KEY POINTS:
During the Cold War you sometimes heard people say the ever-present threat of nuclear war had put them off having kids.
These conscientious non-breeders fell into two broad categories: earnest ex-hippie types who believed a childhood spent in the shadow of The Bomb was no childhood at all, and card-carrying pessimists who reckoned it was just a matter of time before every living thing was vapourised in a flash of light brighter than a thousand suns.
Given the current state of the world, those of a utopian or fearful disposition must be stockpiling contraceptives, assuming they're not too depressed to contemplate carnal activity.
In fact, optimists might now be a distinct minority. I suspect many people are approaching 2009 like spooked horses reluctant to enter the starting gate because they sense that, as Yogi Berra put it, "The future ain't what it used to be".
Who can blame them? Last month, the National Intelligence Council, a body comprising analysts from the various branches of the vast US intelligence apparatus, released a report entitled Global Trends 2025 which reads as if it was ghost-written by Nostradamus.
We'll return to living with the daily threat of nuclear war but the nature of the threat will have us pining for the good old days of the Cold War. Back then, you could assume the people with their fingers on the trigger were more or less sane and regarded their nuclear arsenals as weapons of last resort.
The analysts believe it's inevitable that rogue states and terrorist groups will acquire nuclear weapons within the report's timeframe. Various Hollywood stars have made a career out of combating attempts by rogue states and their terrorist proxies to detonate nuclear devices on western soil and their record is pretty good, although in the last series of the television series, 24, a suitcase nuke slipped through the net at the expense of 15,000 Angelenos. We can only hope their real-life counterparts are as smart, heroic and, above all, lucky.
The Second Horseman of the Apocalypse is anarchy. The report warns that organised crime could eventually take over an Eastern or Central European country and grimly predicts the collapse of central authority in a number of South Asian and African countries.
The third is climate change.
Earlier this year environmental guru James Lovelock upped the global warming ante by predicting that we'll be living in a "desperate world" within a short space of time. How short is short? Try 2020.
Two years ago, riffling on a bleak report on Australia's climate change prospects, I suggested the trans-Tasman migration pattern could soon be reversed and we may be living cheek by jowl with rather too many Shanes and Rayleens.
It seems this wasn't such a fanciful notion. The NIC report says climate change "could force up to 200 million people to migrate to more temperate zones." And if, as seems likely, the residents of the more temperate zones object to the influx of millions of uninvited foreigners, conflict will occur.
In other words, eat, drink, be merry and beef up the armed forces for, if not tomorrow then sometime in the not too distant future, life may become nasty, brutish and, for many, far too short.
But food, drink and battleships cost money. Cue the Fourth Horseman - economic meltdown.
In 1973, British Prime Minister Edward Heath coined the term, "the unacceptable face of capitalism". He was referring to Tiny Rowland, head of the Anglo-African company Lonrho, who was accused of bribing African leaders and flouting United Nations sanctions.
Today, you could fill several portrait galleries with the unacceptable faces of capitalism.
Bernie Madoff, who screwed his investors to the tune of $85 billion, wouldn't necessarily qualify for a hanging because he appears to be a crook, pure and simple.
But what about his investors, many of them finance industry high-fliers themselves, who figured Madoff wasn't kosher because his results were too good and too consistent to be true - they suspected insider trading - but said nothing and kept investing with him because, hey, where else are you going get that sort of return?
Or the executives at the 116 US banks that sought taxpayer assistance in 2008 who last year paid themselves $2.7 billion?
When people are demanding and getting annual remuneration of the order of $100 million without feeling some obligation to perform, you've reached the point at which greed isn't just good, greed is everything, the whole object of the exercise. That individuals earning such sums could then seek astronomical taxpayer bail-outs merely confirms that there's something rotten in the state of capitalism.
Try to have a happy New Year.
