Rogue uranium, China’s infrastructure burrowing – Things predicted: The “Told ya so” edition

In the past decade and a half, I’ve had occasion to perceive some significant trends and express concern about what they would predictably lead to.  These have been specific sets of developments involving both politics and technology.  They go beyond predicting human moral and societal train wrecks, although I’ve done my share of predicting those too.  In some ways, the latter are easier to see.  We are all expert in them at some level.

But the more specific and contingent trends, like the ones linked to the emergence of technology and its ability to fulfill motive (but not limited to that category), take more work to perceive.  For some time, perhaps the chief example I had to offer was the roiling of the Middle East set in motion by Obama in 2009, which led pretty much exactly as I envisioned to what Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev called the “tectonic” perturbations of the Arab Spring.