Viewed from this point in history, early May 2008 looking forward to the year 2024 when I shall be 69 in the Spring there seems much way to go; a Way that shapes up to contain much economic, environmental, military and social tragedy.

If 2008 were 1908, we would still find ourselves part of the flourishing for some and world-dominating European Bourgeois order that is known in the UK as Edwardian, the surfeited stage of the European ascendency and the British Empire, with the US still pending as an economic power and the age of oil in its infancy.

Many then, as now, were aware of contradictory conditions and looming consequences, not least of which among the movements for unionism, syndicalism, socialism and anarchist 'bottom-up' overturnings of the existing social order; but The Great War and Russian Revolution must have seemed hard to imagine, as it must also have been hard to imagine the likes of the Great Depression on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere that would lead to WWII and the cultural, technological, economic and political changes that bring us to the present era.

The so-called West, in spite of the Cold War, adventurism and criminal interventionism, has yet to see anything like open war or even much by way of guerrilla activity let alone serious social unrest anywhere near its heartlands (I refer to UK-Europe, US-Canada, Australia-NZ, Japan as the West).

There is much poised to happen in the sixteen coming years up to 2024, of which climate change or destabilisation at least is for sure. Methane outgassing in Canadian and Siberian tundra is not just a sign but an accelerator of this tipping-point-prone inevitability.

Let these notes serve as an indicator to some of it.