Outside The Box

The forsythia bush by the driveway, the hopeful one that regularly sends out a few exploratory blossoms in December just to see, may finally be convinced that winter has arrived. We suspected as much. The hum of the electric meter has developed a tone that unconsciously stimulates my hand to reach protectively for my wallet. Ice forms on my morning coffee waiting for Dr. Poopenhouser, whose winter coat is apparently much better than mine, to finish his meticulous study of the best possible locations to conduct his morning constitutional.

Someone found out where all the long-range spaghetti models are kept, and now suddenly everyone on social media is an expert on the weather. It might snow this month, or the next. You know how excitable we have become now that every event is another piece of the falling sky. (A falling snowflake did lodge in my eye this morning. It melted.) At home, we have a bag of flour and a bread machine, so there’s no need to run to the grocery just yet.

Curious thing about sliced bread. It’s supposed to be bad for you unless there’s a possibility of a tenth of an inch of snow or more, and if you stuff it under your coat for insulation when threatened by those “real feel” temperatures, it can feel quite toasty. I’m grateful for the constant reminders that wind makes you feel colder, but my Buffalo girl is not impressed.

The impending doom caused by the inconvenient 23.5-degree tilt of the Northern Hemisphere away from the sun aside, we enter this new year with hope. Though I do not give credence to signs and omens, we bought a can of Pringles yesterday that was filled almost to the top. Surely that portends a good and prosperous year.

I’m hopeful that 2025 will mark the beginning of a long-awaited return in the direction of common sense and pragmatism. We just witnessed 1.5 billion votes across 73 nations cast against incumbents in an extraordinary rebuke to the status quo. This is far and away beyond the normal pendulum swing from left to right and back again. It is, generally speaking, a rejection of globalism, global war, and an awakening to the sinister sameness that has crept into many of the nations of the West.

Here in the US, the outgoing administration is busy trying to shore up what it sees as its legacy and sabotage the agenda of the incoming. That is to be expected. Historically, such efforts have ranged from the comical to the heinous. The outgoing Clinton administration removed all the “W” keys from every keyboard in the White House. The George W. Bush administration left office with a host of “midnight regulations” to thwart Obama. The first Trump administration exited with a flurry of executive orders, and several derogatory notes were left for incoming Biden staff to find.

The Biden administration, for its final act, chose to throw gasoline on the fire in Ukraine by authorizing the use of the Army Tactical Missile System, which prompted Russia to unleash its Oreshnik hypersonic missile, against which NATO has no reliable defense or counter, at least none they’re willing to admit to having.

Some have accused Biden of “trying to start WWIII,” a claim which we dismiss. It is apparent even to his supporters that the President has not had a firm grip on the rudder for some time, and whoever is behind the curtain seeking to maintain power is surely not willing to commit global suicide in order to achieve that. We think it is more likely that the Ukraine escalation serves rather to bolster the arms race against Trump’s talk of peace, which has earned him mortal enemies ever since he told the New York Times in 2016, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with Russia?”

Republicans and Democrats have long disagreed on environmental and energy policies, so we can’t fault the outgoing administration for attempting to protect its agenda in those areas because Republicans have done exactly the same kind of maneuvering. However, taken with the direct escalation in Ukraine caused by the authorization of the ATMS, there are two things that reveal the character of the hand behind the curtain more than anything else I could imagine. First, the outgoing administration ended the policy which has been in place since WWII of prioritizing veterans in hiring for federal jobs to achieve a more “inclusive and diverse workforce.” Curiously, the US military is already one of the most diverse organizations on the planet.

Second, and in a callous display of evil intent, the administration pressured Ukraine to draft 18-year-olds into the fray so that they, too, could contribute to the rising death toll of 43,000 Ukrainian, 3,000 North Korean, and 791,000 Russian troops. Thankfully for the future of the Ukrainian people, Zelensky rejected that proposal.

A quick check of the forecast, and I don’t see any snowflakes in the 7-day. That tells me that the NWS predictions and the Facebook forecasts have begun to diverge. However, if we do have to buy sliced bread to stay warm, we can take some consolation in the fact that not a single grain of Ukrainian wheat was sacrificed to make it.

We hope for peace. We hope for a humane and practical border policy. We hope for the merit of a republic over the equity of oligarchic socialism. We hope you’ll find that Republicans already embrace diversity and inclusion if you drop the equity for equal opportunity. We hope that a loaf of bread will be less expensive in the future.

We don’t expect change to happen overnight. The world’s largest economy does not turn on a dime. Like a large tanker or barge, it requires careful and precise steering miles ahead of its destination, and this boat has been headed for a collision for a long time. Like the crime numbers that were obscured during the election and then quietly revised, the truth of the economy will soon be revealed, and there will be impatience, disappointment, and anger. On our present course, the nation would be in the neighborhood of $50 trillion in debt by 2028.

Expect the ideological battles to continue. True believers of any persuasion are not swayed by a popular vote, and there are zealots throughout Congress, the education system, mainstream media, and quite a few boardrooms who would rather see the policies and practices of the past 4 years continue.

Business, however, unless it is a favored appendage of the administrative state, is always sensitive to that bottom line, which is extremely responsive to popular consent. (When is the last time you saw a Bud Light can on the side of the highway?) The incoming administration invites hope that a government can be run more like a business that wants to turn a profit. A business that wants to profit is guided by innovation and pragmatism over ideology, and that bodes well for the price of bread, no matter how you slice it.