Some Cataclysm This Way Comes

 

The feelings always come before the dark clouds and the increasing wind where the storm is filled with steel rain and exploding hail. How far in advance we can never say, but the storm is a brewing. The question is, are you sensitive or equipped emotionally and spiritually to recognize the problem. To figure this out, there are other items about ourselves we need to understand, and the question is how we can reach this understanding. Is there such a thing as evil? Can a person be evil? Can a group of people be evil as in a tribe or club or gathering? Can a society be evil? Can a religious group be evil? Can the entire world be turning towards evil? You have probably noticed that the recognition of what makes something evil is required to see coming disasters, and that is basic. Evil is fairly recognizable when witnessing an act or judging one from the past, especially when the evil is overt. Jeffrey Dahmer opening his freezer and pulling out dinner reveals obvious evil. But Hitler offering the German people jobs, the right to be proud of the Fatherland, rebuild their military as in Europe a military meant safety, return them to having the basic rights of pleasure every human being deserved, freedom from false civil moralities, freedom from the conscience (that annoying little voice in your head that tells you not to do something you really want to do), to free them from the Judeo-Christian ethic and to return everyone to the age of the barbarians when Germany defeated Rome and its false Christian idea was less detectable as evil. Evil brought into a society slowly and using words and phrases which everybody knows and each time corrupting their original meaning just slightly can bring an entire people, an entire country, an entire continent or even a significant and possible majority of a religion to do and practice horrific evils all because they couched everything in pretty frames and used the words from their holy books in selective order choosing those phrases which supported their ultimate goal. And if your nation, religion, sect or any other civil group has written somewhere in their liturgy the need to spread the culture, religion, dominion or whatever defines the intended audience to the entire world, that can be stated as conquer the world and make all like ourselves or they must die if they refuse as your central tenet which is another evil.

 

To put it as an analogy for the lighting of several billion tons of high explosives, the fuse has been lit and we know not its length nor do we know if it is cannon fuse or fast fuse. The fuse could be five-hundred miles long and be the slowest cannon fuse burning about a foot per day or it could be three-feet of fast fuse which once lit we would not get to turn, let alone run. The coming conflagration could start between the writing and the posting or it could wait a decade before boiling over and igniting, or even longer. That is the ways of such things. Still, looking around the globe and the problem is not seeing the growing chaos but picking where the world is unravelling the fastest. Figure that out, then you might believe you have found the flashpoint, not true. The world is tricky with such things. Often the trigger comes from the most unexpected places and other times it becomes so obvious to all only in hindsight. Take the two world wars, the first the trigger is obvious but only after the event while the other built upon pressures put in place to prevent such but instead guaranteed another war. On the other hand anyone studying the world and conflict would have been concentrating on the splits occurring in Islam and been blindsided by the Mongols. Then, looking back you can only shake one’s head and wonder, what was the Caliph thinking when he sent back the severed heads of the emissaries sent by Genghis Khan attempting to set up trade relations. Well yes, we know he believed he had the strongest forces in the known world, which was the problem; they knew nothing about the Mongols and underestimated their strength. It would have been wonderful to see the look on his face as the Mongols road in from over the horizon. Their reaction must have been similar to the Germans on the defenses at Normandy when the fog lifted and they saw the invasion fleet (see picture below). This was amongst the largest of any invasion fleet in human history in numbers of men, ships and definitely in tonnage of equipment, manpower and supplies.

 

Small Part of Allied Invasion Fleet off Normandy Beach on D-Day

 

Looking around our world today and the obvious flash points are the crumbling order of the Middle East and North Africa and the expansions of China; yet a closer inspection also brings in Iran and North Korea. Still, the bet is that whatever is coming will come from elsewhere with one safe bet being out from Europe yet again. But Asia has its history of conflicts with China central in most of them either as conqueror or as victim. One of the longest but least studied in Western schools are the many wars between China and India. Then there are the conflicts which included Japan, the Koreans (they were not always split), Vietnamese, Siam, Philippines, and the Mongols. China was the ten-ton nation in the center and thus a major part of any conflict. Interestingly, within the next decade it is predicted that China will have to surrender its title as most populous nation to India. India has played a part in much of Western history despite it barely getting notice in modern classrooms. India with their sheer numbers formed the eastern wall denying the Persians expansion forcing their thrusts westward where they made their most fateful enemies, the Greeks. After Alexander had handed the Persians their revenge from the Greeks and then struck the same wall, the Indian army and sheer numbers. Perhaps India might be credited with dividing the world between Asia and Europe with the Middle East the fields where the wars would be fought because attacking India was suicide. The Middle East was once the starting and ending place of uncountable wars but two most devastating wars such that they are remembered as World Wars I & II. These were the final two wars between the powers of Europe where, in some combination or another, France, Spain and Britain fought for centuries. The warring between these three nations spread world wide as they conquered the New World and much of Asia becoming empires. It was once boasted that the sun never set on the British Empire. The British had India as a colony and shared the oppression of China during the Opium Wars. The Opium Wars were two wars in the mid-19th century involving Anglo-Chinese disputes over British trade in China and China’s sovereignty. Then there are the largely unstudied wars between the Native American tribes as well as the tribes of Central and Southern America. Where will the next great conflagration originate is anybody’s guess? We need to remember that World War I was started in what has to be one of the most convoluted series of events. Yes, there was an assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess of Hohenberg Sophie, who were assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian patriot fighting for Bosnian independence. He sat waiting in a position which was not supposed to be traveled by the Archduke as the main ambush was set on the planned route but this young and overly excited youth demanded a part and those planning it placed him in this out of the way spot to end his constant demands to be included, or so the rumors put it. Archduke Ferdinand and wife Sophie ended up on the alternate route as their driver, unfamiliar with the winding roads, had taken a wrong turn and was attempting to find a turn to return to the desired route which likely led the driver to drive at a slower speed than usual which probably made the shooting easier than had they been at speed. From this intricate entanglement of events came World War I.

 

This accidental conclusion of missteps brought two people into the path, though unintended, fatefully resulting in the shot that started one of the most devastating wars in human history. This was the first mechanized war where the machine gun ruled the early battlefield only to be outdone by the first land dreadnaughts, the early tanks. These tanks were undependable but would usually function just long enough to reach the opposing trenches free from the slaughtering horizontal hail of machine gun bullets. The machine gun made the war stagnate until the German and Austro-Hungarian troops introduced poison gas into the conflict. The Allied powers of Britain, France, Italy, Russia and Japan responded with the same and these toxins proved a double-sided sword as a change in the winds could turn your side’s gas attack right back onto your own troops. Both sides responded with gasmasks making the gas attacks mostly irritants and mildly dangerous as troops learned how to survive these attacks. The tank was the final weapon changing the battlefield and its introduction brought the war closer to its end. The final shot to the heart was the entrance of the United States whose troops proved to make the difference in the end. The treaties ending World War I gave birth to the Arab states, and a Christian nation, Lebanon, and a Jewish nation, Israel. The Christian nation is in conflict with a series of civil conflicts which has caused much of the Christian population to flee. Christians were over 60% of the Lebanese population in 1970 and that percentage fell to under 35% by 2010. The Jewish nation is unfortunately also in conflict but with a different outcome (see timeline below). The History is a bit longer and more twisted with two exiles, one the Babylonian Exile of seventy years followed by a return to the land but ruled from outside as a tax paying province of successive empires followed by the seriously long exile of approaching two-thousand years caused by the Roman Empire destroying the lands, spreading the Jews throughout their kingdom and some even ejected to the foreign states beyond, renamed the region to erase the name of the Jews, something the Palestinian Arabs are attempting to do today, all in an attempt to erase the Jews as a people from the world. There are historians who claim the Roman Empire had done this to a number of other peoples but there is a problem, the Romans succeeded in erasing those tribes and peoples from the world and their names are forgotten with the exception of the Carthaginians whose names is remembered but who as a people have disappeared (they were originally called the Phoenicians it is believed but they were forced to move after wars with the Israelites under King David). Somehow, the Jew managed to retain their oneness and their identity and have started to return for hopefully the final time never again to be uprooted. The series of treaties ending World War I shattered two empires, the Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire. From the Austro-Hungarian Empire we have the Balkan States as well as Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia and, of course, Austria and Hungary (see map below). Germany lost much of their eastern and western lands to Poland and France respectively. Losing a war has consequences but Germany was so financially crippled that the Weiner Republic was unable to maintain or even establish a functional economic core which led to the rise of a disgruntled population, especially the so-called underclass who were the largest segment of the unemployed. This led to the rise of a leader who promised to tear up the treaty, build a renewed and strong Germany and end the domination of the French and the British and repel the Communists from taking over Germany, as the Soviet Union replaced Russia as one of the most detested and suspicious of countries by whom Germany felt threatened.

 

 

Austro-Hungarian Empire Break-up into Independent Nations

 

Now, let us return, if you will pardon the witticism, back to the future. From our little jaunt through some diverse history and statistics, we hopefully learned that wars have been the norm over the entirety of the planet and human history. It started way back when one tribe saw some women, cattle, stored grains and good land which only had one small problem; they belonged to this other tribe. The one tribe decided to alleviate the other tribe of their land, women, crops, cattle and other belongings so they killed all the males over the age of around nine or ten and any women who proved too resistive and all of the tribe’s people too old to be of any productive service which would make up for the food and other provisioning they would require. This has progressed such that the wars we wage in modern times are not claimed to be to take the other tribes’ women, but that may not mean that is not part of the equation which we purposely refuse to mention. The one other thing we have learned from history is that as war has progressed they have become more and more efficient killing machines. War deaths had been constantly increasing in lethality until World War II and the newest ultimate weapon (see below graph). The weapon was the atomic bomb which convinced the Emperor of Japan to end the war rather than see his nation destroyed. Despite the deaths and effect over time by their use, it is estimated that by ending the war without the need to invade the Japanese homeland saved as much as one-million American and Allied lives and potentially far more Japanese lives including potentially hundreds of millions of civilian lives as the Emperor had demanded that Japan fight to the last person, initially believing the allies would rather surrender to his demands than take such losses. The other thusfar lasting effect over time of the destructive power and lethality of nuclear weapons has been a decline in war related deaths. The one problem is that there exists no weapon, no matter how lethal, which once invented did not become used generally in war other than poison gas and nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we are witnessing the dawn of a resurgent power which did not suffer or be included in the war where poisonous gasses and nerve agents were utilized nor the one where nuclear weapons were used and thus are not intimidated or bothered by their effects nor the suffering which they cause. This could lead to these weapons both becoming weapons of choice in a war in the future. Imagine a war where cities are leveled with thermonuclear weapons and the battlefield is reeking of dead animals and people, mostly civilians trapped without the necessary protection while soldiers move about in hooded coverings, gloves, boot-covers and gas masks seeming to skulk and lumber from position to position with sporadic gunfire dulled by the deadly heavy gaseous smoke permeating the battlefield lying thickest in the gullies and trenches. This could be a coming future were these weapons to become used commonly across a wide battlefield covering every continent. That is how civilizations die.

 

 

This is not what is feared to be on the near horizon. Still, the signs and tensions in the world keep climbing with hardly ever any sign of relief. Things can only be stretched so far before they break. We can only hope that the leaders of our world continue to inspect their areas and assure that nothing reaches a breaking-point. Leaders must keep the peace but that can become difficult to the point of impossible. Would that all leaders of the world desired peace more than expansion and seeking some intractable, uncompromising goal then the problems could be resolved peaceably and through negotiations and not through violence. Problems arise when some have visions of greatness and a world which by right belongs to them and only them. Such visions and beliefs allow for no compromise. The unfortunate reality is that not every civilization, not every group in the world has forgotten their goals of world conquest. The developed world once believed in world conquest which drove their colonialization, a period which was surrendered decades back and all the colonies returned to local rule. There are those in this world who still believe in conquest and expansion and that can only increase tensions very possibly to the breaking-point. The recent elections in Europe we saw resurgence of nationalism and saw the far left demand that they be granted control of all media so they could prevent any further strengthening of the nationalist camps. Such distrust could result in even more strife in an already stressed environment. It does not matter where violence starts, it only matters where it leads and how it ends. Avoiding violence is preferable whenever possible. There are points for every society beyond which there will be no retreat and those are dangerous places. There are already those in places around the world who are starting to feel pressured and pressed already. There are others who care little who they press and one has even taken to making new land on which to place military sites. In a time when we should be talking and treading lightly, we have some who are charging forward ignoring those they may be threatening. We need to find compromises but in order for this to occur there needs to be reasoning and compromise, not threats and demands. The world is too full of threats and demands and far too short on talk and compromise. Where it leads right now appears frightening with little promise and that can be intimidating. Intimidation causes mistakes and mistakes leads to worse. I wish we were more perfect a creature, but we still act more like beasts than intelligent beings that are presumably civilized. These things frighten many of us and unfortunately do not frighten enough of us to make those who would utilize violence change. That is the unfortunate truth and that means that violence is inevitable. That will not end well with the knowledge and abilities human kind has for destruction, even against his own kind. But then, those who would use violence as their means of solving differences because they believe it is their right to claim superiority over all, that leaves everyone under threat as weapons have gone well beyond limited usage. Let us hope everyone knows that war no longer produces winners, it can only send us all back to the stone age, if we survive, if we survive.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

A World Spinning Out-of-Control

 

The first area the world is having difficulties is nothing new as finances and resources are always at a critical point somewhere, but when it spreads wide and wild, then there is a problem. The problems are about to get really tightly strung as the United States cash flow valves are about to be made even tighter until mid to late August when the money will be released to give the economy as good a feel and appearance that people will believe that President Obama’s promises to repair the economy have finally begun to work. This will be reflected in a general media message that all is finally well in the world and the United States is healthy and ready to take on the comeback of the millennia. Nothing could be further from the truth but if the economic weapon is to be taken off the table making the push to place Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton in the White House will begin in earnest. What about the e-mail scandal and the leaking of classified information and her using her own private server to remain out of sight her dealings and what about those dealings and then there is the pay-to-play cashing in on her Secretary of State position by the Clinton Foundation personal slush-fund and so much more it is impossible to keep up with it. These e-mail revelations will all be settled and forgotten by the mid-September push where the world will be all Hillary all the time should her coronation go off as planned at the democrat National Convention, which means Bernie Sanders is the court jester out to entertain the masses while all the Hillary loose ends are tied up nice and neat; then Bernie will disappear and drop out for personal and family needs. Of course he will release his support and give Hillary all his delegates at the second round unless the most unbelievable happens and Bernie Sanders becomes the man and the Democrats will dump on Hillary again and the Clintons will have it out once and for all when Bill tells Hillary that it just was never meant to be. Look for a very vindictive and messy divorce to soon follow as Bill will have not been able to provide the necessary support to assist Hillary when it became her turn. Of course it could never have been that Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton was such a set of damaged goods that anything short a miracle could have ever placed her in the White House as the President. Perhaps the truth lies in that she was better as an ornament assisting Bill and quietly out of the actual scene than she would ever be the ‘One’ herself.

 

Meanwhile American consumerism has yet to recoil from the 2007-8 recession and the United States has been languishing in the shadows making a very slow recovery on the jobs market. This has put a serious damper on American consumerism, the buying power on which much of the world economy sits waiting to serve up the goods for Americans to buy. The European one currency disaster is slowly being repaired by using Germany’s wealth and productivity to provide universal monetary relief making the European Union a full circle system where Germany pays the less affluent countries to pay off their debts to Germany and assist their less than ambitious workforce to at least take welfare and spend it on German goods. This has created a system where Germany produces the goods that the rest of Europe consume with well over half the population using German wealth to buy in, so to speak. This is a model of an economic perpetual motion and cash flow machine. The problem is friction and drag which will eventually cause all the funds to not quite reach their theoretical place and be utilized to purchase German goods. People will use a fair share of the German largesse on feeding themselves and not living on German beer, or is it bier? The governments dispensing this cash flow fungible funds will take their cut as government are known to do and other diversions prevent this perpetual cash flow machine to rather rapidly grind to a halt, then what? This was where American consumerism was to kick in and cover the difference and continue to push cash into the machine to overcome the friction and inertial problems but that did not occur right on time. Then there was supposed to be this new middle class in China ready, willing and wealthy enough to re-prime the European economic model. Another ‘no-go’ as they are spending their cash to prop up much of the Asia markets and doing that slightly better than the Germans, but that too is reaching its tipping point as China’s buying power turned out to be overrated and Japan and Australia were not capable of filling that gap so they were also turning to the American consumerism machine which remained relatively idle for reasons the rest of the world could not understand. The reinvestment in American consumerism is scheduled for lift-off later this year in order to place the next media coronation on-track to place Hillary Clinton back in the White House. Expect Bill to play his role perfectly as the supportive spouse as he provides the necessary cash for her campaign while attempting to resist any temptations which would be a true and dramatic scandal.

 

Then we come to the rest of the world. Saudi Arabia is sitting on that valve with the exception of Iran and the one-hundred-billion-plus bribery to permit them to sit in a really plush hotel suite and dictate their dream nuclear treaty and for President Obama and Secretary of State John François, did we mention he was French, Kerry to appear to be writing and crafting a cleverly devious set of rules and stipulations which would prevent Iran from building any nuclear weapons, especially deliverable ones as they also were writing a prevention to test missiles and related technologies into the treaty. They were terrible actors or at least other than the carefree unconcerned President completely trusting his competent yet bumbling Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the French Sûreté Kerry to bring in the play of the century and deliver the ultimately understated but effective treaty. The entire act failed as none of the parts were played by the late Peter Sellers and thus masterly failing and flailing to the best solution through erroneous thinking always overcorrecting just enough to get the criminal in the end was not pulled off. The Iranians were playing three dimensional chess, or possible a number of dimensions higher, while Obama and Kerry were playing the ever so complicated game of Noughts and Crosses, how so ever European of them. The nuclear path to Armageddon arranged, paved, and decorated by the United States gift wrapped and delivered to the Iranians set Saudi Arabia even further on edge. The Saudis are playing their one card and playing it to its utmost capacity pumping oil from the ground at a pace previously unheard of to crash the market and push prices down as far as it can go.

 

This has had effects all desired and planned by the Saudi government, aka the Saudi Royal Family. The low prices means that the lesser grade or difficult to extract barrels of oil produce little if any profit and even losses for certain lower grade oils less desirable than the light, sweet oil of the Saudi oil field production. This was intended to bankrupt the Iranian oil market which is likely not producing the cash flow which makes Iran operate but fear not, the Obama administration has taken care of that with the unfreezing of over one-hundred-billion-dollar present right into the Mullahs of Iran’s pockets which will neatly finance their missile and nuclear research and production placing their nuclear and missile programs on the fast track for a five year target date which may be even less in the distance than all except soon to be out of office and thus not blamed for what happens next. The low price of oil is also killing any additional fracking or other fairly expensive to initiate oil fields exploration thus slowing the United States ability to develop these technologies until further notice. The final effect is against Iran’s favorite former and soon to be again super power, Russia. Russia is getting next to nothing in profits from oil sales and is likely depending on vodka profits, a real let down.

 

The Russian government is next to broke but this is where gifts from President Obama roll in. Remember that hundred-billion-plus monetary reward the United States is about to turn over to Iran? Well, guess what they are going to do with a goodly amount of that largesse? That’s the ticket; we knew you would figure that out, of course they will be buying tons of military equipment from Russia. Expect the Iranians to repaint those units tan, beige and brown and then claim they designed and manufactured them within the first year. These military sales may end up being the life’s blood, the mother’s milk for the Russian economic engine. So, Iran gets advanced military equipment and will reverse engineer it or also buy production rights and for the Russians to build the factories as well to produce the missiles and other equipment in Iran. This will provide Russia with the funds to operate for a decade longer providing military goods to Iran. What could conceivably go awry?

 

Where does all of this end? Who knows? Sure, we’ll take a stab at it. Even the military equipment will not save Russia from their adventurisms. Propping up Bashir al-Assad is an expensive business and gets all the worse with every downed aircraft, exploded tank and even every bullet shot and supplies shipped to Syria all costs but things could be worse. Turkey is a wary acquaintance with a love-hate relationship with Iran. Should Turkish-Iranian relation devolve back to animosity stages then Turkey might decide to push back closing the Bosphorus thus separating the Mediterranean Sea from the Black Sea and making the bulk of the Russian fleet all but useless. This would also mean resupplying the Russian units in Syria far more expensive as they would all need to go by air routes around Turkey. With the Russian economy still weak and near collapse, such additional expense would be just the impetus that Russia might require to take care of the Turkish problem and take the Bosphorus straights on both sides including Constantinople, well, returning Istanbul to its former name might be part of the plan, couldn’t it? This more than likely would result in an all-out war between Turkey and Russia which might not end with Turkey. The Russians would not even blink when it would come to also raking-in the Kurdish areas of Syria and Iraq taking the northern parts of Syria down as far as Aleppo. Where such aggressions might lead is a troubling thought. Russia, under Putin, might fabricate an insult or problem from the Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia and many of the old nations, especially those in Central Asia, reestablishing the smaller and more vulnerable nations all in the name of protecting them from untold horrors threatening their futures. Now under the protection of Russia they need not spend anywhere near as much on their fears. It has all been crystalized down to one concern; the big brown ten-thousand-ton bear in the living room.

 

 

Ukraine Was Already a Conflict Spinning Out of Control
and in at Least One Possible Future
This Will Become a Picture of the Calm Before the Storm

 

 

The hard truth is financial matters on a global scale are similar to the financial situation in Europe right before World War I. Far Eastern Asia such as China was not one of the main conditions as their economy was not producing great amounts of wealth and thus was not part of the purchasing consumer world. Russia was faltering as the Czars were overthrown and the democratic first elected governance was unable to instantly produce a functioning and burgeoning economy such as had been witnessed in the booming economies right after the turn of the century in Europe and the United States. That brought on another governance and government change and the Communists took over and immediately cowed the people and put them under a harder and more forceful boot that the Czars had done, Europe was facing an economic stall as if somebody had mucked up the flow of money and without money flowing the economic sails drooped and became dead weight and unproductive. This was not as true in the United States but the American economy drove American business and the main imports by the United States were exotic fruits from South America and coffee from South America plus America was still growing though far slower than before. The Ottoman Empire, a long deceased empire staggering, was being largely propped up by the Europeans as nobody desired these lands which were tribal, primitive, unproductive deserts.

 

By every measurement, Europe was a tinderbox awaiting a single spark. The Ottoman Empire was an even more volatile place and the Balkans were the Balkans with the different religious conflicts, the tribal conflicts, largely inert economies, no overriding force of arms keeping the lid on and everything in a kind of lingering limbo slowly devolving into Machiavellian might makes right situation where many thought they had the might and were waiting for the time to be right. Well, the time never got around to being right as firing a gun with the tinderbox that was Europe was frightening enough, what followed was simply the explosion that set the world ablaze. On June 28, 1914, then, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were touring Sarajevo in an open car, with surprisingly little security, when Serbian nationalist Nedjelko Cabrinovic threw a bomb at their car; it rolled off the back of the vehicle and wounded an officer and some bystanders. Later that day, on the way to visit the injured officer, the archduke’s procession took a wrong turn at the junction of Appel Quay and Franzjosefstrasse, where one of Cabrinovic fellow revolutionaries, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, laid waiting. Leaping towards the car the assassin fired into the rear seat shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie at point-blank range. The would-be martyr then attempted to turn the gun on himself but was wrestled to the ground and was basically saved by the arresting officers. The rest is history, no, really, history, literally and exactly World War I history. Nedjelko Cabrinovic was an anarchist and belonged to a subversive group who desired revolution called the Black Hand which was later connected to the Freemasons though there is little evidence we could find of an actual link. Any input either way would be appreciated and allow us to say thanks in advance. Meanwhile, our other conspirator, Gavrilo Princip, was raised in a home of Serbian Orthodox Christian parents though many conspiracy theorists claim because of his appearance he had to be a Jew, the actions of assassinating the Archduke and his wife just sealed the deal on his religious origins had to be Jewish despite all evidence to the contrary. Hopefully there will be no rulers of the Austria-Hungary Empire riding through the Balkans in an open car with a maximum speed of almost seventy miles per hour in the next few weeks having a bang up time at the expense of the downtrodden masses; that would just be tempting fate, now, wouldn’t it. Kidding aside, the world does seem to be picking up speed as if there may be a crashing event in the near future and that is not a happy thought. Really nothing to add to that except the list of national and international leaders vulnerable to some revolutionary anarchist or other form of fanatic is not that far-fetched and that is frightening.

 

Beyond the Cusp