What a charming tableau of optimistic scenarios Jonathan. We get a tour of compartmentalized thinking, one of many human frailties that always seem to mock sanity, to how governments manipulate populations in order to realize monetary gain. I look forward to a bright and productive future filled to the brim with rack and ruin, death and mutilation, more hate, more violence and a grim future for those little toddlers who will grow up into a world divided by hate and fear, a huge debt and no way to pay it. There will be little time or resources for priming an economy headed for disaster. Did I leave anything out?

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should not voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

--H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Well there you have it, the apocalyptic predictions of Lovecraft are materializing even as I write this, perhaps the beginning of the end as the crawling chaos in the persons of Bush and his neocon gallopers draw the black cloak of a new dark age over the face of the earth that even the great Cthulhu will not be able to escape from.

The most astonishing thing is, despite all of known history in all its glorious gore, we never learn that simple lesson that violence creates more violence and thus we proceed ill equipped with our anthropoid brains and chimpanzee violence chromosomes down the bloody path of the human form.

Rob:
Glass half empty today??? Things could be worse. Cheer up, tommorrow is a bright new day with new possibilities. (It'll be Monday, and Monday is ALWAYS a ++ George day.)

Man, the next time I hear about "people-powered politics" I'm reregistering as a Satanist. It should actually be called "people-and-three-million-dollars-of-the-candidate's-own-fortune-powered politics."

"people-and-three-million-dollars-of-the-candidate's-own-fortune-powered politics."

Yes, this is obviously something that's been a bit, uh, glossed over. But given that people generally play no role whatsoever in U.S. politics, it's notable when they do, even just in collaboration with a massive personal forture.