We know what happened in 2011, but what will happen in 2012?

I previously wrote about the most important events of the past year, and did not try to look into my crystal ball for this year. However, I read on a daily basis predictions in the Western media about events that their advocates assert are coming, definitely, certainly and surely, like the sun rises from the east.

I can predict with a degree of confidence that Britain will celebrate this year the diamond jubilee of Queen Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne 60 years ago, and will hold the Olympic Games in the summer, and can predict that the United States will hold elections on the first Tuesday of November, as is the norm every four years.

I remain also confident of the accuracy of my conjectures, as I predict what shall not happen. Thus I venture to say that the Spring uprisings in our countries will not lead to democratic rule and civil liberties, that Muammar Gaddafi shall not return to power in Libya, and that peace between the Palestinians and Israel will not be achieved through negotiations or boycott.

Western leaders, in their traditional addresses to their peoples at the end of the year, expected the global financial crisis to persist, and I believe them because they know their subject too well, having caused the crisis and being clueless over how to rein it in.

The British government said that the global financial crisis will not prevent the British from celebrating the diamond jubilee of the Queen, or spending lavishly on the Olympic Games to attract the world’s attention. But here, I predict that the opening ceremony of the games in London will not be as grandiose as that of the Beijing Games four years ago.

I also read predictions in the Daily Mail that the UK will have the strongest economy in Europe in 40 years. But this is as absurd as me claiming that Somalia will become the world’s richest country in 40 years, and will send financial and food aid to Switzerland. In forty years, neither I nor the Daily Mail editorial writer will be around to be held accountable for what we said four decades earlier.

By contrast, I will indeed find someone to hold me to account if I predicted that there would be an Israeli military strike against Iran this year because of the Iranian nuclear program, and also if I predict it won’t happen. For this reason, it is safer to predict what would happen in forty years as the timeframe involved falls under a statute of limitation.

Today, there are some who expect the world to end in 2012, specifically on 12/12/2012, when the Mayan calendar ends. In fact, the Mayan calendar is a cyclical calendar that repeats every 5100 years, and was used by ancient peoples in Colombia, Guatemala and parts of Mexico before Columbus discovered America. Since the current cycle ends this year, there are ‘experts’, websites and lunatics of every kind predicting that the world will end this year.

This is absurd because the advocates of this prediction cannot win. If the world indeed ends on the 12st of the last month of the year, we will all perish together, and those who predicted the world’s end will not find anyone to congratulate them or give them rewards, while if their prediction is to be proven wrong, then the whole world will laugh at them.

I believe that the world will not end on that day, not because I know something, but because my prediction has a guaranteed outcome: If the world ends and I am proven wrong, then I and the readers will be in another world and no one will hold me accountable. But if I am proven right then all people will still be around, and I can rent a big hall to accept their congratulations on the great press scoop achieved.

One last thing about this issue: Anniversaries in the West are described by precious metals or substances. The first three years are paper, cotton then leather, and then later years are platinum, silver, pearl, coral, ruby and gold, then finally diamond.

However, experience tells us that the taste of all wedding anniversaries, be the marriages long or short, is paper, cotton and leather. For this reason, a man who marries a woman for her money is better than a man who marries a woman for no reason at all, ending up in divorce and with each of them paying the price of the mistake (or prediction) that they both had made.

[email protected]