Welcome to 2025

[bemildred]

Memo to the United States Central Intelligence Agency: You may not be prepared for time-travel, but welcome to 2025 anyway. Your rooms may be a little small, your ability to demand better accommodation may have gone out the window, and the amenities may not be to your taste, but get used to it. It's going to be your reality from now on.

Okay, now for the serious version of the above: In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming administration of Barack Obama.

Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next 15 years - in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors.

"Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor ," it stated definitively, the country's "relative strength - even in the military realm - will decline and US leverage will become more constrained."

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ28Df03.html

[truedelphi]

1. I thought it highly interesting that when the Mylar Balloon was

racing around last week, without Balloon Boy manning it, of course, that radar could not determine its location.

And that they would tell us that.