If you want to read a depressing book, may I suggest "The Coming Anarchy" by Robert Kaplan (incidentally my favorite journalist--bar none...).

What will make your depression worse is that he wrote much of it in 1994.

Its an important book, attested to by the fact that its still in print, but it was never much of a best seller, probably because Americans don't know or much care what happens elsewhere in the world--a phenomenon that is of considerable surprise to European and even Canadian visitors. Some of that is to be expected--the Romans probably thought little of what was going on in Spain or Britain, but if you lived in Spain or Britain, you were undoubtedly up on what was happening in Rome.

9/11 should have disabused Americans about the irrelevance of the rest of the world, but judging from McCain's numbers and Obama's popularity, that just didn't happen. Voters this year are apparently intent on rewarding candidates for being a POW, for being black, of for being a woman. They are not rewarding candidates for being unbelievably smart and comprehensive in their world-views.

I still recall a line from Saturday Nigh Fever--not exactly a deeply philosophical film, but it did have this moment:

JT: Screw the future!

Boss: No, the future screws you...

What prompted this post was an interview with John Ghazvinian, who has authored Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil . While Ghazvinian is short on solutions, he like Kaplan, describes a perfect storm of social crisis being aggravated by a tidal wave of investment in African oil properties. Ironically, Africa is seen as a hedge against "unstable" oil producers like Venezuela and the middle-east, even as historic examples like Nigeria and the Sudan demonstrate how the same actions can be expected to produce the same results.

An interesting read.

I've said this before, but I can't see anyone by Romney who has the mind capable of understanding the bewildering complexity of this and other looming foreign policy disasters and formulating policies to mitigate the worst effects. McCain is just too stupid and Hillary is really only interested in what's good for Clinton, Inc. Obama is Bambi.

If Romney doesn't win, this is really, really gonna hurt.