This is the time of year when lazy writers do retrospectives, usually in the form of lists or worse, tweet collections. Streaming has reached a point where people are doing these on YouTube or DLive. Then you have the predictions for the coming year, which hardly anyone ever mentions as part of their yearend review posts. This makes sense, as most predictions are terrible. No one can see the future, so predictions are always about the present trends and the prognosticator’s hopes for the future.

There is some value in looking back at past predictions. It’s a lot like reading old articles about the glorious future of 2020, which is now upon us. Predictions tend to reflect the binary model of the future that is inflicted upon us by our rulers. The future is either going to be much worse than anyone today wants to believe or much better than anyone ever promised. In reality, the next year will be pretty much the same as the last year, with maybe some new characters in the media.

Looking at your own past predictions is a bit humbling, which is probably why no one does it as a part of their yearend posting. Here is my post from last year with my crystal ball forecast for the upcoming year. When I do these posts, I’m not trying to be too serious, as this is not the time of year to be serious. The point is to have some fun with the format and make some points along the way. Still, if you make a post full of predictions, you must be made to answer for them!

So, how’d I do?

My first prediction about how Congress and the Senate will behave in the new year was pretty much dead right. The Democrat House did spend the year chasing Trump around with subpoenas and the Senate did nothing. I did not see the impeachment fiasco coming, but no one thought the Democrats were that dumb. I was wrong about the Mueller probe. That’s probably the surprise of the year. Trump gets a lot of grief, but you have to give him credit for getting rid of Mueller.

As far as the race for the Democrat nomination, I will take a bow on predicting that Warren would be a bust. She is still in the top-tier of the candidates, but she is fading and probably headed to a bad end. The current polling has her finishing second or third in Iowa and second or third in New Hampshire. That’s pretty much the Howard Dean phenomenon. He never recovered from that and she will not recover from losing the early races. Being a total fraud has consequences.

I think the jury is still out on the censorship. There’s no question that is has slowed over the last year, but that could simply be due to a lack of targets. The alt-right was mostly an open door for the old 1.0 types and other fringe weirdos. Once that door closed, they went back to their respective warrens. As a result, there is not a lot of low hanging fruit for the censors. Still, I think the trend will continue, as the platforms find the cost of censorship rise and the benefits decline.

On the economic front, I got it all wrong on the stock market. The markets continued to be strong, despite the beginning of the great retirement. The fact is, the markets are no longer connected to reality. Instead, they are driven by Fed policy, which was another miss last year. I did get China right. I’ve been saying for years that China is more paper tiger than most realize. China remains a low trust society, outside the local community, so that means lots of mischief in the national economy.

As for Europe, I nailed the Brexit process. I was a little muddled on the way the end game would play out, so I can’t crow too much. My expectation was that the globalists would offer up the Tories as a sacrifice to globalism. I did not think it would work, but I was not all that clear, so I get dinged a few points. I was a bit early on the role of the Eastern bloc of countries. I still think that is in the offing, but Brexit may have to unfold before that can get momentum.

On the sportsball front, I was ahead of my skis on that one. Ratings keep declining for the NBA, but the NFL rebounded a bit. Of course, the ratings are mostly fake, so no one can be sure. My hunch, just based on personal experience, is that more and more white people are abandoning conventional entertainment. The obnoxious propaganda packed into everything is impossible to ignore. Even so, we don’t have hard data to back this, so the cord cutting prediction goes into the loss column.

Finally, I swung and missed on the Facebook prediction. Frankly, I remain puzzled about this one. It is so obviously true that ads on that platform are a waste of money, but they keep suckering in advertisers. Further, the data they steal from users and sell to marketing companies and the FBI is mostly garbage. Facebook is a company that exists in spite of reality. This is why looking back at predictions is good. It reveals gaps in your understanding and it reveals bias.

Over all, it was a mixed bag. In the gambling business, the rule of thumb is you have to win 57% of the time in order to make money. That covers the juice owed to bookmaker I’ve lost track of where I was on this, but I’m glad I did not bet the “Escape Lagos Fund” on these predictions. Even so, it is always fun for me to look back at these posts. They are a good reminder that no one can see around corners, so it is wise to be skeptical of one’s confidence.

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