Roaches and Cyclones

With my house openly tethered to the underground and secretly connected to the world's largest computing system, I gain access to more accessless data than I can possibly use.

Possibly.

Instead, I've employed the natural environment, including the ants, spiders, roaches, and varmints that hang out in my home.  In exchange for food, including dust (including my skin (including skin parasites))), the organisms crunch the data for me, creating information and knowledge.  From that, I extract and create wisdom.

Then, and only then, do I compare the processed data to the Book of the Future.

They say you should never buy a house in good weather.  Buy the house when rain is falling and the yard is full of poodles swimming in puddles.  That's why shoppers are flooding to North Dakota right now - whatever is not under water will keep you safe, dry and fully employed, statistically-speaking.

So here I have a handful of pencils, ready to read the Book of the Future to make sure the wood roach on the ceiling is doing its job.  Otherwise, I won't be crunching data in my next round of data reduction.

Are the cyclones spinning over land masses and large bodies of water larger or smaller, faster or slower, more or less intense, taller or shorter than average, than the past few years, than the next few years, ever, or never?

I had unplugged myself from the local environment in order to feel the effect of the total universe on my person.  But now, it's now to feel the power.  Here goes ...

Trench warfare in a new form.  Bacterial factorials.  Mr. Trousdale in a dale wearing trousers fishing for trout.  Training the nouveau riche to live frugally, enjoying the power of giving empowerment.  Iran becoming a protectorate of the east Asian bloc, India and Russia holding the balance beam on blocks.

Popularity no longer posh.  Relative obscurity the new strength in Roman numerals.

Trading Patagonia clothes for Patagonia clothes.

NASCAR 100-lap demolition derbies, complete with teams trying to wreck others teams to the hard beat of music and dancing beauty queen acrobatic cheerleader squads during "halftime" of NASCAR 500-lap snoozer races.

Professional golf tournaments will turn into judged events, with golfers' scores based on twitter buzz built on sex-crazed versus family-friendly advertising campaigns.

Twitter will fund the development of a device that connects directly to the brain stem, bypassing the upper brain functionality and passing messages via basic instincts.

The rest of the world will weigh an us-vs-them attitude that restricts trade with east Asia until the renminbi is destroyed.  In retaliation, east Asian countries will no longer process raw materials for companies within countries outside east Asia.

A submarine will "accidentally" sink a ship belonging to a neutral nation instead of launching another stealth sickness bomb on unsuspecting cruise ships.

Cuba and Haiti will unite, becoming the immigration destination for many Americans seeking a safe tax shelter haven without extradition treaties with other countries.

Guyana and Guyane will declare Suriname a jointly-owned subset of their countries, leading to Brazil completely taking over South America to preserve peace and get Venezuela out of the publicly-owned/state enterprise business so that tourism will increase.  In turn, the Falkland Islands declare war on América do Sul.  Great Britain tells the Falklanders they're on their own this time - Gordon Brown is no Margaret Thatcher.

Icelanders decide to change their country's name to Volcanoland, freeing up Greenland to change its name to Iceland and set the record straight on who has the most ice and thus the strongest influence on the fate of the civilised world.

Russia annexes Mongolia.  While its back is turned focused on keeping China at bay, Russia misses the fact that Finland had annexed Saint Petersburg.

A set of scientifically-minded dairy farmers prove that molded moon dust really does makes some good-tasting green cheese, finally showing that the flat-Earth people are wrong and our moon is a separate sphere floating in the Sky Ocean above us next to the tiny dots of light that are actually glowing globs of bioluminescent bacteria, not stars, setting back astronomical physics 2000 years.  Astrologists declare their charts are still accurate.

What looks to us like a strange shadow will, in fact, represent an infinitely-large roach that will step on our universe 500 years from now and crush all our theories and postulations about science, creation and anything that we used to justify our belief the oil drop we live in is the only thing that exists.  The roach will lick its leg and swallow the portion of the drop in which we live.  What's left of us and our universe will lodge in the stomach lining of the roach for the next 20,000 years of our existence, leading us to develop new civilisations based on revamped theories of the megauniverse we see from inside an insect's body.

Oh, one last observation from the Book of the Future.  Healthcare costs will keep rising.  Corporations will purposefully bankrupt every country, one by one, and turn all of us into happy servants of the system who eat get-well pills while making money off one another gladly.  We will joyously watch the Earth Company, Conglomerated, come into existence and tell us what to do with our lives.

Wait.  What am I saying?  That's the prediction 200 years ago about today.  Sorry, wrong page.

'ere we go.  The rise of the global citizen will empower us to take control of our lives, crowdsourcing our decisions with our fellow connected e-citizens and creating a permanent underclass of non-e campesinos relegated to working the farms, factories and soft/support/retail jobs without healthcare or financial security support.  Black market sales will overtake legitimate sales as more and more people develop the habit of bartering rather than paying the overhead of retail shopping, further driving down high-tech profit margins, forcing more and more companies to move their manufacturing to unregulated labor markets.  "B-market shopping therapy" becomes the phrase du jour while Africa overtakes China and India as the next great manufacturing/tech center.