Or, things that absolutely, positively, 100% are not going to happen next year.
A few days ago we took a trip down memory lane reliving a 2016 that was widely agreed-upon as one of the worst American years in recent history. It was a year that gave us President-Elect Donald Trump, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, a new, expansive tax on Las Vegas hotels designed solely to enrich Sheldon Adelson and a 1-13 49ers team that just needs to be put down.
But....as in all things, 2017 offers us a new hope for a brighter future as baby new year births from the loins of old man 2016 with all of the promise and hope that these things typically signify.
Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, let's look ahead shall we?
The United States.
The biggest story is, of course, Donald J. Trump. Congratulations America, you finally did it, you elected an ape in a suit to be President instead of one of the many, qualified conservatives that stood against him in the primary. Of course, the Democrats put-up possibly the worst political candidate of the modern age to stand against him so.....
Contrary to the whinging of many, I don't predict an 'end to the Republic' in 2017. As a matter of fact, I think things will move along pretty much in the same shitty manner they are now. The Democrats, out of any semblance of functional power and lacking ways to pay off their various constituencies, will be loud, shrill, stupid and aghast at just about everything Trump does. They will be so shocked it will appear that a Tesla coil has taken full time residence in the Congressional chambers. The NeverTrump crowd, or what's left of them, will sheepishly move back onto their porches with psuedo-witty aphorisms such as "I'm old enough to remember" etc. etc.
The problem, of course, is that many of them are just that. Old.
Business, being what business is, will continue to saunter along without accomplishing much. Companies, still unsure about the long-term future, will continue to hoard cash and progress will be achingly slow. The past gave us the moon-landing and the internal-combustion engine, it also gave us the computer, refrigeration, radio, television and the internet. The future is going to give us faster internet speeds and 2-year commitment packages with phones that might, or might not, catch fire when we log onto TalkAbout, the new "big" social media platform that will enrich it's designers despite the lack of a clear path to profitability. Facebook will become both public enemy number one and the biggest social media platform out there, while Twitter continues to fall in on itself, buried under an avalanche of anonymous trolls and social justice warriors hoping to get noticed.
But, and this is the important part, the Federal bureaucracy will still function, and it will still continue to choke-off meaningful economic growth under the name of 'consumer protection' and 'safety'. The Alphabet-soup of organizations that de-facto run this country will continue to place out-sized influence into the hands of lower-level clerks who, in many cases, barely generate enough brain-power to keep their legs functioning properly. Due to federal employment laws that would make Franz Kafka stand mouth agape with wonder the government is unable, and unwilling, to get rid of these modern day miniature Torquemadas who run rough-shod across corporate profitability each and every day.
Houston
"Space City" as it was once called, is looking down the gun barrel of years and years of bad electoral decisions. From the man who gave us the current pension mess to the man who never found a crony capitalism deal he didn't like to the woman whose anger threatened to rip the city apart to a career back-bench legislator whose life ambition was to become Mayor (think about that for a minute), the incredibly sub-par run of Mayors lacking basic leadership skills has crippled the city to a level that might take municipal bankruptcy to recover from.
Houston is a mess, and it's going to continue being so long as Sylvester and friends sit around City Hall wondering what speech he can give next in order to fool the citizenry into believing that he actually has a clue. More importantly, can he forestall the coming financial vortex for eight more years allowing him to continue to claim the problem "fixed" (in the same manner former-Mayor Bill White "fixed" the pension mess and former Mayor Annise Parker "fixed" homelessness) and skate out of town with a few legacy-making projects under his belt? (Note: He might want to try and do better than Bill White, who only managed to escape with a sidewalk named after him.)
Because the financial and actual infrastructure of the city are crumbling the people have turned inward. Traffic is a mess on the best of days, a dystopian nightmare on the worst. People have gotten so selfish on the road that little things like courtesy and traffic laws have gone the way of the Dodo. Cutting people off to skip a turn line is now commonplace, as is undertaking on the right and pulling in front of people and slamming on the brakes. (Helpful hint: Stay out of the blind spot of other motorists, trust me on this one).
Houston's public transportation system has hit the skids, as reimagining turned out to be an art-installation where the artist (Christof Speiler) did little more than imagine empty buses and design a plan to make it so. Have you seen Metro's ridership numbers lately? It's not pretty. Of course, the toy train is chugging along, moving moderately well-off Houstonians to bars and events, and spit-polishing itself for the upcoming Stupid Bowl. It's Lady Gaga this year folks, let's pray we don't see HER bare breast during the halftime show. Maybe she'll sacrifice a nutria rat?
Speaking of the Stupid Bowl, rumblings are already starting that this, LI if you've been paying attention, could be Houston's last. The last that is unless we take a good, hard look at NRG and commit to providing Houston's middling football team with a Billion-plus dollar play-pen to compete with the likes of Dallas, Minnesota, Los Angeles and (soon) Las Vegas. NRG is not even 20-years old, and you're going to be pummeled with opinion pieces in 2017 talking about how "out of date" it already is and that only a massive injection of public funds is going to save it.
And then we get to the Astrodome, County Judge' Ed Emmet's great, gray, dingy, whale. Of course, there are plans, a parking garage-slash-er-uh-something-or-other that will be there and which will make the wheezing old building shine again because......I don't know, history? Every other city worth a damn, and many that aren't, rightly decided to implode their former "state-of-the-art-at-the-time" complexes but not Houston. In Houston it's been decided that almost anything older than 5 minutes is suddenly historical and deserves to remain standing, forever, even if no one really gives much of a damn about it, never visits any more and there's really no use for it.
It's much the same with Houston's restaurant and bar scene. When a place closes people lament the closure, rip their garments and dress in sack-cloth, right after admitting that they "haven't been there in years".
The Media.
2016 was the year we lost our faith in the media. 100%, totally. It's done, finished, and there's scant evidence that they're going to try and work their way back. Today the New York Times, the Old Grey Lady, dared to lecture Americans on the 'antiquated mechanism' that is the Electoral College. Coming from a newspaper that's a laughable argument. TV News is all but shot, newspapers are honestly at this point just too stubborn to die and anything on the Internet is just as likely to be so-called "fake news" as it is to be the ravings of some progressive nutter. Did you know that "Star Wars" is about *gasp* WAR? This was news to the functional idiots working at Vox.com after all.
2017 is, unfortunately, going to give us more of the same. Because for all of the hand-wringing and concern-trolling from the media on why the American people don't understand their brilliance, there's no talk of ideological diversity, which is the thing they are lacking most.
Want to annoy a newspaper person? Criticize them. Even justifiable criticism, calling out a factual error, is responded to with anger and vitriol. Pointing out bad reporting is met with "Don't you know we're PEOPLE?" and other nonesuch. And if you disagree too strongly? They just stop listening. Which is the good thing about living in an ivory tower, you can just shut the windows to drown out the noise.
There are going to be a LOT of stories in 2017 about the ridiculous nature of rural White America, and how it's ruining the multicultural, fair trade, organic crunchy future that the progressives have designed. Instead of telling us the news of the day, these modern-day low-functioning idiots think they are uniquely qualified to "explain" it to us because they possess a degree in journalism and a blow-torch coupled to word processing software with dodgy spell-check. Oh, and they're hip, everyone they hang out with tells them so. They go to poetry-readings and cocktail-happy-hours at the museum and trivia night at the bars where they drink beer so crafty it was fermented in the navels of local poets. Do you drink beer like that? Or wait in line for two hours to eat lunch at the types of places where people wait in line two hours to eat lunch? Do you dine at a restaurant that has a unisex bathroom?
No? Then you will need the news explained to you because you obviously aren't worthy of much more than having the news explained to you by those who do. Now, if you don't mind providing your credit card number and stop asking questions whenever they bill you randomly for "special issues" that have pretty much nothing to do with anything important.
The media will also be turning up their "fact-checking" and "news analysis" as means to insert their political opinion into the news of the day which was once taboo but is now widely praised and, here's a bold prediction, will result in the first Pulitzer Prize being given to a full-on opinion piece disguised as a hard-news expose. Hell, they're not even going to hide it any longer.
The World.
News flash: There will be wars, rumors of wars, natural disasters, man-made disasters, shootings, stabbings, muggings, beatings, honor-killings etc. The Jews still won't like the Muslims and the Muslims still won't like pretty much anyone. The Americans and Chinese will continue to demonize one another publicly (while speaking diplomatically privately) because their leaders understand the controlling power of a faceless boogeyman. North Korea will continue to live in the dark ages and Cuba will continue to oppress it's people. Raul Castro is not a reformer, but the ideological successor of Fidel. People will continue to wear Che shirts not understanding that, if they knew him in real life, they would either hate him or, more likely if they are women, be raped by him. The UN will continue to tut-tut at everyone and seek for more money by claiming the world is on the verge of overheating in a man-made microwave.
We'll continue to hear how climate change is going to bring about doom and gloom, despite the actual weather and climate results not matching up with the computer models. Scientists, whose very careers are almost totally dependent on continued funding for climate disaster research, will assure us that it's the models that are correct and reality that has it wrong.
Oil will continue to be relatively low priced, as will natural gas, coal will continue to become more and more scarce in the developed world, but will be more and more valued in the developing world due to low prices. Around once per month we'll be reassured that workable, economicly renewable energy is 'right around the corner'.
But we'll see some good things too. We'll hear stories of generosity and bravery, of hope and kindness. There will be beauty in tragedy and mercy in times of war. We will see acts of courage so grand they bring tears to our eyes, up until the point the media/Hollywood machine seeks to capitalize on them that is.
And all of us, the wealthy, the poor, the somewhere in between, will continue to live our day to day lives trying our best to eke out an existence in spite of, not because of, our ruling class and their courtesans.
Such has it always been, such will it always be.
