Happy New Year! Now is the time for futile personal resolutions and for (fake) psychic predictions from the sort of people who claim to be (fake) psychics. I’m not going to publish my resolutions, but here are my predictions.
- American college students will strive to reduce freedom of expression in the name of creating a safer space. This will happen more often in the Ivy League than the SEC.
- People who prefer pious public performances of personal pique will continue to follow Richard Dawkins’ Twitter feed for outrage fodder.
- Hillary Clinton will not be inaugurated as President, even though she will win the popular vote.
- Barack Obama will order a barrage of drone strikes on targets in Africa and the Middle East. His Nobel Peace Prize will remain on record, without so much as an asterisk.
- The armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will end badly. The left will blame racism, the right will blame Obama.
- Pollsters will plumb new depths of citizen ignorance on a range of factual issues, and yet find little support for a Santorum candidacy.
- The dollar will fare well against the yuan.
- Americans will continue their perverse paparazzic fascination with the descendents of King George III, despite their ancestors having made a fairly clean break with royalist thinking.
- Fundamentalists of all faiths will agree upon the moral degeneracy of all other faiths, as well as the need for silly hats.
- The planet will continue to get warmer, and glaciers fewer.
- Terrorist attacks will strengthen nativist political parties in the free west.
- A new and comprehensive meta-analysis will claim to show that something previously though to be harmless is toxic, or vice-versa.
- Patheos Atheist will continue to poach bloggers from smaller freethinking networks. (Not that I blame them, really.)
- Oklahoma politicians will come out with policy ideas so embarrassingly backward that it makes national news.
- The Blueball Skeptics will finally resume broadcasting after a lengthy paternity-related hiatus.
Please feel free to leave your own predictions in the comments.
