JF Ptak Science Books Post 1773 [Part of the History of the Future series.]
Sometimes as the saying goes a bad answer isn't right; and sometimes it isn't right so much that it isn't even wrong. Here we have a collection of not-even-wrongs, tidily collected in one pamphlet. It is a booklet of "predictions" that are so deeply off the mark that I suspect the author would not even be able to make post facto predictions.
Had author R.J. Rasmussen (The Amazing Future, 1938) real powers of diving the future he should've been able to see that choosing to be so dreadfully wrong about the events of 1939 was a truly bad thing to do--of course, if there was some sort of unknown and spectacular power in his brain to see what was coming, the least he could've been was right. But he wasn't, and he wasn't right very widely, and very widely not right almost all of the time. To give the devil his due, Rasmussen did get some broad images correct--like in 1939 a world leader will get sick and die. (Actually, the world leaders dying in 1939 weren't current leaders, but that is a particular that escapes detail when thinking about stuff that will come to pass.) And then there's the bold "a high ranking officer in the U.S. army will pass away". But those broad brushes are about as close as it gets to "prediction". He was right that there would be a year 1939.
The rest is "anti-prediction": "I want to advise all pilots and their aides in the United States...to use utmost good judgment in flying your planes". And "again I say that no war will be declared on or with Germany", cancer will be cured on or before August 26, 1939, and there will be an increase in textile production in the U.S. The Japanese war against China "will be over by August 21, 1941", though the cost will be monumental to the Japanese, somehow; Germany "will continue to forge ahead" (?), the map of Africa "will be completely and totally changed" by 1942, and "during this period there will be increased interest shown in higher lines of thought". And so on, on and on--by the hundreds.
Finally, among everything else that the author didn't see was the following: "the persecution of the Jewish people in Germany will gradually grow less and less that they have ever know in the past thirty years, and before the year 1939 has passed it will have practically ceased in Germany". I must say that of all the minor pamphlets like this that I have seen Mr. Rasmussen made the most detailed and incorrect predictions of anyone that I have ever seen--the only further step backward he might've been able to make was to have written this book in 1941 and gotten all of the history wrong.
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