Until our culture dissolved, most people knew that gambling, wagering, and betting were taxes on stupidity. We protected the stupid from themselves by outlawing betting in most venues. Now, we can bet on anything, anywhere, at any time, from when an asteroid will wipe out humanity (which might make collection difficult) to how many farts Fido will emit after you feed him sauerkraut. Yes, you can do that: A dogs’ motto is, “Eat it now, you can always throw it up later.”

In the spirit of the times, I offer three bets: one short-term, one medium, and one long. 

The first won’t change much, the second will change everything, and the third will prove that everything has changed. 

Bet number one: President Donald Trump’s war of choice on Iran will create so vast a debacle that he will be forced from office before his term ends. If we look at the Iran War through Colonel John Boyd's three levels of conflict, physical, mental and moral, we see that the United States and Israel are winning at the physical level, but not to the point where we can force open the Strait of Hormuz and the larger Persian Gulf. 

The popular focus on the strait is somewhat misleading. The entire Persian Gulf is an Iranian shooting gallery, because the whole eastern shore is Iranian territory. They can shoot missiles and lay mines from anywhere on that shoreline, which stretches about 300 miles. Until merchant ships can sail safely through the Gulf, safely enough for marine insurance rates to normalize, Iran is winning. 

At the mental level, Trump made it clear from the outset that he had to have a short war. When your enemy needs a short war, you give him a long one. That is exactly what the Iranian regime plans to do, and we already see signs that Trump is coming unglued. Re: Israel, Iran does not have to fire many missiles and drones to make Israelis get up two or three times a night to head for bomb shelters. How long can they live with that? The Gulf states are already losing their 

minds over the destruction of the region’s future; no one will ever again believe those places are islands of safety in a turbulent and risky region. 

On the moral level, Trump promised over and over an end to wars of choice on the far side of the world for other countries’ interests. His attack on Iran shows him to be a continental liar on a scale to embarrass poor Mr. Blaine. After betraying his base so cavalierly, he has no moral authority on any issue with anyone. As the war and the closure of the Persian Gulf to commercial shipping drag on, enough terrified Republicans in Congress will join with Democrats to give Trump a choice: resign or be impeached, convicted, and removed from office. 

That leads to my second, medium-term bet: the world will suffer a massive financial and debt crisis, a crisis so severe it will bring about a second Great Depression. (Bet number one could be the fuse that sets off this explosion). All over the developed world, both governments and families have been living beyond their means for decades. A slow decline in the real economy ensures the build-up of debt will continue until lenders look down from the Everest of debt they are sitting on, panic, and stop lending. Central banks will try to make the corpse dance by pumping out liquidity, but that will just add inflation to the reasons to panic. 

The debt and financial crisis will run so deep it will create a situation here similar to that of 

Germany in the 1920s. In 1914, Germany was much like America: a new, growing country where everything was looking up, the working class was joining the middle class, people were proud of their new land and the future was bright. By 1919, Germany was a wreck of a country, blamed for a war Kaiser Wilhelm II did not want and tried to stop, cheated by Woodrow Wilson's promise of a fair peace, with worthless currency and politics shifting from ballots to battles in the streets. In other words, everything will change. 

That yields bet number three. In the long term, when Generations X and Z come to power, the political spectrum will have shifted so far to the right as a consequence of the debt and financial crisis  that Fascism and National Socialism will be accepted as normal elements of the political landscape. 

How could such a thing happen? When societies become disordered, people turn to sources of order. Fascism and its cousin, National Socialism, offer that. (I distinguish German National Socialism from Italian fascism because the latter never engaged in mass murder.) Fascism and National Socialism find their base in the middle class. Marxism, in contrast, represents an alliance of the “oppressed,” however defined, with degenerate elements of the elite; its enemy is the middle class. As America remains a country where most people see themselves as middle class, they will turn to the right, not the left, when chaos comes. If this seems too radical to be realistic, recall that cultural Marxism, aka “woke,” “PC,” DEI, etc., is no less radical in its objectives than Fascism and National Socialism, and no less desirous of a totalitarian 

state. 

Will mainstreaming National Socialism also make antisemitism respectable? Unfortunately, yes. 

Israel’s brutality in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon has made it a moral pariah to Generations X and Z. The financial and debt crisis will be blamed on the 

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Jews because such events always are. The Jewish origins of cultural Marxism in the Frankfurt School will become widely known. Some elements currently labelling any criticism of Israel or any Jew for any reason “antisemitism” have cheapened the term; it's the fable of the boy who 

cried Wolfowitz. 

My three bets have a unique feature: I hope I lose all of them. I hope the Iran War ends quickly, with the mullahs overthrown and Iran becoming a normal country. I hope both governments and individuals get their financial houses in order and start paying down debt, thereby avoiding a financial and debt crisis. I hope politics turns away from all ideologies and refocuses on solving ordinary Americans’ real problems. But hope, as they say, makes a good breakfast but a poor dinner. That ringing in my ears sounds more like the dinner bell than the alarm clock.