The Long View 2008-01-01: Happy New Year: Thanks & Advisories; The Mark of Soros; Uninformed Predictions
And so we come to a new year of John J. Reilly’s blog. As was usual for John on New Year’s Day, he issued some predictions. His 2008 predictions were unusually bad:
The subprime-loan question is starting to look like the Enron scandal: an important story that has been blown up out of all proportion for political reasons. I have seen enough market collapses to know that this is not a very important one. Of course real estate prices are going to fall; the wonder is that they have fallen so slowly. I have no opinion on whether there will be a recession in the United States during 2008. I am pretty sure that no recession will be caused by the subprime issue.
Barring assassinations or divine intervention, Mitt Romney will be elected president in 2008. Hillary Clinton is a poor campaigner who became senator from New York only because the Republican Party in that state chose to run Mr. Potato Head against her. Barack Obama is the son of a Muslim polygamist who started in politics as an Alinskyite agitator.
The Republican Party in Congress will dwindle. It deserves to.
John missed the import of the impending housing crash of 2008, which did indeed cause a prolonged recession. He also missed the absolutely massive popularity of Barack Obama. Hindsight at least allows him to have correctly foreseen Hilary Clinton’s weakness as a Presidential candidate.
I posted the book review John references here in May, but it has a lot of good stuff in it, so you should definitely go read God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World again.
Happy New Year: Thanks & Advisories; The Mark of Soros; Uninformed Predictions
This blog has been posting since January, 2002. Though it has never achieved a mass readership (this update page is read by between 100 and 150 people daily), the readership it does have is better than average, to judge by the email replies I get and the comments that are posted to the Bulletin Board. I would like to thank those readers who have been following it all these years, as well as those who drop by now and again. I would like to thank those who buy Amazon products through this site. Many of the purchases are of books I have reviewed; most of them are of books I have never heard of but many of which I wind up buying myself. If they appeal to the people who read this site, after all, it is only reasonable that they appeal to me. I would most especially thank those readers who make donations through the Amazon Honor system. That goes above and beyond the call of duty.
At the turn of any year, we conceive many ambitious plans for updates and improvements. For the blog, I have been thinking about various technical upgrades, including switching to a commercial blog format; that would at least simplify RSS linking and otherwise lessen the dependence of this blog on the ordinary search engines for hits. Before that, though, I may switch to a date-range format, so that I would make additions to the same update page through the week and archive the whole page only at the end. Not today, though: too much stuff to do.
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The major update to my website for this New Year's Day is a very long review of Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold, an ingenious and at least partially persuasive account of the history and nature of the Anglosphere. Mead, of course, is one of the Usual Suspects at the Council on Foreign Relations; in fact, he is one of the Usual Suspects who sometimes give that much maligned class a good name. For this latest book, however, he seems to have fallen partially under the influence of George Soros. I surmised that some specific points in the book may have been the product of that influence. I do not know whether I have been unjust or insufficiently suspicious. Readers who are more familiar than I am with George Soros and his works and ways are invited to comment.
Be that as it may, the book may be important as an indication that Tranzie World is changing its attitude toward religion. Since the beginning of transnationalist society, there has been a tendency among its ranks to regard religion as unimportant, or a pure impediment to progress, or as an archaic phenomenon that would dissipate with the progress of secularization. Now comes Mead arguing that religion is not only inevitable, but also one of the keys to Anglosphere success. (On this point, he is right and Andrew Roberts is wrong.) We note a parallel tendency in domestic American politics. The Democrats are at least going through the motions of reviving a Left-leaning religious movement. Such a movement would actually have more historical precedent than the current configuration of religion in alliance with pro-business groups.
Let me note that once I tagged along to a presentation at Soros's foundation headquarters in New York that was intended to shake down some continuing funding for Millennial Studies. It was the wrong time to make the pitch, however. The foundation was moving, so the presentation was an audience of interns sitting on packing crates. Actually, a nonprofit that routinely used packing crates as office furniture would be one that I would be inclined to trust. At least I would know they were not frittering their money away on luxuries for the staff.
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Regarding predictions for 2008, I have only two forecasts:
The subprime-loan question is starting to look like the Enron scandal: an important story that has been blown up out of all proportion for political reasons. I have seen enough market collapses to know that this is not a very important one. Of course real estate prices are going to fall; the wonder is that they have fallen so slowly. I have no opinion on whether there will be a recession in the United States during 2008. I am pretty sure that no recession will be caused by the subprime issue.
Barring assassinations or divine intervention, Mitt Romney will be elected president in 2008. Hillary Clinton is a poor campaigner who became senator from New York only because the Republican Party in that state chose to run Mr. Potato Head against her. Barack Obama is the son of a Muslim polygamist who started in politics as an Alinskyite agitator.
The Republican Party in Congress will dwindle. It deserves to.
Copyright © 2008 by John J. Reilly
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