But bigger trends are at play globally. We are seeing the return of great power politics – and with it, the risk of powerful states going to war. Conflict with the likes of Russia or China was something that seemed buried with the end of the Cold War. Yet today’s simmering tensions mean there is a risk of such an outcome becoming all too real.

As in the past, it is perfectly possible that a third world war could start with a small event, or even by accident. One of the many Russian bomber planes now probing NATO’s borders could collide with an RAF Typhoon, prompting an aerial skirmish the likes of which the world has not seen for decades.

Indeed, the skies over Syria are starting to get dangerously crowded, with Russian jets flying near US planes on bombing runs, and sparring with NATO air defences in neighbouring Turkey. Perhaps it could happen at sea, when a Japanese or American ship scrapes paint with its Chinese Navy counterpart amid the reefs in the Pacific that are being militarized as part of Asia’s current arms race.

He said patients often came in complaining of a headache but that a simple heel-to-toe test revealed that they had developed a backwards curve in the neck having spent hours hunched over electronic devices. "The condition is called 'text neck' because it is often caused when people sit with their heads dropped forward looking at their devices for several hours at a time. Instead of a normal forward curve, patients can be seen to have a backwards curve. It can be degenerative, often causing head, neck, shoulder and back pain.

Dr Carter, from Niagara Park on Australia's New South Wales Central Coast, warned that the condition could lead to anxiety and depression as well as spinal damage. And he said 50 per cent of the patients he diagnosed were school-aged children and teenagers.

Every parent lives with a fear of the dangers that prey on young children: the predators who lurk at bus stops and playgrounds, the traffickers who make a living by selling young bodies, the peddlers who push drugs that ensnare and addict, the gangs that deal in violence and bullets, the drunk drivers, the school bullies, the madmen with guns, the diseases that can end a life before it’s truly begun, the cynicism of a modern age that can tarnish innocence, and the greed of a corporate age that makes its living by trading on young consumers.

Children are taught from an early age that there are consequences for their actions. Hurt somebody, lie, steal, cheat, etc, and you will get punished. But how do you explain to a child that a police officer can shoot someone who was doing nothing wrong and get away with it? That a cop can lie, steal, cheat, or kill and still not be punished?

It’s getting harder by the day to tell young people that we live in a nation that values freedom and which is governed by the rule of law without feeling like a teller of tall tales. Yet… unless something changes and soon for the young people growing up, there will be nothing left of freedom as we have known it but a fairy tale without a happy ending.

When the phenomenon was announced earlier this year forecasters hoped it would fizzle out before winter. But temperatures in the Pacific Ocean have been rising steadily and the most powerful El Nino on record is expected to be confirmed within days. The knock-on effects around the globe, which include unusually cold winters in Britain, could be catastrophic.

The last El Nino, six years ago, saw the UK crippled by the worst winter for decades with widespread harsh frosts, sub-zero temperatures and heavy snow setting in from early December and lasting until March. Warnings have been issued across the southern United States where the strength of El Nino is already causing worrying shifts in the jet stream.

Climate experts say the region is set for below average temperatures and above average precipitation which is likely to fall as snow. It is a frightening reminder back to the winter of 2009 which saw both the US and Great Britain crippled by heavy snow and weeks of sub-zero temperatures.

Semtex is different. You can drop it. You can throw it. You can put it in the fire. Nothing will happen. Nothing until you put the right detonator in it, that is. To me, the US – and most of the supposedly free West – increasingly looks like a truck being systematically filled with Semtex.

But it’s easy to counter cries of alarm with the fact that the truck is stable – because it’s true: you can hurl more boxes into the back without any real danger. Absent the right detonator, it is no more dangerous than a truckload of mayonnaise. But add the right detonator and you’re just one click away from complete devastation. We can see how fragile the US is now by considering just four tendencies.

Destruction of farms and reliable food source

The average American is a long way from food when the shops are closed. The number of farms in the country has fallen by some 4 million from more than 6 million in 1935 to roughly 2 million in 2012. And only about 2 percent of the US population live on farms. That means that around 4.6 million people currently have the means to feed themselves. Food supply logistics are extended, sometimes stretching thousands of miles. The shops have nothing more than a few days’ stock. A simple break in that supply line would clear the shops out in days.

Weak economic system

The American economic system is little more than froth. The US currency came off the gold standard in 1933 and severed any link with gold in 1971. Since then, the currency has been essentially linked to oil, the value of which has been protected and held together by wars. The whole world has had enough of the US and its hubris – not least the people of the US themselves, which the massive support currently for Putin’s decision to deal with ISIS demonstrates. Since pro-active war is what keeps the US going, if it loses the monopoly on that front, its decline is inevitable. Fiat economies always collapse.

Americans increasingly on mind-altering drugs

According to the Scientific American, use of antidepressants among the US population was up 400 percent in the late 2000s over the 1990s. Many of these drugs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. These are the type of FDA-approved narcotics lone gunmen are frequently associated with, and their psychoses often attributed to a forced or sudden withdrawal from such drugs. Pharmaceuticals are produced at centralized points by companies which themselves rely on extended logistics systems both to produce and to deliver their output. If the logistics system fails, there’s no more supply.

Morals in decline

During the objective hardship of the 1930s, there was surprisingly little crime. People were brought up with a conception of morals and right and wrong. Frugality and prudence were prized virtues. Communities were generally fairly cohesive. Relative to then, society today is undisciplined, unrealistic and selfish. Around 250 million shoppers participated in the Black Friday sales in 2013 in which around USD 61 billion was spent on consumer items – up roughly 100 percent on 2006 figures. Stampedes and even murders are not uncommon each year with people openly fighting each other over reduced-price items.

My point is that just because US – and many other countries organised after the same template – do not look explosive, doesn’t mean they won’t blow up. Whereas 80 years ago we could absorb major shocks, today we cannot.

Nowhere to run

In the past, people were in rural communities. They could grow food. They had real communities. They also had self-control and a conception of morality.

Today, if the supply lines go down, you are stuck in a house you can’t heat surrounded by millions of FDA-approved drug addicts who are going psycho because they have run out of juice and people who would murder their own grandmother to get a cut-price iPhone.

I would argue that the right shock event – or combination of shock events – will detonate the explosive. I am saying that while it may be possible to keep loading box upon box of societal Semtex into the truck, given the right detonator the collapse will be swift, unstoppable and devastating.

The French daily Le Figaro reported on Saturday that the French envoy to the United Nations introduced a draft text that would be endorsed by the president of the Security Council – currently Spain – to station “independent observers” on the Temple Mount to “identify possible violations of the status quo.”

A senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office dismissed the initiative as “baseless” and as “only declarative.” “We expect that they condemn the incompetence of the Wakf on the Temple Mount,” the official said. “Those who brought explosives and fired firecrackers were Palestinians who turned the Temple Mount into a terrorism warehouse, and they are the ones who tried to change the status quo.”

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan called the French initiative “distorted and biased,” and said it gives a “prize” to Palestinian violence. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said any international intervention on the Temple Mount would be a violation of Israel’s sovereignty there. “Only one side is preserving the status quo, and that is Israel, which wants to allow freedom of religion for everyone,” she said.

During his speech, Mr Danon held up a piece of card with a diagram of a human body entitled "How to Stab a Jew", which he said was "an example of what Palestinian children are being exposed to day in and day out, in school, after school".

Sky News has been unable to verify Mr Danon's claims, in which he said: "When a Palestinian child returns from school and opens (sic) the television, he doesn't see Barney or Donald Duck, he sees murderers portrayed as heroes. When he opens a textbook, he doesn't learn about math and science, he's being taught to hate." Mr Danon's speech came amid an increase in violence in which 41 Palestinians and seven Israelis have died.

In one spot in the Antelope Valley, the storm dumped 1.81 inches of rain in 30 minutes on Thursday, in what the National Weather Service described as a 1,000-year rain event. "It's absolutely incredible," said Robbie Munroe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

October storms are nothing new in the high desert. But experts say the intensity of the deluge is just the latest by-product of the record temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. The warm ocean temperatures — about 75 degrees on Thursday, at least 5 degrees above normal — produced more water evaporation and higher humidity levels. The storm system combined with the high humidity to create enough instability in the atmosphere to trigger the intense thunderstorms and torrential rainfall.

Mr Hookem, speaking from Strasbourg where he has criticised the EU’s handling of Libya and Turkey, said, “The EU is slowly but surely trying to move from the principle of a nation state providing national security; to a more centralised model controlled and commanded from Brussels. The EU is using the current migrant crisis in the Mediterranean as nothing more than an opportunistic excuse for the creation of an EU wide army, navy and air force.

“The EU has already used the current crisis to create an EU wide border force and coastguard, and very soon, we will see Junker in command of naval assets that he has neither the qualifications or experience to command. The next step is land and air assets to be brought under EU control and without an official announcement, we will have an EU army through the back door.”

In Syria, for the first time since the cold war, Russia has deployed its forces far from home to quell a revolution and support a client regime. In the waters between Vietnam and the Philippines, America will soon signal that it does not recognise China’s territorial claims over a host of outcrops and reefs by exercising its right to sail within the 12-mile maritime limit that a sovereign state controls.

For the past 25 years America has utterly dominated great-power politics. Increasingly, it lives in a contested world. The new game with Russia and China that is unfolding in Syria and the South China Sea is a taste of the struggle ahead.

The struggle is also over legitimacy. Mr Putin wants to discredit America’s stewardship of the international order. America argues that popular discontent and the Syrian regime’s abuses of human rights disqualify the president, Bashar al-Assad, from power. Mr Putin wants to play down human rights, which he sees as a licence for the West to interfere in sovereign countries — including, if he ever had to impose a brutal crackdown, in Russia itself.

America still has resources other powers lack. Foremost is its web of alliances, including NATO. Whereas Mr Obama sometimes behaves as if alliances are transactional, they need solid foundations. America’s military power is unmatched, but it is hindered by pork-barrel politics and automatic cuts mandated by Congress. These spring from the biggest brake on American leadership: dysfunctional politics in Washington. That is not just a poor advertisement for democracy; it also stymies America’s interest. In the new game it is something that the United States — and the world — can ill afford.

Over the course of the last six months, we’ve seen China’s land reclamation efforts go from oddity, to spectacle, to alleged “provocation”, to excuse for war as Washington feels compelled to come to the aid of its allies in the South Pacific who cried foul after it became apparent that this was no “normal” dredging effort.

An editorial in The Global Times, which is close to China's ruling Communist party, condemned Washington's "ceaseless provocations and coercion": "China mustn't tolerate rampant US violations of China's adjacent waters and the skies over those expanding islands," it said, adding that its military should "be ready to launch countermeasures according to Washington's level of provocation," it added.

The warship or ships would pass within the 12-mile territorial limit China claims around the structures to demonstrate that US commanders do not recognise it. Such a move, the Global Times suggested, could be a "breach of China's bottom line". "If the US encroaches on China's core interests, the Chinese military will stand up and use force to stop it," the paper warned.

“The terrorists plan on killing several hundred million people. The west is drastically underestimating the power of ISIS. ISIS intends to get its hands on nuclear weapons,” says Todenhofer, calling the group a “nuclear tsunami preparing the largest religious cleansing in history.”

“They now control land greater in size than the United Kingdom and are supported by an almost ecstatic enthusiasm the like of which I’ve never encountered before in a war zone. Every day hundreds of willing fighters from all over the world come. They are the most brutal and most dangerous enemy I have ever seen in my life. I don’t see anyone who has a real chance to stop them. Only Arabs can stop IS. I came back very pessimistic.”

With the ink not yet dry on the “Iran nuclear deal,” Middle Eastern states opposed to Persian domination of the region now are actively pursuing a nuclear weapons capability of their own. President Obama’s deal could literally mean an arms race that could lead to nuclear devastation as Saudi Arabia and others look to get the bomb as well to counter Iran. With more countries obtaining nukes, the greater the possibility terrorists could obtain a weapon, which could be used to attack Israel or the West.

Over 21 billion dollars in shareholder wealth was wiped out on Wednesday, and this was just the continuation of a very bad year for Wal-Mart stockholders. Overall, shares had already declined by 22 percent so far in 2015 before we even got to Wednesday.

Perhaps things are going well for you personally at the moment, and that is great. But now is not the time to buy lots of new toys. Nor is it the time to accumulate more debt. Instead, now is a time to position yourself for a period of difficulty that could stretch on for years. The next recession is here, and it is going to grow progressively worse. The wise will take heed and make preparations, but the foolish will just keep on doing what they have been doing until it is far too late.

Stockman, a former Republican congressman from Michigan and President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote on his blog recently that the world is currently "in the midst of a lunatic financial mania" in which central banks around the globe have addicted national economies to endless printing of money - so much so that any hint of ending "quantitative easing" negatively affects stock markets.

Stockman noted that any hint of backing away from pouring billions of fiat dollars into markets, would cause stock prices to fall, and then the "robo machines and day traders" would implement massive amounts of "buy orders," causing stocks to reflexively jump skyward. So, Stockman points out, when central bankers are talking, 98 percent of monetary policy is being made; if they are moving their jaws, "then buy!"

Only, as in all monetary policy, what goes up eventually comes crashing down - especially when the upward trajectory was built on shaky policy. "Yet do the central bankers have even the foggiest clue that they are sitting on a potential $50-$100 trillion financial market implosion? That the mother of all meltdowns lurks around the corner?" Stockman asked rhetorically.

No, he says; they don't even seem aware of what is happening - of the monster they have created. All of the normal market hardware has been ripped out of the current global system, so there is no circuitry in place to warn of impending disaster.