Predictions for 2024

 

My predictions are always wrong—like everyone else’s. We humans have a lousy track record on predicting the future. Something to remember when you hear alarms raised about global warming. And things have gotten especially unpredictable recently. Aliens? The pope not Catholic? Turning the frogs gay?

So I might as well go ahead and be optimistic—without being unrealistic. After all, God’s in his heaven.

I predict that, in 2024, Trump will win back the US presidency. The Economist gives him a one in three chance. I think it is better than that. He looks to have a lock on the Republican nomination, and the polls show him ahead of Biden in the general. The Democrats seem all in on Biden, and Biden may be impeached for his corruption and possibly treasonous activities, may be too obviously senile by election day, or may, at his age, suddenly die of natural causes. He is also historically unpopular. 

Perhaps they think they can fix the election, but can they? If so, why are they trying to get Trump off the ballot? That’s too blatant, and looks like desperation. I think they are overreaching.

It seems to me the NDP must officially pull the plug in Canada on their coalition with the Liberals before 2025. Otherwise, they will be too closely associated with the Liberals to mount a plausible campaign  when the election comes—and it must come no later than 2025. To make this dissociation real in the public mind, they must also start voting aggressively against the Liberals on confidence votes. So there is a decent chance the Conservatives can craft a confidence motion to bring down the government; especially considering all the incipient scandals under investigation. So I predict a Canadian election in 2024, and a win by Pierre Poilievre.

I predict the Liberals will not switch leaders to forestall this. The have no plausible star in the wings, history suggests it would not help them, and Trudeau does not want to go.

And Poilievre is just too good as a politician; he is not going to lose.

Pope Francis has ratcheted up his “reforms” in the church recently; as if something has been triggered. It might be that he felt constrained so long as Benedict was alive—had he gone this far, Benedict was an obvious rallying point for opposition. But it might also be because Francis hears the beating wings of the angel of death. There are rumours that he intends to fix the election of the next pope; this too suggests he expects to die soon, but his haste to get things done suggests also he has no confidence in his ability to do that. Historically, conclaves have tended to elect candidates contrasting with the previous pontiff, as if to keep things on a steady course. And the worldwide church seems now on the verge of schism in response to Francis’s innovations. The next conclave has a strong motive, then, to try a different tack. God, too, must not be discounted; he will protect his church. So I predict Francis will either die or resign in 2024, and a new pope will be named who is traditionalist.

I am not the only one to notice that wokery is past its high water mark, and is becoming an object of ridicule. When they begin to laugh at you… Bud Light is deservedly toast; Disney is in desperate traits; and when such big fish can be taken out, the little fish too must take heed, and tremble. Now Harvard is losing its reputation and its endowment. I expect this trend to rapidly accelerate, as a bandwagon effect kicks in.

Might as well predict the fall of Xi, Putin, and the Iranian regime as well. All are hanging by a thread, and might collapse at any time. So why not this year? The fall of any of the three makes the fall of the other two more likely, and the fall of any one is likely. Xi is facing economic disaster; Putin is facing military disaster; the Iranian regime is wildly unpopular. So let’s call it as a set.

If Iran falls, to a more liberal regime, that in turn will have profound repercussions throughout the Middle East, where Iran is funding Islamist movements. Like Hamas. Or the Houthis in Yemen.

If either the CPC or the mullah in Iran fall to a liberal regime, we should also see mass conversions to Christianity in those two countries. Which will in turn have world-wide effects. China, for example, could become the centre of the Christian world.

I hear predictions that inflation, and interest rates, should ease by summer. Why not believe them? There may or my not be a terrible recession; so let’s believe there won’t be. It is just possible that the productivity gains being brought on by AI, and computerization generally, will be enough to cancel out all the reckless spending and government financial mismanagement.

Speaking of AI, new technologies are always overhyped in the beginning. As Arthur C. Clarke observed, any really new technology is always indistinguishable in the popular mind from magic. So I’m wagering that all the concerns about AI making us all obsolete, and being a threat to mankind, are hysterical. Instead, it will be a boon to productivity—especially for computer coding.

I see signs of a genuine religious revival in the US at least. God may not have given up on them yet. Back in 1992, Leonard Cohen saw two possible futures, good and bad. The dark option is what we have been getting lately: 

Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby
It is murder
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul

But Cohen saw another option. Having explored the dark side, and discovering where it leads, we may pull back and choose instead the vision seen in “Democracy is coming to the USA.” Of, specifically, the principles in the Sermon on the Mount. If it comes, Cohen sees it as coming to the USA first. And coming first to the “holy places where the races meet”: to the Christian churches.

The New Atheism is dead, and there seems to be an earthquake in the sciences, forcing God back into the picture as necessary hypothesis. Theism is becoming fashionable again, at least in the highest intellectual circles. Every week we hear of some new convert.

Financial considerations still argue strongly for mass immigration, even if unpopular—and there are other arguments for it as well. But multiculturalism is rapidly becoming unfashionable. Affirmative action, “equity,” is rapidly becoming unfashionable. We may be back to valuing and respecting “Western civilization.” And expecting immigrants to assimilate, as most immigrants want to do in the first place. There is a reason why they come to Canada, or America, and it is usually not because they loved things back where they came from so much. Trapping them in multiculturalism is trapping them in exile and alienation.

The influence of Elon Musk’s new Twitter has not yet been fully felt, but the emergence of a widely-used platform that is not enforcing a political agenda makes it untenable for other platforms and media to enforce such an agenda. So that house of cards should now come tumbling down. Once people can choose, they will choose open discussion, simply out of natural human curiosity. I expect the immanent demise of the “legacy media,” the TV networks, the newspapers, and the practice of big tech “gatekeeping.”

The war in Gaza will end with Hamas wiped out, and will trigger no wider war.

People are losing confidence in the experts; the experts discredited themselves on Covid. And so the public is losing confidence in all the predictions of global warming and all the draconian measures governments are imposing in its name. Chicken Little will soon be called out. Climate change is losing its marketability. If global warming is real, the only solution is improved technology, and the best way to achieve improved technology is for governments to get out of the way. Political parties will soon no longer be able to jerk this chain.

And so 2024 may be the year of the great turning. The world could look very different in twelve months.

And then there’s aliens.

A New Hope

 

I am the eternal optimist. I keep expecting the pendulum to swing back to sense, as the world goes mad. As governments seem to act against the interests of their own people. As the churches empty, and we cannot even trust the Vatican anymore. As all the arts are moribund. As we can no longer trust the professions or to act honourably, or the media to tell the truth. As AI threatens to make us obsolete. As no one wants to have children or to raise them anymore. As our education system no longer passes on the culture. As civil society and the social contract, even our collective commitment to logic and reality break down. 

And yet… 

I do see growing signs of hope. The more so since the forces of disorder seem to have pushed matters too far. Camels’ backs cannot bear infinite weight.

The refusal of three university heads, of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn, a few days ago, to condemn calls for genocide, looks to me like an inflection point. First, this is a clear shift of the moral high ground away from academia and the left. They’re the Nazis, this makes plain, not the people they have been calling Nazis. Second, I see a demoralizing of the evil elite at the backlash; the presidents sounded rather condescending, looking down from their ivory tower. Now they will be hearing footsteps on the stairs. The UPenn president, at least, has no resigned. This in turn is a revelation to many on the sidelines that they have the collective power to resist. 

I think October 6, the barbarity of Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the loud support for it among Arab expatriate populations across the West, was an earlier inflection point. When Trump reminded us all that Arabs in New York celebrated on 9-11, people insisted he was lying. Now we see it again, and in numbers impossible to deny. There are differences between cultures beyond what they offer in their ethnic restaurants; there are deep-seated animosities and intolerances. Some cultural differences are important, and irreconcilable. This is a blow, in turn, for the leftist doctrine of multiculturalism.

Back in the 2019 election, I attended an all-candidates meeting in which the PPC candidate noted that one cause of the housing crisis was excessively high rates of immigration. And loud shouts demanded she be silenced and removed from the stage. But now, this observation is mainstream.

I remember when any non-left-wing views were simply never heard. We had only the mainstream media. Anyone who dissented thought they were alone. Then Rush Limbaugh appeared, and talk radio. Then Fox News. Now we have any number of sources on the Internet. Sure, big tech and government are trying to silence them, but they are fighting a growing deluge. We are now at the point of linking up into a distinct and well-rounded counterculture.

X in particular, has emerged under Musk as a pretty free speech platform. Breaking the illusion of any opposition being an “extremist minority.” Alex Jones has just been reinstated.

I expect X to suck all oxygen out of alternatives. Precisely because it allows more viewpoints, it will become the necessary forum for public discourse, the place everyone has to be. The media monopoly will be gone.

And the counterculture is broadening and deepening. Angel Studios and Daily Wire are constructing an alternative entertainment industry, and are getting traction.

The Bud Light boycott, another recent inflection point, is spreading to other traditional brands, now that the dissidents have realized their power. Corporations that get woke go broke. Every week now we seem to hear of another woke corporation taking an earnings hit. This will inevitably drain resources from the left over time.

There are also signs of religious revival: Pentecostal outbursts in Tennessee, proliferating eucharistic miracles. We have heard little from the “New Atheists” of late. Monotheism is in the intellectual ascendant; every week we seem to hear from another intellectual who has crossed the floor to faith. It no longer looks so cool to pseudo-intellectuals to be atheist. 

And, of course, some major woke governments have fallen, or are falling in the polls. Trudeau, Biden. A friend from New Zealand reports that their new government is well to the right. Argentina just went from Peronist to Libertarian. Italy elected “far right” Meloni, and Netherlands gave a plurality to “far right” Wilders. 

Someone recently suggested we are at an 1848 moment. 

I think it’s much bigger than that. Driven by technology, we are moving into a new phase of civilization. If things look calamitous for now, these may be birth pangs. No major chance comes easily, or without desperate resistance.

Predictions for 2023

 

My record for predictions is appalling. Just like everyone else. Who, looking forward to 2022, predicted the Freedom Convoy? The declaration of the Emergency Act? The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Ukraine’s ability to push back? That the UK would run through three prime ministers? That Elon Musk would buy Twitter and open its files? That the US Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade?

But it is my tradition to make my predictions at the New Year, so what the heck. 2023 looks particularly unstable. I have an intuition that we have reached a watershed, and 2023 will be a year of change. 

The regimes in Iran, Russia, and China all look shaky. If any one of them tumbles, this will make the fall of the others more probable. If all three go, we may have a new world.

Russia perhaps looks most likely. It seems now as though Putin cannot win his war, and losing a war usually means the fall of an autocratic government. Wise men say that, if Putin goes, it will be a palace coup, and he will be replaced by somebody more hard line than he is. But this does not seem viable: Putin is not losing in Ukraine due to lack of trying. What could a harder line produce? War against NATO? Given that Russia cannot deal with Ukraine, expanding the war simply looks like suicide.

It seems to me the only path open to Russia is to dump Putin, blame the war on him, withdraw all troops from Ukraine, and pursue a new policy of rapprochement with the West. If you can’t beat them …

Iran looks next most likely. My Iranian contacts all seem confident the regime cannot survive the current wave of protests. And if that regime falls, its successor is again likely to be pro-Western. Just as the reaction to the pro-Western and secularizing shah was to go fundamentalist and Islamist, the reaction to an Islamist regime will likely be to go pro-Western. Rumours are that mosque attendance in Iran is low, and there are many secret conversions to Christianity.

If Iran goes pro-Western, and Russia pulls in its horns, we may have peace in the Middle East.

I have been predicting the fall of the CCP since 1992. It looked shaky then. I think the original appointment of Xi and his strongarm tactics were themselves acts of desperation. They are now coming unglued: Xi had to back down over zero Covid. All he had was fear, and now fear is not working.

Worldwide, there is a struggle between government elites everywhere, who see the internet as an opportunity for Big Brother-style control, and the people, who see the internet as an opportunity to organize themselves without the need for government elites. The Freedom Convoy in Canada was a set-piece example. It is getting nasty, and could get nastier. But I am hopeful that the essential logic of the internet, improved communication, leads in the direction of greater democracy and freedom, not more government control. As did the invention of printing, or the Industrial Revolution, for parallels. Technology favours freedom.

Economists predict worldwide recession, and inflation slowly easing. This is beyond my area of expertise. Broadly, though, I think the improvements in technology through computerization ought to continue improving general prosperity, even if there are bumps in the road, and the effects of the Covid lockdowns, like those of the Spanish flu, ought to be transitory. If the war in Ukraine has been costly, there ought also to be a “peace dividend” if any or all of the three bellicose regimes actually fall.

Housing prices are crashing all over the place. They needed to; housing costs were unrealistically high. It was an investment bubble. 

It might be an unexpectedly good year, after a string of bad ones.

Hopeful Signs

 

A rainbow violates the night.

There are promising signs out there. 

The ‘publicans down in the United States look likely to sweep their midterms.

The US Supreme Court looks poised to possibly outlaw racial quotas—“affirmative action.” This does not affect Canada, but whatever big brother does, little brother always wants to also do.

Elon Musk has taken over Twitter. And begun firings.

Russia continues to lose ground in Ukraine.

The protests in Iran continue at strength.

The government of Canada looks increasingly bad in the Judicial Inquiry into the imposition of the Emergency Measures Act. The truth is being heard.

If the Republicans take both houses, they can launch investigations into big tech-government collusion to suppress speech; into Hunter Biden and Joe Biden and their dirty dealings. Into FBI corruption. Into Pfizer, the drug companies, the vaccine; into where the virus came from. Musk may reveal some dirt in the Twitter backrooms; in any case, the national dialogue should now be restored. If Twitter refuses to censor and cancel, other platforms will soon have to do the same, or lose their audiences to Twitter.

The end of affirmative action may have ripple effects throughout society, in the US first, but maybe also elsewhere, ending the worst racism and the anti-equality doctrine of “equity.” It is officially unconstitutional. That is an important moral argument to be used against it; and it will influence related decisions coming to lower courts.

Putin may be out in Russia, and replaced by a less aggressive figure. This seems almost the necessary outcome. What is someone coming in promising to win the war in Ukraine going to do that has not already been done? Russia’s only honourable escape is withdrawal and peace, blaming it all on Putin. This discredits Putin’s policies generally; as a result, there may then be an opening to the West. There is no reason other than delusions of imperial grandeur for Russia to put itself in opposition to the West; Germany or France do well enough as part of the broader coalition of democratic nations. Wanting territory rather than prosperity is old thinking.

The protests in Iran seem now likely to take down the government. Once women are in the street, it is probably over. The collapse of the Iranian regime is quite liable also to end the civil wars in Yemen and Syria, which largely rely on Iranian funding of one side. Israel’s security may improve—the Shah was once an ally--and the threat of an Islamist bomb may be gone. The fall of both Iranian and Russian regimes, if it happens in fairly quick succession, are likely to trigger some serious protest in China. That regime too is shaky, probably hanging by a thread because of economic troubles fought with increased repression, and may fall in turn. Imagine how the world might change then.

Meanwhile, here in Canada, while the judicial inquiry into the Emergency Act has no legal force, it should be valuable for several court cases proceeding against the government. Pressure will also be strong on the NDP to stop supporting a government convicted of an illegal grab for power. They may already be looking for a way out of their support agreement. If so, this would be it. If not, at a minimum, surely now, with such a judgement or popular conclusion, there is no way the Liberals could win another election.

Covid? As I expected, we have already almost forgotten. The fundamentals are surely still there. In a couple of years, all will be back to normal. 

In sum, I predict a collapse of a number of deserving regimes within the next year or so. A movement significant enough to look like a new birth of freedom. Something on the level of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Raining Shoes

 

Amidst the current chaos, there is a sense that a second shoe has not yet dropped. Nobody seems sure what happens next.

Half of commentators are sounding the alarm about China’s imminent rise to world hegemony. The other half are saying its economy will collapse within weeks.

Half of commentators are saying Russia is winning against Ukraine, and any Ukrainian victory is a pipedream. Half say Russia is on the verge of exhaustion.

Half say Russia is near default due to sanctions. Half say Russia is actually benefitting from them, and the West suffering.

Half are saying the Trudeau government is on its last legs, and the rise of Pierre Poilievre is historic. Half are saying the Liberals are planning a snap fall election to grab their majority, and Pierre Poilievre will reduce the Tories to a fringe party..

Half are saying Trump has finally been caught red-handed, and faces prison time. Half are saying the recent FBI raid ensures he wins the next election.

Half are saying we are entering a period of severe inflation. Half are saying any inflation is temporary. And some are actually saying the problem will be deflation.

Half are saying we are in a recession. Half deny it. Some say it is a historic depression.

I expect this is an inevitable step on the downward slope, once the cognoscenti have declared there is no reality. Now nobody knows any longer what is real.

Add to this the real instability we have been living through; we have come to expect the unexpected.

I hold out hopes that, two years or so from now, Pierre Poilievre will be prime minister, Donald Trump will be US president, Xi will be gone, Putin will be gone, and Pope Francis will have resigned. The COVID crisis passed, the economies of Europe and North America will be booming, while India, Indonesia, Vietnam and others take up the manufacturing slack from a relatively weaker China transitioning to democracy. All appear to be real possibilities, 50/50 in the absence of reliable data. And if they all come true, it looks like a dawning golden age.

Resurrections

 

Easter Sunday reminds us that the darkest hour is often just before the dawn. 

We are in a dark time, but there are recent signs of hope.

Pierre Poilievre is drawing Trump-like crowds. 

In order to overtake Poilievre’s support with the base, Jean Charest and Patrick Brown would have to sign up a large number of new members. Brown had done this with success in the past. But it looks as though this is not going to happen. It is Poilievre who seems to be drawing people into the party. 

Why would there be great enthusiasm to support a candidate who represented positions similar to the Liberals? Why not just support the Liberals?

Poilievre’s crowds also confirm my sense that next election will be a change election. People are angry and want to throw the rascals out. Poilievre is an ideal candidate for that mood.

The Freedom Convoy woke a lot of people up. A lot of people found one another, and discovered many others were thinking as they do. Now Poilievre may be able to channel that into political change.

In the US, there is Elon Musk’s attempt at a hostile takeover of Twitter. Win or lose, at least it shows there is someone with power who wants to defend free speech. The cathedral is not monolithic.  It also exposes the power elite—they are apparently prepared to sacrifice the interests of their shareholders and the company to preserve their political power. Perhaps people will start to notice.

As the left has been demanding more radical positions, and deliberately throwing people off their bandwagon—Tulsi Gabbard, Jimmy Dore, Tim Poole, Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Bill Maher, and on and on—they have inevitably been reducing themselves to a smaller voice among commentators. It has become safer and easier for their opponents to speak up. There has to be a tipping point, and we may be there.

Past duplicity is getting exposed: the Hunter Biden laptop, the Steele dossier and the Russian collusion deception. The supposed Whitmer kidnapping plot; January 6 suspects are getting acquitted; the false accusations against Rittenhouse; the high-profile fakery of Jussie Smollett. Sooner or later, the judgement of The Boy Who Cried Wolf must be tripped.

Current polls suggest a Republican landslide in the midterms.

We also cannot ignore the miracle in the Ukraine. We thought Russia to be vastly more powerful. One of our gravest fears is beginning to look like smoke and mirrors.

Perhaps China as well? In Shanghai, the situation looks hellish; but this may also be the spark to set off a general revolt and end the CCP’s dominance there.

COVID restrictions are coming down. The usual suspects had been telling us that, with Omicron, things were getting worse. Instead, with natural immunity growing more quickly now, we may be seeing the end of COVID as a pressing concern. The virus may now be the best vaccine.

After two or three terrible years, next year may look better.

Predictions for 2022

 

Surrender, Dorothy!

A cautionary note: the prediction most likely to come true is a prediction that things will continue more or less as they are. Sudden change is the exception. Slow change is not generally perceptible year upon year. Any prediction other than this is most likely to be wrong.

But saying things will continue more or less as they are is hardly a prediction at all. You would stop reading at this point. 

So what sudden changes seem most likely?

I’d like to predict that the COVID pandemic will be over by the end of the year. Without interventions, the Spanish flu burned out after 2-3 years. Surely with our vaccines and all, we can do as well. Signs are that omicron is milder than previous strains, and is driving them out. I really expect it to be all over but the shouting by February. People will stop being scared of catching omicron. But I have been consistently over-optimistic

If the pandemic ends, I expect the world economy to come thundering back. A pandemic does not affect fundamentals. It is hard to see any lasting economic damage from the Spanish flu pandemic. I expect a season or more of optimism and growth.

The US has mid-term elections coming this fall. Everyone expects the Democrats to get trounced, and they only have a small majority in Congress now. A spanner in these works might be the end of the pandemic. Just as Trump was unfairly blamed for the pandemic, and FDR might have been unfairly credited with the end of the Depression, the Democrats might benefit from the resulting mood of general optimism. The economy should also boom in recovery, and Dems will be able to cite those stats as though they were their doing.

On balance, I’d say the odds favour the Republicans re-taking both houses. The opposition party usually gains ground in midterms, and the Dems only had a thin majority. And inflation looks like a real problem, that probably will not go away soon. But I don’t expect a blowout.

Things look unsettled in China. There are signs of a leadership struggle. The economy is getting hit hard, and Xi Jinping seems to be making it worse—a crazy move if he is not acting in mortal fear for his position. China is facing a heating shortage, an energy shortage, and a food shortage this winter. Not to mention a new outbreak of COVID. Xi might start a war out of desperation, in a bid to rally support behind him. But I think this is unlikely. It seems obvious that Xi himself does not want a war and is not preparing for one. To fight a war and lose would be suicide, and Chinese diplomacy is doing all the wrong things if it intends to win a war—provoking multiple possible enemies at once.

I’d say there’s a better chance that someone other than Xi will be in command by the end of the year. I think the party turned to him and threw him his extra powers because they were already in a desperate situation, and were looking for a man on a white horse. If visible improvement does not come within a reasonable time, if things instead seem to be getting worse, such a leader can fall suddenly.

North Korea also looks unstable, although what is really going on there is opaque. There are renewed rumours that Kim Jong Un is near death. Regardless, his policy of blowing up subordinates is probably not wise in the long run. Will some group of officers or officials sooner or later decide to band together secretly and move quickly to take out Kim before he kills them all? One of these days, something like this could happen.

Some are talking about civil war in America, or separation. Left and right seem to live in two different realities, and do not agree on the most fundamental principles. 

I think it is more likely that we are at a tipping point, and the general population and Overton window is about to lurch. I think of that old saw, “First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they fight you. Then you’ve won.” There might yet be a bigger fight, but the result is not in doubt. Insanity must over time collapse in the face of sanity. 

The core issue is abortion. It looks as though the Supreme Court is about to roll back Roe v. Wade to the extent, at least, that individual states will be able to impose significant limits on abortion. I suspect that this will draw down much of the pressure, like lancing a boil. A compromise will have been reached, at least temporarily.

Sudden and successful popular uprisings never seem to come in the most obvious countries at the most obvious time. Who expected Tunisia to kick off the Arab Spring? Were the Thirteen Colonies really the most oppressed part of the world in 1775? 

It is not the oppressive or cruel regimes that fall to popular uprisings, but regimes perceived to be incompetent.

There is a general mood everywhere that the “elites” have failed, wear no clothes, and are corrupt. So almost any state currently fills the bill. Who can say where this will reach the ultimate flash point? 

We might be in store for another year like 1848. Militating against that, however, is the fact that the populations in most countries are rapidly aging. Revolutions and civil unrest generally come from the young, who feel their way upwards blocked. An older population sees less value in upending the boat for possible future rewards.

So, on the whole, nothing very unexpected is going to happen next year.

A Few Reasons for Hope

 

Back in early 2020 we joked about how 2020 was one piece of incredibly bad news after another. And we looked forward to 2021 taking over. But 2021 has probably been worse than 2020—notably in number of covid deaths. And the bad news keeps coming.

Here are a few hopeful thoughts:

Crisis tends to precipitate change.

1. In France, a presidential election cycle is beginning. Macron, the incumbent, is a centrist. His two closest rivals are both on the right. And not the centre right, not Gaullists; on the “far right,” people The Economist used to refer to as “thugs.” The “far right” candidates may not win, but the discussion and the issues have changed. The argument always used to be between the Gaullists and the Socialists. The Socialists are pretty much out of the picture.

2. In Britain, we have seen Brexit and the historic defeat of a left-leaning Labour Party in the last general election. Even if Boris Johnson is squishy, he faces competition from the right, from Nigel Farage and UKIP, as well as from the left. If those right of him do not have a presence in parliament, Farage demonstrated in the last European election that this could soon change, if they grow dissatisfied.

3. In the USA, the Democrats narrowly won the last election cycle; but the polls show their popularity now extremely low. It is not just Joe Biden who looks as though he could not get re-elected. Kamala Harris is almost as unpopular. The current cold shower of leftist policies may inoculate the States from voting left for some time to come. Just as it was unlucky for the Republicans to be in power when the Great Depression hit, or in the 2008 financial crisis. Trump himself should have been reelected, had it not been for Covid. Now the Democrats probably own it, and more.

4. The shakiness of the Chinese economy may be bad news for the world’s markets, and may cause recession or depression. That’s the bad news. But it may also cause the regime to fall. That would be much more significant good news. China under the current regime is the main threat to freedom and to world peace. It is more than a little perverse to worry about a bad Chinese economy. 

5. There is a chance that the new Omicron variant of covid is milder—we do not know yet. If it is milder, it may be to our benefit that it out-competes more dangerous strains. If it is not milder, the next strain may be. We may settle down to a covid that is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu.

6. The left is fighting back harder and harder, and making more and more outlandish claims and demands. They are more obviously simply denying truths we can all see for ourselves. This feels like the final act. “First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” The left is spending quickly any moral capital they once claimed. As it gets harder for good people and for intelligent people to be on the left, people may soon be ashamed to admit they are on the left, for fear of scorn or ridicule. When this happens, and it feels close, it is over.

7. The left is now in a position, thanks to political correctness and open denial of realities, of finding humour hostile. As a result, Saturday Night Live is no longer funny; Gutfield is. Stephen Colbert is no longer funny. Steven Crowder is. Nobody hears from The Onion any longer. It is now always the Babylon Bee. When it is no longer fun to be on one side, the other side wins. We saw this in the Sixties when the funny stuff was all on the left: National Lampoon, Month Python, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce. It was the best evidence that the right was intellectually bankrupt then. Now it shows the positions have flipped.

8. More and more public personalities who used to be on the left, or whom we assumed to be on the left, are now moving to or coming out as rightist. Dr. Oz is one recent example. When he announced for the Senate, I automatically assumed it was for the Democrats. He was Hollywood, and he was Oprah. Not so. He was a closet Republican. Tim Poole has stopped insisting he is on the left. Joe Rogan sounds more right wing. Jon Stewart sounds more right-wing. Jimmy Dore sounds more right-wing. People are walking away. I suspect that soon it will not be cool to be on the left.

9. It looks as though the Supreme Court might, by summer, overturn or restrict Roe v. Wade. While this would make no immediate difference even in the USA, it would be a heavy blow to the argument that abortion is a human right, accepted in Canada and perhaps elsewhere largely on the American model.

10. In the end, you cannot hold back the avalanche of information on the Internet.

Hope this helps.

Democracy is Coming ... to the USA

 

It seems to me we are seeing a general collapse of all social systems. We can no longer rely on any institutions. 

The parliamentary system, of reasoned debate, used to keep our legislatures functioning reasonably well. Now that civil discourse seems to have completely broken down. It is just a matter of massing votes.

But now, in America, nobody trusts the voting system, either.

The church used to stand as a voice of moral authority against excesses in the secular world. This seems no longer true. For mainstream Protestantism, it has not been true for generations. The last bastion of this, the Vatican, has now been stormed and fallen under Pope Francis.

The court system used to stand as an independent adjudicator to whom we could appeal, based on reason and precedent. Now the courts have become more political than the legislatures. Reason and precedent are largely ignored, and whims are “read into” the law.

The universities used to be semi-monastic in their separation from practical affairs, and able to reflect objectively on them. Now they have become more political than anywhere.

The press used to pride themselves on their independence and lack of respect for any authority. Now they are an arm of the professional establishment. Journalistic standards have been abandoned, and news reports are not reliable.

We used to think science was objective and incorruptible. We could trust the science. That was probably always false, but the COVID crisis has revealed multiple examples of this not being true. “The science” too has become political.

We used to suppose private enterprise was a check against government. That was probably always false; but it is increasingly clear that large corporations and governments work hand in glove. 

We used to trust in a professional civil service. The trustworthiness of the government seems cast in dramatically greater doubt by revelations off the “deep state.” They now seem to be lunging for greater power. An example is Merrick Garland’s Justice Department declaring dissatisfied voters at school board meetings “domestic terrorists.”

I and many like me used to think that Silicon Valley and high-tech was a force for freedom; some of us are old enough to remember Apple’s “1984” commercial. Now they have been revealed as Big Brother.

Nothing in the system seems to work any longer as it is supposed to; everything has been subverted by people interested only in power.

I blame postmodernism.

But all of these institutions are also in decline, notably due to technology. Perhaps the rapid loss of power and relevance has provoked a panic reaction, and fear has led to overreach.

If we are seeing the fall of the American Empire, I see no obvious replacement in the wings.

Back in the 90’s, Leonard Cohen recorded his album “The Future.” It offered two competing visions: the title song, which saw chaos coming; and this has proven accurate; and “Democracy is Coming to the USA,” which saw instead an American revival, and a new birth of freedom. 

Perhaps he accurately foresaw both. 

Perhaps we are witnessing a case of creative destruction. Perhaps as old systems are dying, new systems are about to emerge. And perhaps Cohen is right, that it is still America where the new is most likely to appear.

It's coming to America first,

the cradle of the best and of the worst.

It's here they got the range

and the machinery for change

and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.

I see hope in groups like the Daily Wire, Steven Crowder, and Tim Poole trying to build independent cultural engines. I see hope in Andrew Yang's new political party, proposing a new form of voting. I think we may be on the brink of a new moment of immense creativity.

The Future

 

The surest evidence that an election was stolen is if, immediately after the election, it is forbidden to suggest that the election was stolen.

I had thought that the tech execs were only interested in making money, and that their censorship was a temporary bug, forced on them by advertisers and users. I was misled by economic theory. I should have been thinking psychology.

Now it occurs to me that if you are the type of restless spirit that sets about acquiring vast wealth, and you succeed, and a few billion more or less no longer seems to matter, and you inevitably find you are still not satisfied, you are naturally going to turn to other possible sources of satisfaction. Why not, say, try for power, if the opportunity is there? 

The internet looked at first like something that would decentralize power, as the invention of printing did. That seemed inherent in its architecture. Now everyone would have a printing press and a video camera. I overlooked the fact that those more open channels for communication went both ways: also allowing increased surveillance of everyone.

At this moment, I am almost prepared to indulge that luxury of the old, despair over the future. I think we have lost both democracy and free speech. That means the only way to resist oppression is with violence, and violence is both appalling in itself and leads to purely random results.

2021 Predictions

 

I seem to have missed making my usual annual predictions last year. Just as well; they would all have been wrong. My predictions, like everyone’s, are always wrong, and this past year was utterly implausible. 

It was as though the world was one big roulette wheel given a reckless spin, and the ball is still bouncing.

I might as well go nuts with my wildest predictions. Now anything is as likely as anything else.

I predict COVID will fade from consciousness in Canada, the US, and Europe by about April. If the vaccinations are done intelligently and efficiently, starting with the most vulnerable, the actual death rate by that time will have dropped enough that the coronavirus will no longer feel frightening. I also hope that rapid testing and therapeutics will be making a significant difference by then: ivormectin, monoclonal antibodies, sniffing dogs. And spring will bring a natural reduction as well.

I predict that Operation Warp Speed and the novel vaccine techniques it encouraged will soon bring unexpected benefits in treating other disease. Perhaps the common cold, perhaps cancer.

I predict that Trump will remain in office for the next four years. I know this is crazy, that the odds against this look astronomical. I am going with a gut instinct. I am convinced from what I have heard that the election really was stolen; and that Biden has been bought by China. So far, people in authority have been going along with the fixed election results for fear of civil unrest and upsetting apple carts; if the risk of unrest becomes greater with Biden than with Trump, their support may flip suddenly. I sense movement in that direction.

Not only may Trump retain power: the Democratic Party as it now exists may be generally discredited. It may then be taken over by the “progressive” left, by AOC and her fans.

I think China, even before the virus, was close to hitting an economic wall. It is in effect a Nazi regime, a Ponzi economy, and probably unsustainable over the long term. Before the virus, they probably seized Hong Kong because they needed to loot it to stay afloat. The virus and its aftereffects, and the strange weather, may be a larger strain than the system can bear. I imagine the Chinese leadership trying to recoup and rally the population with some military adventure; and they may be driven as well by the need to plunder.

This suggests a coming war; most probably an attempt on Taiwan. I expect the other side to win, probably with muscular US involvement. China can count on no allies. The government of China will fall as a result.

In the meantime, the war with China may unite the US, which otherwise looked headed towards civil war. The mad left will not be pleased with Trump staying in office. On the other hand, the riots are not going to get going until the weather is warmer. By that time, they may be preempted by the war. If they do start, the war will rob them of popular support and give cause to suppress them.

When the Chinese government falls, I foresee a period of chaos. China has a tendency to fall apart, and the CCP has deliberately suppressed any possible alternative social organizations who might be able to step in and preserve order. Ordinary Chinese will flock to the Christian churches and to Falun Gong; one or the other or both will become the kernel of a new order, but it will take time. And perhaps a civil war or two.

In the meantime, to escape this, Hong Kong will attempt to shear away and to restore ties with the UK. This, together with the UK’s departure from the EU, will give an added impetus to a preliminary CANZUK agreement: a loose military, free trade, and free movement association among Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and now also Hong Kong. Singapore may express interest in joining as well, fearing to be eclipsed as a banking and trading centre by Hong Kong. 

Everyone expects a Canadian election this year, once the pandemic abates. I do not. The Liberals would be foolhardy to call one so soon into their term, and the NDP would probably suffer if they provoked an election without some good reason. If it comes, I expect the NDP to suffer badly, because they have been propping up the Liberals despite scandal, and because they have not distinguished themselves from the Liberals in policy terms.

I would venture that the Conservatives would win that election. If China attacks Taiwan, or is otherwise in the news, the close ties and friendship of the Liberals to the CCP may become the main issue, and sink them. If they want to run on how well they handled the pandemic, much depends on how well the inoculations go. It does not look promising so far. Canada lags the US and the UK, and that is how Canadians will evaluate the matter.

I expect there will have to be a rash of retail bankruptcies in Canada, the US, and everywhere else as a result of the pandemic, hastening a move to online shopping that was already underway. Similarly, a lot of universities and colleges in the US are going to start declaring bankruptcy. This may be the beginning of a general shift to learning online, now that everybody is familiar with the tools. The economics are hard to beat.

We should see a definite demographic movement now away from the big cities. There is no longer any reason to live in a big city for shopping; many of us have learned to work remotely, so it is less important to be there for work. Rental and real estate prices have become unsupportable. With the internet, there is far less reason to be there for either entertainment or education. The riots have demonstrated that they are dangerous due to crime, and the virus has demonstrated that they are dangerous because of disease. The flight from the cities should be a major theme in the new year.

Legacy media have been kept alive on ventilators by anti-Trump rhetoric and the systematic censorship and deplatforming of alternative sources online. But the systematic censorship, at worst, is self-limiting. It forces the creation of new competing platforms to serve the demand. I expect the rise of new social media platforms in the upcoming year, and the decline of established players like Facebook, YouTube, Patreon, PayPal, AirBnB, and Twitter, who have become politically partisan, against their business interests. We are already beginning to see this.

I do not expect Muslim terrorism to be much in the news. Remember Muslim terrorism? With the collapse in the price of oil, their revenue sources in the Middle East have dried up. Just as when the IRA lost its funding from the Soviet Union, and then from Libya, peace is breaking out all over, and this will spread. As with China, the virus’s effects are likely, on top of the decline in oil prices, to topple the Iranian regime. When it falls, a large proportion of the Iranian population will publicly apostasize, in reaction to the regime having so closely identified itself with Islam. This will produce a ripple effect throughout the Muslim world: it may become less fashionable to be aggressively Muslim.

The reaction will probably be to want to Westernize and to secularize, as this was the tone under the Shah.

We will see, in a year, how close I am to seeing the shape of things to come.

How I Did on My Predictions for 2019

I predicted a hard Brexit. Looks like a relatively soft one, and it has not happened yet.

I predicted the Liberals would win the Canadian election. They did.

I predicted the Conservative would win in Alberta. They did.

Other predictions were more vague; I would have expected Apple, Patreon, Twitter, and Facebook to be in more visible financial trouble by now than they are.

I think I batted about .500

Predictions for 2020

I’m probably absurdly optimistic, but I have an intuition we have turned a corner.

UK former speaker John Bercow put out a Christmas message in which he called for greater civility and no more demonizing those with whom you disagree.

This seems notable, because Bercow was a notorious “Remainer,” and stands accused of twisting the Commons rules in aid of the Remain cause. The Remainers in general were guilty of slandering Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and the Brexiteers as racists and fascists.

It looks a bit like a concession speech. The left-wing elite may understand that their popular support has abandoned them, and they now risk being on the receiving end of the sort of treatment they have dished out.

It may not be related, but I was also surprised to receive friendly responses from several old friends to whom I sent electronic Christmas cards—who had previously unfriended me over political differences.

The shift may happen suddenly, after all. Gandhi tracked it, or someone; we generally attribute the quote to Gandhi: “first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you’ve won.”

This is clearer in the UK than in North America, thanks to Johnson’s big election win; but we are all now tightly bound together in the Anglosphere—an illustration of why an English-speaking union makes sense. The shift of the working class in the north of England looks like the shift of the upper Midwest working class to Trump last US election.

Both shifts look historic, a paradigm change. Regular folks are leaving the left electorally.

So let’s go ahead and make some crazy optimistic predictions, on the premise that the paradigm has shifted.

China’s government falls. I’ve been predicting this since the nineties. But as the Chinese living standard rises, it gets more probable every year: there is a point, at about $10,000 per person per annum GDP, at which the middle class will no longer tolerate and need no longer tolerate dictatorial rule. China is close to that.

The CPC has now been in command for 70 years. That’s the point at which the Soviet Union ran out of social capital. There may be something in that number—it is the point at which all the original generation that supported the revolution has passed on.

My Chinese friends always said the regime would stay so long as the economy was good; but if it turned sour, they could command no residual or ideological loyalty. No more mandate of heaven. The Chinese economy is hitting a demographic hurdle, thanks in large part to the one-child policy. They cannot compete on cheap labour any longer.

Moving away from China, the rise of social media is cleaning things up everywhere. Corruption has always been the main reason the underdeveloped world is underdeveloped. But now the average person can record functionaries misfunctioning, and post the results for all to see. This is causing corruption to be rapidly rooted out in the Philippines, and probably elsewhere. Either governments prosecute when this is uncovered, or governments get overthrown.

Social media is also making it easier for opposition groups to organize and communicate. Flash mobs can appear at any moment to protest. The Arab Spring demonstrated the potential--but may have been only a dress rehearsal. In a way, the recent British election was another consequence: people are no longer taking the lead of the media.

So we are seeing lots of people in the streets, in lots of countries. Any given regime might go down.

Who is most likely to fall? Surely Iran is a prime candidate. Putin in Russia. Both have seen close calls in the recent past. Both must be reeling from the decline in oil revenue. Either would have vast significance in geopolitical terms.

I think Saudi Arabia also needs to be on that list. For them, too, the oil money is running out. During the Arab Spring, they bought peace. They can’t do it a second time.

Now imagine two or three of these governments fall in the next year: Russia, Iran, China.

Trump then wins reelection against Bernie Sanders in something like a landslide. The Democrats will be left in the same kind of disorder as Britain’s Labour Party.

Yes, I’m predicting Bernie Sanders will be the nominee. See my argument in a previous post. And I do not think this would be a mistake; I think he would do as well as anyone running in the general election. But barring a big recession, I think Trump is unbeatable. If, say, China and Iran go down, he’s going to have an easy win.

Britain is now going to leave the EU. I predict there will be no dire consequences; Britain’s economy will thrive. Once out, it is in Europe’s interest to make a new trade deal. If the EU does not act quickly and enthusiastically, pressures will build for other countries to pull out—the UK is too important to them. At the same time. new trading opportunities will open up beyond Europe.

I hope to see negotiations begin almost immediately on a trade deal with the US and Canada that will, in effect, bring in Britain as a member of NAFTA. Negotiations will begin on something with India too. Maybe a joint deal with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

In Canada, the electoral forecast seems murky. The Conservatives, in the middle of a leadership race, are not going to want to force an election soon. The NDP is out of money, and so are not going to want an election. The BQ had a surprisingly good result last time, and probably cannot expect to do as well again; so they are not going to want an election. This will sustain a now quite unpopular government in power.

This will increase voter frustration with the Liberals—and discredit the other parties for seeming not to offer an alternative. The Tories will probably reinforce this impression of lack of choice by turning to a more moderate leader. On present form, the NDP platrform will not be much different from the Liberals.

I predict, when an election does come, this should produce a breakthrough for Maxime Bernier and the PPC. They will look like the only real protest vote.

As a result, the Liberals probably get to stay in power…. But if we are really seeing a paradigm shift, we may instead see the two biggest parties suddenly both being on the right, as has happened in Europe. The centre might abandon the Liberals for a similar Tory platform, on the grounds of general corruption and disgust, and the angry protest vote, which can generally as easily go left or right, goes Bernier. Then the Tories may come to power by forming a coalition with either the PPC to their right, or the Liberals to their left.

We are due, even overdue, for some significant medical breakthroughs thanks to our growing knowledge of the human genome and to CRISPR. I expect some major development in the new year. Why not some promising new treatment for cancer, or something to notably slow the aging process?

Hi-tech is less easy for me to predict than it used to be, now that it has become so diffuse and pervasive. I think the underlying logic of the Internet works against the big monopolies that have developed. I expect the march of technology and increasingly bad PR is going to pull Google/Alphabet and Facebook down to size. I think Amazon still has legs and should continue to strengthen. I think Elon Musk is mostly a good vapourware salesman, and Tesla is going to go under.

AI is going to start replacing white-collar jobs.

Please bear in mind that all predictions are almost always wrong, and I have a no better track record than the experts.

Cohen on the Future

What did he see?

I think Leonard Cohen got it right when he said that the modern world is in the middle of a spiritual catastrophe.

I think he was right to say that the essence of that catastrophe is a lack or a failure of love.

And I think he believed, and I think he was right, that the most troubling and evident example of that absence of love is abortion.

“Destroy another foetus now

We don’t like children anyhow.”

In this regard, things are rapidly getting worse. We are everywhere dissolving into warring factions, with few or no bonds of common morality or common civility left.

Perhaps Cohen was ready to die when he did die, as he said he was, because he did not want to see what was coming. Many, including his son, thought it was significant that he died on the very eve of Trump’s election as US President. (This does not mean that the problem is Trump; it could as well mean Trump is a symptom and result of the problem. Indeed, it must, since Cohen clearly believed the problem long preceded Trump. And it might be the inevitable reaction to his election, as much as or more than the election itself, that was his concern.)

“I’ve seen the future, brother.

It is murder.”

Glenn Beck recently publicly said he instinctively or intuitively expects some great general war within the next few years.

Some say Beck is inclined to be alarmist. Kind of like spiritual click-bait. That may be so.

I have been inclined to be more optimistic, to feel that the forces of hate had by now become so blatant and blatantly wrong that there would be a natural and general pulling back to morality. That their very virulence suggested they were becoming desperate.

But then, I’ve thought that since the early Seventies. So far, I have been wrong.

Perhaps Beck and Cohen are right. Desperate hate may well take down everyone and everything possible before allowing its own defeat. It will go, but it may well not go quietly.

News of the Future

In case you missed it, Samsung just followed Apple in declaring a big and unexpected revenue shortfall. And the cause seems to be the same: Chinese consumers have stopped buying smartphones. They have apparently also stopped buying cars.

It might be just that the market has reached saturation point. But that seems an unlikely explanation, for a drop so sudden and so big. Put this together with the swift and severe crackdown on dissent reported by YouTube vloggers, and China’s current sabre rattling abroad, and I conclude that China is facing serious trouble economically. I suspect that, lacking transparency, there is a lot of smoke and many mirrors in China’s economy. And things could collapse quickly.

In other news, several respectable forecasters have reported recently that 25% of colleges and universities in the US will be gone within the next ten years. Some say 50%. Moody’s says 25% of private colleges are now running in the red. Traditional tertiary education is about to go the same way as the press. First, there are now better and cheaper alternatives online. Second, they have lost their comprehension of their original mission, and have become self-perpetuating parasitical cliques.

You’d think that, faced with tightening budgets, the colleges would do the obvious, and start cutting out administrative jobs, which do not relate to their core mission or the quality of what they are doing. But this is the reverse of what they have been doing: in recent years, more and more of their budgets have been going on administration, and where they have cut is on actual teaching, by using more adjuncts and hiring fewer permanent faculty.

Predictions for 2019 and Beyond

France in the year 2000, as predicted in 1899.

Worth ignoring, of course. My predictions are always wrong, just like everyone else’s.

To begin with, let’s assert that things are getting better year by year.

Apparently this is not obvious. My leftist friend Xerxes wrote a New Year’s column saying everyone is looking to 2019 with fear and trepidation. Oddly, just as those who now call themselves “liberal” do not believe in individual liberties like free speech or the right to life, those who now call themselves “progressives” do not believe in progress.

That is, in the end, the most prominent dark cloud on our horizon: the modern left. They are actually working against progress, against civilization, against the future. They are now aggressively trying to shut down dissent.

The good news, though, is that I think this is near or beyond the tipping point at which they are doing no more than to discredit themselves in the popular mind. They demands have come to openly defy common sense. These are now the thrashings about of a dying beast.

A quick overview, then: the poorer parts of the world are broadly rising rapidly out of poverty. The proportion of the world that is desperately poor is declining rapidly. Famine, not long ago a fact of life, is now increasingly rare. We are defeating the worst diseases, one by one, and life expectancies are obviously rising—with a tragic reservation in the case of addictions and “mental illness” in the developed world. Farewell polio, tuberculosis, smallpox, scarlet fever, and so on.

The Twentieth Century was an era of near-apocalyptic wars. The Nineteenth was better, thanks to Pax Britannica, but there still were almost inconceivable bloodbaths: the US Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of any new major war has receded; we seem to find ourselves in one of the most peaceful periods in history. Granted, there are local horrors in the Middle East; but on a much smaller scale than we saw even during the Cold War. Granted, many fear the rising power of China. But so far, that has only been an economic competition. With benefits to everyone.

You will say, as Xerxes did, but what about global warming? Nothing else matters, since the world is all about to end from global warming.

But even here, things have gotten better. All my life, the world has been about to end in a great ball of fire. In grade school, they tested out the air raid systems, and everyone was making their emergency plans and building bomb shelters in their back yards. The end was bound to come at any moment.

In my final year of high school, our biology teacher made us all read Erlich’s The Population Bomb. In university, the Club of Rome released The Limits to Growth. We were solemnly warned by all our profs and teachers that, at some point in our own adulthoods, the world would no longer be able to feed itself. We would run out of all resources. We would be fighting to the death for the nearest source of potable water. A friend decided that his only hope was, on graduation, to emigrate to New Zealand.

And this is not to mention the dire and immanent effects of depletion of the ozone layer, which would kill us all with skin cancers, and acid rain, and mass poisoning from DDT, not to mention an almost limitless list of other industrial pollutants, and the impending ice age.

And now all we need to worry about is the earth getting warmer? And the pollutant is—carbon dioxide? Sounds like a good deal to me.

It also does not help my lack of confidence in the future, of course, that all of these earlier predictions of imminent doom seem to have been wrong. Self-evidently, we are still here. The price of most raw materials has actually declined since these dire predictions were made in the Sixties and Seventies.

Peak oil? Oil production is way up; it is the price that peaked and started to decline.

Running out of arable land, and the inability to feed such a large world population?

Do you know which country, excluding city-states, is the most densely populated in Europe?

The Netherlands.

Do you know which country is the world’s second largest exporter of food?

The Netherlands.

Obviously, we are nowhere near running out of agricultural capacity to feed the world population. Which, in any case, seems poised to tip into general decline.

So on to the future.

The rise of social media has made all governments less stable, just as the development of the printing press did in its day. We have seen the outburst on the streets of Paris most recently. On the whole, this is a very good thing. It forces democratization and greater equality.

And it makes the survival of either authoritarian regimes or regimes out of touch with their populations more doubtful.

The first current regime that comes to mind in this regard is China.

There are lots of signs that the Chinese leadership itself feels vulnerable. Xi has been cracking down and shaking sabres. It is inevitably an unstable, threatened regime that shakes sabres; consider the former juntas in Greece or Argentina.

I also cling to a fantasy that regimes that are transparently built on false premises are not likely to last more than a human lifetime—as with the Soviet Union. That is, they are not likely to long survive those who first created them, and who are therefore deeply committed to the original fantasy. Once they all die off, someone is going to notice that the emperor wears no clothes. By that measure, China is due for its morning wake-up call. The legitimacy of the government has of recent years hinged on growing prosperity. A bump in that road could bring it all crashing down. Demographics say a bump is due.

Iran ought also to be at high risk. The fall in the price of oil, and the reimposed US sanctions, cannot help.

Russia’s position is also dicey. There have been prior signs of upheaval. But these things are also unpredictable. Who expected the riots in France?

The fall in the price of oil should also force Russia to stay closer to home; there is an economic pothole in their path as well. The future for Saudi Arabia likewise looks grim. This also means sources of funds for Islamic terrorism, and Islam’s prestige in poorer parts of the world, should decline. Put it all together, and the new and greater availability of oil and natural gas should spontaneously reduce many of the political/military/security troubles in the world. A lot of troubles with insurgencies in Africa and South America ended with the loss of funding from the old Soviet Union. The troubles in Northern Ireland seemed to fizzle when Gaddafi in Libya pulled funding for the IRA.

Speaking of which, the government of Cuba is probably in big trouble. They were in a pickle when the Soviet Union fell, got a lifeline from oil-rich Venezuela. Now this surrogate sponsor is also bust. The Obama administration stupidly (or disloyally) threw them an undeserved few extra years by lifting sanctions, just as they did for Iran. But it is not likely to be enough.

I expect a hard Brexit, for reasons given in this blog previously. It is not in the interest of the Brussells bureaucrats to give Britain a better deal than a hard exit would. But as soon as the UK is out, they will be back at the table to make a sensible trade deal. There is already news that Ireland has gone to the EU with a tin cup seeking financial support in the case of a hard British exit. When and if this happens, Ireland will be the biggest loser. Then the calculations change: if the EU still insists on not dealing reasonably with the UK, rather than discouraging others from leaving, they may force an Irish exit as well.

I expect the Liberals to win the next Canadian election, slated for the coming year. I think that there is a potential populist revolt in Canada, as we have seen in France or Britain with Brexit or Trump’s election in the US. But there is currently no clear Canadian electoral alternative that could be a vehicle for it. Neither Scheer nor Singh have the guts for this. They are typical Canadian nice guys not about to raise any ruckus. Bernier might have, as Conservative leader. As leader of a new party, he might make gains, but not enough in one run to take power; just enough to split the opposition.

The Conservatives are, on the other hand, a dead cinch to return to power in Alberta. Trudeau will soon face a wall of provincial intransigence. This is where the real opposition will form.

In the tech field, Apple’s recent revenue warning confirms my longstanding prediction: it’s going moribund without Steve Jobs. I expect a slow decline from here on out. It’s living on the prestige Jobs banked.

Facebook is toast. It never had much to offer, to my mind. Nor was Mark Zuckerberg some visionary who was ever going to be a font of new ideas. The Facebook concept itself was taken from others. He’s just a wheeler-dealer, who has had a remarkable run.

Patreon has pretty obviously publicly slashed their own wrists, and is likely to go down fast. Twitter faces similar problems, for similar reasons: trying to censor their users. That’s not likely to work in a free market situation, and one in which the economic bar for new entrants is rather low. You cannot bank too heavily on established user base. Ask Nokia, or Blackberry, or America Online, or MySpace, or Internet Explorer. They are both going to be remembered mostly as fascinating case studies in business schools.

I used to have a pretty good idea of what technical innovations were likely to appear next: when the digital revolution was younger, it was ridiculous how many great opportunities were just lying there, and nobody had gotten around to them yet. Now the future is less clear, at least to me. I did not see driverless cars coming, nor delivery drones.

I think 3-D printed houses and buildings ought to become a thing. The economies look compelling.

One sector that has been clearly crashing out is retail. Main streets and malls are shuttering, as purchasing goes online. Nevertheless, main streets and malls perform a vital social function, and I expect they will reincarnate accordingly. But they will look more like farmers’ markets, featuring local crafts and produce, targeting unique local tastes. It is the chains and franchise operations that have most to fear, and the result may be better for community.

I expect education to move almost entirely online. Again, the economies seem obvious. If universities and colleges are still doing reasonably well in North America, it is largely as a kind of travel experience, like the old Grand Tour done by the English aristocracy, most appealing to foreigners wanting a taste of American life. They tend to sell themselves to students on the quality of campus life.

When education proper goes online, people will be able to shop around for the best option for each course, and study on an as-needed basis, not having to move or devote long years to not earning an income. If institutions like Oxford or Harvard survive, other than as travel experiences or finishing schools, it will be as evaluators, providing tests and certifications of acquired knowledge. You go to take the proctored test, or to present the thesis.

Everyone has been worrying for some time about jobs disappearing as a result of these many innovations. Some forms of work will indeed go, but the evidence seems to be that unemployment is going down, not up. This was predictable in theory, and so should continue. Automation makes things cheaper; people then buy more things; on balance, then, more jobs. Nobody fifty years ago would have believed you could get someone to pay good money for bottled water, or pay five bucks for a fancy cup of coffee.

Manual labour was mechanized long ago. Now it is the professions that are going to be in increasing trouble. Here is a case of an elite amassing power, prestige, and wealth on the premise of special knowledge. Since WWII, indeed perhaps since the turn of the century and the Progressive Era, there has been an over-emphasis on formal education and on relying on “the experts.” Every job wanted to constitute itself as a profession. It has all been oversold and overbought.

That seems likely now to suddenly be thrown into reverse.

Like the printing press, the Internet and the digital revolution democratizes knowledge. Suddenly everyone can read; suddenly everyone has the world’s knowledge at their fingertips. As a result, the claims of and the need for the professions are less tenable—exactly like the claims of the clergy at the dawn of the Reformation. Many professions are being exposed, now that the information is more widely available, as mostly smoke and mirrors and loud quacking noises; journalism and teaching being two examples. A lot of what others do can be more efficiently done by computer: searching the law books for legal precedents, medical diagnosis, much accounting; all that filling out of forms of all kinds. You may still need a human operator, but not years of study.

In the long run, I think everyone will gradually become some kind of artist or craftsperson or planner or manager. Just less boring, repetitive work.

Predictions

Every year at about this time, I review my predictions for the old year, and make my predictions for the new. And, of course, my predictions almost always turn out to be wrong. There is a reason why it is called “news.”

I missed the one biggest story of the past year: Pope Francis. But then, so did everyone else. I also wrote, last year at this time, “Turkey seems poised to surge ahead.” Turkey is looking quite lost in the surges these days.

I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast recently which pointed out that everybody is lousy at predictions. Experts are no better at making predictions in their field than is the man in the street. Neither does as well as the simple blanket prediction that “everything will go on more or less as it has.” People who become famous for accurate predictions are usually remembered for predicting one very surprising thing that came true; but it you check their prediction record on everything, these same people turn out to be unusually inaccurate. The strategy is to keep predicting the most improbable things, and, when on a rare occasion you get lucky, everyone remembers that and forgets all the wrong predictions.

That said, perhaps I should just predict the most improbable things I can think of. 

I was right last year, I think, in foreseeing the relative decline of Apple and rise of Google in the IT game. I was right in predicting that neither the US nor Israel was going to do anything violent to prevent the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons.  

For the coming year, I will predict, once again, the possible collapse of the Chinese government. It is going to happen one of these years. The recent sabre-rattling by China is an indication that the end might be near: it is entirely against the Chinese national interest. Their best policy is a silent, unthreatening rise. This makes me think it is driven by internal instability, internal leadership struggles.

I think the collapse of North Korea is also increasingly likely. The public dismissal and execution of your number two by feeding him to dogs does not really suggest a stable government. 

I expect Justin Trudeau’s popularity to decline, as I believe it lacks any foundation in his real performance. I believe it simply tracks Obama’s popularity—which looks now as though it is going into serious decline. I do not expect Stephen Harper to resign before he has fought another election. He has earned the right. I also think the inevitable bursting of the Trudeau bubble means Harper could win. 

I doubt there will be a federal election in 2014, but I expect the Conservatives to win the next election. The senate scandal is just not serious enough to warrant turfing out a government. It is really quite trivial. Given a little time, nobody will be able to figure out what the fuss was really about.

I expect large gains for the Republicans in the 2014 midterm elections. This is not a very risky prediction: the party out of the presidency usually gains in midterm elections. But Obama is also, as noted, on the decline in the polls. Because hopes in some quarters were so high for him, his fall will probably be comparably harsh. People don’t like being disappointed.

America will continue its decline in global influence—or rather, in interest in the rest of the globe. It is not natural for it to give a tinker’s dam what happens outside its borders. Now that there is no big obvious threat there, it will surely pull back. However, there is no one power obviously in a position to seize this opportunity. Russia is on borrowed time due to the shale oil boom; Europe is hobbled by its imploding welfare state; Japan is doomed by demographics; China is politically unstable. 

The world will have to muddle through on its own. 

I keep seeing suggestions recently that the situation in the world right now is uncannily similar to that just before the First World War. America is Britain, the declining hegemon. China is Germany, the rising new power. The Middle East is the Balkan tinderbox. Japan is perhaps Austria-Hungary, or France. Or maybe France is France.

There are indeed similarities. But I think crucial elements are missing. Germany went to war largely for fear that in a few years Russia would surpass her in military might. Where is the Russia now to China's Germany? Ergo, China, unlike Germany then, has every incentive to maintain the peace. And the second essential element was Austria-Hungary's perceived need to rattle the sabres to forestall her own collapse. Japan is a poor substitute for Austria-Hungary in that regard; it has a social cohesion most countries can only dream of.

The First World War surprised nearly everybody, and its origins are still subject to debate, precisely because it resulted from an improbable combination of factors. It remains improbable that those factors will recur. Good concept for selling books about WWI, though.

Africa will do well for now on cheap labour, but I think long-term prospects are limited in a way East Asia’s was not. It won’t move past heavy industry to the service sector. It does not have the long tradition of civilization and literacy. I suspect this is important, when it comes to clerical affairs.

The world will not end in 2014.