Gore Vidal is now so old and crotchety that he’s becoming amusing again.

In this interview with the London Times, he has unkind things to say about nearly everyone from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, whom he predicts will be deposed by military coup(!). (I almost hope so, Gore, I thought, reading that one.)

Americans in general come in for the roughest treatment. Alas! we are all just a bunch of ignorant, uneducated yahoos, and unlike certain authors, we are generally not rich, famous, and descended from a prominent political family able to take credit apparently both for founding the airline industry and bringing Oklahoma into the Union.

Interestingly, Gore Vidal is lucid enough to recognize that homosexuality is a matter of acts, not of identity. He might have said more of interest on that subject so near to his own heart, but after remarking “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He refused to elucidate on how he thinks they are different.

I commonly link George Friedman’s penetrating and insightful analysis of foreign policy and military strategy in Stratfor essays, so I was interested to see their author deliver a series of long-term prognostications on this 4:29 video issued last November in association with the release of his new book, The Next 100 Years.

Friedman predicts even greater American world influence due to our naval supremacy and… solar energy from space (!). Less good news is that the Ottoman Empire is coming back. And the really bad news is that Mexico is going to challenge the United States. (I wonder if Mexico becoming a failed state in the near future might not impact the last predicted development.)

I tend to agree with more of Mr. Friedman’s essays than I do with all this. Frankly, in this case, he lost me right after the Influence of Sea Power on History. Besides, who is going to take seriously a guy who makes videos in the library of the Army & Navy Club not wearing a tie?
—————————————————-

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Glenn Reynolds has a little prediction for you lefties.

William Gray and his associate Phillip J. Klotzbach, the Colorado State University weather forecasters are forecasting a “very active hurricane season” this year, with 17 named storms and a 74% chance that a major hurricane (category three or higher) will hit the U.S. coast.

2007 Forecast

The Wall Street Journal notes that:

If that 17 number sounds familiar, that happened to be their initial prediction for the number of named storms last year, too. That didn’t work out so well for them; they cut their forecast twice last summer and were still off the mark, as just nine named storms formed.

USA Today’s “Weather Blog” guys come to Colorado State’s defense, sort of, pointing out that in five of the past seven years, Colorado State’s April hurricane forecasts “have actually been less than what actually happened.” And in four of the past seven years, their predictions were fairly close to the mark, at least when it came to the number of named storms.

But their numbers have been pretty wildly off the mark, too. For example, Colorado State predicted 11 storms in 2005, when a record 26 formed. They predicted nine in 2001, when 15 formed.

It seems obvious that if a “very active hurricane season” is predicted annually, sooner or later that prediction will be proven right.

Ironically, the left blogosphere will be jumping with joy today over this good (bad) news, but the chief predictor, William Gray, is a Global Warming Skeptic.