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Many people consider Nostradamus as the greatest predictor of future events in the last 500 years. His quatrains are famous and very popular in today's culture. I prefer to believe that George Orwell had a more accurate vision of the future, particularly in his book 1984.  This book was requisite reading in my High School days of the late 60s and early 70s. Orwell's predictions of Big Brother and constant video monitoring are eerily real in today's world. I recently dropped my wallet while leaving the local grocery store one morning after taking my kids to school. I realized within five minutes of driving that I had lost my wallet and returned to the supermarket where it had happened. They were able to replay their video monitors both inside the store and out into the parking lot and show me how I had tucked my shirt into my pants pocket along with my wallet and how my shirt had pulled my wallet out when I had sat down in my van. They also showed the young lady who worked in a business right next to them arriving about one minute after I left and picking up my wallet. She had carried it into her place of employment and was trying to find my name in the phone book to contact me. This is both comforting and disturbing to me. On the one hand, I was able to recover my wallet and its contents quickly and safely. On the other, hand, I feel like my privacy has been invaded as I was constantly surveiled while doing the rather innocent act of grocery shopping. Our media, which is supposed to be unbiased and keep us informed has become a branch of propaganda picking and choosing what facts to report only as they fit the message they are trying to convey. Probably the uncovering of the Watergate break-in was the last true real reporting for the benefit of the American public.  Now we are fed stories to justify our needs to invade foreign countries, manufactured numbers to deny that we are in an economic recession, and political rhetoric that is meant to confuse rather than clarify our leaders true motives.

Much is made of the predictions of Nostradamus' Quatrains. They are very long and obscure passages that are the subjects of interpretations of facts after they happen. Despite their existence for 500 years and vast studies, they have never been used to accurately predict a catastrophe or event in time to prevent it. It is only when looking back and using liberal interpretations that there seems to be any validity to his predictions.

I will provide links to several sites on both Orwell and Nostradamus for those wishing to look for themselves at the different sides of this debate. I have used these sites fro my own research, although I confess that much of what I feel about Orwell goes back to my studies of him in High School and Political Science classes in college.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus
www.skepdic.com/nostrada.html
www.evangelicaloutreach.org/nostradamus.htm
www.nostradamus.org/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
www.george-orwell.org/
www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/orwell_george.shtml
www.k-1.com/Orwell/