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The Descent Quickens

For months now I've been going on about what is coming, economically and politically, and I have been glad when some of my gloomier predictions have not materialised.

I've not been alone in warning that the vast debts of the United States were a clear and present danger to that republic. Nor that the euro might fall apart. Nor in warning that giving the regimes of this earth the idea of cutting up sovereign states and justifying it by some spurious appeal to invented nationality is a bad thing. Nor in noting that wheat and oil price rises in common with a vast wall of monetary surplus could easily lead to stagflation. Nor in detailing the advantages of religion compared to the global destruction of individual character and the capacity of societies to survive presented by consumerism, materialism and global capitalism.

However, I take no pleasure in the lurching descent pattern we now seem locked into. Tonight, nationalist nuclear hardliners have won Iranian polls, though 'reformists' have some comfort. Most of the latter group were barred from standing.

Tonight also, the forces within China whose mindset is one in which first Tibet and then Taiwan are dealt with have been immeasurably strengthened.

Iraq is still on fire, and consuming more and more souls by the day.

Peak oil, as an idea, is growing in credibility. And bank closures and market collapses, like pilot fish, are clouding the eyes of onlookers from the leviathan behind them.

That leviathan is $516 thousand thousand millions of dollars in derivative vehicles in the global markets. Combined with bad debt amounting potentially to twenty per cent of American GDP, we face a global economic crisis.

Derivatives are derived from underlying markets. If they go sour, derivatives go sour.

During the Great Depression, for good or ill, statesmen were able to take advantage of populations that were tough, that were disciplined, and that were relatively humble in their aspirations. Religion, whilst incubating some of the vices that typify mankind, had not been so systematically trashed that nothing was left to hold back vice, let alone elevate it. If the wind blew now, what trees would protect people from the temptations and horrors to which they would be invited by global military and economic descent?

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