On the left, Tracy Flick from 1999’s excellent Election. On the right, Hillary Clinton doing her best Tracy Flick impersonation. Click the arrow to watch life imitate art.

All Hillary aside, I thought Election was a great companion film to 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In Ferris, Mathew Broderick plays the high school wise guy who has all the cookies crumble his way 24/7. In Election, he’s the high school teacher who has all his plans and dreams go horribly wrong in every facet of his life.

I’m not sure, but I think Broderick even played up the juxtaposition of these two rolls. In Ferris, he enthusiastically starts the day in the shower with a shampoo mohawk and a Shower Massage microphone. Then, in Election, he goes through identical soap-my-armpit motions, but this time we see the lack of a spark clearly beginning to drag the boy down.

And so it is with Hillary…going through the motions, but the lack of a spark is really starting to drag her down.

After 8 years, America is realizing the big party is over — not because it ever got started, but because BushCo blew our party funds on a bunch of fireworks that turned out to be duds, and the few that weren’t really pissed off the neighbors.

So, here’s a tip, Hillary: After 8 years of watching Bush screw up and then explain his actions as “hard work” — over and over and over — the last thing we want is another special-interest mouthpiece promising more “hard work.” Screw that.

Over the last year and a half, we’ve seen what happens when you elect leaders who promise to work hard. That’s what the Democratic Congress promised if elected, and they did practically squat, except to wipe Bush’s rear end everytime he messed his pants.

No, after the last few years I don’t believe our politicians will ever be capable of righting the ship with hard work. It’s going to take the rest of America to do that. So, maybe instead of electing one person who promises to work hard, the time may be right to elect someone who can inspire the entire country to change, and to hope, and to convince us that it’s worth our time to care again.

Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m convinced one person’s “hard work” can’t dig us out of the deep hole in which BushCo and the neocons and the corporate money men have buried us.

Read More: Hillary Clinton, Tracy Flick, Election

At the beginning of the year, French diplomat and ICANN board member Jean-Jacques Subrenat invited me to expound upon the trends listed in his post, 2008: What Can We Expect.

In his post, Jean-Jacques speculates what events and trends are likely to take front stage and center in 2008…trends with aftershocks that will shake the world beyond the year.

Among other things, Jean-Jacques’ well-thought list covers the United Nations’ proclamation of 2008 as the International Year of Languages to promote unity in diversity and global understanding.

He also covers the significance of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, tries to make sense of the looming recession, points out global zones of tension, and pays homage to expanding forms of communication which are affecting cultures in even the remotest corners of the world.

Here’s my list…

New York Times Square Ball

On the night of December 31, for the first time ever, a bunch of people stood in New York City’s Times Square and watched a lighted ball drop from a pole.

Call me crazy, but I’m convinced the ball drop thing’s going to catch on big time, for years to come.

What’s that? Oh, that was New York, 1908. Sorry. My bad. Let’s fast forward to 2008…

The Empire Shifts East

People tend to look at empires through polarized geo-stationary lenses. But, while most people think the Fall of Rome put an end to the Roman Empire, some realize the Empire survived; it just shifted west and eventually set up shop in the New World.

Last year, many recognized the beginning of another Empire shift when Halliburton moved headquarters to Dubai.

Ahhhh…Remember when New York was the Empire State? Those were the days, no? Alas, those days are gone.

While the United States is funding many a war-profiteer’s bon-voyage, while Freedom Tower still struggles (after 7 years!) to crawl out of its own basement, while we refuse to chunk a chimp from the Oval Office…Dubai, Shanghai, and Singapore have grown some truly impressive skylines that are pure twilight eye candy.

In 2008, I think more people will realize, for worse AND better, that the Empire is setting sail for a new home.

Blended Families

The death of the traditional, nuclear, one-race family used to be feared. Now it’s beginning to be embraced. Several trends are contributing to the phenomenon: Cross culture marriage. Cross culture adoption. Cross culture remarriage after having children. Cross culture same-sex remarriage with cross culture adopted step children. And, maybe most of all, less fear of change.

Of course, some will no doubt associate the breakdown of the nuclear family with the decline of morality in America. In contrast, I’ve noticed that the rate of lynchings has dramatically declined since the mid twentieth century heyday of the nuclear family. So, I say blend away!

Food Inflation

The USA grows an unimagineable amount of corn, and we eat even more. Think high fructose corn syrup…yes, it’s made from corn. And it’s in your soda, chips, ketchup, hamburger bun, special sauce, and what do you think the cow who provided your all-beef patty ate? LOTSA CORN!

All that corn takes a lot of fertilizer to grow. The fertilizer is made out of oil. It’s spread by tractors with engines that require oil. The trucks that transport the corn from Iowa to the rest of the country use oil. The price of oil has gone up. And smarty-pants George W. Bush is now promoting the switch to use more ethanol — which is made from corn which requires so much oil to produce.

More oil to grow more corn with more of the corn going into your gas tank instead of your love handles. Connect the dots. Your Big Mac Attack is going to cost more in 2008.

Welcome Surprises

In addition to the above trends, there are a few other trends that I’m hoping will reach critical mass and begin to snowball in 2008. How about a drastic decline in the popularity of Corporate broadcast “news”? I put “news” in quotes because so much of it is broadcast brainwashing picked and chosen with far too much priority placed on promoting or censoring ideas instead of imparting information objectively.

And, to end with a really vague prediction, I’ll hazard that advances in ambient intelligence, nanotechnology, and wireless networks will continue to blend together in unpredictable and spectacular ways that will change the daily routines of millions of people.

Read More: trends, 2008, empire, blended families, food inflation

Congratulations to Elvis Scarecrow for winning first place at the Huntsville Botanical Garden’s 2007 Scarecrow Trail, but, as you can see, all the scarecrows were winners.

I hope everybody is enjoying Halloween and getting ready for a day full of costume parties, haunted houses, more treats than tricks, and staying up late and watching some horror films.

Happy Halloween!

Read More: Elvis Scarecrow, Huntsville Botanical Garden, Halloween

The Romans first coined the term Dog Days after Sirius, the Dog Star. Long ago, during the hottest, most sultry days of summer, the Dog Star rose at the same time as the sun (no longer true, due to the precession of the equinoxes).

Where I grew up, the term also brought to mind the image of pets that, during this period of summer, typically tolerated the midday hours by stretching out on a cool slab of concrete porch in the shade, if it could be had. The look on such a dog’s face was of utter boredom, with its big slobbery hound lips leaving wet Rorschach splotches on the concrete where said dog collapsed for its heat-of-the-day nap. And what else can a dog do but park for a nap during such baked days?

And so it goes the past couple of weeks here. I’m really feeling, and relishing, the dog days of summer. I’m relishing the sweltering vapidness because I know it’s human nature to fear change, and the dog days of early August seem to be the most invariant.

Yeah, I saw that Bush signed a law expanding eavesdropping so now a bunch of strange government spies can listen to our fiber optic communications in addition to all the electronic ones they filter through Echelon.

And, yes, I’m aware that certain candidates that have been approved by the establishment are criticising other candidates for accepting money from lobbyists while they themselves receive rewards from corporations and AIPAC, but lie about it and hide it better.

And, yes, I’m aware that the FBI still maintains there is no hard evidence linking bin Laden to 9/11, and that, in all probability it appears that bin Laden died in December 2001.

But, sitting here in Huntsville, Alabama, smack dab in the middle of a D4 drought — the most severe category of drought — while ExxonMobile pays forty policy groups to undermine the scientific consensus about the human influence on global warming, even these news items can’t seem to break the stagnating doldrums of my summer. And to some extent, I appreciate that calm, because I fear one day soon I will wish I had appreciated it more when I had the chance.

And yet, the kids went back to school last week, and got real live homework this week, and the windows on the house need a good caulking before winter, and even in this drought, there’s yard work that needs to be done…again. And, surprisingly, a few unregulated candidates survived the dog days of summer and they’re still refusing to be silenced by the corporate machine. And the lulled public is, perhaps, again primed for another false flag attack of epic proportions, and more change, and more change, and more change.

And so, I sense the world awakening, for better or worse, a hint of change already in the air, and the dog days of summer drawing to a close.

Read More: dog days of summer, doldrums

Three Days of the Condor (1975), in which Robert Redford stars as a CIA agent on the run from a mass slaughter in his CIA research office, is one of my favorite films of all time.

I especially like the final scene, which gets more and more haunting as the years merge celluloid with reality. To think the truth about the Iraq War was on the silver screen in front of the whole wide world over thirty years ago!

It’s almost as spooky as The Lone Gunmen pilot, which prophetically depicted a government plot to crash a hijacked Boeing into the WTC towers.

Speaking of the WTC, the spanking new twin towers, in all their filled-to-the-brim-with-space-age-asbestos wonder, are featured so prominently and so often in Three Days of the Condor that they’re practically a character in the film.

The First Cheney/Rumsfeld Era

It sends me down the rabbit hole to ponder the era when this film was released: Dick Cheney was Chief of Staff to President Ford. Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense. They were both about to successfully push out Colby and push in George H. W. Bush as Director of the CIA.

Heck, even back then, Cheney and Rumsfeld were both fighting to use wiretaps without a warrant and chumming around with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. It’s almost a given that the neocon crew already had their cold, slimy eyes on Iraq.

Art Imitating Life?

So, was Three Days of the Condor cinematic art imitating behind-the-scenes CIA life? Or did Cheney and Rumsfeld see the movie and think, like Higgins, that invading the Middle East really could work?

Whatever the case, not only does the following scene depict an exposed plan to invade the Middle East for oil; the final words depict a future in which the CIA may even have the New York Times under its thumb — something inconceivable then, but almost certain after Judith Miller showed her true colors…

From the script:

Read More: Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford, Iraq War, CIA, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Oil, Middle East