‘Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen, The clouded sky is now serene…’ Sadly, no.
Britain: a country in the midst of a slow motion financial and political train wreck, wrapped in a European political and economic union frantically supergluing the cracks in its seams with money that it doesn’t have, inside a Western alliance which is still looking for a strategy for Afghanistan almost 10 years after invading it.
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The flogging will continue until morale improves
Where does that phrase come from anyway?
It remains a mystery. As so many good lines do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_beatings_will_continue_until_morale_improves
Other than that, it’s going swimmingly.
Yeah, but at least we have iPads now
…and it could be raining.
It’s pretty bad the world over. In fact, it’s rarely good. Maybe some of the South American nations can be said to be doing well, but I imagine that will be purely short term. In Africa you have so many nations afflicted by corruption, civil war, famine and desertification that for a time I simply stopped reading the news about it. In Eastern Europe and the Caucasus you’ve got frozen over local conflicts and frozen great power bragging matches that help create new local conflicts. The Middle East has a potential arms race and a Palestinian/Israeli peace process so bogged down that heavyweight Israeli politicians are supporting the one-state idea. Central and South Asia has separatists, warlords, and militant Islam. East Asia has North Korea (which is enough by itself). Oceania has global warming and horrible economies to handle. We have had bad times in the past, it is possible to recover from them.
Visit Australia!
No horsemen of the apocalypse here, or any foreseeable threat of war, famine or poverty.
We’ve got failing states to deal with, sure, but I’ll take the ‘problem’ of the Solomon Islands’ economy over its Greek counterpart all day long.
As for global warming, isn’t that what the beaches are for?
I was lumping Australia in with East Asia, North Korea has the potential to be a problem for just about everyone nearby. However, if Australia wants problems…there’s trade disputes with China that look like they’re getting ugly, immigration headaches galore and how to get out of Afghanistan without infuriating the U.S.
Natural disasters and climate issues aside, is there a svengali tugging on strings the world over? Or does everyone have a traveling show these days?
Prozac!
In the words of the late Captain Blackadder…
“We’re in a sticky situation all right. This is the stickiest situation since Sticky the Stick insect got caught on a sticky bun.”
Well at least people like us should be in business for some time to come.
With 80 dead from bombings and political drive by shootings in successful peaceful Iraq yesterday, and the whole Eurozone project now in question as well, it certainly puts the Thomas P M Barnett’s thesis that we’re all on a slow glide path towards a shrinking ‘gap’, and a global, universal liberal-democratic utopia, in serious perspective. The daily jitters on UK news media about what ‘the markets’ think about our political adventures (seriously, this gets fed into every leading news story on the BBC now) has meanwhile also been a fascinating sidelight on the real pressure points, one almost as revealing as the original bailout packages were. The Tories’ warnings that we have to hurry up because ‘we’re at war in Afghanistan’ have, equally revealingly, much less apparent leverage (game over there anyway soon). On Australia, don’t they have serious environmental worries with water resources? Still, they probably will be fine in the medium term at least, as long as they keep selling uranium to the Chinese ;-)
When the rats start leaping…
And you VOLUNTARILY (and quite recently) became a citizen of said country? You have chosen poorly.
On the basis of a theory, roughly, that globalisation and economics make the world peaceful, Thomas Barnett accuses Australia of being strangely paranoid about wanting to take out some military insurance against the possible rising confrontation and competition that may happen in the Asia-Pacific. Like most futurologies, the first question has to be, what if he’s wrong?
Agreed. And he’s looking increasingly wrong.
Every time I read Barnett or any other liberal/democratic/globalization peace theory proponent expound about great power peace, I can’t help but think of this:
“We must not count with certainty on a continuance of our present prosperity during such an interval [15 years]; but unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than we may at the present moment.”
DPT – is that Pitt, if my memory is right? great quote
Yes, in 1792… But it works pretty well with ‘Asia’ substituted for ‘Europe’ today, of course.
A friend contributes, via their facebook status:
“Where has the world come to? The former Thai PM got Montenegrin citizenship for a promise of vast investment in the tourist industry, a bunch of comedians won elections in Iceland and in Ukraine a zoo became a target of a terror attack. Who said we don’t live in a circus?”