They've just discovered a fossilized skeleton of a creature with a long tail and some "human" features in a German pit mine.  Many claims about its relationship to us present day humans are being made left and right.  That long tail tells me a different story.  That creature was parent to simians rather than humans.

Today humans are making all sorts of plans to take us into the future and changes which we may not think are very human-like.  But there is a futility of trying to explain the past and the future.  Rarely do we get the future, which is closest to us, correctly.  How can we tell the millions' of years old bones (even with fingernails), this fossil, is related even indirectly to you and me.  Yes, that tail does the trick for me.  I know that in our fetal development we have tails like most creatures that grow from union of a sperm and an egg.  But, we lose the tail and have opposable thumbs which make us human - so the prognostication goes.

I admire the way our minds are put to work to unravel the past and explain the future.  We cannot understand very much about our present lives and yet we are fascinated by the bones dug up from the past and look into tarot cards and crystal balls to explain all while we understand little.

In very short time as we know time, there will be consequences of the election just past which gave us our first non-white American as President.  He and his critics have accepted him as a Christian and he is telling the Jewish and Muslim residents of the HOLY LAND what he expects of them.  That there are differences of opinion here is to be expected and we will soon find that the bones of ancient differences will be dug up to slug it out in order to define the future of what is "HOLY".

But there is futility in such activity.  We try to understand and just get along and are often disappointed when things turn out to be completely different and unacceptable compared to what we thought they could, should or would be.  And, that is looking backwards and into the future.

One completely overwhelming activity is trying to figure out how the post Fidel Cuba will turn out.  The only Communist country in our hemisphere is creaking apart even as Fidel is falling apart.  Raul is not Fidel.  And what are we to do with OUR part of Cuba, Guantanamo, when we try to make up for the mistakes of becoming just like other countries which use incarceration and torture for the wrong reasons?  It is like I said at the start of this; there is futility in trying to explain the past and the future.  We have our troubles living in the present.