When I first began writing The Market Ticker I made a practice of doing a "Year in Review" ticker toward the back half of December with a list of predictions for the next year.  Part of this, after the first one of course, was scoring myself on the previous year's predictions.

Predictions for events, market-based, societal or political, with a year timeline are pretty tough.  Most years I managed to get somewhere around a third to a half of them, and a couple of times a few more than that.  Plenty of people thought this was a terrible record.  Frankly, I'll put that up against Gundlach, Gartman (who for a very long time was the absolute best person to bet against, ever) and a whole host of others, most of whom would be lucky to hit 10%.  And while half sounds like random chance it's not by any stretch of the imagination; these are not bets against professional odds-makers such as a football game where the book does its level best to set the line right at the 50/50 point and if they suck at it they are out of business in a very short period of time.

2020 was an utterly-astounding year.  I had made a decision a couple of years earlier that since I was quite tired of the NW Florida coast and the ever-increasing soft encroachment of "Ft. Lauderdale North" in both the level of corruption and other matters (e.g. traffic, etc) I was leaving, and spent most of 2019 looking for the exact where, focusing in NE Tennessee.  That contract was in the bag before the end of the year and in the early days of 2020 a hard contract to sell my residence in NW Florida was in the bag too.  Of course I had no idea at the time that Covid would show up a few weeks later -- but it did.  It complicated my moving somewhat due to the lockdowns and bullshit, but in the end it was all executed on and completed -- and I'm in no way unhappy with my choice.

I've long pointed out that for a self-employed or not-employed person there are severe problems imposed by Obamacare that make it really ugly until you reach 65 and qualify for Medicare, and they get worse every year.  I'm not yet 65.  The reason is the "donut hole" in Obamacare subsidies designed to intentionally screw you starting at just over $20,000 a year in gross income, and which reaches its maximum level of financial rape right at about $40,000 for a single person; both figures doubling for a couple.  The screwing ratchets upward rapidly with age, yet it is precisely the middle-age individual who is best-positioned to start a business -- during the formative years of which he or she will make little money and thus the screwing is most-intense.  It's the most-regressive taxing scheme ever imposed in the history of the United States against entrepreneurship.  It not only does not bother large, established businesses they actively promote and love it because it inhibits competition.

Had it been in place during my early years of MCSNet it would have literally prevented me from starting the company as doing so would have led to me living in the street; I would have been unable to pay rent, groceries and the power bill at my apartment.  If you think that outcome was accidental you're flat-out nuts.  I'd have had no choice but to take a "code monkey" position somewhere and by now I'd have likely been displaced by my job being moved to India or some H1b dude who works for $20k/year being imported with either resulting in my being tossed into the street.

It has been ten years since that time and nobody has risen up in revolt -- not openly, not quietly, not at all.  No work stoppages.  No general strikes, although I've pointed out that they're not only legal they cripple both government and private industry and are the single most-effective non-violent and legal means of coercion a population has.  Simply put nobody cares and instead the echo chamber of social media is where people threaten to secede or riot -- yet other than a few soyboi who claim to care about "black lives" yet burn black businesses to the ground, and have you noticed nearly every one of them bringing the gas-filled bottles is a white drug addicted asshole or serial felon?

Covid is just the latest load of bullshit.  Oh, not the virus; that's real.  No, the hysteria.  Early in the course of this thing I pointed out that by the math it had to be here in the US no later than October of 2019, and was probably earlier.  That's how comparing RNA samples works; entropy is a fairly decently understood thing and given a fair number of samples you can put an inside boundary on when something started.  You can't put an outside boundary on it since you can only compute from what you have samples for.  Everyone thought I was a crackpot -- but now we know it was true because antibodies were in blood donated in the first two weeks of December of 2019, and in fact the prevalence in those samples was 1.4% and was more-or-less evenly distributed through the country which means over 4 million Americans had been infected by December of 2019.  How much attention has been paid to this?  Zero; yet it is irrefutable scientific proof when antibodies are in your blood that you had the infection.  It is accepted proof for measles, chicken pox, mumps and dozens of others that if you have a titer of antibodies you were either vaccinated or infected.  If you look at the "flu" curves for the last five years you do have to wonder; is Covid really novel at all or has it been circulating in the United States for years?  It certainly was circulating in the first part of the flu season last year and yet of course we don't count anyone dead from it until roughly February despite hard, scientific proof that it was all over the place and more than 4 million Americans had been infected by the first two weeks of December.

Did the CDC, NIH or anyone else run any of these samples in January and February?  Nope.  Everyone simply took China's and the WHO's word for it.  Ditto when they started shoving tubes down everyone's throat despite us knowing in February it did not work in that the data out of Wuhan showed that more than nine out of ten times if you ventilated a Covid patient they died.

Remember this?

95% failure, known in March, yet our Lord and Savior Trump spent billions and fed a medical machine and murderous Governors including Cuomo, Witmer and others with ventilators produced under the DPA that did not work and we knew did not work, conclusively so.

Where were the people with their pitchforks and torches demanding the ejection of every one of these murderous assholes who killed your grandmother with known worthless but very expensive and profitable medical procedures?

Nowhere.

Has this ever changed?  Nope.  It has not changed a bit.  Again we knew in March that this virus produced a clotting disorder if you got hammered.  I have early reports of this out of California in a thread in The Bar here on my forum.  I found some of it hard to believe; people with O2 sats pictured in the 80s laying on a gurney using their cellphone to text people, yet there it was.  We've known how to treat clotting disorders for close to 80 years.  That's no bullshit folks; Heparin and Warfarin are both very old drugs with known safety profiles used in millions of people.  My father was on Warfarin as he had phlebitis and it was a prophylaxis given to him in an attempt (successful over more than a decade's time) to prevent a clot from forming and breaking off that could have easily killed him via heart attack or occlusive stroke.

In addition there was reason to believe both Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin were potentially active, at least if used early when viral replication was still going on to treat this disease.  As it turns out they both are.  HCQ turned into an immediate political football but Ivermectin was more-or-less ignored.  Or was it?  Not everywhere -- just here where money is all that matters and dead people are fine provided it makes money.  Think I'm kidding?  Look at the infection and death rates in parts of Africa and South America where there are few doctors and damn little resource.  What there happens to be is Ivermectin in wide-scale use as an anti-parasitic and damn little Covid death.  That correlation was known early, plenty of people misread it to think it was HCQ that was involved and perhaps some of it was because malaria is also in those areas.  By June the studies had started to show up on Ivermectin and at this point there are 24 such studies completed and reported out, 10 of them randomized trials and 100% of them found benefit.  Two, one in Egypt and one in Argentina found from 80-100% effectiveness when used as prophylaxis to prevent infections.  In short we know how to stop the promulgation of Covid without a vaccine and its potential risks; Ivermectin has a proved safety profile with nearly four billion doses dispensed along with wildly-common use in animals as well.

I have raised Hell about the screamfest of "Massssssssks!" for the last five months becasue it is clear on the data and the physics that they cannot and do not work.  Multiple alleged "scientists" have claimed they do but every one of those claims has been blown up over time as spikes have occurred after mandates where compliance has been extremely high, exceeding 75% and in some cases exceeding 90%.  There is not one place where durable suppression of transmission has occurred concurrent with a mask mandate.  Why not?  Because most transmission occurs in homes and the second is nosocomial -- that is, from a health care worker.  If a health care worker who is trained as a professional in the proper use of masks and in fact has access to and is using the best quality masks is still infecting people then obviously that particular claimed intervention is worthless and worthless or not nobody is going to wear a mask in their own home.

On the other hand a medical school, EVMS, has documented a protocol that does appear to work including post and pre-exposure prophylaxis.  The data says that protocol works as well as a vaccine in preventing infection.  This means we could have cut off Covid-19 starting in the late summer; we had the data and simply refused to use it.  Had we used it then at least half those now dead would be alive and there would be no fear, no reason for masks, no reason for vaccines or anything of the like.  The proof is right here:

We live in a post-science society folks.  I have no dog in this hunt.  I own no stock in Pfizer or Moderna.  I do not and never have earned a nickel from the so-called medical complex.  I've watched through my years decades of malfeasance and worse when it comes to medical procedures, from the bullshit surrounding statins to the latest crap including stents and high blood pressure meds.  You may or may not know this but there is no evidence that for a person with stable angina a stent does anything to reduce their risk of heart attack or stroke but has a 1 in 50 risk of killing you during or immediately after the procedure.  Yes, stents can save lives; if you're having an actual heart attack they are one of the few ways to stop the damage right here, right now and are of lower risk than immediate open-heart surgery, so there you go.  Ditto for blood pressure meds; in people with mildly-elevated blood pressure while the meds do lower blood pressure they have zero impact on mortality from the averred method of prevention -- stopping heart attacks and strokes.  Of course both make people money.  Then there's the statin mess which I've written on in this column many times, along with the psychotropic meds (SSRIs) which are known to create "rage monsters" in a small percentage of those under the age of 25 -- yet are still handed out like candy.

Anyway, enough of the expose on the medical scam; it's not new and in fact goes back decades.  It was a huge part of Obamacare and for decades before that.  It's been a racketeering enterprise for decades as well and despite it being fully and explicitly legal for any doctor to prescribe any drug "off label" -- indeed, roughly a quarter of all drugs are prescribed off-label -- doctors are threatened and even get their tickets punched for doing it whenever and wherever it might interrupt the cash flow in the local medical systems and hospitals.  Medicine, in short, has not been an art for a long time; it is now an assembly-line where the primary study endpoint is the making of money and outcome-based compensation is in fact illegal.  Little wonder the death rate per 100,000 people in the US has been going up rather than down for the last 10 years.

Oh, the media hasn't told you that?  It's right on the CDC's own pages!

Well, fuck 'em all.

In 2011 I altered what I ate, going directly against the so-called "medical advice" and I'm in better physical condition now and more athletically competent than I was when I was 17.  I consume and require zero prescription meds on a routine basis.

Since April I've personally used the non-prescription prophylaxis that has developed and been learned from over time.  The protocol I've been using has been stable since June.  I've been exposed to Covid several times that I know occurred (approaching a half-dozen known exposures at this point) and yet I haven't gotten it.  I did, however, get a nasty flu-like bug the first week of January that had lingering effects for over a month and proved physical degradation until just a month or so ago in terms of VO2 recovery -- but if it was Covid then I didn't build an antibody response to it because I've been able to ascertain that I don't have them.  Maybe I did have it, that I had plenty of spare capacity kept me being ratfucked, I was T-cell reactive and thus didn't build antibodies but all of that kept me out of the hospital and also kept me from being killed by a tube shoved down my throat.  Who knows.

In the backdrop of all of this and the screaming idiots under their desks demanding you dehumanize and de-socialize yourself by hiding behind a diaper we had an election that was one of the most-outrageously insecure and corrupt in my time on this planet.  It was facially illegal under the Constitution in a whole host of states simply because non-legislative modifications were made to procedure and those are facially unconstitutional -- pandemic or not.  I have no idea who actually won but it doesn't matter because, as I noted in a speech before the County Commission here a few days after the contest it is nearly certain Biden will be inaugurated in January.

This didn't happen in a vacuum -- it happened because for the last 20+ years you have sat around with your thumb up your ass as all manner of unconstitutional and otherwise illegal things have occurred instead of rising and demanding it stop under penalty of immediate removal from office and authority by whatever means were necessary.  This was compounded by what we now know was deliberate suppression of the fact that an existing criminal investigation was underway related to the entire Biden family for more than a year and their potential money-laundering ties to China, never mind the blatantly-unlawful acts surrounding and after the 2016 elections which the so-called "Savior of the World" Donald J. Trump did not stop, expose and blow to beyond the orbit of Mars despite being the factual head of said agencies and section of government responsible for same.  In other words he had the full authority to do so and didn't use it.  Stop making excuses for someone who had four years and sat around with his thumb up his ass.  He deserves ejection for that standing alone.

With that said here are my predictions for 2021.  As was always the case in the past I reserve the right to modify anything in this posting until 12:01 on January 1st, 2021 and no revisions will be noted as having been made since nothing is set in stone until that time.  This posting will not be pinned but will be exempted so it will not roll off; back when I used to do this every year there was no roll-off but now there is by default, so in the interest of being able to actually account for accuracy I will exempt both the post and all replies.

Here we go.

• Biden/Harris is inaugurated on January 20th.  This could be interrupted at this point, in theory, by one of a number of events -- invocation of the Insurrection Act or one of the handful of court cases still running around.  But since the Texas case was dismissed (incorrectly in my view; it deserved to be heard in full whether the USSC liked it or not) the only actual option left would involve actual proof of systemic fraud.  Again, all elections have fraud but proof of systemic fraud doesn't just strip Biden/Harris from the Presidency -- it strips multiple State actors from office and in fact is cause for an immediate no-bullshit Revolution, right here and right now.  There are lots of claims that this occurred but thus far I've not seen a single one of them put forward as hard proof.  Those who are making claims that, if true, not only justify but demand such a response if there is anything left of a Republic to defend had better put up or shut the fuck up.  Acting to incite such an event without proof is just as evil if not more-so as installing Biden. Period.
  
  
• The Senate will not flip to 50/50.  It may be 51/49 but that does not matter.  Without a 50/50 split The Senate can block the sort of radical bullshit that is coming from the AOC-wing of the Democrat party, and will.  The manifest weight of the evidence is that while plenty of people don't like Trump they like Communism even less and thus the Democrats suffered major losses in the House and in the States.  A few Democrats have noted the problem and urged caution; they have a brain and realize that the people did indeed push back against such things as national gun registration, "Medicare for All", "Universal Basic Income", stripping private property for grins and giggles, outlawing carbon-based fuels and/or gas powered cars, "Green New Deals" and the like. That political parties have batshit-crazy wings is nothing new; in fact it's as old as America.  In two years I remind you that it is the Democrats who have the severe disadvantage in terms of Senate seat retention and if they don't watch out they'll lose both House and Senate in the midterms which effectively ends the Biden/Harris Presidency as a matter of law-making capacity and if the suppressed investigation into the Bidens in fact ends with hard proof of complicity or worse it could lead to either a Biden impeachment, assuming he stays in office that long or even a dual impeachment of both Biden AND Harris.  With a Republican Speaker that ends the Democrat control of the White House on a summary basis in two years, not four.  Tread lightly, Mizz Pelofuckyoubitch.
  
  
• There will be at least the rumblings of actual secession.  I suspect Schumer is crazy enough to not care but Pelosi, for all her bluster, is not.  She knows damn well that even a moderately lawful and peaceful act of blockading through the middle of the country (e.g. by General Strike which is entirely lawful or active denial which is moderately illegal), while nowhere near completely effective at shutting anything down would be wildly disruptive to city cores and might trigger mass-riots that would render cities entirely uninhabitable.  California and New York are already watching companies leave that are their primary taxpayers in terms of size -- California in particular has had drips and drabs of this for a while but it's accelerating.  There is a point where crazy gets pushed back upon and it doesn't necessarily mean shooting.  All the bleating in the world by a bunch of pantywaists will do nothing when you get down to it; at the end of the day someone has to go to work and produce the power, Internet service, food and various other industrial outputs that make modern life possible, never mind moving all of it from one place to another.  Piss off enough people or make their working environment dangerous enough with bullshit like what is going on out in Portland and suddenly you have a municipal water plant with no sanitizer and thus, no safe drinking water.
  
  
• Covid insanity will be exposed before the end of December, and collapse in the New Year.  Florida is leading the way here with a demand for Ct publication.  Tennessee data already showed up from one lab proving that, if it holds for the other labs in distribution of test results that anywhere between 2/3rds and 3/4s of alleged positive tests were false positives -- that is, not infectious.  In short the Ct scam kept the fear possible from the late spring through mid-fall months where the truth would have made everyone shrug their shoulders and told the government to go to Hell with all of their restrictions.  Once this becomes clear, and I believe it will within the next few weeks, there will be Hell to pay and it's going to be aimed directly at those who took any sort of "mandate" approach to this disease or wagged their finger.  Suggestions are one thing; orders are another entirely especially when they cost people jobs.
  
  
• The previous, once it is fully out in the open and it will be, will doom public acceptance of Covid vaccines.  For those at high risk they'll take it and it's probably a good trade-off with risk.  For everyone else, however, who won't have the opportunity until after the Ct scam has been out in the public for months, they will refuse.  The incidence of severe but not fatal side effects will only add to this; there are already reports of 105F fevers being produced which, I remind you, are stand-alone dangerous in adults.  It will take very few of those that show up in the general population and wind up all over the news to doom widespread acceptance.  There is also widespread refusal that is coming from very powerful places such as the NYC firefighters, who are unionized and are already saying they will refuse en-masse to take the shot.  They can and will enforce that refusal and won't be able to be fired for doing so.  I cannot accurately handicap the actual efficacy and safety of the EUA'd vaccines since there simply isn't enough data to do it; as I have repeatedly noted the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  But once it sinks into the several million who were quarantined and forced out of work for 2 weeks because of a false claim they had an infectious disease they never had if you think those people are going to believe the very same government officials when it comes to safety and efficacy of a vaccine, especially when it produces severe side effects (fatal or not) in a material percentage of those who take it you got rocks in your head.
  
  
• The factual capacity to interdict spread and provide early treatment will be resisted -- and won't matter.  With the most at-risk already vaccinated while "cases" will not go away death will, and immediately thereafter nobody will care.  This is sad, because most of what is part of prophylaxis for this virus also works for basically all the others -- not 100%, but close enough.  Specifically Vitamin D levels are a big deal and we've known that for a long time, but the sedentary, sit-indoors-and-play-video-games paradigm obviously prevents you from getting that from the sun and the lack of attention will stop you from taking a supplement.  As a result we will learn an effective nothing in terms of long-term health impact from Covid, which is really shitty but -- oh well.
  
  
• Bread and circuses still works.  You'd think we had learned something about the eventual outcome of that sort of bullshit since, oh, second century CE? Apparently not.  Hand the people "stimulus checks" insufficient to even cover half of most people's monthly nut twice in one year and they'll shut up instead of telling the government to go straight to Hell, burn their masks, open their shops and other enterprises, stick up the middle finger and if the government tries to challenge that tell the goons to stand down, get out or get shot -- and mean it.  Yeah, they can try to pull business licenses and such but the reality of it is simple: There are 100 or even 1,000 ordinary citizens for every cop and they all live in homes that are not and cannot be protected at the same time they're playing goon squad; if it comes to a fight the citizens win and the cops lose, badly.  They only pull this crap and make their threats because statistically zero people stand up to them and tell them to fuck off; they know damn well their authority only exists because the general public consents.  The minute that changes they're done and they know it.  But instead of demanding that the goons shut up and sit down, leaving peaceable citizens alone so they can earn a living and calibrate their own personal risk of getting a virus as they see fit the people bleat that a $600 check was not $2,000!  Meanwhile the rent and power bill that they don't have to pay today continues to accrue and both the landlord and power company are now sitting on receivables that on their books is an "asset" (thus they look solvent) but nobody's asking exactly how that $15,000 per apartment that wasn't paid over the last year is ever going to be collected -- and from whom.  After all the people that got those checks blew it on booze and, in many states, bong hits.  I remind you that the American Revolution was fought in the middle of a smallpox outbreak, a disease that killed 30% of those who got it, not 0.2% and which with known treatments would be 1/10th of that or less.  What used to be the definition of America, in short, is gone.  We're all Jews being herded into boxcars in exchange for the promise of a meal!  How does this play out in 2021?  No idea, but ADE is a real thing and one or more of those vaccines might have that problem -- nobody knows because we short-circuited the testing.
  
  
• Inflation is coming.  Not immediately, but it is.  Mid-summer, roughly, before it starts to get very noticeable. As a consumer that's when you have to watch out.  As an investor start paying attention roughly around March or thereabouts.  Beware that the markets have a way of figuring things out long before they happen.  Perv-n-Ho will almost-certainly be able to shove through both tax increases and sunsetting of other provisions, along with through Executive Action opening up the H1b and illegal invader floodgates.  Both will do critical damage to an already-screwed wage base.  They'll try it anyway since they see the writing on the wall for Medicare which I've written about for over 10 years and have studied and predicted back in the 1990s.  Nonetheless they have no answer that doesn't lead to an immediate and very deep recession, which no politician will do on purpose, so we're going to get hammered.  The hammer is not coming this year but the attempts to evade it will.  Count on it.
  
  
• Expect the grab-bag of money-printing to continue.  If you're in a big city you're in trouble.  You'd think this would inure to your benefit -- nothing is further from the truth.  Corporations have figured out that they can run without all the expense that comes from their presence in those places and with it the decimation of budgets and big spending will accelerate.  The Federal Government cannot stop this nor replace it; oh they'll try, but fail.  If you own property in such places watch out; you are going to get it in both holes.  The 2000 crash was bad enough in that regard; the echo effects of that doubled property taxes in many areas.  This is likely to double them again which will render a large percentage of those properties worth an actual zero on a discounted cash-flow basis.
  
  
• The left will go back to their violence -- in spades.  When they don't get what they want because the Senate won't pass anything stupid the riots and "black lives (don't) matter" thugs will be back.  By summer when it's nice and hot and the Covid scam has evaporated all manner of "fun" will break out.  Notice how it all disappeared literally overnight?  Well, that's because they thought they had a seat at the table and would get not only hand-outs but their communist agenda.  They don't and never did.  Whoever thought they were buying said seat by burning cities and minority businesses had rocks in their head; they in fact likely got charged several Democrat House seats.  The left loves to claim the "far right" is the violent group and goes on a shoot-n-riot spree but that's always been bullshit, all the way back to The Weathermen and even before.  Simply put when the "Far Right" gets mad enough to actually do something you'll know because structure fires started from chopped-up children stuck in ovens set on clean will occur by the hundreds or thousands along with other acts of well-targeted extreme anger in which the actor does not care if they get caught and in fact expects to -- they only care about the score they achieve first.  There are always a few lone crazies on both extreme ends but they pose no real threat; when it comes down to it the stock in trade of the Communist isn't removing people from the playing field via well-targeted fear and even direct assassination campaigns -- it's general mayhem that is intended to destabilize society as a whole.  "Defund the police" is equally-stupid for the same reason; oh, so you defunded the police?  Well who's going to arrest the gang-bangers who are having a shoot-a-palooza on the corner over some random drug deal and how many 3 year old kids get killed by said poorly-aimed fire?  What do you think the people who live there will think about that when it happens?
  
  
• We learned on Christmas that the fraud and rot reach all the way to emergency services.  We'll pay for that in 2021.  The Christmas morning bombing in Nashville exposed a very ugly truth -- AT&T got a contract for emergency services all over the country that, among other requirements, included redundancy.  Not only did they not have it in the Nashville area the failure extended across four states; all the way into Kentucky, Alabama and the western corner of Virginia, including Knoxville, the NE part of Tennessee and elsewhere.  Ten guys with intent to attack that infrastructure nationally could literally destroy emergency communications for days across virtually all of America as the redundant switching and pathing that was promised in those contracts was not built and delivered and it has now been conclusively proved.  The CEO of AT&T, every person involved in that contract including the Governors, Mayors, FEMA and others should have been instantly arrested and indicted but of course none were or will be.  The problem isn't just the theft of money for services not performed; the far more-serious issue is that every American enemy, foreign and domestic, now knows how to cripple our law enforcement and emergency service communications and it will take years to rectify this if it's done at all.  The most-likely outcome will be exactly what happened in 2000, 2009 and with the election: They'll ignore it and nobody will spend a single day in prison for it.  It would not surprise me one bit if one or more of those enemies exploits this in grand fashion this coming year.
  
  
• We were taught political violence pays off and is worth the (meager) investment; what is demanded when backed up by a riot, arson or looting is delivered by the politicians.  In city after city and state after state riots and arson following people getting shot because they pulled a gun on a cop, fired at a cop or were otherwise not actually "oppressed" resulted in defunding of the police, "new rules" that prevent enforcement of the law against violent criminals or worse. May God have mercy on the souls of politicians and those on the left if the rest of America, not the nutjobs who inhabit the wild-eyed crazy brigade, take this lesson to heart and decide to use it as a means to get rid of corrupt, tin-pot dictators at the local, state and federal levels along with those in the private sector, especially the rich assholes who profited mightily while destroying the middle class and small business.  This sort of lesson, by the way, is exactly how you get a dirty civil war.  While it's not an odd-on bet and thus not a prediction the odds of this happening in 2021 went from a background level of "1 in a thousand" to more like five to fifteen percent, which is not a trivial level of risk.  All your "preps" in the world, by the way, are worthless if this sort of crap starts to happen.
  
  
• The bond market will appear to be stable.  It's not and I give it 50% odds of having the lid come off in 2021.  The Fed's repo game disappeared from the news but didn't disappear in fact.  The underlying instability is still there; beware in that the reason this occurred in the first place was the wild mismatch between actual supply and demand that always occurs when insane deficit spending is going on.  To a certain point it's absorbable especially if property value continues to expand in that there's at least an asset behind it with someone willing to go into hock to have it.  This does not apply to stock prices; they can and do shoot the moon into the maw of a fiscal collapse and have in multiple nations.  Expect exactly nobody to give a wet crap about this especially if the Senate confirms Yellen to be Treasury Secretary, and they probably will -- after all, they were all willing to line up on their knees to give her pleasure when she sat at The Fed, so why would it change now?  If it comes apart it will be Yellen that causes it.
  
  
• Strum and furor out of DC -- but damn little actual change.  If the bond market doesn't blow and the money printing doesn't go bananas that's actually a good setup for the stock market.  Unfortunately it's bad for small business and virtually everyone else.  Big social media will not change a bit.  Nor will any of the data collection and exploitation.  The biggest problem with social media is that the entire premise of "targeted advertising" is to connect you with things you would buy and not with things you won't.  That's the entire reason it exists.  The problem is that it's not limited to "buy" in application nor can it be, which is an intractable problem whether self-imposed or enforced upon you.  Never mind that the firms that run it have their own agenda, of course, which they're free to express and will.  Not one move was made during the previous administration to separate out utility style services (e.g. pipes, DNS, hosting, etc) from consumption services (e.g. Facebook, Netflix, etc) and it certainly won't happen in this administration.  Why do you think they prohibited slaves from learning to read in the South?  You think the "farm system" these companies have set up is really much different from WALL-E's "CONSUME!" chairs?  Ha!  Absent mass-revolt of some sort such as targeted boycotts and shunning aimed not just at these firms but derivative acts on all the advertisers, their employees and families there is no amount of pain that overcomes the money.  And no, the "alternatives" (e.g. Parler, etc) are not any better; it's just a different asshole in the left seat.
  
  
• My cat will remain my best friend.  While Hell may indeed freeze over and things could change in that regard I will not hold my breath waiting for it to do so as I would be very likely to die of asphyxiation if I did.  'Nuff said.

We'll leave it here for the time being but I may add a few more bullet points before the end of the year.  For other than typos and similar once January 1st comes, however, whatever is on the page is what it is.

Let the scoring begin!