Well, this is a bit late, as it got lost in the draft pile for a while. But better late than never.
It’s 2012, which means we’re mere months away from a flurry of white-manufactured Mayan exoticism. It also means looking back at the psychic predictions that came out in 2011! In the past I’ve covered the likes of self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne, Nostradamus fanboy John Hogue, and Toronto-based Nikki “Psychic to the Stars”. Last year I even got to include alternative medicine Level 85 Blood Elf (I assume), Mike “Health Ranger” Adams.
Let’s jump right in:
Nikki
Nikki makes just under a couple of hundred predictions (seriously), but she does have a tendency to repeat herself. For example, in addition to 2 Persian Gulf oil spills, these all appeared:
- President Obama has to be careful of parades.
- President Obama’s children in danger.
- Danger around President Obama.
Romney fan?
Since I can’t include all predictions here due to the huge volume, let’s check in with a few of the silliest ones:
- The world’s first brain transplant. Wow.
- Parts of the polar ice cap will melt. And the world will continue to turn…
- She reported that North Korea would war with South Korea and attack Japan. Certainly a busy year expected for North Korea, but no mention of the death of their leader Kim Jong-Il.
- Mount St. Helens will erupt. She’s not even trying anymore. There are websites for these things now. Poor show of effort on this one.
The reason I include the very silly items is to illustrate how easy it is to make a huge number of statements ranging from obvious to completely wild and just hope that something hits the jackpot. If the jackpot happens to be one of the zanier predictions, bonus, because that’s all fans will talk about. Though she has a few obvious items in there like a tsunami in Japan (a softball, as those are a non-zero risk for Japan at any given time and she said nothing about the massive scale of what actually happened), the list is full of just as much utter nonsense. But confirmation bias ensures that fans will remember a tsunami prediction more than they will remember dozens of failures.
Notable for 2012, she has doubled up on some of her failed predictions from last year (e.g., Nick Cage splitting from his wife). We’ll see you next year, Nikki.
Sylvia Browne
Currently Sylvia doesn’t allow people to view her predictions for the upcoming year unless they are willing to drop a little coin. But she did publish last year’s predictions and after reviewing them, I have to wonder why she bothered. Let’s have a look:
POLITICS
Obama finally steps up to the plate and implements some of the changes he’s promised.
Sarah Palin stays in the news but she won’t become President.
More mysterious phenomena appear in the skies that even the government can’t explain.
The above are what I like to call “fish in a barrel” predictions. They are vague and almost certain to be at least partially true. It’s like having said “climate change will be discussed”. She wouldn’t have had to give any details to be basically right.
CRIME
Among other things: We are getting more and more gangs that take over cities, and Federal troops have to be called in, especially in Portland. No, just no.
ECONOMY
Here she makes statements vague to the point of sometimes not being a passable sentence. This allows for enough ambiguity to argue for a hit later. For example: “Taxes loosen up as well as banks, because they will be investigated.” Or “Small businesses finally see some relief after much talk.” And finally: “Social Security will give out, but not in our lifetime.” These are unmeasurable due to undefined terms, indefinite pronouns, and in one case a statute of limitations of “our lifetime” – which, read a certain way, may give her until the end of human existence before we get to check if she’s right.
MEDICINE
Here she went with totally amazing medical discoveries vs. totally mundane progression of science, predicting vaccines for AIDS, MLS, and MS (none of which happened) and that a new medication for diabetes would be developed “as well as a great type of nutrition formula”.
CELEBRITIES
These are typical “who will break up, who will stay together” predictions such as Jennifer Aniston getting married (no), Madonna ending a relationship (sure), disaster for Lindsay Lohan (come on), a breakup for Brangelina (no), a breakup for John Travolta (still in mid-2012 a matter of tabloid speculation), TomKat divorce (oops, a year early on that one), and this:
Celebrity doctors who give out prescriptions too freely will be outed. Who specifically? She could have shot a bulls-eye and went with Michael Jackson’s doctor, but she didn’t even go that far. Given the recent celebrity deaths related to prescription medication, this is a softball.
I grow bored of Sylvia and think I may retire her from coverage. Given that she has changed her procedure to only release predictions under payment, I feel like she’s not really trying to appeal to the masses anymore.
Hoguestradamus
John Hogue is perhaps more confident in his abilities. Though one has to buy his book to get the full version, he does provide a summary for free on his website. Just like last year, he claims that his climate predictions were 100 percent accurate – I assume he may have copy/pasted this paragraph because it reads exactly the same. Man alive, psychics, do you think we don’t remember what you’ve said? He has nothing really interesting to say, but there was this gem of a hyperbole that I feel I must share with the world:
World War Three begins in 2010, but not the war anyone imagined. … Mother Nature declares a Third World War on human beings.
Now that is how to be theatrical. All he needs for a hit is for any number of routinely-occurring natural disasters (such as the many tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, or volcanoes that have an impact on people every year) to hit on schedule and he can declare the first shots to be fired across humanity’s bow.
His other available predictions are just political and economics opinions wrapped up in predictiony language.
Uh oh, this year is looking like a bust. I think Sylvia and John could take a lesson from Nikki and just go full balls to the wall, like: Category Five Hurricane wipes out Miami (actual Nikki prediction).
2011 Preview
But wait. Mike Adams, yeah that Mike Adams, promoter of anything even remotely nonsense-tastic from astrology to homeopathy, decided to weigh in some predictions for 2011. First, I want to give the context of his own personal (and sure to be not at all ridiculously biased) evaluation of how he did in 2009. For example:
Prediction #1 - Big Pharma will begin to implode – Right
No qualifiers whatsoever for why he’s right about that. Conveniently, some of the things he got wrong seemed to be things he was happy to be wrong about… He does the same at the end of this year’s article. Oh, this is promising. So what’s in store for us, Mike?
General Vaguery
- More people growing their own food.
- Increased awareness of natural remedies and health freedom.
- More people waking up to reality. (He “clarifies” this by explaining: More and more people will be awakened into a state of awareness [emphasis his]. Oooooooh. Of course.)
Specific upcoming victories in the world of natural health
- The People will achieve significant victories over GMOs
- FDA forced to admit “mercury fillings” dangerous
- Next big battle over water fluoridation
- Surge of interest in Libertarian political philosophy
- “Tenth Amendment movement”
Specific short-term predictions
- Big Government war on Internet freedom
- By end of 2012, “significant” food supply disruptions in North America
- Food prices climb with alarming speed over the next two years
- Oil prices will also trend sharply upwards over the next two years.
- By late 2012, the economic downfall of the United States will have accelerated
Long-term predictions
- Disappearing “health middle class” and a great divide between the healthy and the sick because of superfoods, the sun, and nutritional supplements (which he happens to sell). The sick get to wallow in processed foods, prescription medications, and ignorant doctors “even if it kills them”.
- By 2025, the FDA as we know it today will be ancient history, and a new era of food freedom and health freedom will have swept across the former United States of America.
- By 2030, it will become obvious that all those people treated with vaccines, chemotherapy, pharmaceuticals, and conventional medical procedures are largely infertile and dying from degenerative disease.
Bold words, Mike. Bold, paranoid words. I predict that he will claim to get several of these predictions right, particularly the vague ones that are good for his business (see the brilliant “More people waking up to reality” bit), while Big Evil Pharma continues to wither and die in its moral corruptness. For more on Mike Adams’ predictions, see this Facebook post by Richard Murray.
I can’t wait until 2013 when I get to review the vast nonsense that was predicted for December of this year. Bring your popcorn.
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