It’s January 16 Do You Know Where Your Year is?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

This image is a misnomer, of course, because the year of the Fire Horse (also the Red Horse. Uh) doesn’t start until end of February, but a wooden snake is not nearly so amusing, and besides I have this theory that in our fast-communication world the avatars for the Chinese years got confused and started reigning (in this case perhaps raging would be more appropriate) when the Western New Year starts.

It sure would explain — as much as anything can — what happened starting Jan 1 — well, Jan 7, but you know — when the year came in like a horse. A horse that’s on fire. (But…. it’s on FIRE.)

I mean, it’s not just the fact that in the dead of night we removed a dictator from his bed and brought him to the Us to be held accountable. That’s amazing, yes, but there’s so much more going on. No, it’s not just Tim Walz being Timwalzed and doing his best imitation of Temu Jefferson Davis — or as someone put it “If Jefferson Davis and Liberace had a baby.”

There’s Iran, which is rebelling. It’s been quiet recently, and I think the rebellion is in the process of being subdued, and I’m hoping we don’t allow that. It’s the kind of edge of the seat thing that is keeping me awake at night. (If you’re the praying sort pray for Iran.)

And then there’s… good Lord, this year has been everything all the time. Like, we have finally made a food pyramid that makes sense, not one designed by people who thought Diet For A Small Planet (i.e. we’ve got to stop eating meat, because the population is exploding) made any sense. And we did away with two thirds of early childhood vaccination.

In a normal year those two things alone would have been news enough for six months of argument in the newspapers. I mean, you might think the food pyramid is just a recommendation, but it informs all the federal food aid, plus feeding of the troops, food in schools, all of that. It has a profound impact. But…. this year.

The US withdrew from 66 global organizations.

In a normal year the left would be wailing about our leaving such vital organizations like:
1) 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact

2) Colombo Plan Council

3) Commission for Environmental Cooperation

4) Education Cannot Wait

5) European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats

6) Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories

7) Freedom Online Coalition

8) Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund

And such vital UN organization as:

9) Peacebuilding Commission

50) Peacebuilding Fund

51) Permanent Forum on People of African Descent

52) U.N. Alliance of Civilizations

53) U.N. Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries

54) U.N. Conference on Trade and Development

55) U.N. Democracy Fund

56) U.N. Energy

57) U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women

58) U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change

59) U.N. Human Settlements Programme

But this year? This year it’s not even registering. They haven’t even started a scream that Israel withdrew from those right after we did.

Meanwhile abroad: Syria working with Israel on security. Israel recognizing Somaliland. Somalia being removed from the nations eligible for refugee status in the USA.

Also, apparently, some number of nations are no longer eligible for visas to the US.

And– And– And– Oh, yeah, stuff is being done to curb fraud and clean voters’ rolls, though I’m sure it’s not enough, and I wish it were fast and more strict. OTOH considering how much they depend on fraud, just removing some avenues might help.

Of course there’s already been sad events too, like Scott Adams’ death. Soemthing else that would take at least a month of news, any other year.

And I’m sure I’m forgetting half a dozen things that rocked my world when they came across the screen. It’s that type of year, apparently, it’s been at least a year since Jan 1st.

So — as a community service, I’m laying down a challenge: What do you have on your bingo card for this year?

Things I’m hoping for –

freedom for Iran

the fall of communism in China.

Things I wouldn’t be surprised if they happened:

The collapse and political rebuilding of the rest of the Americas

The discovery and IMPLEMENTATION of life extension technology.

Things that might rate a raised eyebrow:

The EU breaking apart in a fit of sanity
Atlantis raising from the sea.

Deej kindly contributed some for that last category:

“Elon reveals the colony he’s already established on Mars.”

“Grok copied Scott Adams’s brain pattern, and will be making Dilbert strips for the foreseeable future.”

Now, your turn. Hear those hoof beats? The year commeth like a raging fire horse. (Or perhaps a raging zebra.)

What’s in your bingo card?

71 thoughts on “It’s January 16 Do You Know Where Your Year is?”

  1. You missed the French farmers going on strike, Japan announcing a snap election, and further collpasing of the uniparty over on airstrip one where the tory wing has lost a couple of important former ministers to Reform and Two Tier Keir gets ever more bansturbatory deciding to ban some local elections so that he doesn’t lose more local councils.

    In things I expect. Cuba and Venezuela are going to both collapse. Iran too. Russia may not, but if so it will only because it becomes a de facto satrapy of West Taiwan.

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      • Impact of 2-tier banning under 16’s from social media.
      • Amusement witnessing the efforts TO ban under 16’s from social media given the institutional lack of expertise of the UK bureaucracy in anything technical. I suspect they think that merely saying it is so will make it so.
      • Inevitable unbanning of under 16’s from social media when 2-tier realizes that it’s unpopular.
      • Witnessing the 3 soldiers left in the British Army deploying to Ukraine, along with the donkey constituting their logistical train, and then finding that their European partners are somehow missing.
      • Reaction from Russia on finding NATO troops deployed to Ukraine.
      • 2-Tier boasting that he, single handedly, is going to parachute into Russia to beat up Vlady.
      • Huge amusement witnessing the further attempts of the UK and Europe to moderate free-speech worldwide. I am particularly looking forward to additional pithy comments from the 4Chan lawyer.
      • The production of pink “”Welcome Greenland” hats.
      • The employment of Tim Waltz as a consultant to the new Greenland state government and the concomitant increase in childcare and ambulance businesses in Greenland.

      Good thing that I didn’t post this from the UK.

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    2. The European farmers’ strikes have been ongoing in a rolling series for at least five years. They all have somewhat different causes, but all are in opposition to top-down decisions that have little or nothing to do with actual food security and good farming practices.

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    3. Saw on Twitter a report China has already nibbled a good strip of Russia almost to Vladivostok. Interesting if true.

      And really,what can Russia do about it?

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      1. Valadivostok used to be part of China. IIRC, during the Qing Dynasty, the Russians agreed to assist the Dynasty with some negotiations with the European powers. The Russians took the territory, and then reneged on the deal.

        The Chinese haven’t forgotten.

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      2. The British government released an online visual novel called “Prevent” that’s aimed at teenage boys. Apparently the idea behind it is to warn those young men that certain actions will lead to bad, far-right radicalism. Some of you will have heard about it already, as it’s come up on social media discussions.

        Apparently one of the choices that you can make in the game results in the protagonist accepting propaganda against immigrants from a cute English female classmate (Amelia), researching those materials at home, and coming to the conclusion that her anti-inmigrant stance is correct. You can later ppropose marriage (and the proposal itself is racist, btw), and end up happily married to her with kids.

        This is a “bad ending”, according to the people who wrote the visual novel.

        This seems like a screw-up of massive proportions. The protagonist ends up happily married to an attractive woman, and they are raising a family.

        It occurred to me earlier today that maybe the real issue is that the people who created this VN believe that whites marrying whites is so self-evidently a Bad Thing(tm) that no self-respecting white male would want to do so?

        Anyway, I keep seeing conflicting reports about the status of the VN website. The last I’d heard was that it had been down, but was now up again with most of the endings disallowed.

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  2. The Reader expects Russia to collapse soon, and that collapse will look like 1917, not 1991. All of the bad actors bordering Russia will try to grab a chunk of it and we’ll discover that none of their militaries (including the PLA) can spell logistics. The Reader does think St Petersburg will make a lovely addition to Finland or Estonia and that Trump should grab Big Diomede Island.

    The unknown unknown is how much additional debt world governments can print money for before there is a run on the world.

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  4. Let’s see… There will have to be some kind of peace made regarding AI and media. The early adopters will figure out an appropriate place in the pipeline for AI assistance, the traditionalists will double down, and the hacks making slop will make slop exponentially faster.

    I think that the big platforms will crack. They won’t be viable for indies much longer. As a response to angry consumers who are displeased with the incoming AI slop flood, they will implement “quality control” in typical heavy-handed fashion, nuking all indie creators.

    Whatever you create, get your own platform ready now.

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    1. Very perceptive.

      AI is currently somewhere around the intellectual level of a publicly-educated fifth grader. That’s impressive, but like the singing collie, it’s not that it does it well, but simply that it does it impresses us.

      Private platforms are easy and cheap now, and unfettered. A friend told me the other day he runs a million dollar online business on a virtual machine that costs him $4/month. Yes, the virtual machine is elsewhere, but it’s unrestricted. Doing the same from a server in his closet would work the same but cost a little more.

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        1. Yes, exactly. How much power would we cede to an actual 5th grader, even one who could remember all of the crap the schools (LLM) had pumped in to that point?

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            1. LOL – good point, but in reality that vegetable couldn’t remember his own name. Rather than AI, his presidency was more like a Magic 8-Ball. :-D

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      2. ”AI whisperer” will be the growth job category, since it’s become basically like negotiating your wishes with a djinn. Even in coding, where there was huge initial AI-replaces-humans potential, early adopters are reporting AI generated code has of late become more and more buggy, with the coding flaws deep and hard to find. So the folks with l337 prompting skills will be the ones in demand.

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        1. Or editor. You get Ai as close as it’ll get, then hire someone to get it in shape.

          My experience with AI is that it gets further from what I want with every iteration -.- I disengaged from a contract with an artist who did that once already. I think there may have been tracing over ai gens going on, because the obtuseness kept getting worse.

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          1. I know of at least one university program that is using AI as you describe in IT and computer-science curriculum. They have AI write the code (prompts make it deliberately buggy to greater or lesser degree), then have the students debug it.

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        2. Very early AI coding help is why I got my first major job. “Doesn’t do what we want it to. Fix it.” Which meant rewriting huge chunks, if not the whole thing. Because AI could not do what the users needed. No reason why that has changed at the top level. The rewrites AI now could probably be guided into writing those blocks. But it would take someone who knows what building blocks are needed and why, then guide the AI to paste them together. This has been ongoing now for almost 40 years in software.

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          1. Deerest Klaus,

            Can Yu give me a fast multipole in react and vue that can help me calculate the halting problem?

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      1. Exactly. And so was YouTube. And probably a lot of others.

        Ai will add pressure from at least 2 angles:

        1. The promise of Ai automating customer service, detecting slop, and solving all their problems while paying fewer entities that possess brain cells and comprehension.
        2. The imminent flood of Ai-accelerated slop that’s about to come in from get-rich-effortlessly schemers calling themselves indie.

        Indie artists, writers, vloggers, and more will be squarely in the crosshairs, while slop vendors will remain endless and the slop will remain bottomless.

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    2. You know, I must say that watching an American governor call for open insurrection against the federal government is quite an occasion. Has that ever really happened before?

      #LittleTimmy must be in some really deep doodoo. Way over his head.

      Looks like they bet the farm on #Cacklin’Kamala, they rolled snake-eyes and now the marker has come due.

      Who wants to bet some prominent American politicians fell the country in the next month or so? Governors, senators, legislators, people like that. Jump on a plane and fly to China. No point flying to Cuba anymore, it’ll be part of Florida later this year.

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      2. The thing that strikes me is the metaphorical bullet dodged when the kneepads+timmay ticket was defeated, and not just because DJT+JD won. If you want a bad timeline, imagine timmay, his Middle Kingdom friends, and his Somali coconspirators a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

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        1. The USA really is watched over by the same God that guards drunk men and little children. We all missed the kneepads+timmay win by a quarter of an inch.

          I say “we” because I’m putting Canaduh in the basket of countries that are being saved by #TheDonald. Nothing could move the entrenched elite here in Canuckistan short of bankruptcy.

          Here we are with bankruptcy looming over Ottawa, and it’s barely been a year. Three more to go! Faster, please!

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      3. The Reader offers Francis Wilkinson Pickens, governor of South Carolina from December 14, 1860 – to December 17, 1862.

        On January 9, 1861, Governor Pickens sanctioned the firing upon the relief steamship Star of the West, which was bringing supplies to Anderson’s beleaguered garrison (at Ft. Sumter).[6] In a letter dated January 12, 1861, Pickens demanded of President Buchanan that he surrender Fort Sumter because “I regard that possession is not consistent with the dignity or safety of the State of South Carolina.”[8]

        He also approved of the subsequent bombardment of Fort Sumter. He remained a fervent supporter of states rights. On December 9, 1862, Pickens quietly left the governorship and returned to his home in Edgefield, where he remained through the war.

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        1. Pickens had the right of it, though.

          South Carolina built the fort, and owned the fort.

          Anderson’s forces hostilely occupied it in a night raid (from Fort Moultrie). After being

          Allowing the Union to control the state’s only major port would have been suicidal. And being an honor-based culture, there’s really no way they could accept the violation of parole and seizure as anything except a deadly insult.

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      5. Saw an article saying Carney is in China more or less pledging loyalty (as in, looking forward to becoming part of the “new world order.”)

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  6. I’m hopeful for the end of the Federal Reserve, and the 16th Amendment had best watch its back. But, hey, we’re already halfway through January and the doomers tell me nothing’s happening …

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    1. I can’t point to anything directly, but beyond the “limiting”, essentially no for most households, “taxes on social security”, mutterings of “no taxes on retirement savings”; i.e. 401(k)/IRA. Already a bunch of pension sources that are limited on tax burden (based on the list showing on TurboTax, not that we’re qualified for any). If nothing else, the 16th Amendment is getting whittled by an ax in a way that makes it more difficult to restore. Not impossible, just more difficult and on the record.

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  7. Hopeful the left continues to melt down into absurdity, as Californians wait for it to sink into the sea, and wait, and wait.
    A question for Cali;
    Who will you tax after all the billionaires leave the state?
    A question to those who believe in over population;
    Why hasn’t China sunk into the earth under the weight of all those people?
    India?
    Africa?

    Yes very tongue in cheek.

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    1. ”Who will you tax after all the billionaires leave the state?”

      Obviously, the same people the Federal income tax changed to tax after they got the 16th amendment ratified by promising “a tax just on the rich!”: Everyone Else.

      The question is how many idiots can be bamboozled into voting for the proposition, though with all the publicity’ and Gavin’s political ambitions, I wonder if the powers-that-be will quash the effort to even get it on the ballot.

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    2. “Who will you tax after all the billionaires leave the state?”

      Millionaires.

      Then thousand-airs, and so forth.

      Communism only works with a captive population. If they can hop into mom’s minivan and drive away, the Commies are kind of stuck.

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  9. Goodness. Looking ahead to see what I need to do this afternoon is far enough to look ahead. My age tells me that’s more important, and necessary for peace of mind.

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      1. Did you see the video? The guy next to him reacted with a “what the hell did you just say?!” glance when #CarkMarney said “new world order”? That was Scott Moe, the Premiere of Saskatchewan.

        It’s a hell of a thing when a professional politician like that guy breaks character at a formal event.

        Going to be interesting what His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has to say about #Carky’s little China trip the next few days. We are fortunate to have YouTubers to cover these things, given the slavish obedience of regular media.

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      1. “…his “Gov’t agent” was Chinese.”

        I saw this one. Clearly a work of fiction, my dear JP. Chinese government official? Impossible.

        All government officials are Indian.

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  14. Hmmm. Wood Dragon. I will have to make use of that somewhere….

    (rolls d20) “Splinter breath blast! Critical hit! The attacking fighters are now on the wall as hors d’oeuvres. Call the housekeeping gelatinous cube for cleanup. And Munchies. ”

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  18. I’m on a list of things I don’t want to see.

    Mostly because I worry about Nimrod of your Choice (Putin, Xi, mad mullahs, whatever) deciding, “If I’m going down you’re going with me,” and pulling something nasty out of the bag.

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  19. This image is a misnomer, of course, because the year of the Fire Horse (also the Red Horse. Uh) doesn’t start until end of February, but a wooden snake is not nearly so amusing, and besides I have this theory that in our fast-communication world the avatars for the Chinese years got confused and started reigning (in this case perhaps raging would be more appropriate) when the Western New Year starts.

    Japan switched to calculating based on the Western new year!

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    1. Don’t you remember Enamelon toothpaste? A two-component formulation that underwent a chemical reaction when mixed, and deposited calcium phosphate onto the teeth. I used it for years, until it became unobtainium.

      I’ve seen that happen so many times. You find a great product, that works, and then you just can’t get it any more.

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  21. I basically had three good ideas, supplemented by 21 more or less procedurally generated place holder ideas. Basically, dark fleet something, Preston Byrne’s granite act, and maybe I will use an LLM for something this year.

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  22. So on the strength of this, https://moelane.com/2026/01/15/me-star-trek-starfleet-academy-and-sheer-gleeful-spite/ I decided to predict that sturmfleet academy will be a breakaway hit. This lead to a total of five big IP predictions, including three ‘maybe Disney can fix things and bring the fans back’.

    I also had five fanfic predictions (some of which were possible), and five webtoon predictions (written to be unlikely, except for one).

    A lot of the rest were ‘overplayed subgenre becomes an anime and is actually good’, and ‘improbable combination becomes popular in a culture that would probably hate it’.

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