I've got a bad feeling about this year. Maybe it comes from too many jalapeño peppers and tequila shooters, but I don't think so. There is something transitional in the air, as if the little staple that binds the world's fragile concord is about to encounter the staple remover of devastation.

2005 ended on some scary notes. To name just a few:

In Australia, the Howard Government passed legislation cancelling worker's rights, curtailing freedom of dissent, and the removal of university services (student unions). All of these come into effect in 2006.

Despite Americans' growing awareness of the bleeding obvious, George W. Bush and the stark raving loonies pulling his strings will continue to bring Iraq and the world into chaos.

Hurricane Katrina signalled both the arrival of wild climate change and the incapacity of American government agencies to deal with it.

And then there was the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June of 2005. Both he and Bush are being goaded by their homegrown, patented gods into a nuclear showdown.

OK, we read the papers or watch the news and we know about all these things, but then the force of the "reality" we all share kicks in -- the reality in which we are born to toil at the expense of intellect in order to produce and consume the products that fill our lives with illusory time killers and which become meaningless when we die. This "reality" prevents us from properly assessing events and acting on them.

As the world slips further into chaos we are too overworked at our jobs and too busy maintaining the rest of our life to find the time to comprehend the enormity of events. How can we think outside this planet-size square if we are constantly bombarded by the unholy exhortation to consume, to watch the next episode of the latest clever series of between commercials filler?

This is the story of the human species. For all of recorded history we have blithely existed in a solipsistic cocoon devoid of any interest in analysing events beyond our own front door. And every so often those events get out of control and obliterate us.

That's how 2006 has felt to me for several months now. As if we are in the motionless eye of the storm.

And then I happened on this little item:

During continuing unrest in the Middle East, one of the leaders will be able to get hold of a nuclear bomb. He will go to the greatest lengths over the smallest things and will not hesitate to use the weapon because of his obsessions with deadly warfare. The people he is warring against retaliate with a nuclear weapon. The country has a coast on the Mediterranean.

One of the bombs will land in the Mediterranean instead of the land, poisoning all the fish. The passages of trade in the region will be disrupted so that the people on the other coast of the Mediterranean will be desperate for food and will eat the fish anyway. It will happen near the east coast of the Mediterranean in a region of dark-colored cliffs.

The nuclear weapon being dropped by one of the Middle Eastern countries will spark off yet another war on top of that war. European and Western nations will try to interfere to diminish the threat to oil supplies. When the European countries try to interfere, the crazed leader who earlier dropped the nuclear bomb will use the rest of his arsenal on Europe, most striking the closer southern part.

The European Mediterranean coast, particularly that of Italy and France, will be almost uninhabitable, and Italy will get the brunt. This leader is not the Antichrist but helps to set the stage for the Antichrist to rise to power with little or no opposition. The Antichrist will wield great power and authority; no one can argue with him.

Well, now, that joyous little scenario comes from our dear old friend, Nostradamus, in a book called "The Nostradamus Code," cleverly titled to coincide with the worldwide Da Vinci Code craze.

Sadly, we don't need the questionable prophecies of a sixteenth century Christian with irritable bowel syndrome to see the grotesque possibility of such an event happening. The point being that 2006 may be the year in which the accumulation of recent idiot misadventures begins to bear its strange fruit. Something has got to give.

In the meantime, I've ordered another U.S. gallon of jalapeños and stocked the larder with Patron Silver. I know how to deal with the bleeding apocalypse.