Are you ready for the future?

Life is short... or shorter than you might hope, than you might optimistically expect. Then again it can, whilst still being usefully short, be relatively long. I saw an interview on tv with Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazillian architect. He's about to turn one hundred and he can function adequately enough to be interviewed and to provide lucid and interesting answers ('Catholicism was cruel... I met all the most interesting people when I became a communist..'). That's a relatively long human life. The rest of us in the developed world look to statistics and then expect or hope for three score and ten, plus a little index-linked extra. If you're 23 now in northern Europe you can 'expect' to live to be 93.

So we all hope. No-one seriously 'expects', expectation is arrogant, it is tautologically presumptuous. It is not possible to say anything definite about the future. Even the Sun's "inevitable" rise tomorrow morning is only a close approximation to 'definite'. It's still worth worshiping Sun-gods over, or at least it used to be.

If you are at all educated, and even if you're not, our learned world-view is historic in its sweep beyond the personally lived, forcing our minds back hundreds or maybe thousands of years. History allows us to re-transmit a never-ending perspective on the Human condition. The future is largely undealt with besides a soupçon of science fiction and a dash of prognostication. The flat-earthers of our intellectual and power élites confine themselves to carrot metaphors, heavens and paradises, to look forward to as some kind of compensation for a life of toil, tithe and servitude. Or for blasting six-inch nails and your internal organs all over, and through, the shoppers at an outdoor market that the Man-In-The-Big-Hat disapproves of for some geopolitical reason or other madness.

To say that there is in fact nothing to look forward to is an uncomfortable, and highly liberating, perspective of the future. I can look forward to tomorrow with relative certainty, I can get excited about that trip to Italy next year with a not-misplaced expectation, I can fantasise about the big house in the hills that one day I will own and enjoy with, well, my highly developed sense of fantasy. The further into the future you try to optimistically look, the more that doubts and caveats creep in. I'm organising a huge party for 5,000 lucky people for January 21st, 2040. Every guest will receive a party bag containing a credit chip for 5 million Euros. It really will be the best party ever known. Tickets are €1000, first come first served.

So, unless you're over 40, or destined to have an 'unlucky outcome', you have something to really look forward to! You may well be dead in which case, I'm afraid, you will in fact have ceased to exist and certainly will not be in a heaven or a paradise, no matter how the Hats have been programming you. And tickets are non-transferable for security reasons. Apart from that minimal statistical downside have something concrete to motivate you in your toils, a reason to strive towards old-age. It'll be a real celebration of survival and geriatric advances. A feast of medication.
I can't wait!
Oh, and I hope to see you there!

God keeps his/her/its counsel

There, proof, as if it were needed, that the supposed deity, the superbeing, the all-knowing, all-seeing, Fat Controller of earthly affairs simply cannot be bothered to affim its existence. Well, not on this blog anyway. Or anywhere else for that matter.

So why all the fuss? Car bombs in England and Scotland, for what? Absolutely zilch to do with any kind or religion. The prophet Allah must be turning in his grave.

Tony Blair, the war criminal and murderous zealot, mutters to his skygod everyday..."Dear God, thanks for the new job, I'll do my best. Met that bishop the other day, he said I can join the Catholics. The wife'll like that. Anyway, give us strength to fight the Muslims, we're only doing it for your glory. Gotta go and talk to the Jews now. Please, oh Lord, keep the snipers and suicide bombers away from me. Love from Cherie. Amen.

Meanwhile the battle for Iraqi oil-rights will go on and on. Ultimately Exxon Mobil will not tap the dollar-wells of Iraq. Why not? Because Iraq will be fractured, religious doctrine will become government, law and force and the re-payment contracts (free oil to re-pay the US its hundreds of billions over 25 - 30 years) will be burned on a pyre of American flags and effigies of Bush. Oh yeah, God indeed, $$god$$ morelike. The only successful way out for the American corporations would be if they can install another brutal dictator in Iraq, Saddam II. I can't see that happening. The Americans will almost certainly have a bad outcome. You wonder how the military manages to keep morale...

There could be a good outcome for the Kurds in a few years time, when US troops are forced out: Kurdistan might get drawn onto the new map. Good for them.

Meanwhile the sham and fiasco continues apace with the soon-to-be-a-catholic Tony Blair appointed as Middle Eastern Peace Envoy. You couldn't make it up if you tried!