The premise is that the central manuscript was written in the very near future, then hidden online and discovered 200 years later. Because society has changed so much, an anthropologist has annotated the text for his 23rd-century contemporaries. They are no longer familiar with notions such as venture capital or advertising, much less Microsoft or Nasdaq. The 23rd-century reader even needs a footnote explaining what condoms were used for.

These footnotes are a way for us to conceptualize a future that has moved beyond our current obsessions. Instead of describing that future explicitly, though, we will suggest what it will be like by showing what facts and ideas future readers won’t understand. I've written a hundred-odd footnotes to get us started re-imagining the present from the perspective of the future. It’s up to you to fill in the rest.

Remember, these footnotes don't have to be accurate. They only have to show what anthropologists and other experts from the future think are accurate explanations of our society. And these experts needn't necessarily agree with one another.

Who will rid us of these evil men? Someone...

WWhen the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side street, near the empty spot where he had habitually parked his Ford Explorer. At about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a white rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of Memphis, where he had just had a jovial dinner with friends. The following week, Vladimir Pasechnik collapsed in London, apparently of a stroke.

The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four nerve-jangling months. Stabbed in Leesburg, Va. Suffocated in an air-locked lab in Geelong, Australia. Found wedged under a chair, naked from the waist down, in a blood-splattered apartment in Norwich, England. Hit by a car while jogging. Killed in a private plane crash. Shot dead while a pizza delivery man served as a decoy.

What joined these men was their proximity to the world of bioterror and germ warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked, was a researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as anyone about how the immune system responds to attacks from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was Russian, and before he defected, he helped the Soviets transform cruise missiles into biological weapons. The chain of deaths -- these three men and eight others like them -- began last fall, back when emergency teams in moonsuits were scouring the Capitol, when postal workers were dying, when news agencies were on high alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its mail.

In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths might not have been noticed, but these are not ordinary times. Neighbors report neighbors to the F.B.I.; passengers are escorted off planes because they make other passengers nervous; medical journals debate what to publish, for fear the articles will be read by evil eyes. Now we are spooked and startled by stories like these -- all these scientists dying within months of one another, at the precise moment when tiny organisms loom as a gargantuan threat. The stories of these dozen or so deaths started out as a curiosity and were transformed rumor by rumor into the specter of conspiracy as they circulated first on the Internet and then in the mainstream media. What are the odds, after all? [...]

A typical sketpic drivelfest, published in the New York Times where probability is rolled out as the explanation for everything, science is held up as the only true reality and the only tool need to explain everything.

There are no conspiracies, only mathematical probability. Its a predictable, condecending piece of tripewriting. She even put in strawman false data, knocking it down further in the argument and parading it as proof that her argument is right.

Someone has stepped up to the plate, and is eliminating these evil pigs who are hell bent on destroying the world, one pig at a time. It must be costing a fortune, there will be no thanks given, no awards for saving humanity..."You do not know these men. You may have looked at them, but you did not see them. They are the wind that blows newspapers down a gutter on a windy night... and sweeps the gutter clean."

Open-Source Literature

Juki Net Will Die

Vastu and the New York Twin Towers

Who will rid us of these evil men? Someone...