This is generally a slow time for news. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is when everybody important takes time off work, and we remaining peons don’t make significant decisions.
Thus pundits must resort to lame topics like “The 10 biggest stories of 2006” or “Top predictions for 2007.” For variety, though, we might look at “Things that were supposed to happen in 2006 that didn’t.”
For instance, even well into October, Karl Rove, the premier political strategist of the Bush regime, was predicting that Republicans would maintain control of the Senate and would maintain a majority in the House despite losing a few seats.
You expect political types to sound optimistic, at least for public consumption. You never read a public statement that says, “Our inept candidate is going to get his butt handed to him on Election Day, as he richly deserves.”
Instead, you read, “It is a competitive race, but we still have the lead and we are going to keep it, and we are going to win it.” That came from Colorado’s own Dick Wadhams, who was directing the re-election campaign of Virginia Sen. George Allen – and despite the predictable prediction, Allen didn’t win it.
Now to Wadhams’ role model, Karl Rove. To quote from Newsweek, “He wasn’t just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his ‘metrics’ were far superior to plain old polls. … Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists – to study just how wrong the polls were.”
So there was something an expert predicted that didn’t happen in 2006.
But the most erroneous expert prediction for 2006 was made in 2004. The expert was Bill Gates, who is not only the world’s richest man, but chairman and chief software designer for Microsoft, the world’s largest software company.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 24, 2004, he said, “Two years from new, spam will be resolved.”
Spam, as you know, is unsolicited commercial e-mail. Nearly three years since Gates made the prediction, I find dozens of messages in my inbox every morning. Most of them have a subject line like “It me Hector” or “Good Morning Heather,” and they tell me I should buy some obscure oil company’s stock because it will soon be in great demand.
The odd thing about these scams is that, in a way, they’re true. If you had some of the stock they’re touting, and you figure that at least 1/10 of 1 percent of the population is dumb enough to want to buy it based on spam, then the price would rise and you might make a tidy sum.
Alas, I have no idea what stock this “pump and dump” crowd will tout next, so I will not be able to retire, but at least I understand why they’re doing it. Ditto for the folks promoting sexual aids.
But this is not so with the spam that appears to be in Russian (or some other language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet) or Chinese (or some other language that uses ideograms). Why do they bother?
Perhaps it would be apparent if I used a Windows program rather than Linux – and I’m sure I’ll read some “expert” predictions, just as I have for the past decade, that the coming year will be the “year of mass adoption of desktop Linux.”
And that will be yet another expert prediction that did not come true in 2006 and will not come true in 2007. That’s my prediction.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
