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29 July 2006: The nervous and the cautious, the depressives and the cynics all feel a chill in these hot summer nights. Our leaders are busy making the world a better place. They are never more frightening than when they're like this. 

The line at the moment is that war in the Middle East is a wonderful opportunity for peace. Two thousand rocket attacks and hundreds of dead prompt Bush to say we must "seize this opportunity to achieve lasting peace and stability." This sort of optimism is rarely found outside medical text books. 

Blair knows, at some level, that it's balderdash. So I called one of my team of forensic linguists back from her poolside holiday to parse a prime ministerial paragraph that clearly shows he knows it's balderdash.

The Prime Minister told the US press conference he wanted the Lebanese government to take control of Lebanon, he wanted this to be the government that people wanted, and for there to be a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Then he produced this paragraph:

"If we are able, out of what has been a catastrophe for many of the people in the region, to do such a thing, then we would have turned a situation of tragedy into one of opportunity, and we intend to do that."

Mme La Grammairienne points out that the sequence of tenses gives the game away. The sentence itself is a fine example of Blair's big-tent complexity. It's saying many pleasant, desirable and unachievable things but in this case, each is flagrantly undermined by the "would" in the middle. All other verb moods in the sentence are indicative and demand a "will" in turn. The use of "would" indicates a foregone failure of the stated intent. The "would"implies a sentence beginning "If we had been able, we would have turned a tragic situation into one of opportunity. But we couldn't. Because we're complete crap at all this but if there is a nuclear war we'll blame it on the Bible (see Rapture item, right)."  That last remark was outside her brief and cost her the recall bonus.

29 July 2006: George Bush's lasting achievement will be one of creating unity where there was division, and common purpose where there was only discord. By his actions, the Sunni and the Shia will unite in ululating defiance of America, and drag the majority of the Arab world into coalition against America and Israel.

As at 29 July, the Rapture Index stands at 156 (+1) (against a 2001 high of 182).

Readers should know: "The Rapture Index is by no means meant to predict the rapture, however, the index is designed to measure the type of activity that could act as a precursor to the rapture. You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity."

http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html

There are 3.5 million posts on the Rapture Ready website. This is a very high level of activity, in internet terms.