Free Republic

The president of Estonia goes on national TV to urge his countrymen to have more children. Russian President Vladimir Putin warns his parliament about "a serious crisis threatening Russia's survival": the nation's low birth rate. The government of Singapore is trying to reverse that country's birth dearth by sponsoring a massive taxpayer-funded matchmaking service. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, panicking the world with dire predictions of a population explosion. By the year 2000, he predicted, the world would be so crowded that hundreds of millions would die of starvation. Although Mr. Ehrlich's prophecies have turned out to...

The first Emerson College Polling national survey following President Biden’s decision not to seek re-election finds Vice President Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump 50% to 46%. Five percent of likely voters are undecided. With undecided voters’ support allocated, Harris continues to lead by four, 52% to 48%. With third-party candidates on the ballot, Harris and Trump’s support evenly decreases by two points, Harris to 48% and Trump to 44%. Four percent support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This month’s national poll included only those who indicate they are very likely to vote, previous polls included all registered voters. Registered voters were...

Polling and data guru Nate Silver updated his prediction to “toss up” two days after he said former President Trump was electorally favored to win the White House in November. Silver, a prominent elections analyst and statistician, released his first election model since Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee on Tuesday. He predicted Harris would win the popular vote, but called her “a modest underdog to Trump in the Electoral College.” Silver wrote on Substack that this posed a risk of a “repeat of the popular vote-Electoral College split that cost Democrats the 2000 and 2016 elections.”...

Companies in Australia are being warned they shouldn’t play down climate risks. For once I agree with the green regulators. Warning to Aussie firms on mandatory climate reporting By Marion Rae Updated July 26 2024 – 11:16AM, first published 11:12AM Almost one in five of Australia’s top 200 companies are providing very little reporting on their climate risks ahead of the implementation of mandatory disclosure. The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors report released on Friday found the majority of ASX200 members have net-zero commitments and most have also set interim targets, which helps investors to gauge the credibility of a...

We can’t escape AI these days. Between the handwringing over what role AI will play in the future — some of which is understandable — to the ubiquity of AI assistance online, it’s on our minds and in our faces. AI can be helpful; we occasionally use image generators here at PJ Media to come up with funny or unusual featured images. It can also be annoying as all get out; if Meta AI is any indication, I don’t think we have to worry about robot overlords taking over anytime soon. But now, prognosticators rely on AI to predict all...

Nate Silver's current model of the 2024 Presidential Election has Trump at 66% to win. Nate is pretty good I think, he had the highest odds of anyone in 2016 for Trump.

A Hunter Biden email about Ukraine from 2014 looks ‘suspiciously’ like it could have come from classified information, a leading GOP senator has claimed. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said the April 12, 2014 message to one of the first son’s business partners resembles documents that the State Department gives members of the Senate when they travel overseas. “It reads like one of those scene-setters — highly detailed information in terms of Ukraine,” Johnson told Fox News Tuesday. The email from Hunter to Devon Archer includes a granular 22-point memo the Biden scion described as “thoughts after doing some research.” Those “thoughts”...

CNN - The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season isn’t here yet, but is already shaping up to be one for the books, with more hurricanes and named storms predicted in a pre-season forecast from Colorado State University than ever before. This June through November could see 23 named storms in all, including 11 hurricanes and five Category 3 or higher “major” hurricanes, according to the university’s Atlantic hurricane season forecast, released Thursday. “This is the most active April forecast that we have ever issued,” lead forecaster Phil Klotzbach told CNN. “Our prior highest hurricane forecast in April was 9 hurricanes, which...

As we look ahead to 2024, there is no shortage of expert forecasts and predictions for the world’s economy, markets, geopolitics, and technology to track in this new year.In this now fifth year of our Prediction Consensus (part of our comprehensive 2024 Global Forecast Series), we’ve summarized 25 of the most common predictions and forecasts by experts into a single visual of what’s expected to happen in 2024.Drawing from our predictions database of over 700 forecasts compiled from reports, interviews, podcasts, and more, Visual Capitalist's Niccolo Conte created the Prediction Consensus “bingo card” and this article to offer an overview...

CBS News' "Face the Nation" held a roundtable on Christmas Eve, affording various talking heads an opportunity to make predictions for 2024. While most of the predictions were relatively banal, one among them stood out, prompting critics to puzzle over its possible significance. Network correspondent Catherine Herridge, the wife of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, suggested that "2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that's very hard to predict." Statistician and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term "black swan event" in his...

In his latest Forbes column, Radical Ventures Partner Rob Toews published his predictions for AI in 2023. Next year, Rob is anticipating GPT-4’s release, the normalization of self-driving, humanoid robot development, and a revolution in search. In his 2022 predictions retrospective, there were some misses and significant hits including the dominance of language AI and Toronto establishing itself as the most important AI hub in the world outside of Silicon Valley and China.Here are the highlights of Rob’s 10 AI for 2023: 1) GPT-4 will be released in the next couple months—and yes, it will be a big deal. “Expect...

PCR and rapid tests aren't the only places where evidence of SARS-COV-2, commonly known as COVID-19, shows up. The virus that causes COVID-19 also turns up in a city's wastewater. Because of that, wastewater has become a powerful tool to give scientists early glimpses into when infections are peaking. "Wastewater actually tells us a really great story," said Amanda Wegner, communications and public affairs director at the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District. "What we've learned with viruses is that people shed the virus. When they use the bathroom, that enters the wastewater stream." According to the Centers for Disease Control and...

One of the few advantages that come with age – and believe me, there aren’t many – is that one can look back at all the predictions made by futurists that turned out to be wrong. I am still waiting to travel in my flying car or by jet pack. Unless I missed the news, we still have not colonized the moon or Mars. And those colonies at the bottom of the ocean have yet to materialize. One area where it seems that seems particularly wrought with inaccurate predictions is climate. In the 1960s we were all going to die...

One of the more delightful aspects of being a dissident from the absurd apocalyptic climate doom cult is the ability to laugh at the decades’ worth of failed, yet quite specific predictions of disaster from purported “experts” that the media has gleefully trumpeted. The track record of the failure of previous predictions matters not in the least, as if mass amnesia has infected not just the media, but government, academia, and the corporate world. Yet, all of these commanding heights of our political economy are united in pushing forward with ruinously expensive schemes that cannot work to substitute unreliable intermittent...

Ah, the annual predictions piece, the conservative scribbler’s best friend and perennial go-to column, the easiest topic outside fake Indians, perverted presidents, and the gnarly predilections of creepy Never Trump weirdos.First, let me review how crappy I did last year in a Stream of Kurtiousness video listing my predictions. I thought the Dems would run away from COVID insanity. They kind of walked away, but a lot of sissy Dems are still yearning for public health serfdom. I was sort of right.I recommended that we make it harder for stupid people to vote. That did not happen. In 2022, stupid...

Buckingham Palace ablaze Nostradamus predicted 2K23 will see “Celestial fire on the royal edifice.” Taken literally, this could mean a meteor is headed straight for Buckingham Palace, burning down the house if you will. On a more metaphorical tip, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who recently released a “bombshell” Netflix series detailing the dark deeds committed against them by the crown, have taken aim with a different kind of fire power, lighting up and tearing down the reputation of the royal family as we know it. World War III The prophecy points to the conflict escalating into a full scale...

Saxo Bank’s “outrageous predictions” for 2023 include a ban on meat production, skyrocketing gold prices and Britain voting to “un-Brexit.” The Danish bank’s annual report, published earlier this month, expects global economies to shift into “war economy” mode, “where sovereign economic gains and self-reliance trump globalisation.” The forecasts, while not representative of the bank’s official views, looked at how decisions from policymakers next year could impact both the global economy and the political agenda. Gold to hit $3,000Among the bank’s “outrageous” calls for next year, Saxo Head of Commodity Strategy Ole Hansen predicted the price of spot gold could exceed...

By Dario Perkins, chief strategist of TS LombardThings That Won't Happen In 2023A light-hearted take on 2023, with big consensus-busting “non-forecasts”Such as Powell takes his Volcker obsession too far; BoE needs a bailout……CBDCs realize the conspiracy theorists’ nightmare; Brexit, what Brexit?Since we first published our annual “Things that won’t happen” outlook in 2015, writing outlandish non-forecasts has become considerably more difficult. Back then, nobody would have taken us seriously if we had said Donald Trump would become US president or the UK would quit the EU or there would be a two-year pandemic with rolling global lockdowns. And the surprises...

2022 was the worst year for the stock market since the financial crisis, fueled by a combination of rising interest rates, economic worries, war in Ukraine, inflation, and other factors. As of Dec. 20, the S&P 500 was down by more than 19% for the year. However, with the year coming to a close, what should we expect for next year? While nobody has a crystal ball, here are a couple of my predictions for the stock market in 2023 and why I believe each one is likely. 1. The stock market will have an excellent year My bold prediction...

Will 2023 be a year when extremely destructive conflicts erupt all over the world? We are certainly already living in a time of “wars and rumors of wars”, and tensions are approaching the boiling point in a number of key global flashpoints right now. If several more major conflicts were to suddenly begin next year, we could potentially witness an extended period of geopolitical instability that would be unlike anything that we have ever witnessed. It is easy to start wars, but it is much harder to end them. If you doubt this, just look at what is going on...