Happy Unpredictable New Year

The problem with predictions is they're so unpredictable.

Forecasters looking into the future a year ago didn't see the significant drop in oil prices, the rise of ISIS, the muscling up of Russia over the Ukraine and the Republican takeover of the Senate.

Five years ago, the editor of NaturalNews.com predicted that by 2012 a "deadly superbug will escape the hospital" and start "to infect everyday people," the United States power grid would "suffer a catastrophic regional failure," nuclear weapons would be unleashed in the Middle East and the U.S. would nearly come "to military conflict with China over natural resources."

Ten years ago, the United Nations Environment Programme warnings were particularly dire. By 2010, they said 50 million "climate refugees" would be fleeing the Caribbean, low-lying Pacific islands and coastal areas due to raised sea levels from melted polar ice. Just two years later, former Vice President Al Gore said the North Pole would be "ice-free" in the summer by around 2013 because of "man-made global warming."

Fifteen years ago, a 15-month collaboration among the National Intelligence Council and dozens of outside scientific, diplomatic and corporate experts indicated Russia would continue to become economically, militarily and socially weaker, China would be faced with political, economic and social pressures that would "increasingly challenge the regime's legitimacy, and perhaps its survival," and AIDs and tuberculosis were likely to account for the majority of deaths in most developing countries. None of those have happened.

Interestingly, though, in one of its most sweeping conclusions, the report said governments would have less and less control over flows of information, technology, diseases, migrants, arms, and financial transactions, whether legal or illegal, across their borders. Globalization, it said, "will not lift all boats."

Twenty-five years ago, a Los Angeles Times article by Jack Smith discussed letters written by the 1940 and 1965 eighth-grade graduating classes of Malaga Cove Intermediate School in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., that were to be opened in 1960 and 1990. He also quoted from a letter written by the class of 1990 to be opened in 2015.

The 1990 students, who said they referred to each other as "stud," "dude," "nerd" or "loser" and described something in positive terms as "rad," "gnarly," "stoked" or "awesome," predicted "there will be a few people [in 2015] that will live on the moon for a very brief time," there will be cures for cancer, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, and "doctors will be able to cure memory loss and other diseases better because they will understand the brain better."

Significantly, they also foresaw that people won't bother to carry money, that "everything will be bought with a card."

Fifty years ago, though, radio commentator Paul Harvey managed to get a lot right when he discussed how he would destroy America if he were Satan. He, among other things, said he'd "subvert the churches first," would whisper to people to "do as you please," would tell the young "the Bible is a myth," would "confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is square," and would teach the old to pray, "Our Father, which art in Washington."

Further, he would encourage schools to "refine young intellects, and neglect to discipline emotions" and before long "drug sniffing dogs and metal detectors" would be at every schoolhouse door. He would have prisons overflowing, judges promoting pornography, churches substituting psychology for religion and deifying science, priests and pastors lured into "misusing boys and girls, and church money," young people being taught marriage is old-fashioned and people questioning hard work, patriotism and moral conduct.

In other words, Harvey said, "if I were the devil I'd keep on doing what he's doing."

The new year, 2015, will be what it is. It will be filled with things that are predicted and others things that aren't. If we're vigilant and even-keeled, we'll roll with the good and bad, battle the devil Harvey talked about 50 years ago and come out on top.

That's, after all, the adventure of life, isn't it?

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