Hot '5 Or Stinko Cinco?

Good and bad predictions for the new year

Ronald Bailey | December 30, 2004

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," declared baseball legend Yogi Berra. Here's my year-end stab at crystal ball gazing.

Politics

President George Bush will renege on his promises to reform social security, overhaul federal taxes and lower the Federal budget deficit.

Bush will quietly ignore any proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Such an amendment will not garner the two-thirds vote needed to pass both Houses of Congress anyway.

Since the election confirmed his infallibility, Bush will give even fewer press conferences than he did in 2004—why put up with the carping of doubters from the liberal media? There is an upside—we will be spared his irritating smirk and his butchering of English syntax.

The Republican Congress will once again try to ban both therapeutic and reproductive human cloning—it will fail in the Senate.

Due to opposition by civil libertarians on both the Right and the Left, sections of the USA PATRIOT Act relating to foreign intelligence and law enforcement surveillance authority will be allowed to expire on December 31, 2005 as provided by law.

Science

No cloned human baby will be born in 2005 (despite what the Raelians or Panayiotis Zavos claim). Cloned baby monkeys, on the other hand, are possible. Cloned babies by 2010.

No asteroid will strike the earth in 2005 or in 2029 either.

The first application to use human embryonic stem cells to repair crushed spinal cords will be filed with the FDA.

No grants for actual human embryonic stem cell research will be issued from the new California stem cell research fund in 2005.

Renewed government funding for cold fusion research is likely. Could this be the solution to any global warming worries? Naturally, ideological environmentalists would oppose it. Recall that neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich warned that cold fusion by providing humanity with a cheap inexhaustible energy supply would be "like giving a machine gun to an idiot child." Luddite Jeremy Rifkin declared, ""It's the worst thing that could happen to our planet."

The Space Shuttle Discovery will not be launched by June 3, 2005.

Environment