Kevin's Watch

When I was young we lived with the single omnipresent threat of nuclear holocaust. The knife-edge balancing act that was MAD hung over our heads like the Sword of Damocles as the two world super-powers faced each other off in a staring contest in which neither was prepared to blink first. Then the USSR came apart at the seams.

We all (briefly) breathed a sigh of relief - the russians it turned out were after all the good guys, solidarnosk and glasnost to you all.

Then came the Balkans - OK, we could live with that. A hiccough on the way to getting it together. Then 9/11, and all of a sudden terrorism with a capital T hit the world. We knew the muslims hated us (the Ayatollah and all) but we never realised it was this bad. But little did we know that what we had seen to date was just the tuning up. Soojn would come the main event. "Buckle up folks," as Beetlejuice would say, "It's Showtime!"

At the last count we now have:-

1) The imminent destruction of the planet as a result of the unstopable march of Global Warming.

2) The imminent meltdown of the West as a result of the catastrophic crash of global finance.

3) The imminent death of a large percentage of the worlds population as a result of a SARS/H1N1 type global pandemic which is waiting in the wings ploishing up it's act.

4) The imminent plunging of the world back into a cold war, or indeed an actual war in the Middle East as a result of the Iranian/isreali nuclear weapon situation.

5) The imminent catastrophic flare up of the whole Middle East in respect of the 'Arab Spring' movement and our increasing involvement in it.

6) The increasingly tense situation re Chinas flexing it's economic and military muscles in the Pacific and Amaerica's unhappiness thereoff.

7) The increasingly dangerous situation as different nation states compete for ever declining rescources and come into potential conflict in areas like the Artic and Antartic.

The unleashing of a veritable 'Pandora's Box' of problems re the 'Stuxnet' type of computer virus which an expert in the feild recently said could now be downloaded from the internet and clipped together like pieces of a jigsaw and unleashed to wreak havoc on industrial opperating systems the world over. This man said the age of 'Cyber-War' was now truly upon us and would never be stopped again.

9) The very scary emergent feild of 'synthetic biology' which crazy as it seems, is so unregulated at present that you or I or anyone with a mind to, can buy DNA building blocks online to custom build virses/bacteria whatever without constraint or question. In the program I saw (Horizon - Playing God, BBC tv) some kids 'created' flourescent E. coli bacteria in a village 'Bio-hacking' club over the course of one weekend 'just for fun'.

I don't know if I've missed anything out, but if I have I'm sure you guys will tell me . In the meantime I can't help feeling in some ways I preferred the old system where the planets future was balanced on a knife-edge that could tip and precipitate us into nuclear oblivion at any moment. Somehow it seemed safer.

And people want to know why I stopped watching TV.

None of the threats are really new. They're just being played up by faux news agencies who are trying to trump up their ratings.

If a headline is practically screaming, you can probably ignore it.

aliantha wrote:And people want to know why I stopped watching TV.

Ditto.

It's all been done before. For 500 years until about 1500 thousands of Christians and Moslems died in the Crusades, and then Christian Europeans turned on what we now call the Balkans and part of Spain.

Almost half the population of Europe died in 1348/1349 during the plague that we now call the Black Death.

We survived!

Sooner or later, we're all gonna die.

Does it matter who's to blame, in the great scheme of things?

Face your death down, deal with it, get right with your Creator, and then one day at a time.

(Io, you forgot the influenza epidemic of the early 1900's, which some say killed more than WW1.)

deer of the dawn wrote:(Io, you forgot the influenza epidemic of the early 1900's, which some say killed more than WW1.)

Yes, I did, and it did. That was another huge loss of people.

Check how close we are to midnight (Doomsday) HERE

I'll Just Keep Rolling along with the Grace from the Lord Above.

Did anybody recognise the film quote in the thread title?

peter wrote:Did anybody recognise the film quote in the thread title?

no and my google failed. anyone recognize my quote?

sgt.null wrote:

peter wrote:Did anybody recognise the film quote in the thread title?

no and my google failed. anyone recognize my quote?

Google did it for yours Sarge - and by the way it's a good answer to all that bad stuff above!

(mine will it seems have to remain one of those great unsoved mysteries that even the 'Great God Google' cannot answer.)

peter wrote:Did anybody recognise the film quote in the thread title?

"It's a Wonderful Life" ??

Screw Christmas, Clarence. We're all gonna die, don'cha see?

Nice! (but no cigar.)

This is ridiculous! I'm just going to tell Sarge that Apocalypse Now isn't the answer when I think "Hey - I wonder why nobody can get this. Maybe I better check it out." So I google the script of the film I think the quote is from - I can't find it. I check it out on you-tube - no sighn. Now I'm stumped. It appears that *even I* don't know the film the quote is from. Hell - perhaps it isn't even a qoute at all; perhaps it's just one of those 'made up memories' your brain uses to fill the holes that develop in your memory over the years. But I'm still convinced it's from the film I think it's from - I can see the scene in front of my eyes right now (just nowhere else though). For this reason I'm not going to spill the beans untill I know for sure if i) it's a made up memory, or ii) it's from a different film altogether or iii) it really is from the film I think it is.

But please in the meantime be my guests and keep on guessing from the infinite number of films that it may (or may not) have appeared in. I'll just go into a corner and scream........:p

Det sjunde inseglet?

wayfriend wrote:

Screw Christmas, Charlie Brown. We're all gonna die.

THAT'S IT!!!