I don’t remember the last time I failed to publish Realities, but it’s been many years. Last week power problems caused the problem. My apologies to everyone. These are challenging times, which I expect will soon test us exponentially.

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The scope of the several L.A. fires should scandalize even people without common sense. The threat of East wind driven wildfires is as old as the hills in California, and they are with us as I write this today. The deadly Paradise Fire which wiped out that town wasn’t sufficient to remind Woke L.A. leaders of their duty to be prepared for such conflagrations, to build the promised reservoirs and keep them full, instead of spending billions on the homeless and illegals. From Governor Gavin Newsom down to L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, it has been the years of Woke, radical, liberal Democratic Party leadership which has destroyed our state.

The same liberal philosophy under Joe Biden’s presidency has done much irreparable damage to the nation at large. We cannot repair the damage our abrupt surrender in Afghanistan has done, with the loss of $85 billion in equipment and thousands of civilian lives to the Taliban (after a 20-year war). Even doing our best it will be impossible to find and deport the 20 million illegal aliens who invaded the sanctity of our borders. The list of Biden policy outrages is long and depressing and will take more than the four years Trump has to fix. We need to take a long look at the current devastation rendered by California fires to understand that Biden leaves the nation in an equally wretched state. Biden leaves office as the worst, weakest, most criminally corrupt president in American history. It is a great irony that radical Democrats and their socialist surrogates were able to brand Trump as a felon unconstitutionally, while Hunter and the Biden crime family are pardoned leaving the scene of the crime with tens of millions in policy bribes from America’s enemies. My dream punishment: locking them all up in a sound room playing only the Cars For Kids melody, for years, with interludes introducing the Macarena.

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Like most Americans I am anxious for Donald Trump’s inauguration just a few days away. It’s a time pregnant with hope, mixed with reasonable anxiety concerning national defense. Our global enemies, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, smell opportunity anticipating any confusion during the changing of the guard. However competent Trump’s new cabinet proves to be, it always takes a while to settle into those strategically critical jobs, which slows our readiness.

In the meantime, our enemies, like Russia, ramp-up the intensity of its attack in Ukraine, China prepares a massive number of troop and tank boats for an amphibious assault on Taiwan, Iran rushes madly ahead to finish its first nuclear bomb, and the “Hermit Kingdom” of North Korea injects thousands of its soldiers into the Ukrainian fight, with promises of thousands more. The question here: Does Trump have enough time to respond? Despite much fanfare about NATO’s growing state of readiness, its military forces are woefully inadequate at every level.

Both Russia and China suffer critical weaknesses in their economies and demographics. Both are seriously overconfident in their mistaken ability to destroy the West by surprise without annihilating themselves. They should take advice from that pugilist philosopher Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”