Melting Down Writ Large.

It doesn't look good sports fans. In fact, it looks like a five alarm fire cubed is gearing up. I sense that in the next few weeks global civilization runs the risk of having a global Alice Through The Looking Glass experience that no one is ever likely to forget, try though we might. What is happening in Japan is the proximate catalyst that informs my very gloomy outlook, because, my dear readers, it isn't just a few of Japan's nuclear reactors that are melting down, but Japan itself that is in the hideous process of liquefying.

Should Japan, in possession of the planet's third largest economy, cease to meaningfully operate as a civilization for some extended period, well, we are all going to feel it hugely. Know this: Should all the radiation containment issues be solved in the next twenty four hours, we are still going to experience unpleasantness globally, but, whatever we experience will be as nothing compared to the hurt we'll feel should the latest hopeful news about the power going on at the most troubled nuclear plant fail to deliver on the promise of a very near term solution.

The world is entirely too interconnected for a Japanese flock of black swans to flap its wings, deliver a massive, steaming payload of glowing excrement from on high, and have the collective not subsequently feel the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. And all this epic awfulness, of course, leaves out all the presently overshadowed, but none too insignificant, upheaval occurring in the Middle East.

Now, as a sort of coda to this evening post, I offer the following quote as reported by the BBC.

"They are leaving us to die," says the mayor of Minamasoma inside the exclusion zone.

The very unfortunate Mayor and his fellow citizens in the aforesaid abandoned town put me in mind of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, who were, in effect, left to fend for themselves-where they weren't left to fend off the monstrous goons of Blackwater.

I feature the quote above primarily for the purpose of highlighting the ever growing condition whereby central governments across the world demonstrate their profound unworthiness. And I focus on that phenomenon, because, as the realization grows, as it must, amongst citizens all across the planet, that in their most desperate hours of need they simply can not depend on central governments to help (let alone save) them, these very same citizens will reject the very idea of obeisance to a central authority.

After all the enormous failures that have already occurred here and elsewhere are almost too numerous to mention; they involve the failure to rescue citizens in the aftermath of natural disasters, and the dereliction of government's solemn duty to uphold legal statutes and enforce laws regardless of who may be acting outside the law. However, as the Wicked Witch of the West was wont to say about certain, in her case, nasty endeavors, "These things take time." Indeed, they do, but a bit of time is about all that's standing in the way of governments around the planet, pardon the phrase, melting down.