Warnings

I have seen the future, in Black & White. How do I know this? First I have to explain my methods. There I was, wandering along, basking in temporal stability. I stopped to eat at one of those lovely oriental restaurants where they pack three countries' worth of flavor into an external structure approximating Dr. Who's Tardis.

In this particular humble joint, I discovered a large tome propping up the leg of a rickety table. Declaring a Book Swap in effect, I replaced it with a large tome of my own, ordered, and settled down to study my new treasure. It was a documentary from an Alternate Future, which I visited for seven hours spanning breakfast & lunch. What I learned: Barack Obama won't win the Presidency in 2008. The document is a study of the Presidency of America's first African American President following a President disgraced by scandal. It ends in an impeachment trial.

(Hillary won't win either, but that's just me making a bar bet that the strident wife of a former prez isn't the female equivalent of FDR who can force that kind of political precedent.)

Time travel is a Funny subject for all values of Funny. The paradox is, of course, that no one can "directly alter the historical past". This doesn't stop entertainers from making scads of money pretending. But that's why the money flows - because we know that it IS pretense, and it makes us feel safe at a subterranean, visceral level.

The famous phrase that the future is unwritten is completely true. It's that free will theme again. The only qualifying factor whether the influence you can throw at that future can overcome the inertia of that future. This is why Billionaires are fun to watch - because a Billion Dollars can do just about anything, including affixing lasers to sharks.

Anyone, at any moment, can create a chosen future at the micro level. "Oh yea, I'm gonna live on the edge, I'm gonna' take the risk... I'm going to buy THREE bottles of Mountain Dew! Why? Because I need to enable the future, the one when I'm gonna NEED that third bottle."

Excuse me for a moment while I retrieve it.

"But that's not exciting", you say.

Bang - there's the problem with most entertainment depictions of the future - that there somehow has to be an excitement level greater than the present "real" world. Unfortunately, futures don't work that way.

Wouldn't it be exciting to have the first Black President? Maybe. For a year. Then it would tear the country apart, because it will expose some long-suppressed issues our country is not ready to face.

The future is a problem of Information. If I took a vacation for a week and stayed in the hotel room the entire time, the *local* future is easy to predict. It's a matter of controlling the variables. The better the variables are studied for any potential future, the easier it is to visit it. Then all you have to do is learn something, and bring that knowledge back to operate in the Present.

I am holding a 740 page study of the effects of a Black President. It was written forty-three years ago, so some of the variables are out of synch. When these variables are corrected against present trends and mapped to current probabilities, the Prediction Curve becomes hyperbolic by 2012. Let's explore why.

Back when the professional extrapolators were working in 1991, there was a small recession. No one was exactly sure how it was going to go away. Politics-As-Usual forced George H. W. Bush out of office, because that was "the thing to do" to incumbent presidents during recessions just before elections. (Or maybe they wanted to change Southern accents coming from the White House.) By 1996, the recession was over and the reasons were clear - the Information Age was finally here. People were going to work at jobs that never existed, creating brand new value. Value creation solves recessions.

In 1996, someone visited the future and didn't like it. An 875 page document ensued, which warned against the event we now know as Nine-Eleven. In that future, the entire government was obliterated, and national panic resulted. The warning sold a lot of copies, and so traveled through the cultural memory. By the time the real event occurred, the plane bound for the White House/Capitol was forced into the ground. I found that one during one of my bulk acquisitions, sandwiched between a printout of a web blog's study of feeding cactus plants Coca Cola (they live, because it's just sugar & a soil acidity enhancer), and a copy of Arthur Clarke's Sands of Mars.

Now another such event is upon us. One future of the first Black President was foreseen, and it culminated in an impeachment trial. The telling point is this - the vision is set with *the first Black President following an entrenched insider disgraced through scandal*. What the country needs after scandal is a period of quiet in which to recover. Then, when the country has regained some social cohesion, it will be ready to make the effort necessary to move the institution of the Presidency into the 21st Century.

Make no mistake - a Black President is in our near future. Just not in 2008.

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