Strange happenings

The transition in American politics that occurred between 2004 and 2008 was very striking. After re-electing George W. Bush as president, there was a Democratically controlled Congress and a likely Democratic president. Not only would the new President be a Democrat, but a left-leaning Democrat, the likes of which the country had not seen since George McGovern had made an unsuccessful run in 1972. Observers imagined that the first move of the new president would be to nationalize the oil industry and institute a wide variety of leftist policies. This was a time of exploding oil and gasoline prices. In the run up to the election, $5 a gallon gasoline seemed inevitable and $10 seemed a possibility. Who knew what outrageous amount a barrel of oil would command. How about $500 a barrel? Of course, all this was driven by speculators who were pouring money into the only market where there were big returns being earned.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

The world seemed an unstable place in 2008

In the run-up to the 2008 elections in the United States, the world seemed an unstable place. The world economy seemed on the edge of at least recession, if not worse. Rogue nations, such as North Korea, Iran, and Syria were collaborating on nuclear weapon development. The elections in the United States seemed certain to place a pacifist, leftist government in power. It would a government that would be unwilling to respond to the aggressive, Islamist threat. At the same time, China seemed to increasingly to be testing the United States to see if China might be able to be more active on the world scene and succeed in applying force to expand their power without an American response. South Korea and Taiwan had strong elements that seemed ready to allow the Chinese and North Koreans to succeed with provocative acts. How would the year end?

Thursday, April 17, 2008

The very fabric of the country seemed to be fragile

In the early 21st Century, the forces on the "Left" had been so successful in promulgating their message that there was widespread sympathy for radical change. Only a relatively short time before, the surface appearance was that the United States, and even Britain, were heading in a more Conservative direction. All that changed after the terrorist attacks, starting with the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. People desperately wanted the Muslim world to back off their threat and imagined that if they only stopped fighting, that the conflict would evaporate. Sadly, it was not to be, but that hope is what drove the United States leftward in the aftermath of "September 11th".

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Technological conveniences

The mid-21st Century has many technological conveniences. My favorite, which would be the envy of denizens of the early 21st Century and before, is the ability of cars to stop next to a parking place and "step over into the place". Eliminating jockeying a car, back and forth, into a parking place is such an obvious step that you might wonder why having such a feature took so long. Apparently, there was too much complication for such a feature to be economically viable a rather short distance back in time. Another major step forward was eliminating gasoline as the energy source. A variant of hydrogen fuel cells essentially made the oil in the ground in the Middle East and Venezuela close to worthless. For relatively clean power, not without complications, water is turned into hydrogen and oxygen, using electricity from newer generation nuclear power plants. Why was there such a delay in using a nuclear-heated thermocouple to generate electricity?

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Concern about Barack Obama

By early 2008, analysts became increasingly concerned about the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. By this time, they had learned something about his relationship to a Lebanese businessman with ties to the Middle East and to wealthy Muslims in the United Kingdom. There was evidence to suggest that he had been subsidized by those sources since at least 1995. There was precedent for this sort of thing, as the buzz was that the Clintons had been subsidized by the Red Chinese since the early 1970's. That had continued until the scrutiny had become to strong, by the latter 1990's. The question was: "where were Barack Obama's true loyalties?" The observers at the time could only watch as events unfolded.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

By early 2008, the world was descending into chaos

By early 2008, the situation seemed quite desperate and seemed bound for chaos. We saw increasing numbers of freelance terrorists, striking for some obscure or for some mainstream cause. The world economy seemed on the brink. Leftist governments were springing around the globe, including the United States. The main progressive candidates spoke of implementing economic policies that had proved disastrous in 1930. They wanted to raise taxes and erect trade barriers (so they said). Crimes committed by delusional people looked little different from those committed by extremists. A deranged gunman killed people at Northern Illinois University. A short time later, a Palestinian gunman killed students at a seminary in Israel.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

The situation in the early 2000's got more and more outrageous

The leftist media that operated internationally had succeeded in discrediting fighting Islamic extremism and had discredited business and free enterprise in general. In the American election of 2008, the Democratic candidates were ready to implement Herbert Hoover's economic policy. They would put up protective trade barriers and tariffs against foreign imports and raise taxes on successful companies and people. These were just the thing that would topple the world economy into depression, if implemented. Already, the bubble had burst on the American housing market. As early as 2001, thinking people wondered how long the bubble would last. In a few markets, the bubble never formed, but in places like California and Minnesota, housing prices became highly inflated. When the bubble finally burst in 2007, the air came out of the market quickly. The first casualty was the credit industry, which had followed the direction of liberal government and had loaned money without regard to credit history. "The rest is history", as they say.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

A modern convenience

One of the rather goofy, modern conveniences from the mid-21st Century is the device that lets a person use a "lightning pager". The person is suitably zapped from the sky with a lightning bolt-like phenomenon to get their attention. They are not actually injured by the lightning bolt, but it sure gets their attention, which is the object. The accompanying capability allows the speaker to talk to the person as a disembodied voice from above. I think it is kind of a nice touch. This is sort of the modern equivalent of talking from a burning bush that is not consumed.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Vigilantes

Vigilantes are a dirty business. In "the Old West", they were a way for the people to enforce order when the authorities either lacked the means or the will to do so. In the early 21st Century, "the courts" so restricted law enforcement that criminals were acting ever more boldly. The not unexpected reaction was the formation of "death squads" and "sniper teams". These vigilantes knew that law enforcement would treat them more harshly than they treated criminals. One of the first sniper teams formed with the objective of "taking out" a crew of bank robbers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Let us just say that they succeeded. A feature of these sort of operations is that the vigilantes operate as "judges, jury, and executioners". It "works" but is a dangerous precedent.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

The cover story


Sixty years of stonewalling by the American government about unidentified flying objects had caused people to eventually forget the subject. Still, the story would not totally die, due to the repeated sightings.



In the case of the gigantic flat "thing" hovering less than a thousand feet over north Texas, the cover story offered by the government was laughable. After denying that there had been aircraft near the sighting area, southwest of Dallas, they later said that there had been ten F-16's in the area. Those who had seen the odd vehicle when it was hovering and then had shot off out of sight, they knew very well that it had not been F-16's. They knew what the F-16's were like and had seen then later flying after the large vehicle.



The generalized cover story was that whatever was seen could always be explained as something totally natural and usual. That served to cover both the alien craft and crashes and the prototypes from the various black projects that used technology developed from the alien crash sites.

Friday, January 18, 2008

A "black program"

The general populace in the United States had long believed that the U.S. Government was suppressing information about what people were seeing in the skies. People also suspected that the government might have collected artifacts from wrecks within the continental U.S., at a minimum. In fact, it was true. Since 1947, when the first wreckage had been collected, a concerted effort was made to collect similar wrecks, when they were found and to hide that fact. A long-running "black project" was underway to study and to utilize what was found. Prototypes were built, but they were constructed and tested under the most secret conditions. One of the prime contractors was an aeronautical company that had formerly designed and built complete aircraft, but had gotten out of that business, as the aviation market shrank. They seemed like a good company to employ, because they were out of the main stream of aviation development. They had a huge complex in Texas, and a lot of spare manufacturing capacity. By the early 2000's, the Government apparently felt emboldened and started to fly their new craft in the night skies to the southwest of Dallas. Startled observers described what they saw as being "a mile long and a half mile wide", but the actual craft was considerably smaller than that, although it was very large. The test pilots and crews stayed close to the ground to avoid radar and to avoid commercial and general aviation. They liked to fly on the weekends, as there was generally a lower level of activity on the air and on the ground. The long winter nights were welcome cover. The crews delighted in playing with their running lights to give the started residents a good show, and they attracted a great deal of attention and wonderment.

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