... separating the trees from the forest. Yes, to people in August 1914, the assassination of Ferdinand did feel like the beginning of the end of all good things. They knew it was pitching the world into crisis and war and that things would never be the same.

The problem is, they felt like that during the 1905 First Morocan Crisis; the 1911 Second Morocan Crisis; and the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars. The trouble with a close reading of the day's events, in an age of hypercommunication, is that there is a lot of ferment and turbulence, and it's hard to know when something's building to a tsunami or dribbling off to nothing.

Will historians see today as the start of the much-anticipated WW III (or IV, if you're a neocon)? I don't know. But I do agree: It scares the jeebers out of me.

Doesn't all of this make George W. Bush's end-timer supporters happy? I wonder if this was the type of thing discussed when the Bush administration officials consulted with the "Apostolic Congress".

There's also the "rapture index"

Rapture Index of 85 and Below: Slow prophetic activity
Rapture Index of 85 to 110: Moderate prophetic activity
Rapture Index of 110 to 145: Heavy prophetic activity
Rapture Index above 145: Fasten your seat belts

The index is at 155 as of July 10th

http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html

The missiles are flyin' … hallelujah!

It's true. I don't claim all-seeing perspective yet, and still I see things shaping up in very ominous ways. Unlike the last great tension (the Cold War) there is no balancing between two global powers with both having causes to project and territories to defend. This time, it's one global power facing off against a diffuse multitude of small, often non-state oppponents, and on top of that, multiple regional conflicts in which the lines of support and opposition are often quite thinly drawn.

My own bet for the hottest "trouble spot" is still Kashimir, simply because it features two nuclear-armed opponents facing each other with a good cast of non-state actors thrown in to muddy the mix. That said, the Middle East certainly seems to be heating up in its own intractable ways - is there really anything that all parties there can ever find agreeable as a way of reducing tensions?

Climate change is the wild card. If floods of refugees begin to move around the world, we will see things I suspect we can not now imagine. And since many seem unwilling to say it, I will: A large part of man-made climate change is not only attributable to US fossil fuel consumption, but in general to the ever-rising population worldwide. And that rising population comes at a high cost - especially in the developing world, where fertility rates are highest. Infrastructure development and maintenance cannot keep up with the rate of population increase. The simple capacity of many poorer nations to feed their people is straining. As they strip near areas of fuel wood, desertification increases, and the capacity to grow food crops shrinks. The spiral continues.

I'm the first to admit I have no solutions. I do think, though, that it's past time we see our highest calling as making life better for everyone worldwide, not blowing up significant numbers of "those other people" who don't think, look, or sound like us in order to control their resources. If people everywhere were well-fed and housed, would there really be as much insurrection and terrorism afoot? I think not.

and the world is seeing itself in a clear light for the first time in decades. No flowery, empty speeches that make everyone feel good but sweep the real problems under the carpet.

North Korea can't continue to be appeased, that's what got them nuclear weapons. Radical Muslims can't continue to threaten the world and slaughter innocents without consequences. Iran can't expect to be treated with respect when they clearly threaten Europe and the West.

The world isn't any more out of control than before it's just out in the open.

"to people in August 1914, the assassination of Ferdinand did feel like the beginning of the end of all good things. They knew it was pitching the world into crisis and war and that things would never be the same.

The problem is, they felt like that during the 1905 First Morocan Crisis; the 1911 Second Morocan Crisis; and the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars."

The sense of foreboding that seemed to accompany the July 1914 crisis was partly retrospective. I'm thinking of the volume of Osbert Sitwell's memoirs( Great Morning)in which he talks about the "omens" that appeared in the summer of 1914 before the crisis broke.

Still, some statesmen at the time recognized that the situation after Sarejevo was different. There's the comment by the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg: "if the iron dice roll, may God help us." And there's the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey's more famous "the lamps are going out all over Europe, we will not see them lit again in our lifetime."

What I find particularly disturbing are the parallels between the US today and pre-1914 Germany. There's the same fundamental aimlessness when it comes to policy as well as the self-fulfilling tendency to create enemies and then feel threatened and surrounded by those very same "enemies". By 1912, German policy-makers had pretty much concluded that a general war--the sooner the better--was the only way to shake up the European order in a way that favored German interests(cw the neocon desire to invade Iraq before 9/11). There's also the tendency to cling to Israel as an ally just as Germany wound up clinging to Austria-Hungary, to the point of issuing what amounts to a "blank check" to any action Israel takes regardless of consequences...

There's new reports that the violence in Darfur is spilling into Chad, too!

...just a tiny bit of clarification, since I'm right in the middle of reading G. J. Meyer's superb new one-volume history of WWI.

Archduke Ferdinand's assassination really was the proximate cause of WWI...but a great deal of bad management and bad luck had to occur for the European powers to mobilize. There was a good chance nothing in particular would have happened after Ferdinand was murdered, a very good chance. Except for the power of human nature gone bad.

The run-up to WWI is among the more salutary tales of the last 100 years. While it was an immensely complicated process, it is actually possible to pin responsibility for what happened on a handful of men, most of who had the most ordinary desires for power and status on their minds, and acted to preserve their own positions.

There is more than a little in the story that applies to our own time. If, in the Summer of 1914, there had been more men of genuine humility, breadth of vision, with real concern for the big picture, and all the millions of people in it, WWI might well have been averted.

Oddly, the three men you would most expect to have been in support of war, were the three men who were most against it, and who, if they had acted more courageously, might well have prevented war altogether: The Emperor Franz Joseph; Tsar Alexander II, and even Kaiser Wilhelm. None of them wanted war at the moment it approached, and all three tried to avoid it. Because they knew well what was going to happen.

The men around them poisoned the possibility of a settlement before the fact.. and the apocalypse was unleashed.

It's not quite that simple. But in Meyer's history, and others I've read...it was almost that simple. We see much the same thing today: men, and women, who do not have the fate of the world in their hearts...they care only about their own positions. *That* is the true recipe for disaster..not any one or two events. Events are nothing without humans using those events for their own ends.

If there were ever a time when we needed an FDR, or, at any rate, whatever your politics, men and women of vision and charisma and humility, doing what was good for ALL, it's now. But we don't have them. Not even close.