History of the future

This is how The Jetsons have fared, 50 years later.

GOT WRONG (some can still come true)

Computers are huge and still use punch cards

Flying cars - we all expected those years ago

Apartments buildings hundreds of feet in the air

Women generally don't work

Rocking rogs rike Rastro

Jane doesn't seem to need shoes, but does mention buying them

No smartphones or other hand held devices


WHAT IS RIGHT

Talking computers

Flat sceen tv, even built right into the wall

Video phone calls

Most Pop music still sucks

People still toil for low wages while 1% get richer

Majority

If you have a majority you can ignore what the majority of people in your country want.

Thanks to the apathy of voters and the hopelessly old guard liberal party elite that gave a heartless, mean, emotionless person who has little regard for others, is too stupid to understand even basic science, a majority, there are now a ton of laws on the books that should never have even been considered.

As a species our fossil fuel  habits are killing the environment we live in. Harper's response? WEAKEN environmental laws. We live in a place where David Suzuki has no say in environmental law and is ridiculed by the government. Harper is so entrenched in his ideology, and incapable of learning anything new,  that anyone who dares to think ahead about how things we do today can severely limit our future is labeled a terrorist and a traitor. Harper lectures Europe about how short-term economic thinking is folly???? Sup with that???????????


The law of cause and effect can apparently be applied arbitrarily if you have a majority.   


We have military planes on order that cost...sorry you are a traitor if you ask the cost...

It really sucks badly that we can simply hope that the idiotic laws prove unenforceable, that that is the best case scenario.

To go back to money the old adage that left-wing governments spend more money than right-wing ones, is utterly false. Conservatives nickel and dime out things that are actually worth having. The money spent on military  items we don't need as well as the prisons, costs several times more than the most ambitious left wing social program.

Even if I admit that the gun registry was inefficient, why not reform it rather than kill it, especially when all of your law and order police chiefs want it to remain?


Reform...that word sounds familiar...

Blackberry singing in the dead of night

Smartphones as they are called are pretty nifty. I prefer to call them pocket computers as making phone calls is only one of the things they can do.  A comic had a joke that ten years ago he had a joke about a cellphone, and MP3 player and a digital camera, but now he has to cover all that in one joke. My prediction is that for many users, the docking station will mean that a smartphone can be hooked up to a large monitor and a full keyboard and pretty much be their computer and tv as well.

For me, this is what my device has replaced, or could replace:

Friends (ok a wee bit of a joke, lol. But on the truthier side, you can check wikipedia to see who was in "from here to eternity, rather than having to phone someone).

A watch
An alarm clock.
A calculator
A stand-alone phone
A radio, if you want to pay extra.
Some TV shows, again you pay extra, but it does have a satellite receiver 
An MP3 player. Hook up some speakers and it is a home stereo as well.
A camera - turns out it even has zoom!
A GPS
A contact list

 ..but I wrote this on a netbook as I do not have a tablet.....lol...

TWF

New Big

Back in France a few centuries ago, the powers of society were called "estates". Since the early part of the last century, we labelled such things as "big" - big business, big government and so on.

Three new bigs have taken over in this century: big greed, big bully and the glue the binds it all, big stupid.

New politics is about bullying - anything Harper does, or Rob Ford does or what Tim Hudak would do if he had the chance. You are for this bill, or you rape children in hell.  Don't agree with the mayor over transit? You're fired. Big bully is easy to understand.

Big greed is also easy to understand. When you have four billion dollars you need to protect every last penny and make sure some homeless family doesn't get any of it. Big greed is the idea that the rich need to be as rich as possible. I


But it's big stupid that drives everything. I am  not saying the people who run things are stupid: they are not. They simply count on stupidity to move everything. And this is what we are supposed to believe:

Left-wingers are all book-readin' don't live in the real-worlders. The true champion of the lower and middle classes are the right-wingers. Left wingers would do stupid things like institute daycare or make it so if you work and pay into unemployment insurance, that you will get it when you are not working. For some reason people who purchase billions in fighter planes we don't need are going to help you.

Movies should be judged by how much money they make.

Musicians should be judged by how much money they make

You should be judged by how much money you make, especially if you are male.

Drugs are bad if you decide to take them, but not if a person in a coat says to take them.

A "balanced" opinion is this, say about climate change: On one side you have a person who works in the field, went to school to study it, and knows what they are talking about. On the other side: someone who doesn't know what they are talking about.

Women's reproductive rights should be debated by men, many of which wear funny hates and have never had sex.

Bigotry is ok, but only if it's in fashion: it's ok to bash gays because of the "choice" they made.You have to be stupid enough to see this as a "choice" in order for that to work.

You think this is how science works: One, yes one, one study shows a link between autism and vaccinations. With this you launch a campaign. You don't know this is how science works: there were hundreds of studies done to show ASA in low doses helps you in many cases.

More to maybe follow

TF

Is the oceanliner really making a turn?

(though many of my examples and points are American, it is not very different here).  

Hemingway: I am getting to know the rich. 

Mary Colum: I think you’ll find the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money. 

After the market crash of 1929, there were regulations put in place to remedy a situation where the gap between rich and poor had become too great. Also, to avoid another huge market correction, or the "boom bust" cycle that was the roller-coaster ride that had been western capitalism since the mid 19th century, the rules were implemented to make sure people "played fair". As the 1980s began, each and every one of these regulations was repealed so that by the mid "oughts" of the 21st century, the playing field returned to it's 1929 rules. And the same thing happened again. CRASH KE-BANG

In the dirty 30s, the new deal introduced the above-mentioned rules. The Rich were blamed for the mess and were asked to pony-up money to get things moving. But in 2009 and after, it seemed the last bastion of  the middle class was to blame. My anaology has always been this: The company shows a profit of 12 cookies. The CEO takes 11 1/2 of them. With cookie crumbs falling out of his mouth he points to the plant manager and warns him that greedy union rep wants too much of that half cookie. I call the modern CEO part of the uber-greedy.

Obama came in to change this. He didn't.

That the Mitts and Newts of the world don't need a fraction of what they have is a given. That they grab all they can and tell the poor they have to make do with less is predictable. The rich may think they are different, but they really do just have more money. What boils my potato is the mass agreement that has been there:  that somehow it is the fellow with 3 cookie crumbs  who has to give 2 of them back, to make things right. In this once great country, we elected Harper who is a cookie monster. Almost one one in three Canadians voted for him as they swallowed his story that the role of government is to get rid of as many rules as possible - because, as you see, THAT is what is making the game unfair. We all know a good hockey game would have no refs at all and if teeth and bones are smashed, that's just the way it should be!!!

I watched the 1951 "A Christmas Carol" recently, well actually right around Christmas of course, and Scrooge would be to the left of half of the right-wingers, and that is BEFORE the ghosts!


 I think now it is becoming too obvious to ignore the fact that the system is broken. I am not so much of a hippie that I think "all rules are bad, man!". I have always objected to rules that were there for no reason, rules that do not work, or rules that are unfair. But well-thought rules are not simply desirable, they are essential.

The occupy movements are too broad and unfocused. But at least they are a welcome start. But how can we translate that into votes?

Thomas.

The future ain't what it used to be

In the Star Trek universe, the early 21st century is one of anarchy and things have taken a step backwards. In this fictional timeline, the middle class has been hollowed out and the masses of poor grow in numbers while an elite few hold all of the wealth... There is a third world war and large parts of the planet can no longer be inhabited by humans. In our our 21st century we haven't had a world war, but... TF