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Mr Hopeful

It became something of a Sunday tradition on this blog for a while there to write a piece about the advancing drums. These tend to be the beat section of a band composed of stagflation, peak oil, war and the theft of society by narcissistic professional elites (so unlike my own songs of praise to the middle temple on a blog with a big picture of me on it).

The drums have been here for some time, of course. However, I thought that I might continue a slight tendency to break the habit of going on about them with three things that I have recently noted.

Firstly, Syria's attempt to destroy Lebanon by plunging that embattled democracy into an abyss of Hezbollah-Hamas violence oiled by Iranian money and the blood of Syria's victims, which Wahabists and Baathists could then manipulate, has clearly failed. The instability of last year's truncated Lebanon war, occasioned by the Islamist blitzing of Israel, is over, and Lebanon has made it through the semtex car seat routine.

Secondly, I found this beautiful piece about Pope Benedict XVI, the world's greatest intellectual and a man of dignity, on a site I normally disagree with.

Thirdly, Irwin Steltzer (Mr 'Iraq oil at $20 a barrel' of 2003) has made a bit of a fool of himself and exposed the absolute denial of peak oil on the point of obscenely wealthy ideologues who do know better in the Sunday Times today. He's got a pasting in the comments. I was pleasantly cheered to note that peak oil, which is hard and logical science, unlike global warming, and much more of a menace, is becoming more and more accepted as a reality that sensible people will begin to adapt to.

This revelation ran alongside the relatively even, if not positive reaction to union defences of pension rights at the grangemouth plant, where a company that makes three millions a day run by the world's 25th richest man is refusing to put aside £16 millions a year for the workers' future, as it is required to do by law. A few years ago, reaction would have been uniformly hostile to the Unions; now it isn't. It's about time that working men and women reclaimed some dignity and got a grip on their interests.

So, all in all, a nice Sunday, made unexpectedly better by a series of nice personal events and an unexpectedly good mass. Ah well, I grew up with enough Calvinists to know that the punishments will make their way in at some point this week....

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