No Optimism, Much Hope

While history is always full of surprises, including happy ones, I must confess that I'm not full of Pentecostal joy as I consider the next twelve months. World politics are likely to be grim. The Russian bear will continue his aggression in Ukraine, perhaps kinetically. China will intensify its pressure on Taiwan after the Winter Olympics (during which the communist regime's massive human rights violations will not receive nearly as much media attention as the BLM movement did in 2020). Democracy will erode further in Latin America. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes will weaponize refugees and migrants, inventing new forms of human trafficking to destabilize the West. The European Union will continue to insist (as it did recently) that limitations on the killing of unborn children constitute "gender-based violence" because abortion on demand is a "fundamental human right" that "cannot be subordinated to cultural, religious, or political considerations." The World Health Organization will remain an obstacle to getting at the truth about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.