Seems so much has been handed us, in snippets, since last one was at this keyboard..
On the British political front, Tony's upstaged all of those who might aspire to taking his job, by making one of the most listenable Labour Conference addresses in decades..
It has now been made abudantly clear that he is going to step down next year, but as one Member of Cabinet stated, it really doesn't matter any more, the exact timing.. Tony has set wheels in motion which Labour, as a Party, would find disasterous to either alter or abort.
The heir-apparent, Gordon Brown, while heaping praise on Tony and his administration (as indeed Tony in turn lauded Gordon Brown as the 'best Chancellor this country has seen in 60 or more years') , was rudly brought down to earth by a comment made by Cherie Blair.
For when Gordon said, in his address, that he had enjoyed working under Tony for lo these past 10 years', Cherie was heard to mutter 'That's a lie...'
However, one can say with reasonable certainty that the next Labour Leader will be the irascible Scot, Gordon Himself.. much to his probable relief at finally getting to move to No.10 from No.11, an ambition long held close..

Interesting to note, that the average Brit is £3thousand in debt, which leads the EU countries by a good margin.. But on the other hand, the same poll reveals the other Member states are quickly catching up, at a rate 3 times the British..

And of course, the confirmation of Bulgaria and Serbia's entry into the European Union has been confirmed, as of the 1st of the coming new year. Yet another pair of bankrupt countries to join in the weight pressing against the fragile web that is keeping Europe as a whole, even close to solvent..
And more home-made terrorism in the US, with a gunman dead and a student wounded after the shootist ran amok.. Pressures in that country are reaching the boiling point, even in the normally detatched south-west. This uncertainty concerning their next government, with the added pressure of being the most reviled nation in this present world, seems to be telling in the most unlikely of places..

This is the time, we one advising al Qaeda, to pull something big off. To stamp a mark either on British or American soil. To underline Isam's position as untouchable, while demonstrating how, with our simple everyday lives, we are vulnerable.
Amdenejad's visit to Venezuela, with even the South Americans condeming American as 'the great Satan', and worthy of a Holy War, is an indication of consolidation of Christian and Islamic ideals, under the umbrella of oil.
The United States, pulling Britain along, is falling into a terrible spiral, wherein it's allies are exceeding few, and it's foes, legion. A spiral in which it must keep itself at war, to support it's own economy, and the choice of 'peace' is not only taken away by the determination of enemies, but by the demands of an economy which is surviving on 'throw away commodities'.
One has stated many times before in these writings, the position one would take to rid this constant threat of terror. That economic sanctions, if not complete embargo's on foreign fuel from the enemy, would hit them a thousand times more effectively than ten thousand troops on the ground in a region that is already, for the time being, lost in religious fervour.
Allow Russia into the WTO.. take what might be the minimum of fossil fuels from that country, as a massive country-wide move towards retooling for alternate energy sources is forced through to the consumers..
Take the wealth away from those who fund the terrorists, and the terrorist will have nothing to work with..
It's time we hunkered down, and looked for the long-term, rather than throwing our efforts at home and abroad towards making the world a better place, for those who don't want what we have to offer, other than the $.
This is not just a diatribe against the Levant, but against all those who would work diligently, to destabalize what we have come to expect as 'our way of life'.
Let the rest of the world do as they will.
Deal as little as possible with those who have no ethic that doesn't even remotely come close to matching ours.
Let the transition to China becoming the next world superpower, supplanting the US, be as painless as possible, while getting our homegrown traditions back on track.
If it were only as simple a move to make.. it it were not such a complex issue, one would say withdraw the Western forces and the Western funding completely and utterly from the Middle East and Africa. Let them decide their own fates, in their own way, but without a steady flow of £'s and $'s to fund their historically endless cycles of violence, famine, pestilence, and oppression.
This is not a world ready to stand united.
Ergo, it is time to become insular to the extreme.