And this hallucinatory drawing shows you everything you see in this drawing is Iluvatar.

In early January, the American social critic James Howard Kunstler described India as a nation with one foot in the modern age and the other in a colorful hallucinatory dreamtime. Kunstler s view is harsh, but perhaps prophetic India s climate change related problems are doing heavy damage to the food supply.

The Palestinian leadership knows that if Iran ever launches a nuclear attack against Israel, their people would suffer terribly as well. On the other hand, peace between Israel and the Palestinians might neutralize the poison of Iranian hatred and break the hallucinatory political mechanism that identifies Israel with absolute evil the small Satan that should be annihilated at all cost.

Now, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq, a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. But I'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years, although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century. One sees it all over the world, although not homogeneously.