What 2007 holds for the country.

I gave you my predictions for 2007 a few days ago. Now, these are among the findings of an Associated Press-AOL News poll that asked Americans to gaze into their crystal balls and contemplate what 2007 holds for America.

Another terrorist attack, a warmer planet, death and destruction from a natural disaster.

Six in 10 people think the U.S. will be the victim of another terrorist attack next year, more than five years after the Sept. 11 assault on New York and Washington. An identical percentage think it is likely that bad guys will unleash a biological or nuclear weapon elsewhere in the world.

Seventy percent of Americans predict another major natural disaster within the United States and an equal percentage expect worsening global warming. Fewer than one-third of people, or 29 percent, think it is likely that the U.S. will withdraw its troops from Iraq.

But on a brighter note, only a minority of people think the U.S. will go to war with Iran or North Korea over the countries' nuclear ambitions and a third of people see hope for a cure to cancer.

NOW BOYS AND GIRLS, HERE COMES THE SCARY PART:

One in four, or 25 percent, anticipates the Second Coming!

What make this so scary is not the fact that the Second Coming will occur - NO, the scary part is that 25% of Americans BELIEVE IT!

On a couple of side notes here:

1. These people don't have to worry about how many shopping days left till next Christmas and;
2. I still vividly recall when I was twelve years old in 1960 our next door neighbour (who was a heavy-duty Catholic) told me that the world would end that year!
She was just like any other “End of the World” adherent, still trying, after 2000 years, to experience the rapture! All she managed to do was scare the crap out of a kid - me!

Your "pass the kool-aid" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Fearless Predictions and Forecasts for 2007

Well here it is on the last day of 2006. Hope it was a good year and I hope next year is even better! What's in store for 2007?

After "much research" and soul-searching I have compiled list of stuff that should be relevant to us in the New Year! Some of it is obvious, some of it just makes sense and some is out in left field.
(Which is apparently also the position I play in the game of life!)

Social Networking: By now, almost every online marketer has heard of social networking sites (such as MySpace) and have figured out that they are most likely the future of media. Many online social networks started out small, and now a few are becoming a global brand.
However, marketers need to be creative in order to develop campaigns that integrate messages without offending those who don’t want to be marketed to.

Targeted Marketing and Digital Email: With the increase in social networking we will also see increases in targeted niche marketing. Improved email execution will enhance messages and make email efforts more relevant.
Soon, marketers will replace the plain HTML or text messages with dynamic content and include more strategic and forward thinking to make sure their emails get opened.

Online Video: Online content will continue to evolve, and will include more online video than ever before.
However, the right audience and the right offer need to be determined first, if streaming video is to have a big effect on sales. When the right factors are in place, results have shown as much as a 1,000% increase.

Vista will be the last major release of Microsoft Windows. The next generation of operating environments will be more modular and will be updated incrementally. The era of monolithic deployments of software releases is nearing an end.

Proliferation of RSS - RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Users of RSS content use programs called feed readers or aggregators: the user subscribes to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user. (Did you get that?)

Blogging will Peak in 2007 and Start to Mature. In 2005, blogging and bloggers had fun, tasted the waters - some liked it and some moved on. In 2006, blogging matured (slightly). Blog Networks buckled down and started believing in themselves as a business - it’s time to take it to the next level, and that’s revenues. In 2007 … I believe the cream will rise to the top in blogging. (ME?) You’ll have your 10% of highly dedicated (and influential) bloggers, blogs and blog networks and the rest that will just plug along.

WAR: Many visionaries foresaw 3 great wars (WW1, WW2, WW3.) taking place in the same century and they were right. A lot of people don't realize that the "Cold War" was actualy WW3. In 2007 we see regional conflicts escalating, especially in the Middle East.

*US Lifts Cuba Travel Restrictions: Fidel Castro’s eternal rule over Cuba ends with his passing in mid 2007. Diplomatic relations immediately improve between the US and their neighbour to the South. Travel restrictions will be lifted, and Americans will flood Cuba. By the end of 2007, Cuba will find itself in a position to be one of the fastest growing travel destinations in the world while at the same time Canada pulls out of Afghanistan and invades and annexes the Turks and Caicos Islands.

*Housing: I predict a holding of prices in early 2007 due to sellers not willing to drop. Then we will see prices dropping in June/July, after a few months of increasing inventory.

*Hockey and soccer gain popularity. Why? Large flat-panel televisions. Fast-moving goal sports are hard to follow on small TVs. The action turns compelling on 50-inch or larger high-definition LCD or plasma screens. If you're old enough, you remember how boring football was on TV before color and instant replay. With their advent the NFL's popularity exploded in the 1960s.

ALSO:

*The blurring of the lines between journalism and entertainment.

*The blurring of lines between news and opinion.

*The blending of news and advertising, sponsorships or other commercial relationships.

*Recruitment shortfalls lead the Pentagon to hire temps to fill some positions and outsource some work to the Indian military.

*Jimmy Hoffa's body will be found in Elvis Presley's grave. Location of Elvis unknown - last seen in a Mall in Minneapolis!

*The problems and pitfalls inherent in pack journalism go to ridiculous extremes.

*I prognosticate and project that the the prolonged, professed and prohibitive tendency towards pessimism proliferates progressivly in profound proportians by profiteer's. In other words, the growing media fascination with the pathetic, the perverse and the pathological continues!

*Social orthodoxy, or political correctness will finaly start to wane.

*The next six months in Iraq will prove to be critical for determining how the following six months are going to go.

*Increasing strife in the blogosphere leads to the appointment of a Blog Study Group, which proposes dividing the blogosphere into three autonomous Liberal, Conservative and Moderate blogistans.

*An increasingly bellicose Switzerland announces plans to develop nuclear weapons to thwart the threat of North Korea.

*John Kerry repeatedly uses the n-word in a joke gone horribly wrong.

*Pictures of Rudolph Giuliani in drag will surface, scuttling his plans to run for President.

*Rupert Murdoch crashes his computer while trying to load a page in MySpace and angrily sells the company.

There you have it Folks
Your "Swami" Scribe
Allan W Janssen

Nothing Surprises Me Anymore! 2006 Review!

Folks, we just get weirder and weirder and no one so much as blinks!
2006 might not go down as the most newsy year in history, but it sure had it's share of strange stuff!

An interactive exhibit at the Ontario College of Art and Design is allowed to serve pasteurized breast milk for taste-testing purposes - six flavours from six donor moms!

Immigration officials go to a grade school and threaten to take away two young sisters if their illegal immigrant parents don't turn themselves in within 30 minutes.

A man who was involved in an international steroid trafficking ring, and admitted to helping a friend burn and dispose of a murder victim's body, is reinstated as the swim coach at an Oakville athletic club!

A Toronto school principal is charged with two counts of assault after "allegedly" tossing shit at children! (Honest!)

A California man attempting to join his family in Burlington for Christmas is stopped by customs and charged with trying to smuggle child pronography into the country on his cell phone. It was a picture of his naked 4 month old son.

Given a choice between jail and exile to Canada, an American man convicted of having sex with a minor, (his under-age girlfriend) chose Fort Erie, Ontario.
(Fort Erie? He should have chosen jail!)

Over 150 of 800 delegates to the International AIDS Conference in Toronto stay behing after it's over and claim refugee status.

And finally;
Toronto paralegal Harry Kopyto was ejected from court after a Justice of the Peace complained his jacket clashed with his shirt and he was in breach of court decorum!

Tomorrow we will look at my fearless predictions for 2007!






















Your "mystic" scribe;
Allan W Jansen