We all remember the disaster that was going to happen at midnight, January 1, 2000. Every single computer in the world had been programmed so that it couldn't tell the difference between January 1, 1900 and January 1, 2000. And computers ran the whole highly technical and tightly interconnected modern world.

All the professors were paid to meet and discuss the inevitable catastrophe. All the talk shows and commentators talked about it.

I was in a science conference out west, and even there the young geniuses were talking about how we should prepare for a catastrophe. I didn't take commentators and a bunch of sillyass professors seriously. But when I saw that the young geniuses were scared it worried me a lot.

Do you remember what happened on January 1, 2000?

Nothing happened. And that's the point.

In the 1990s, all the professors and commentators were trying to come up with what kind of government program should deal with the coming catastrophe. If you notice, when professors are brought in as experts to discuss a crisis, they always decide that the answer is to let professors and bureaucrats take everything over.

So while the professors and liberal commentators had the usual meetings and came to the same conclusions they always come to, somebody quietly made sure the catastrophe didn't take place.

While there were all sorts of wild warnings and media events, somebody in the background was actually dealing with the problem. The same thing happened with the energy crisis around 1980, the inevitable permanent meat shortage everybody has long since forgotten about, and every other crisis that made so much media noise.

While the media concentrate on noise, real problems are dealt with behind the scenes. Nothing the professors and the media propose ever makes any difference.

In other words, we are always fixated on where the noise is coming from while the real future is coming from an entirely different direction.

On November 21, 1998 I began an article, SUPERTERRORISM, with the following sentence, "There it hangs, the threat of Superterrorism." It seemed like a pretty harebrained thing to be talking about at the time. It had absolutely nothing to do with the headlines of 1998.

Almost exactly three years later to the day, our entire national attention became riveted on Homeland Defense. Every threat I talked about in that article is now front-page news.

The same people who moan or cheer over what is in the media right now don't even remember which news items obsessed them in 1998.

What is really going on in the world has a lot to do with the crisis that did not happen on January 1, 2000. What is really going in the world has nothing to do with a bunch of predictable, silly professors and commentators huddled together coming to the same conclusions they always come to.

So if you are a leftist who thinks those professors are prophets and the world of the future is theirs, you're being ridiculous.

And if you are a rightist who takes everything we see around us at this moment very, very seriously and think we are all doomed, you are being ridiculous.

What is really going has nothing to do with the headlines or what we now think we know about the future. Everybody will nod when I say that. But then they will go back to being hypnotically entranced by whatever the headlines are this week. I have not met more than three or four people who get the full import of what I am saying.

And until you do get the picture I am trying to convey, anything you say about the future is simply nonsense.

Which is good, because the future you would predict right now looks very grim indeed.