Here a crisis, there a crisis, everywhere a crisis!

And cartoonist, Roz Chast, captures especially well the already widely-known crises in the cartoon below...

© Roz Chast New Yorker
[click on cartoon to enlarge]

But you thing things are grim now? Roz Chast's excellent cartoon amounts not even to half of the problems we face, the "we" being all of us around the globe. Add to the mix the irrefutable facts that inhere from demography and you have a future of pain...

"The world is in crisis. A financial crash and a deepening recession are afflicting rich and poor countries alike. The threat of weapons of mass destruction looms ever larger. A bipartisan congressional panel announced last month that the odds of a nuclear or biological terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the year 2014 are better than 50-50. It looks as though we'll be grappling with these economic and geopolitical challenges well into the 2010s. But if you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s. The economic and geopolitical climate could become even more threatening by then -- and this time the reason will be demographics."

Demography is destiny; the interpretation of its facts provides the sole speculative element. And the facts, as argued in this Washington Post Op/Ed essay, are well-known, mooted for the past 10-15 years. But today's indisputable facts were once interpretation of trends, and the interpretations of the new set of facts prove persuasive, and scary.

And yet within the grim reality lies hope. Read the entire essay to learn why, and how. And where.
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist