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Checking our predictions for 2016

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It’s time to check the predictions we made around this time last year, something you don’t see the tabloids or most highly-paid consultants doing. Your predictions for 2016, as usual, were thoughtful, interesting, mostly-wrong, but with some remarkable accuracies.

Go here to read them all and come to your own conclusions. We were still under the World Table comment system back then, so go to that link. If you do a search for the post, it will come up as there being no comments, but click the full post and you will find them. (Tom Hering predicted that I would leave Patheos over the issue, which had a trace of truth about it, though in a scrambled way. I got us out of World Table and Patheos itself got taken over by BeliefNet. The $5 monthly contribution that he predicted all of you readers would send to me has not been forthcoming.)

First of all, despite lots of political projections, no one picked Donald Trump to win the presidency. Nor did anyone pick the Cubs to win the World Series. (DonS predicted that the Yankees would miss the playoffs, which they did; Kirk thought the Nationals would win the series, which they did not. Nor did Kurt Cockrain’s Rockies.) Pete made several Bob Dylan predictions, but said nothing about his Nobel Prize.

There were some close ones. Nils predicted that Ben Carson would become Secretary of Health and Human Services. He has been nominated Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Stefanstackhouse came really close. After a fine and accurate analysis, he predicted that Trump would get the Republican nomination. He also predicted that Hillary Clinton would be derailed by an unexpected scandal. But that, he said, would prevent her from getting the Democratic nomination. Instead, Elizabeth Warren would get the nomination, whereupon she would beat Trump and become the first woman president. So the prediction started well but then kind of came apart. Stefan also had a pretty good prediction about evangelical colleges facing major threats in 2016. That called to mind the proposal from the California legislature to force Christian schools to accept gay sex or lose state funding, a measure that was, however, not enacted.

There were also predictions that did come true. As Sam P and Nils foresaw, Leonardo DiCaprio did get his Oscar (best actor for Revenant). SKJAM! predicted that a Supreme Court justice would die and that the Republican-dominated Congress would refuse to consider the president’s nominee, wanting to wait until after the election. One-and-a-half months after SKJAM! said this, Antonin Scalia died and Congress did as he said they would. SAL made another striking prediction, that the candidate with the most votes will not win the election.

Those last two could easily have won our contest, were it not for one of the most impressive performances in the history of this blog. The clear and indisputable winner is. . .

. . .skyorrichegg. He or she made three spot-on yet unlikely predictions:

  1. Trump is Time person of the year.
  2. Britain will vote to leave the EU.
  3. There will be an assassination attempt on Turkish president Recep Erdoğan. [There was a major coup attempt in Turkey in July. I’m sure the rebels would have been glad to assassinate the president if they had the opportunity. The coup was put down. Responsibility for the coup is still in dispute, as skyorrichegg also predicted.]

Skyorrichegg also predicted archaeologists would discover a trove of ancient manuscripts in the Middle East or China. News broke about some important manuscript discoveries in China, though the actual discovery was made a few years ago. Lots of discoveries are coming out from the Middle East, though not a big cache of manuscripts as far as I know. But archaeologists did discover 400 writing tablets written by soldiers from ancient Rome.

Though skyorrichegg did not predict Trump’s victory (projecting Clinton winning against Marco Rubio), that would have made the Time person of the year even more unlikely. And hardly anyone saw Brexit coming.

So skyorrichegg is the prognosticator of the year, winner of all virtual and imaginary honors and awards that go with that title. Congratulations!

Tomorrow: Make your predictions for 2017!

Image by Mike Licht, Creative Commons License.Original Article

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