Long Trends Omnia Vincit

The demographic growth and strengthening of the national-religious dedication of the Israeli religious segment is causing increased stress in the government structure. My granddaughters are learning religion in the kindergarten and Netanyahu is proving unable to form a coalition.

Labor got only 10% of British votes and the country is divided and ungoverned. The European Union is holding but the lack of a foreign enemy is making it purposeless. Surprisingly Russian bourse is the world's best, that country has pulled itself together.

China and the US are competing for hegemony. The US is increasingly desperate and aggressive, it all leads to a shooting war in Asia. The war could re-align the world into a new configuration. Remember: there were TWO Vietnam Wars. One with China and China lost. Other with France/US and USA lost. The pic shows how impressive is (or they want to be seen)  the Chinese military: Twenty-something mobile cannons firing at the same time, everything perfectly clean and ordered.   As a former AA team leader, I know how impossible is to achieve this level of synchronization. Even in a parade show.  This pic is fake. But real wars are unpredictable. 

I am expecting a new William the Bastard. In the year 1100 England was in chaos.  The Angles and the Saxons (North Germanic barbarians) were unable to govern themselves. Came William with his French-speaking Nordmen and imposed strict order, divided the land among his sub-chiefs, made a grand inventory and established a well-ordered tax system. The new landowners extracted rent from the farming population and gradually replaced them. This structure lasted 800 years. It was based on stable laws and agricultural rents. When farming produce became abundant and cheap in the early twentieth century and the rents of the aristocracy became worthless and England's structure collapsed. It is chaos again. England returned to island marginality.

BTW, Tom Segev's book 1948 about Israel's first year shows the beginning of a similar structure. Expulsed Arab houses and lands were taken over by well-connected former soldiers with initiative, and a middle class started to take form.  That structure disappeared or went underground with the organization of Israel's legal forms, but I am still suspicious about the origin of some fortunes. But they were small middle-class fortunes, they dissolved in the second generation. Something that did not happen in England, there landed fortunes persisted for many successive generations.

The English are an amazing race.