Today Peggy Noonan Writes
"The heat is on, We May Get Burned"
When I worry aloud about this (mood of the country) and say to a conservative or a liberal, a Republican or a Democrat, that I think something bad is going to happen, no one disagrees. No one says "Don't worry, it's nothing." They say-again, left, right and center: "I'm afraid of that too."Maybe the end is near? It's not a new theory. In fact 2010 is supposed to be the year.
As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage; America 'Disintegrates' in 2010
DECEMBER 29, 2008
For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously.
"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.Well ok. The civil war did not start.......yet. But the inflammatory rhetoric from last week makes one wonder if it is far off.
Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."I guess he got that one right. Spring has sprung and behold, there have been no miracles. The corrupt swamp that is DC has not been drained, the lobbyists have not been banished as promised, and the covenant of a new bipartisan era has been broken.
People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.
