Some miscellaneous predictions

I believe in the importance of making specific and testable predictions about things.  Making specific predictions is a way of preserving intellectual honesty:  it's too easy to cultivate and spread opinions at will, and only think about or talk about those opinions that turn out to be justified by events but to ignore those predictions that fail.

So making predictions in a public way, and returning to those predictions in order to grade yourself afterwards is a great way to set up an intellectual feedback loop.

So here are some New Years predictions, to be graded next year:

Political

1. Impeachment.  Pelosi eventually gets the impeachment papers over to the Senate, having accomplished her goal of framing the Senate trial as somehow illegitimate. The Republican controlled Senate mirrors the actions of the house and uses the trial as much as possible to get political points by highlighting whatever Democrat malfeasance they can.  The President is not actually convicted, and the whole affair is a slight net political plus for Trump.
2. Election.  Biden is the Democrat's candidate, and he looses narrowly to Trump, who proclaims his victory the greatest thing ever.

World

1. Hong Kong.  No freaking idea.  My only prediction is that this will not simply fizzle out quietly.
2. Iran and the US.  The aggressive US stance towards Iran will provoke crazy revenge talk (not actually a prediction since it has actually happened) and possibly some carrying through on said talk.  There could be some real violence.  This will force the rest of the civilized world to essentially back US aggressive actions, despite their originally unilateral nature  Once Iran realizes it won't be able to play Europe against the US here, it will back down and resume attempts at diplomacy.  Alternatively, the "crazy" phase of Iran's response could get out of hand too quickly and we could have a full-blown "Desert Storm" style war, which Iran (of course) will loose badly.  But it's against my rules to hedge my bets with an alternative, so I'm going with option 1: "Brief fury and no war" as the prediction.

The Church

(Ugh.  Don't feel like trying to read the tea leaves here. OK, here are two very general predictions:)

1. Aside from some steps taken by some few individual bishops, little to no substantial actions will be taken to fix sexual abuse problems.  Most everyone in power will try to pretend nothing happened.
2. In general, Church "conservatives" will continue to be unhappy with Vatican leadership.  Pope Francis will say at least six wildly inappropriate things this year that will get us riled up.

Science and Technology

1. It's going to be a fairly uneventful year for science, in terms of big public announcements.
2. Some very cool medical tech research will be announced but will be still too far from actual release to be useful yet and will barely register on the public consciousness.
3. We'll get at least two new "this will be the best thing ever" battery hype announcements that will go pretty much nowhere.
4. Status quo for global warming theory in general and for the politicization of it as well.

Economics

1. Hydrocarbons from the US will remain plentiful for at least this year.
2. I'll go out on a limb and predict an economic crisis for China happening this year.  I feel like it has to happen at some point, so let's guess it's going to happen in 2020.  This will create economic shocks around the world that I'm not even going to try to predict.

Culture

1. Media piracy will increase dramatically.  No one will really care.
2. It's going to be a "meh" year for major motion pictures.  Major blockbusters are going to feel more formulaic than usual and the "small movies" slots at theaters are going to be clogged with lefty "message" movies of dubious value.
3. Everyone will proclaim this to the be year that streaming services take over all the creative content in the world.  Some really interesting stuff will be produced, but we'll end the year disappointed with the overall quality of streaming offerings.

OK, those are my predictions!  See everyone in 2021 for a grading.