An interesting read that I vaguely remembered came up in my Twatter feed.  It was one of those articles predicting doom.

DOOOOOOOOM.

This is my review of Corona Refresca Mas:

The article is here (TW: Salon).  Even though it was published by a reliably left wing outfit, it was from 2010 when “reliably leftwing” existed on a binary for me, and likely most of everyone here.  A CIA analyst structured the predictions in two scenarios:  a 2014 and a 2025.  I was more struck by how little of it applies today after a short time.

Let’s see how they did!

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Thus far I am grudgingly in agreement but I doubt its for the same reasons.

Simultaneously, China’s central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order.”

So…like Bitcoin?  I’m pretty sure no governments outside of El Salvador, are happy about this.

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington’s last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China’s global network of communications satellites, backed by the world’s most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Meanwhile in 2021, China lost control of an 18 ton rocket that eventually crashed in the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

By 2020?  That “far-right patriot” openly ran on ending wars, but made little progress towards those ends in part to an apparent unelected bureaucratic apparatus that simply chose not to move in that direction.  The rest is varying levels of that “far-right patriot’s” inability to navigate the system and being dumb enough to put people like John Bolton in cabinet positions.

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world’s natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

LOL.  This was written before fracking.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

Sure, but the new extraction technologies lead to oil and gas boom, so we’re doing this by choice.

The rest of this is mostly a laughable attempt to imply we are headed toward impending doom.  Ten years later we can only reasonably conclude the one true prophet is Peter Schiff.  Even then he’s been making the same reasonable prediction for 20 years so eventually he was going to be right.

 

What the fresh hell is this?  Is it beer?  Is it fizzy water?  Is it spiked Cool-Aid?  I don’t know, but its nice.  Agua Fresca is a popular beverage in Mexico and this has a similar quality to it, plus 8% abv.  So it treads a line between the white boy summer seltzer and the sugar-laden insanity that is Four Loko.  Drink it in a reused big gulp while driving a commercial vehicle, at your own risk.