There is only one true “prognosticator of prognosticators” in this world, and that is Phil the Groundhog in Groundhog Day. Because Phil, like The Secret Garden’s Susan Sowerby, knows. He knows that wishing and hoping and tears and prognosticating won’t bring Spring even a day early. Susan Sowerby knows that all kids need to learn that they don’t get the whole orange.

Right now, what with Putin and the tragic loss of the Moskva and galloping inflation and Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter and the question of when, not if, the next recession will start, the prognosticators are in full cry.

Then there is the question of whether it’s all over for the US Dollar as Russia and China and India create their own financial system. Or World War III.

There’s the question of whether the upcoming midterms will be the biggest wipeout for the Democrats since 1938. Yes, did you know that the Democrats lost 72 House seats in the 1938 midterms?

There’s the question of whether President Biden will serve out his term, and also the question of whether the Deep State will remove the vice president first, as it did with Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1974.

Now, I am writing this because I read Curtis Yarvin wondering whether Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter “is meaningful,” and confidently predicting that the Canadian truckers and clearing out the homeless encampments don’t change anything. Forget about the issues. “Aristocratic support is necessary for any successful rebellion.” And right now the aristocrats ain’t goin’ nowhere.

All perfectly true, Curtis. Until it isn’t.

Down the street here’s Gregory Copley prognosticating that President Xi is “riding and deliberately exacerbating China’s economic decline in order to restore the mainland to Maoism” and allying with Russia so it can stop importing food from the U.S.

Oh really? So President Xi thinks he can put the genie back in the bottle? Good luck with that, old comrade. If I were you, Jinping, old chap, I’d notice what has happened to the Biden administration that so confidently came into office a year ago with trillions in spending plans, an immediate cutoff for eeevil fossil fuels, eeevil oil pipelines, and money for everyone.

But at Battleswarm blog they say China is toast anyway.

Just this week, the Feds are announcing a resumption of oil and gas leases on federal lands. I wonder what President Biden means by that. And White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is circling back so much she looks like a glider pilot desperately circling in a thermal hoping to avoid landing out.

Oh wait, she’s already on a glide to land out at MSNBC. That’s what I call a real competent soaring pilot.

Never mind about prognosticating the future; how about understanding the past, as in Santayana’s line: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”?

But you know what? The question is not to “remember the past” but to dodge the ruling class’s self-serving narrative about the past, for instance, that our rulers first freed the slaves, then protected the workers, then stopped Hitler, then liberated the women, then rolled back Jim Crow, then saved the environment, then protected gays, then sent transphobes to somewhere where the Florida sun don’t shine.

My self-serving narrative is that the rulers have successively led workers, women, blacks, and LGBTs into the wilderness. That’s why workers are “dying of despair,” women are less happy than they were in the Fifties, blacks like Frank James have been carefully taught to hate and to fear whites, and transgenders are humiliating and canceling the feminists.

The way I understand the world, I would expect that, after this unjust rule of the last century, the ordinary people of America would be getting restless. And I would expect that our rulers, like all rulers down the ages, would be insulted by their lèse majesté.

So it makes sense to me that the rulers, with the help of Mark Felt, Deputy Director of the FBI, would get rid of President Nixon, the president of the “Silent Majority.” It makes sense to me that Democrats would make a concerted effort to get rid of President Reagan, president of “Morning in America” and the Reagan Democrats, once they had got the Senate back in 1986. It makes sense to me that the entire ruling class would combine to get rid of Donald Trump, president of the ordinary American middle class, by any means necessary. (But not stealing the election: Oh no.)

I would also expect that our rulers would be marginalizing ordinary people as “far-right,” “populists,” and stigmatizing opponents as “armed insurrectionists.” And Vlad would be insulted by the ungrateful Ukrainians, and Jinping would board up Shanghai until the people learned some manners.

But as for prognosticating what comes next, I don’t think anyone has a clue.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Pixabay